The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  “But if he does, I’m throwing you under the bus.”

  “Sounds like a deal,” Mayor Coffin says, sticking out his hand. They shake. Then they look through the glass, both of them baffled, both of them seeing this as the tip of some horrific iceberg beyond comprehension.

  * * *

  “YOU’RE LOOKING FOR THIS, aren’t you?”

  Zelda whirls around, surprised by the voice in the mostly empty CPS parking lot on Rope Alley.

  The man who stands beside her car is beautiful, and terrifying. Lithe, limber, hungry-looking. Jug-handled ears. She knows him from Tinder: his smile unspools something inside of her. But the twinge of lust she feels for him is dwarfed by the one she gets when she sees the little plastic baggie between two of his fingers.

  “I heard about you,” he says, tossing it to her. She catches it with a skill she didn’t know she had.

  “What’d you hear?” She clenches it in her fist, ecstasy already filling her up.

  “How hungry you are,” the demon-handsome man says. “How full of great ideas. I’ve got one of my own. I thought you might like it.”

  He puts a brown paper bag on the hood of her car and stalks off into the alley darkness. She hollers at him to wait—even turns on her cell phone’s flashlight function and hurries after him—but he’s already gone. So she returns and looks into the bag, where dozens of brand-new paintbrushes await. And a note. With a plan. And a very long list of addresses.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  RONAN

  Thick snow, painting the whole town white. Whales swimming through the sky. Shattering clouds with every sweep of their massive tails.

  “You’ve got to get out of here,” someone said, his mouth mere feet from my ear, his voice a whisper that echoed so loud I came awake with a shout. Into utter darkness—but cold dark, not the warm dark of our living room. My father laughed, beside me, like someone laughing in a dream. We were on the front porch in almost total darkness, curtains drawn, the smallest sliver of streetlight coming in through the screen door. We sat side by side on the porch swing.

  “Jesus, Dad,” I said. “How did you—”

  “You’ve got to get out of here,” my father said.

  Was it him? Could I trust this?

  But I was awake. I knew it for certain. “How are you here right now?”

  “Only for a moment,” my father said. “I fought so hard to get here, and I can’t stay long. But I had to tell you: go back. To the city. You’ve got to. This place—it’s feeding on you. It needs you.”

  “Needs me for what? What is it going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. His hand groped for mine. I clasped it tightly, gratefully. As in the dream, I was wearing my nicest suit. My neck was raw, freshly shaven. Judging by how dark it was, I’d already missed the election watch party I’d promised Jark I’d come to.

  “I can’t leave you,” I said.

  “Now you can’t leave me,” he said, and laughed, and I laughed, too.

  “I’m sorry I left you for so long,” I said. “I really am. I was an idiot. I was lost, and miserable, and I blamed this place. But wherever I went, I was just as unhappy.”

  He heard me. I know he did.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t keep you safe,” he said. “From this place. From everyone who hurt you here. From what happened to your mother.”

  His voice came close, but he did not cry. And here, finally, the last of the walls I’d built around my heart came tumbling down. I saw their construction, brick by brick so slow I never even saw I was doing it, how I’d steeled myself against the homesickness and hurt of not having him around, how I’d pulled up bulkheads to shield myself from the scorn of my classmates, the homophobia of my neighbors, and never saw, until now, how much I was hurting myself by doing so.

  My father said, “I think we’d both do things differently, if we could. But we can’t. All we can do is try to keep things from getting worse.”

  I squeezed his hand. This meant something.

  “I started something terrible, Dad. I need to stop it. I don’t know how I’m going to do that, but I have to. Otherwise—”

  Otherwise the ghost or monster that I unleashed will suck this city dry of all its hate and fear and anger and use it to shatter our souls.

  Otherwise a whole lot of people are going to die.

  Otherwise Hudson burns.

  “You can’t stop them,” he said. “Don’t try. Just get out.”

  Sudden light filled the darkened porch. My phone, left faceup on the table in front of us. An incoming call from Dom. In that harsh glow, I watched my father’s face slacken.

  Fuck, I thought. You scared him away.

