by Clea Simon
Sure, she finally responds. Tanned, rested, and ready. She hits delete, erasing all but the first word, and watches him blink off. Too late, she realizes she doesn’t know if the system shows her words as she types them. If he’ll get the reference. If he’s the sort to be amused.
‘Damn it, Peter.’ She gets his voicemail again. He’s the one who got her into Zeron. The least he could do is return her calls. She has so many questions.
While she refills her coffee, someone has touched base. Her office line is blinking, and she spills in her hurry to find out who has called.
‘Tara? It’s Scott.’ She slumps in her chair, disappointed. ‘Call me?’
She needs to speak to Scott for sure. About this article. The magazine. His publisher. But she wants to get things clear in her own head first, and so she hits erase and watches the message disappear. Dabs at her blotter, the paper already puckered and brown, and then it’s time to leave.
Any other night, she’d pick up a pizza. Have a glass of wine to celebrate the week’s end. Any other night, she’d find a movie to watch. Wouldn’t worry about her work. But the dinner last night has spoiled pizza for a while, and Gina has finished her wine. She swings by the deli for a rotisserie chicken and a six-pack and settles in at her kitchen table, notepad and pen in hand.
An hour later, the chicken is cold. But she’s still on her first beer as she wipes her hands clean and pulls up yet another search engine, tries yet another search. Peter’s right. There’s precious little on the scene. The cops never did make any major busts, although the cheap heroin seemed to fade away as quickly as it appeared. She can list the casualties, most of them anyway. Brian. That college kid. Chris Crack. Count as well the clubs that closed, not only the Casbah but Flash’s and the Dive.
Between the deaths and the closures, the all-ages scene disappeared as well. The hardcore bands lost their places to play, and the unofficial venues couldn’t last, not once parents had ammunition to keep their kids away. Yeah, Oakie’s hung in. Cover bands and suburbanites helping to fill the void. She has her own archive up on another window and she switches over. How could she not have seen what was happening? How could they all have missed it?
She doesn’t need Peter to spell it out. She didn’t care. It wasn’t her story. Just like Gina said, all that mattered was the music.
She closes her eyes. It’s late, and she’s tired. She thinks about turning on the radio. About playing some of her records. The old ones. Vinyl. The compilation or, no, the Whirled Shakers single. Only she can hear it in her head already, and so she cleans up. Throws the rest of the chicken in the fridge, and falls into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Saturday passes in a daze. She writes – poring over her notes to find connections. Highlights the research she needs to do. The questions she still has to ask.
When Peter calls, she has her list ready. Who he talked to. What he said.
Scott she puts off. ‘Don’t worry,’ she promises. ‘I know you were speaking in confidence. And I appreciate what you’ve done for me.’ They make plans to talk again on Sunday. He offers to cook again, but she suggests they play it by ear.
Sunday morning, she wakes early. Makes herself wait, drinking coffee, until ten. As the time clicks by, she realizes she’s been holding her breath. Expecting Neela to cancel. For Mika to intervene. But the phone does not ring, and she turns it off as she sets out for Mika’s place. For one final interview.
She finds the street easily this time, driving once more through the newer subdivision to Mika’s neighborhood. The SUV is gone, the driveway empty, but Tara parks on the curb, under the shelter of an old maple. The house looks quiet. Deserted, and she checks her phone one more time. Scott has called, but there are no messages. She turns the device off once more and heads toward the house.
She hadn’t noticed the doorbell before. How loud it is, audible from the stoop, where Tara stands, waiting. It must echo throughout the entire house. Must wake the baby when it rings. Unless the volume is in some way a reflection of the house. Of its emptiness. Yes, she thinks. That’s it. Neela has changed her mind and left. Or the other woman has simply forgotten. Has joined her daughter at whatever church the family attends.
The thought is almost a relief. She has followed this story far enough. But just as she turns to leave, she hears the click of a latch. The door opens, and Neela greets her. She looks older – old, suddenly – a frail shadow of her former self. She walks slowly as she leads Tara inside, into the split level’s sunny front room. Toys have been stacked in a plastic bin, beside an overstuffed sofa that shows signs of wear, but the house is quiet. Clearly, Neela is alone. Henry has joined his parents at church or some other arrangement – a babysitter other than the unsteady grandmother – has been found.
