He comes closer.
No, it is a man. He is wearing a long black coat and he is carrying a gun. The gun is pointed at her chest. “I’m looking for Kylie O’Neill,” he says.
“She’s not home—she, she, she went to New York,” Rachel stutters.
The man raises the gun…
She wakes with a start.
The bed’s empty. Pete is gone. The house is quiet. She’s had this dream before. Variations on a theme. You don’t need to be a genius to interpret this nightmare: You are in debt. You will always be in debt. You owe. Once you are on The Chain, you are on forever. And if you even think about trying to emancipate yourself, the blowback will come for you.
It’s like her cancer.
It will always be there, lurking in the background, for the rest of her life. For the rest of all their lives.
Cancer.
Yeah.
She looks at the pillow, and sure enough, there are a few dozen brown and black hairs and—oh, how charming—quite a few gray ones now too.
When she’d gone to see her oncologist on that fateful Tuesday morning, Dr. Reed had immediately sent her for an MRI. The results were sufficiently concerning for Dr. Reed to recommend a surgical intervention that afternoon.
It was the same cream-colored room at Mass. General.
The same kind Texan anesthetist.
The same no-nonsense Hungarian surgeon.
Even the same Shostakovich symphony playing in the background.
“Honey, everything’s going to be just dandy. I’m going to count down from ten,” the anesthetist said.
Come on, who says “just dandy” anymore, Rachel thought.
“Ten, nine, eight…”
The surgery was declared a success. She would “require only one cycle of adjuvant chemotherapy,” which was easy for Dr. Reed to say because she didn’t have to go through it. She didn’t have to have the poison dripped into her veins.
Still, once every two weeks for four months is something Rachel can handle. Nothing is all that terrible now that her little girl is back again.
She brushes the hairs off the pillow and the bad dream from her mind. She can hear Kylie upstairs above her in the shower. Kylie used to sing in the shower. She doesn’t do that anymore.
Rachel pulls back the blinds and picks up the mug of coffee Pete left for her by the bed. It looks like a nice morning. She’s surprised to see that there’s no snow. The dream felt so real. The bedroom faces east toward the tidal basin. She takes a sip of coffee, slides the glass doors open, and goes out onto the deck. It’s crisp and cool, and the mudflats are full of wading birds.
She sees Dr. Havercamp walking through the dunes in front of the house. He waves and she waves back. He disappears behind a large beach plum bush from which this island and the one in New York got its name. The beach plums are ripe now. They’d made jars of preserved plums last fall, selling them at the farmers’ market. She and Kylie split the proceeds. Vineland Jam Corporation, Kylie had called it, writing that on the homemade labels. Kylie had loved the fact that dangerous piratical Vikings had maybe made it as far south as Plum Island. Those were days when you could long for danger from a place of safety.
Rachel tightens the belt on the robe and goes into the living room. “Honey, do you want me to make you breakfast?” she calls to her daughter.
“Toast, please,” Kylie says from somewhere upstairs.
Rachel pads into the kitchen and puts two slices of bread in the toaster.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” someone says behind her.
“Shit!” she says, spinning around and holding up the bread knife.
Stuart comically puts his hands in the air.
“Stuart, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know you were over,” Rachel says.
“You can put the knife down now, Mrs. O’Neill,” Stuart replies, faking terror.
“Sorry about the S-word too. Don’t tell your mother.”
“It’s fine. I might have heard that word once or twice before in various, um, contexts.”
“Would you like some toast?”
“No, thanks. I just came by to say hi to Kylie before you guys leave.”
Rachel nods and makes some toast for Stuart anyway. She and Kylie and Pete are going to Boston for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was only two days after a chemo Tuesday, so Marty had stepped into the breach and invited them all to his place for the holiday.
It’s OK. Everything is OK.
Rachel makes two more slices of toast, puts them on a plate.