  I answered and held the phone to my ear. “What the hell, Dom?”

  “Ronan?” he said, and his voice sounded so fragile, all my anger evaporated.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Everything okay?”

  “Can you come to the hospital?” he asked, and I could hear that he’d been crying.

  “Of course,” I said, because Columbia-Greene was a block away from me. “What happened?”

  “It’s Wick,” Dom said. “Fucking goddamn Christ.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Wick’s dead, Ronan.”

  Chapter Forty

  They sit, the three of them. Dom in the middle, Attalah and Ronan on either side. Holding hands. Staring at the floor, or sometimes the ceiling.

  What time is it? Dom wonders. In the grim, bleary-eyed, backstage warren of an emergency room, it is always two in the morning. But now he thinks it is actually two in the morning. But he is also afraid to look. Or move. Or say anything. Like if he waits long enough, the ice will freeze around him and he’ll be able to climb up onto something solid again. Instead of drowning in the black waters of despair.

  At five P.M., someone driving across from Catskill saw a pedestrian climb up onto the guardrail of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. She slowed fast, already rolling down the window, but before she could shout Wait! the person had stepped into space. By five-ten, an ambulance was on the scene. Five-twenty and the police rescue boat had been dispatched, heading for beneath the bridge. By five-forty, the fallen pedestrian had been hauled on board. Five-fifty and all resuscitation attempts were suspended. Jeremy Bentwick, identified from the learner’s permit in his pocket, was pronounced dead.

  He’s back there, somewhere. His body. Being probed and examined. No helpful information will come of that. Only ugly answers to questions no one actually asked. Did the impact kill him? Did he drown? Was he on drugs when he jumped? Wick’s phone is down at the police station, being scoured for signs. He’d left it unlocked, which they said was a hopeful sign that maybe he wanted them to find something there. A note, maybe. Typed or handwritten . . . or recorded on video, a jerky dim selfie shot while he walked out onto the bridge. A sad list of lonesome grievances; an angry series of shrieked accusations at everyone who ever harmed or failed him.

  Dom groans, imagining every horrific thing that could be found on the phone. What did it matter if he left a note or not? Wick was dead. A sad, beautiful, talented creature was gone forever.

  We’ve been here before, Dom thinks. Me and Ronan, together. He remembers holding his best friend’s hand the night his mother died. The ER looked a lot different back then. Twenty years; three big renovations ago. And back then it was Ronan who needed love and support. Now they all do, Dom knows, but he feels like he needs it the most.

  “I’m going to be sick,” he whispers.

  “You picked the right place for it,” Ronan says.

  Attalah rubs Dom’s back, whispers, Shhhhhh. He lowers his head, lets it hang between his knees. The pain of it is unfair, disproportionate. He’d only known Wick for a couple of weeks. How dare it hurt this much?

  This is why I never wanted kids, he thinks, like another answer to a question he’d never asked. I’m like my dad. I love too hard for a world this full of hurt.

  Dom lowers his head, presses
his knees together against his temples, wonders if it’s possible to crush one’s own head. Decides to try. Is unsuccessful.

  * * *

  ATTALAH CAN’T HEAR her, from way across the emergency room, but she can sure as hell read Pastor Thirza’s lips. What else could she possibly want to know?

  Where is my son?

  “Dom,” she says, nudging her husband awake.

  “Fuck,” he says, rising fast, hurrying to her.

  For eight hours, they’ve been looking for her. At her home, at the church. Calling up friends and family and parishioners. The most likely explanation is that she was out cold somewhere, in her bed or office, buried under six feet of opioid bliss, unable to hear or respond to phone calls or door knocks. But Attalah can’t shake the image of her wandering the streets and woods and walking the freight train tracks, holding aloft a lantern, repeating the question she’s now asking Dom.

  Where is my son?

  Whoever found her, they already told her. Whatever storms of pain and grief took hold of her when she found out, they’ve subsided now, leaving a puffy face, red eyes, and utter numbness.