Neela gestures toward the sofa. The sun has faded its floral print, but it looks comfy. Lived in, and Tara sits down. She pulls both her pad and a recorder from her bag. Neela still has not spoken, and the silence has grown oppressive.
‘If you don’t mind,’ Tara says, more to break the silence than to ask permission. Neela seems to understand, because she doesn’t answer, except to take the wingback chair opposite. It is large and upholstered, its arms – the encompassing wings of the high back – both isolating and supporting her in her weakness and her grief. Only then, when she has settled in – sunk in, really – does she take a deep breath and begin to speak.
‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ she says. She looks away, embarrassed. As if she had broken a vase, rather than tried to end her life.
‘I think you do.’ Tara speaks softly. ‘I think you want to confess.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
She calls Scott back as soon as she’s home. The drive has given her time to think, a little distance. She wants to tell Scott first. To give him a chance.
‘We need to talk,’ she says. He doesn’t question it. Simply reiterates his invitation for dinner. She doesn’t ask about wine.
She spends the rest of the afternoon at her computer. All these years later, writing something out helps her understand. Only, this time, it’s not how a series of changes tugs at the heart. How a dash of dissonance sets off that pure pop chorus, turning its sentiment into something conflicted and rare.
Or maybe it is. She pauses, halfway through, to laugh. The scene she loved. This tribe. Maybe they knew they were doomed. Fated to die or fade away. Maybe its ephemeral nature is what made the music so powerful. One brief chance, one stab at fame or something greater. Immortality, wrapped in transience. Because all the while, time lurked. The dulling of age, the vulnerability of youth. Loss, whether gradual or abrupt.
As the afternoon light dims, she thinks about putting on a record again. Vinyl, old school. But it’s almost time to go, and she needs to get this drafted – get it clear – before she meets with her old editor, the one who got her started.
It’s Sunday night, and so she drives. Passes one of the new places – a seafood restaurant that plays up the waterfront theme – a stylized fish outlined in neon and steel. Two young men lean against the wall. They stand as she slows. Valets, but she’s not some suburbanite, and they’re not what she thought, in that moment, when she first spied them, huddled, heads together.
Past the restaurant, the street is dark. The area still hasn’t come into its own, and she finds a spot beneath a streetlight. A chuckle surprises her as she locks up. She didn’t have a car this nice in the old days. Min did, but that’s when she learned about parking down here, especially toward the end when things got bad. About looking for a light. Maybe this is better now – the construction, everything new. Maybe these things come in cycles, like the tides.
She’s thinking of the tides as she walks to Scott’s apartment, that beautiful space with its view of the harbor. A flicker of movement catches her eye, even as she approaches the condo, its foyer lit and bright. She stops and turns, but it’s gone. Paper, maybe, only there is no wind tonight. A rat, then. This is still a waterfront, no matter wh
at else may have changed.
And Boston is still a port city, a place for trade and commerce. That can’t all have gone now, even with the condos. The restaurants. No, the trade must have shifted. Moved underground, like that rat.
She holds her bag tight against her side up the walk to that well-lit door. Is it that different, then, the way she hurries, slightly breathless from anticipation? Back then, her only fear was missing the set. Missing the show. The band. The story. God, she was fearless then.
And now? She presses the button for Scott’s apartment, and the door buzzes open in response. He’s expecting her. He has bigger worries than a break-in, she realizes, as the elevator takes her up.
‘Hey.’ He greets her with a quick half hug and ducks away. ‘Be right with you.’
‘No rush,’ she says, grateful for the time. Alone in that beautiful room, she crosses to the window. The autumn sky is clear. Night now, dusk long gone, but the sky is far from dark. The ambient glow of the city silhouettes the buildings across the way. Running lights on a motorboat late to dock pass silently below.
She takes a moment to enjoy it all. The view, the quiet. When Scott comes up behind her, she takes the glass he offers silently. Drinks without speaking. Red this time and good.