Pete comes in from his run, looking breathless but happy. He’s been running a lot the past two weeks and getting stronger. The VA in Worcester got him into a methadone program, which allows him to ease the opiates out of his system gradually. It’s working so far. And it would have to keep working. Her family is the priority. Pete knows that.
Pete kisses her on the lips.
“Good run?” she asks.
He looks at her. He can tell. “Bad dream?” he whispers.
She nods. “The same,” she says.
“You should talk to someone.”
“You know I can’t.”
They can tell no one that they have gone through the looking glass and into the world where nightmares are real.
Pete gets himself coffee and sits next to Rachel at the living-room table.
He had never formally asked to move in. He had driven to Worcester and brought the stuff he’d wanted—which wasn’t a whole lot—and then just sort of stayed.
Out of the three of them, Pete perhaps is doing best.
If he has bad dreams he doesn’t mention them, and the methadone keeps away the worst of his cravings.
Out of the three of them, Kylie is definitely doing the worst.
That night at the Appenzellers’, Kylie went down to little Amelia. The girl had woken up and Kylie had comforted her and told her that everything was going to be all right. But that isn’t the point. The point is that she went down there. She was part of the apparatus keeping Amelia prisoner. Thus Kylie had been both victim and abuser. Like all of them. Victims and accomplices. That’s what The Chain does to you. It tortures you and then makes you complicit in the torture of others.
Kylie hasn’t wet the bed since she was four years old. Now nearly every single morning, the sheets are soaked.
When she dreams, the dreams are always the same—she’s thrown in a dungeon and left to die alone.
Everything is changed on Plum Island. Kylie doesn’t walk to school or to the store or anywhere by herself.
Before, they seldom locked the doors; now they always do. Pete has reinforced and changed all the locks. He cleared Rachel’s devices of spyware and his friend Stan came in and professionally debugged the house and put coin-size GPS trackers in Kylie’s shoes. They monitor Kylie constantly when she goes anywhere, especially when she stays with her dad in the city.
Kylie knows she can’t tell her father about what happened. Not her father, not Stuart, not the school counselor, not her grandmother. Nobody. But Marty is no fool and he sees that something is wrong. Maybe something to do with a boy? He isn’t going to press it. He’s having his own problems. Tammy had suddenly moved back to California to take care of her mother who had recently been in an accident. Tammy wasn’t interested in a bicoastal relationship. A few curt e-mails, and just like that, so long, Marty.
Pete wasn’t too surprised. Marty had bailed Tammy out of bankruptcy, restored her credit, sorted out all her legal woes, and then she’d said, Thank you very much, I’m off to the coast. She socially engineered them, Pete thinks. He’s seen Tammy’s type before; in fact, he married a girl almost exactly like Tammy. And he knows plenty of male Tammys.
Kylie finally comes downstairs. She’s changed out of her pajamas into sweats and a T-shirt.
Rachel knows what that means. Her pajamas are in the laundry basket.
“Oh, hi, Stuart,” Kylie says.
She looks so very sad. Thanksgiving will hopefully give her
something else to think about. Rachel watches her while pretending to look through her philosophy books. Stuart is talking and Kylie is giving him vague, halfhearted answers.
Finally Stuart says goodbye; they all have breakfast and then get dressed.
At one o’clock, Pete drives them down to Marty’s new place in Longwood, which is almost within home-run range of Fenway Park. Good neighborhood. Lawyers, doctors, accountants. White picket fences, well-kept lawns. “Whatever Marty’s giving you in child support, ask for more,” Pete says, parking the Dodge.
Marty hasn’t even tried to cook. He ordered in everything from a gourmet-delivery app, which is fine. The house is barely furnished and he does not have a new girlfriend in tow, which surprises Rachel a little. Marty always seemed to be a plan A and plan B kind of guy.
They get the lowdown on Tammy’s sudden departure and Marty’s career. He’s upset about Tammy breaking up with him via text message and then ghosting him from California, but Marty’s not one to let something like that get him down. He riffs about clients, tells a hilarious story about a will reading, and then does some of his better lawyer jokes.
