Burning Blue

by Paul Griffin

  My father was at the piano, this little electric job we picked up for his birthday at BJ’s with my discount, low-end keys on ironing board stilts. I recognized the piece, Rachmaninoff, Vespers, some doleful notes to be sure. On the side table: bottle of red wine, the second one. The first, a dead soldier, was on the kitchen counter, next to picked-at Mexican takeout.

  I would have asked him if he was okay, but he only would’ve told me to mind my own business. He’d catch an AA meeting the next morning on his way to work, and then he’d be good for a month or so before he fell off again. At least he wasn’t drinking and driving anymore, or that’s what he promised. But $4.99 a bottle? If you’re going to be bad, at least drink something good.

  You might think art critics make a lot of money. They’re lucky if they make almost enough. They’re really smart, and they dress like they’re heading to a cocktail party at the Princeton Club, if you don’t notice that their designer label clothes are irregulars pulled from the Marshalls clearance rack. They can carry on one heck of a conversation-charm you silly-but they’re not to be confused with the millionaires they cover in their columns. Stevie Nazzaro from Hoboken did well enough to get into Columbia on a scholarship, art history of all the useless things, but he would have been better off if he stuck with the wrestling. Naz the Knuckler, WWE smackdown champ or some crap like that.

  I think I was pretty close to getting him to give up on me, and then I could emancipate and be free of whatever it was I was living, just this day-to-day grayness. I’d move into the city and get by waiting tables or pushing flavored coffees at a godforsaken latte bar maybe. I could take subways instead of having to kick my skateboard everywhere. No more shoulder-less north Jersey roads without sidewalks, step-trucks and speeding Range Rovers sucking me into traffic. It would be better for my father too, having me out of the apartment. Couldn’t be easy living with a son of minor ambition.

  “You had therapy today, right?” he said. “You didn’t ditch, did you?”

  “I went.”

  “How was Mrs. Schmidt?”

  “It’s Doctor. Terrific.”

  “Any of that bullying crap going on again?” he said.

  “Nope. Thought you were getting home late.”

  “I did. You were later. You have to get right in their faces and give it back to them, Jay. I told you how many times, you can’t just roll over.”

  “It’s fine, Dad.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “Okay, don’t believe me.”

  “You’re holding back. Something big too. Your breathing, it’s solemn.”

  “How can breathing be solemn? It’s just breathing.”

  “I need to be out of town for a week.” He tapped the high end piano key. “This conference wants me to speak. The money is just north of lousy enough to turn down.”

  I checked the fridge for milk, nothing in there except duck sauce packets.

  “You hear what I said?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Then can you acknowledge you heard me?”

  “I heard you, man. Have a great trip.”

  “Hey, Jay? When do I stop getting blamed?”

  “Blamed for what?”

  “Everything.” He headed for his room with the wine. He halted at his bedroom door, as if he wanted to say something, but he didn’t. He went in. The door puffed shut.

  I grabbed what was left of the takeout and headed for my room, not much more than a closet with a bed that was too short for me, but it was on the back of the building and it was quiet, except for the old man’s TV, muffled by the wall. I could barely make out he was watching the old movie channel again. I hated feeling sorry for my father. Writing him off as a jerk was a lot easier.

  I remembered that I’d forgotten to take my meds. I swigged them down with this sports drink that looked like chalk dust suspended in antifreeze. I’d grabbed it at work, overstock they were looking to dump, and now I knew why: It was disgusting. I shoveled cold burritos into my mouth as I waited for my laptop to boot. Now that I’d spent an afternoon with Nicole, had seen her up close, helped her out of that puddle on the side of the road, touched her, I felt involved. Okay, maybe not involved, not yet, but scared for her. That she was being followed freaked me out. If a photographer could tail her so easily, without being caught, couldn’t the psychopath who got away with throwing acid into Nicole Castro’s face just as easily sneak right up on her again?

  Maybe I thought about it for a minute before I did it. Maybe not that long. In less than twenty keystrokes, I hacked a line into the Department of Motor Vehicles. Plate number MBE-7921 ran back to one Shane Puglisi.