‘It’s Jonah,’ she says at last. ‘Isn’t it? He’s killing the story.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Scott comes up to stand beside her. He’s back to seltzer. The bubbles fizz and burst. ‘I should have known.’
‘You couldn’t have.’ She turns to look at her friend. So handsome and so miserable. ‘Not all of it.’
They sit and she spells it out – speculation, for the most part. Only it all makes sense. The money, the drugs. The unknown backers who ran the city in its bad old days. Who run the city now, only their hands are clean. Cleaner, she corrects herself. By the time she’s done, her glass is empty.
He goes to the kitchen for a break. Probably to turn off the stove, too.
‘How did you know?’ He’s brought the bottle and refills her glass. He’s topped his own off, and added a slice of lime.
‘It was the story of Chris – of Frank and Neela.’ She pulls the printout from her bag. Watches as he reads.
He nods when she covers the territory he remembers. About how Chris Crack appeared from nowhere, as ethereal as a sprite. As skinny as one too, following his own sickly childhood, the source for ‘Bubble Boy’.
‘I thought it was a metaphor.’ His voice clues her in.
‘Yeah,’ she agrees. ‘We all did.’
Maybe it was that childhood – overprotected, his parents so scared of losing him – that drove him to the scene. To the drugs on offer. Maybe it was his looming fame. His fear of being called out. A fake, a tourist.
Maybe it was something built into his DNA, along with an early childhood condition – the inability to process certain proteins. Whatever the key to his own addiction, Chris was the perfect proselytizer. Heroin chic, before that phrase ever hit this dirty town. He got Neela using, even if she never shared his addiction. Even when she was carrying his child.
‘I wasn’t, you know, shooting up,’ she had told Tara that morning. ‘I snorted it and, yeah, I skin-popped but …’ She hadn’t been able to look Tara in the eye. Instead, she had stared out the window. Maybe she was hoping for her daughter to come home early. Her daughter and the grandson who had inherited Chris’s condition. ‘I wasn’t a junkie.’ Her voice was soft. ‘No matter what Frank thought.’
Tara had waited, then. Confident that the rest would come. Sunday morning. It was time.
‘He didn’t know about the drugs – that I was using – when he proposed,’ Neela had told her. ‘He found me there, in the back room, right after I’d told Chris.’ She’d sucked her lips in, the memory still bitter. ‘I’d told him I was pregnant. I didn’t … I don’t know what I thought. He’d just come back from rehab, and I didn’t really think he’d marry me, only …
‘Only he didn’t care. Not about anything but the smack. About scoring again and getting high. And then Frank came in and found me crying. He figured it out. Said he’d marry me right then. Said he didn’t give a shit whose it was. That he didn’t want to know.’
She shifted to face Tara. ‘I wanted to hurt Chris then, like he’d hurt me. So I said yes. I never thought …’
She swallowed. Looked away again.
‘You never meant to go through with it. Did you?’ That much, at least, was clear.
Neela shook her head. That radiant hair grown thin now, drawn back in a tight bun.
‘And then it was too late.’ Tara kept her own voice soft, knowing there was more to come.
‘I loved him so.’ Neela stared. Seeing a slender golden boy, incandescent and now gone. ‘I knew it was over, but I couldn’t stay away. And if that meant getting high …’
She stopped then, and Tara filled in the rest. That a reporter – Peter – was researching the drug connection. Was in the clubs, observing. Waiting to find out who was going to talk. To snitch to the police. Peter might not have been the ace reporter that Tara had thought him to be, but he had an edge. A girlfriend on the scene who introduced him around. Who introduced him to her friend, a woman with her own agenda.
Even knowing Min’s history, Peter bit. He thought he was smarter. Always did, and he would have seen Frank as the obvious candidate to tell him everything. To tell the cops. Not the rising star, a user with no real interest in getting out. No, an angry man with a grudge against the club owners, against the men who had fired him and ruined his life. Peter must have worked on Frank, prompting him to spill all. Only in the course of his prodding, Peter had revealed too much. Min had shared too much, and he’d let Frank know that Neela was still seeing Chris. Worse, that she was getting high with him. Shooting up.