He doesn’t ask about Kylie’s school. He already knows about the collapse in grades and he thinks it’s best not to bring it up.
Kylie is distant, and Rachel is too exhausted to say anything, but for once Pete keeps up his end of the conversation. He says he’s thinking of kayaking up the Intracoastal Waterway and he talks about the intricacies of the Cape Cod canal and the Chesapeake.
Rachel’s mom calls from Florida, and Marty insists on speaking to her. There’s a heart-in-mouth moment when Marty asks her about Hamilton, but Judith remembers to lie about that.
Judith tells Rachel privately that she needs to make a clean break from that awful O’Neill family, and Rachel listens, agrees, wishes her a happy Thanksgiving, and hangs up.
“What did you do for Thanksgiving last year, Uncle Pete?” Kylie asks.
“I was in Singapore traveling. Didn’t do much. Couldn’t get turkey.”
“What was your last proper Thanksgiving at home? With family?” Rachel wonders.
Pete thinks about it. “It’s been a few years. The last Thanksgiving I remember was in Okinawa at Camp Butler. Mess hall had turkey and mashed potatoes. It was pretty good.”
Rachel listens and smiles. She holds Kylie’s hand under the table and moves the food around on her plate and pretends to eat. She looks at Kylie—now laughing at her dad’s jokes but almost always on the verge of tears. She looks at Pete—broody and quiet but trying his damnedest to keep the convo going. She looks at Marty—handsome and ebullient and funny. Tammy is an idiot. Marty’s a keeper.
She excuses herself to go to the restroom.
She catches her reflection in the hallway mirror.
She’s fading away again. Dissolving into the background. She goes into the bathroom and plucks at that annoying red thread on her favorite red sweater.
She sits there on the toilet with her head in her hands, thinking.
The bell sounds on her phone. A new message on the encrypted Wickr app. She had only gotten messages from one person on Wickr: the Unknown Caller. The Chain.
She opens the message.
You have a lot to be thankful for this year, Rachel. We have given you back your daughter. We have given you back your life. Be thankful for our mercy and remember that once you are on The Chain, you are on it forever. You are not the first and you will not be the last. We are watching, we are listening; we can come for you at any time.
Rachel drops the phone and stifles a scream.
She bursts into tears. It will never be over. Never.
She sinks to the floor and after a few seconds remembers to breathe.
She weeps and washes her face and flushes the toilet and takes a deep breath and rejoins her family.
Everyone looks at her. Everyone knows that she has been crying. Two of them guess the reason why.
45
Fifty-Five Fruit Street, Boston, Mass.
She tells them not to come. She wants them to come, but she always tells them not to. Pete has to drive her, of course, but there’s no reason Kylie and Marty have to be there.
As ex-husbands go, Marty is pretty high up there.
They wait outside in the family room.
The family room is fine. There’s a TV tuned to CNN and a stack of National Geographics going back to the 1960s. There’s a view of Boston Harbor. You can just see the USS Constitution.
She’s glad they aren’t in here to watch her gasp in pain when the nurse accesses the port or to see her when the poisons flow and the shivering begins and the nausea makes the room spin.
Chemo is a little death that you invite in in order to keep the big death waiting outside on the porch.
When the humiliation and the agony are done, they wheel her into the recovery room and they smile at her. Hugs from Kylie and Pete. Marty talking a mile a minute.
That’s what you need. Family. Friends. Support.
Dr. Reed is happy with her treatment. And her prognosis is good. And the trajectory is pointing to the upper right of the chart.
But the terrible secret truth is that she isn’t doing well.
Her body is failing.
She’s getting weaker.
And she knows it isn’t the cancer that’s consuming her. That isn’t the big C.
Not the cancer.
It.
The Chain.
46
A family has just finished moving into a house in Bethesda, Maryland. It’s been a long day but now the delivery guys are gone and all the boxes are inside.