  At this point I wasn’t doing anything more than poking around. I had no inclination to do more than feel bad for Nicole and wonder whether or not she was going to call me before next Thursday, when I would see her in Schmidt’s office. She wasn’t particularly thrilled I’d followed her into CVS. Stalking her by way of my computer would win me a top spot on her hate list, if she found out about it. She might even be mad enough at that point to sic the cops onto me. I just wanted to be sure that Shane Puglisi wasn’t a psycho. After I cleared him, I was going to delete my suspect list from my phone and mind my own business.

  Turning Puglisi inside out was cake. Most of the actionable intelligence the National Security Agency and CIA scoop comes from open source information. Most of that comes from Facebook. Hackers don’t have to hack so much anymore. Why would I take on the risk inherent in stealing information from you when you’re willing to tell me everything about yourself for free? The challenge now is skimming and leaking without letting people know you’re doing it. That’s the real game: remaining anonymous. Not that I was planning on doing any leaking when it came to Nicole’s case. Not yet anyway.

  Shane Puglisi’s LinkedIn profile said he was a freelance photojournalist. His Twitter profile picture was a shot of a rat sitting atop a cube of cheese, its legs crossed. I could have stopped there, reasonably sure that Puglisi, while a low-life sleaze, wasn’t after Nicole Castro, not to throw acid at her anyway. But I didn’t stop there. My fingers seemed to hammer the keyboard of their own will. I dipped into Puglisi’s bank account.

  He’d wired money to one Brian Meyers, whose Facebook profile picture was a direct match to the guy I’d seen hitting on Nicole in CVS. All of this made me feel, if not better, then somewhat relieved, at least about Puglisi and Meyers. They had run a scam to get a shot of Nicole and auction it off to the highest bidder, splitting the take, end of story. Then again, not quite. One of the wire transfers in Puglisi’s account traced back to The New Jersey Clarion.

  I found this more disturbing than surprising. Like every other newspaper desperate to stay in business, the Clarion had a “soft news” section, and Brandywine was almost exclusively the Clarion’s beat. But the paper paid my father’s salary and our rent. We were getting by and in a sense getting over by taking money from a company that chased down people who were dealing with any number of miseries, including losing half your face to an acid attack. I can’t say that it was this sense of guilt, though, that had my fingers itching to hammer my keyboard for some more digging-not exclusively.

  How would my mother have reacted to my stepping away from this girl who was clearly in pain when I had a skill set that might be of help in catching the psychopath who had ruined her life? Would she think I was crazy for wanting to help Nicole, or would she be proud of me? What would Mom have done if I had been attacked instead of Nicole? That one was easy: exactly what Mrs. Castro was doing, putting her life on hold to help her child.

  I’d lost her almost six years earlier. The loss was at times, particularly in reminiscences that for some reason came strongest at twilight, as stunning as it was the day she died. She was smiling at me by way of the visor shade mirror. She’d flipped it down to block out the high beams of the oncoming truck. The last thing she said to me was, “Jay-Jay, do you know what we’re going to do tomorrow?” And that was it.

&
nbsp; At the very least, she would want me to make sure the police were trying to catch Nicole’s attacker. After that, I would stop my prying-I swore this to myself. I tapped into an e-string that linked Brandywine Hollows High School to the police. Sneaking into Mrs. Marks’s computer was a joke. Her password was marksy123. Why bother? I found the two emails the acid thrower sent her, the first coming the night before the attack, the second moments after. Marks had forwarded the emails to the Division of Detectives, nobody specific, just info@. So now I knew where the emails ended up, but where had they come from?

  I backtracked them to what we hacktivists call a zero-map, a changing series of relay servers that were part of the Conficker bot net. The emails had ricocheted off of a thousand drives before they landed in Marks’s in-box. They were perfectly untraceable. I studied the first email: “after a little test run, I find that I like the sound.”

  Had the acid thrower burned an animal? I’d read that serial killers often started out with rodents, then cats, dogs, moving their way up to humans. Was there such a thing as a serial acid thrower? Schmidt said no, but I wasn’t so sure. The bigger question for me at the moment was: Now that I have these emails, what should I do with them?