  Attalah has never seen her out in public without her wig before. Baldness makes her seem taller, somehow, even without the extra inches her hair provided. She wears a small hat. Ultramarine. Askew. All wrong. She embraces Dom, who has started to cry again, and it’s like she’s the one comforting him. She whispers something in his ear.

  Attalah can hear Wick’s voice, quavery and uncertain, taking photos of her at the Hoe-Bowl arcade. You’re so lucky to have found a guy as good as Dom. His face transformed by flashing game lights. Mauve, then teal, then bright sky blue.

  That remembered voice is what does it. What breaks something loose inside her.

  Did you ever leave Hudson? he’d asked her. I want to go to college for photography. I want to go away and never return.

  Dom sits back down beside her. A heavy sound; a tree falling in the forest. When did he get so big? So old? When did she? She holds out her hand and he takes it. Ronan is asleep. Somewhere nearby, someone cries out in pain.

  They watch Pastor Thirza move through the emergency room—which is weirdly overcrowded tonight—opening doors, pulling back curtains and dividers, intruding on surgeries and lifting sheets, saying her son’s name like a mantra, in a low voice respectful of this space hallowed by so much suffering.

  * * *

  NO WONDER the emergency room feels so full: half of Hudson seems to be sick. Explosive diarrhea.

  Paula Dinehart has never liked her job at the motorcycle-themed café. The owner is an asshole, and the pay is crap. And the coffee is too expensive for anybody she knows, anyone who actually comes from here. So only pieces of shit ever shop there. So when that sexy guy she’d been chatting up on Tinder appeared on her doorstep the night before with a stack of DVDs—Oscar screeners, all the ones she’d been wanting to see, half of them still in theaters—and a vial of clear liquid, and some simple instructions, she was elated. Easy to slip it into the carafe of filter coffee that morning, the soy milk, the half-and-half, dab a dot into every mug so that the espresso drinks will get some, too.

  It didn’t take long to start to work. Some of these hipster freelancers, who buy one cup and plant themselves in a corner with a laptop for the rest of the day—one by one they rush to the bathroom, and stay in there for a long, long time, and then skedaddle. She doesn’t mind how often she has to replace the roll of toilet paper, or how bad the smell is. They are suffering way worse than she is, that is for damn sure.

  And Paula is not the only one who got handed such a vial.

  By 10:00 P.M., almost everyone who went to the Jark Trowse election watch party is feeling the pain as well. Jark Trowse, Mayor Coffin, Police Chief Propst.

  * * *

  “HE WON,” Dom says, holding up his phone to show a Facebook post.

  “Of course he did,” Attalah says.

  They sit, staring at the floor. Smelling the stink of voided bowels. Hearing a mother call out her dead son’s name. Not giving a shit about any of the schemes and hate that have consumed them for the past month.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ronan says.

  “Nothing does,” Attalah says. They all know she doesn’t mean it, but they also know that self-pity and hopelessness are as valid and transitory as grief.

  * * *

  WEDNESDAY MORNING, sick as a dog, and Jark is nevertheless still hard at work.

  Because there are photos on social media to be Liked, and thank-you emails to be sent, and Pequod Arms preparations to be finalized. Winter Fest is just a couple of days away. The Ferris wheel is on order. Food vendors getting locked down. The Pickle Guys causing problems. Nothing he can’t handle.

  Diarrhea-addled Jark canceled or postponed all of his planned postelection events. The press conference; the symbolic photo of him and Mayor Coffin. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t working. He’s just doing it from the toilet.

  Working so hard, in fact, that he keeps forgetting—and then remembering: I fucking won. I’m a fucking mayor.

  Trawling the Hudson Community Board on Facebook for any early-riser posts about the election, he sees a picture of a skinny, unsmiling, young Black man, and the words RIP WICK.

  The face is familiar. He met this boy, once. Backtracking through his tagged photos—before the deluge of the last twelve hours—he finds it. A photo of the two of them, posted by Wick, where he’s smiling to beat the band.

  SO CRAZY that I got to meet Jark Trowse tonight! This guy lives the life I want. #goals

  Jark remembers seeing the photo the next day, but not meeting the boy. In a church, apparently, based on the backdrop. Flipping back to the community board, he finds three comments on the RIP WICK post, from three separate users:

  How did he die?