The family are posing for a photo outside their new home. A happy family in sunlit suburbs. Imagine an early-1990s version of Robert Bechtle’s painting ’61 Pontiac, except the kids are the same age. Twins. The husband, Tom Fitzpatrick, is a small, trim, dark-haired man in a white shirt and thin black tie. He looks rather like the first Darrin on Bewitched. He seems harmless enough. His new wife, Cheryl, is pregnant. She has long, straight golden hair and bangs that hover a couple of inches above her pretty brown eyes. Without straining the analogy, you could say that she has a bit of a Samantha Stephens vibe.
The little boy, Moonbeam, is now called Oliver. A chubby, harmless-looking kid with maybe a slightly eerie unblinking intensity about him. The girl, Mushroom, is called Margaret. She too does the eerie unblinking thing, but you don’t notice as much with her curly red hair and perpetual-motion antics. If Tom were one for taking his kids to head doctors, Margaret would probably be on Ritalin, but Tom is not one for doctors. He’s old-fashioned like that. “You don’t need a pill for every ill,” his father says.
Two days after they move in, they hold a housewarming party and invite all the neighbors. There are congressional aides living on this street, employees of the State Department, the Treasury Department.
There are three parties taking place in the house at the same time that night. There is the party where the men are getting to know one another. Tom comes off OK. He seems like a square, boring kind of a guy with his GI Joe hair and pocket protector and fridge full of Coors Light.
There’s the women’s party. Cheryl seems pretty and dull and maybe a bit simple. Cheryl is a typical suburban mom who had her own dreams but who has given them up to be a supportive wife. Cheryl wanted to be a baker like her grandfather.
And then there’s the kids’ party taking place in the TV room. The kids’ party is the most interesting. The boys are dissecting the record collection and declaring it lame: John Denver, Linda Ronstadt, Juice Newton, the Carpenters. The girls are spilling the family secrets. Ted’s dad is a drunk who is having an affair with his secretary. Mary’s mom crashed her car two years ago and killed a woman on a bicycle. Janine’s mom thinks the neighborhood has gone straight to hell now that an Indian family has moved in.
As the party continues well past the kids’ bedtimes, Oliver is informed that the Jets and the Giants both suck but the Giants suck m
ore because they’re in the same division as the Redskins.
Oliver says that he doesn’t even really like football. A ten-year-old boy named Zachary tells Oliver that he is a little queer who smells. Zachary also informs him that his mom looks like a whore.
Oliver calmly tells the boy that his mom is dead. His mom was murdered and her body was mutilated and then burned in a fire.
Zach looks pale. He looks even paler a minute after Margaret dares him to drink half a can of beer she found. Zachary chugs the can and says he has drunk beer before. That might be the case, but not beer laced with a teaspoon of ipecac syrup.
Zach begins projectile vomiting, and this effectively puts an end to the party.
47
She stares at the computer screen. A blank page, a winking cursor.
It’s a frosty December morning, an hour from high tide. The tidal basin is filled with wintering geese and eider.
She takes a deep breath and types: Lecture 2: Introduction to Existentialism. The existentialists believed that our lives are an attempt to impose meaning on an existence where there is no meaning. For them this world is an ouroboros—a serpent that eats itself. Patterns repeat. There is no progress. Civilization is a rope bridge dangling over an abyss.
She shakes her head. Wrong tone. She clicks Delete and watches her hard work vanish in an instant.
Kylie comes downstairs in her new red coat. She looks happy today. She, like her mother, is getting good at faking happy. A little turned-up-corner-of-the-mouth smile and a phony lilt to the voice. But the eyes tell a different story.
She’d been having a lot of stomach cramps lately. The doctors haven’t found anything. They say it’s probably stress. Stress that doubles her up in pain and gives her nightmares and causes her to wet the bed.
She puts a brave face on it, but Rachel knows.
“Can we go?” Kylie asks.
“Sure. This isn’t working anyway,” Rachel says and shuts the laptop.
“Just give me five minutes to shower and we can head out,” Pete says.
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