  FIFTEEN

  From Nicole’s journal:

  Thurs, 21 Oct-

  Emma tried so hard to make me laugh when I visited her today, but underneath the cheerfulness she seemed so weary of it all, the pretending that everything is going to be all right. The bags under her eyes. The bruises on her arms from all the IVs. I don’t know how she knows not to do it, but she never asks me who I think burned me.

  After that little bit of peacefulness with Emma: another horrendous Nye session. I told him I didn’t want to take the Xanax, that the stuff is too strong. He might as well have rolled his eyes as he said, “What do you think: Is it okay to be happy?”

  He means numb. Dr. Schmidt tells me it’s okay to feel the pain. To face it.

  After Nye left, David came over.

  We whisper-fought in the living room while Mom made hot chocolate for us.

  David: “I was driving all over Brandywine looking for you.”

  Me: “You ditched me.”

  D: “I did not.”

  Me: “You said, ‘Well, that’s just messed up, Nic. Seriously. I can’t believe you. You know what? Forget it.’”

  D: “That doesn’t mean I wasn’t driving you home. How did you get home, by the way?”

  Me: “Walked.”

  D: “Alone?”

  Me: “Save it. Mom already gave me hell about it.”

  D: “Okay. Look, I’m sorry. I am.” And then he asked me about it again.

  I’m not lying for him.

  I told him to leave. He tried to kiss me, and I gave him my cheek, the wrong one, by mistake. He went into the kitchen and said good-bye to Mom. He was teary as he left. I was too. Mom plunked next to me on the couch. We sipped hot chocolate, and then she held out her hand, the pills in her palm. I took the antibiotic but passed on the Xanax. I needed to be able to think clearly. Jay Nazzaro. What was it about him that made me act like a complete idiot, practically begging him to walk me home even after he lied about following me into CVS?

  I headed upstairs to my bathroom.

  They’re all lined up so neatly on the bathroom counter: the vacuum-packed dressings coated with topical pain reliever, the latex-free surgical tape, the hydrogen peroxide, the prescription-grade antibiotic gel.

  The bandage change. The horror movie I’m too terrified to watch. The freak show I can’t turn away from. Who is that girl sitting in front of my bathroom mirror? The FedEx delivery guy used to come right up to the door with that warm smile, and now he backs away. Not in his movement, not in his smile, but in his eyes. He’s afraid to look at me. At the same time he’s afraid not to look at me, and he just ignores the fact that half my face is bandaged and stares really, really hard into my good eye. Not asking what happened is conceding that what happened is cataclysmic.

  How will I do college interviews now, job interviews? For the rest of my life, do I just not acknowledge what happened? They’ll ask me to tell them about some of the formative experiences in my life. If I acknowledge It, will they think I’m asking for pity? If I don’t acknowledge It, will they think I’m just not able to confront difficulty, challenge, hurdles, this absolute nightmare?

  This is the worst part of the bandage change: too much time to think. No, it’s the quiet. Nine months to the day after Dad left, and I still hear it. The yelling, the nastiness, the echoes trapped in the walls. Mom begs him to tell her how long it has been since he stopped loving her. The accusations. His denials. His growing exasperation with her cutting him off. Then, “To hell with it.” The stairs groan as he stomps toward the master suite. The suitcase clumps to the floor. I’m listening to all this from the tub, the water hotter than I can stand it, to waylay the cramps snaking into my calves after two brutal tennis matches that day. I believed him. He’s not the type to cheat. Too classy, too proper to have a girlfriend on the side. To betray his wife, his daughter. To lie.

  The lie.

  The stranger in the bathroom mirror.

  Or is she the truth? The real me, hiding just beneath the gauze?

  “Mom? Mom, please.”

  She appears at the bathroom door instantly, as if she’s been waiting just outside, and she has, of course. She pulls the tape away quickly.

  Six weeks after the burn, and I haven’t yet dared touch it. I regard it as if it isn’t part of me, an invading species that will never quite overtake me, or at least not the rest of my face. How do I live with this, being branded? My mind drifts back to my horse riding lessons. That sweet little red roan with the omega seared into her left shoulder. Riding her into the Meadowlands with Daddy on a clear Saturday morning, letting her graze the salt hay and cordgrass. She looks back over her shoulder to me, as if to ask if it’s okay we’ve stopped.