  Suicide I heard

  It’s none of our business respect his family and their privacy

  And maybe it’s the abject physical misery he’s in, and maybe it’s the lack of sleep or the emotional high he’s still riding from the night before, but Jark starts to cry.

  He does a quick trip through Wick’s posts. Finds out a few key facts. Downloads the photo of the two of them. Prepares to share it to his own Instagram. Spends an exorbitant amount of time puzzling out the caption. These three sentences take him eighteen minutes:

  So sad to learn that we lost Jeremy “Wick” Bentwick last night. I didn’t know Wick well, but he was clearly a luminous soul who infected everyone he encountered with joy and laughter. He aspired to be an artist, and like most great artists he must have had some real darkness in him, but I’m sick at the loss of all the light he could have brought into the world.

  He smiles, impressed with himself—I’m going to make a hell of a mayor—and taps POST. And empties his bowels again.

  Chapter Forty-One

  RONAN

  At least there was YouTube.

  We’d spent three hours on the massive brown corduroy couch in Dom and Attalah’s living room, tumbling deeper down a rabbit hole, using our phones to cast onto their giant wall-mounted panel television. Mostly old music videos from the eighties and nineties. That helped. Sometimes Dom got into it. He liked Lil’ Kim and REM. He made requests. The video for “Losing My Religion” prompted him to ask for the trailer for The Cell, starring Jennifer Lopez, which had been directed by the same guy as that video, and then the rabbit hole shifted to nineties movie trailers.

  It was after midnight. I prayed we’d never run out of videos. Because every time one ended, in that slim pair of seconds while the next one loaded, the pain came flooding in. And it hurt so fucking bad.

  The pain, and the remembering. Wick’s awkwardness, his energy, his joy to have someone to talk to. His pain.

  Attalah and I were on Dom detail. Trying to keep him from starting to cry again. He was so, so upset. So were we, but Dom’s grief was a raw live thing, a terrifying animal. He was his father’s son. A profoundly decent man. Too decent for a
world like ours.

  Caring for him helped us, too. His grief was so much purer than ours. Focusing on it meant we could forget how all of our schemes and plans were falling apart. We’d lost Wick, yes, but we’d also lost the election. We’d lost Hudson.

  “This asshole,” Attalah said, holding up her tablet so we could see a post Jark did, reposting a photo of him and Wick. “How much you wanna bet he’d never have known who Wick was if Wick hadn’t tagged that photo and fanboyed out about Jark?”

  I went to the kitchen, inspected the cabinets.

  “Cool if I make chocolate chip cookies?” I asked. “You have all the ingredients.”

  “That’d be amazing,” Attalah called.

  I thought of my dad, as I wielded the wooden spoon and whipped together the butter and the brown sugar and the white. It was his instinct that had brought me to the kitchen. His drive to care for people by feeding them.

  We’d had a moment, last night. Him and me, on the porch, in the dark, talking for the first time. And maybe some of him rubbed off on me. Maybe we’d bonded, on some deep ghost level. Maybe he’d help make me more whole. Maybe I’d help wake him the fuck up for real.

  Maybe he’ll help me kill Tom Minniq. Maybe he knows how.

  “Hey,” Dom said, standing in the doorway.

  “Hey,” I said, and handed him a teaspoon, because I’d been prepared for this moment. “You want some cookie dough?”

  “Damn right I do,” he said.

  It wasn’t planned out. Had I given it any real thought, I’d have known this was not the time to talk about it.

  “I was thinking about your dad today,” I said, avoiding looking at him. “He loved my dad’s cooking. Or at least he always said he did. Sorry. I’m sorry to bring it up. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “No,” he said. “I like talking about him. No one ever wants to. They’re afraid I’ll start crying. Which, to be fair, I do do pretty often.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Emphysema attack. Three years ago. While he was driving. He always had too much stress in his life. Always took on too much. He was like your dad, really. They both cared so much about the people in this town that . . .”