It must have unspooled from there: Neela was pregnant, and Frank was out of time. Getting Chris busted wouldn’t help, not if Neela was caught up in it too. Instead, he changed his plans. He had the shit he’d taken off a kid, and he’d spiked it with something. Something to make it just a little stronger. He got it to Chris, maybe through Brian. Maybe just by leaving it in the Casbah office – everyone rifled through the lost and found. Through the bags and the pockets of the coats left behind. Maybe in some other way that Tara would never know. And then Chris was gone.
‘How did you find out?’ She wanted to be gentle with Neela. The woman had been through so much.
‘It was when Henry was first having trouble. Frank had a friend who helped us. She steered us toward testing. Toward the right doctors at Children’s. And that was when I realized that Mika was Chris’s, and that Frank had known all along.’
‘You must have known.’ This part made no sense.
Neela shook her off, biting her lip. ‘No, not really. I wasn’t ever sure, and I didn’t think he could be, either. Because, if he was, how could he be sure that I’d … well, that I’d come around?’
‘Ah.’ It hit Tara, a moment before Neela could say it.
‘Yeah.’ The word a barest breath. ‘With Henry’s diagnosis, it all came out. Frank knew. He always knew. But it didn’t matter. Cause he also knew I’d stay with him. I’d marry him, because he knew Chris wouldn’t be there. That he’d be gone.’
‘You confronted him?’
‘We had a fight. I pushed him. I think the cops suspect.’ She said it quickly, glad to have it out. ‘I’d kept my end up. I’d been a good wife. A good mother. But Chris …’ She covered her mouth with her hand, but still the words leaked out. ‘I loved him so,’ she said.
Sitting with Scott, waiting as he reads her pages, she feels at peace. The fairy tale ending was never going to be, but now she understands. About Peter, maybe, and his desperate drive. About Scott, her friend, who took so long to find his way. And maybe now she has a clue about her own. This is what she’s meant to do, even if the article in her editor’s hands never runs.
‘It’s quite a story.’ He looks up at last, the ghost of a grin on his
handsome face. ‘No wonder Frank went quiet. He’d gotten Neela out, and he wouldn’t want to raise any questions about his own involvement. And now that Neela’s talking to the cops, I’m almost tempted …’ He stops, looks down at the pages again. ‘You wouldn’t consider rewriting the drug connection out of it, would you?’
‘It wouldn’t make sense without the Casbah.’ Neither of them mentions Jonah’s name. Besides, they both know Jonah was only a front man. Maybe still is. Tara thinks of her car, sitting low on its rims. The timing fits. ‘Scott, my tires. You think …?’
He shakes his head, as if willing her not to finish her question. ‘I don’t know, Tara, and I can’t ask. I’m sorry.
‘Let’s eat.’ Hands on his knees, Scott pushes himself to his feet. He leads the way into the kitchen. ‘If this roast hasn’t completely dried out.’
An hour later, it’s gone. They’ve both eaten heartily and have now pushed their chairs back in the relaxed manner of old friends.
‘That was great.’ Tara feels her eyes closing. It has been a day.
‘Thanks.’ Scott is staring at that window. If he can see more than his reflection now, she can’t tell. ‘I enjoy it. Cooking, I mean.’
She follows his gaze. The night outside is full, but the indoor lighting is well done. Indirect. She can still make out the distant shore. Or maybe that’s a ship at anchor. It’s hard to tell.
‘One thing, though.’ Scott isn’t talking about the boats. Maybe he isn’t seeing them. He’s lived here long enough. ‘One question that’s still bothering me,’ he says. ‘What did Frank spike the heroin with? I mean, where would he get something that could do that?’
TWENTY-NINE
The next morning, Tara wakes with a start. Only after she remembers that she is, in fact, on vacation does she lie back and relax. Settling on her pillow, she thinks about the dinner with Scott. It was nice. Easy, as if with all the unspoken that lay between them finally voiced, they could go back to being friends again. Maybe better friends, Tara realizes. For while Scott has no intention of confronting his boss, he has promised to make some inquiries about her story – see if he can help her place it elsewhere. He has always been supportive of her, of her work.