  “Is it okay?” Mom says, her eye on me, on It, what used to be my left eye. I clamp my good eye shut, but I easily picture what’s happening. I feel the pressure stream. Mom pushes down on the hypodermic syringe full of saline to flush the wound. I keep seeing it, over and over. The bottle’s nose. Coming up to my face. An explosion of liquid.

  After the scrubbing comes the salve, a low-grade sting, then the dressing and the tape with its epoxy-like adhesive. Then comes the kiss to the top of my head, the hug that lasts a long time. She never says it’ll be okay. I’m grateful.

  “Mom, how can I ever ask anybody to be with me now? To put up with the way people look at me or see me or can’t see me? The way I can’t see me anymore? Where did I go?”

  “Easy now, Nicole. Breathe. You’re still here. You’re with me, and I love you.”

  “This is crazy. I always saw myself loving somebody forever. Being there for him. Lifting him up when he was down. How do I do that now?”

  “Honey, there are a lot of guys out there who. . No, there aren’t a lot.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But there are a few. The good ones. You’ll see.”

  “I always saw myself with kids. How do I bring a child into my life now? Say I adopt as a single parent. How do I ask my kid to make eye contact with me? I read about it. It’s all in the eyes, the facial expressions, the thousands of tiny movements in the muscles around your eyes, your lips. The child reads them without knowing it. How is she supposed to feel I’m her protector when she’s reading a horror story? I mean, how are you doing this?”

  “It makes me feel good to be able to do this for you.”

  I tap her heart. “How are you keeping it together?”

  “You’ll get past this. We’ll get past it. Find the good in this, Nicole.”

  “The good?”

  “You and me. Us. You were running here, there, and everywhere before. Now we have this time together. And when we’re together, we’re stronger. I really mean that. I feel it. I feel stronger, seeing you overcome this. Being with you. You�
��re empowering me, giving me the courage to face it.”

  “I don’t know how you can even look at It. You don’t even flinch.”

  “I don’t mean the burn. I mean face the. .”

  “What?”

  She sees herself in the mirror. Suddenly she’s exhausted. She strokes my hair. “You’re allowed to cry for exactly three more minutes. By that time I want you in your Snuggie and in bed, and I’ll scratch your back.”

  We hug and rock in front of the mirror for a while. My eyes are closed. When I open them, I catch Mom eyeing me in the mirror. She sees I’ve caught her and holds me a little closer, but she was staring at me for just a half second too long.

  “What?” I say.

  “Nothing,” she says. She winks and I try to wink, but it hurts too much.

  She holds out her hand, palm up. The little blue pill. “You just seem so agitated, Nicole. Please, sweetheart.”

  I pop it. For her, I swallow the Xanax dry. Anything to get out of this bathroom, to escape the sterile bandage smell, except it’s always with me, the faint scent of bleach. Still, I have to get away from the mirror. From that girl. Me. It.

  Mom tucks me into bed. She cuddles with me and combs my hair with her fingers. The Xanax is starting to work. I think I only blinked, but my eyes are closed for hours. When I open them, Mom’s gone and the sun is strong. I haven’t dreamt a thing. Time just stopped.

  It hits me: that look I caught Mom giving me in the bathroom the night before. Was it suspicion? My second thought is that Jay Nazzaro hasn’t called. I feel like an idiot all over again. I thought he felt it too, a connection, the possibility of deep friendship rooted in common experience: being afraid of the next attack, not knowing when it’s coming. But can you build a real friendship on fear?

  I’m groggy as I head downstairs. Mom is in her studio. She left me a breakfast plate on the counter, steak and eggs. I slide it into the microwave and stare through the window, watching the carousel turn as the food starts to smoke. Suddenly the rain is back. . loud on the windows. I kept the umbrella Jay fixed for me. He knows what it’s like, people trying not to stare at you. They smile sweetly, but really they’re thinking, Freak. Maybe we could be alone together.