I strap the flashlight on my head—thanks, Cooley Hardware—and I ease RIP Melanda out of the trunk. I don’t belong here. I did not kill her and Fort Ward is not the Grand Forest and I hear you in my head, in my soul—When you do go to Fort Ward, make sure you don’t walk off the trail because there are some surprisingly steep drop-offs—and the trail is steeper than I anticipated and damn you, Melanda, because this is the definition of injustice.
I didn’t kill her. I didn’t.
I struggle to stay upright and you weren’t kidding. This isn’t the Grand Fucking Forest—the first part of the trail is paved, thank God—and it helps to have you with me as I climb, as pavement gives way to rocky terrain. My thighs burn—Sorry, Seamus, but this is harder than a Murph—and the endorphins kick in and I am angry. I am sad.
I didn’t kill her. I didn’t do this.
But my heart is thumping faster and louder and my forehead is a sweaty foul place and every time I put one foot in front of the other, I am steadier, my muscles are adjusting. But then I am angrier by the second. An anger that taints every endorphin in my body.
I didn’t fucking do this, Mary Kay. I didn’t.
I pass a chain-link fence, I’m getting there, and the black rocks work against me, unstable enemies on the floor of the forest trying to take me down with every step, and I am deaf with pain until finally the trail bends and to my left I see the abyss—not as deep as I expected but deep enough—and I break away from the trail. I’m a gentleman and I try to carry her but it is steep—you were right—and eventually I just can’t hold on to her any longer.
“Sorry, Melanda.”
I drop her body and let it roll down into the core and she loses her duvet along the way and it all comes back to me, the horror of what she did.
I run down the hill to wrap her up. I don’t like an open casket.
The ground is wet and loose as you said—I’m telling you, Joe, don’t walk off the trail—and I dig into the earth with a trowel—thanks again, Cooley Hardware—and my bare hands. I remember pottery in third grade and a field trip to the beach when I was eight—nine?—and I dug and I dug but I didn’t find any crabs. I dig like a dog, like a child, like my son, like a young Melanda by the sea, sunburnt and full of hope for her future, resembling a young Carly Simon, assuming they were on the same track in life and there is dirt in my fingernails and the dirt is tainted by blood.
I didn’t do this, Mary Kay. I didn’t do this.
I help Melanda into her bed and I cover her with muck and large fat orange leaves. She would want to be here. She wanted to give back to the community—the future is female—and her incubator will come to fruition. I can’t help but feel proud of my work. I laid her to rest and she’ll fertilize the land she loved so much that she couldn’t leave it behind.
And this part, this I did do. This resting place is my work, my empathy, my sweat.
I kiss my hand. I touch a leaf. “Sweet dreams, Ruby. Watch in peace.”
I wipe my hands on my shirt, my shirt I need to burn, and then white light blasts me and it isn’t lightning. It isn’t nature. It’s man-made light. And where there is man-made light, there are men.
“Say cheese, Goldberg.”
21
I know that voice and the Strawberry Killer followed me. He’s alone. I’m alone. And this is the dark version of the poem about the second set of footprints in the sand, when God is carrying the lonely, besieged man on the beach. The Strawberry Killer didn’t save me. He followed me. He’s armed with a camera and a flashlight and a gun and this is what I get for caring about Melanda so much that I forgot to watch my back. This is what I get for trying to let her rest in peace. I reach the trail and I’m out of breath and is this how I die?
“I didn’t… This isn’t what it looks like,” I say.
Even I know that’s a stupid thing to say but this is why people say it in the movies so fucking much. Because it’s true. The Strawberry Killer points his gun at me. “Turn around and put your hands behind your head, my friend. One step at a time.”
That’s what a cop would say but a cop wouldn’t call me his friend.
I look up at the starry sky and as I take a step forward, I feel the press of metal in my back. We pick our way down to the parking lot over divots and ruts in the path. Is this it? Is this how it ends? Does Love win? My foot lands on a stone and I lose my balance and the Strawberry Killer seizes my shoulder. I fall back into line, marching in the dark. Am I going back to jail? I want to marry you but this soft-shouldered preppy goon is going to bury me, isn’t he?
Finally, the parking lot comes into view, just two shadowy outlines of cars. I want to make a run for it but the road ahead is wide and I am a fish in this motherfucker’s barrel. Then, before I can paint a full picture of us in my mind, before I can take one good shot at an escape, the back of my head explodes and all the Christmas lights in the sky disappear at once.
* * *
I wake up with a lump on the back of my head and my throat is dry. It’s dark, too dark to see but I’m not knocking on a door to heaven. I smell old blood and I taste donuts and I wanna go home but I am home. I am in my Whisper Room and the welt on the back of my head throbs.
I am groping in the dark and I might be bleeding. RIP Melanda only just died—am I next?—and no I’m not next. You need me right now. It’s been hours—has it?—and you must have read her fuck-you message by now and you must be devastated, tearing at the walls, desperate to see me and I am on my feet. I knock on the bloodstained glass wall—Gently, Joseph—and my cry in the dark is met with singing—Some people call me the space cowboy—and the Strawberry Killer is the kind of asshole who knows all the words to that preppy ditty. SK is playing my guitar in the dark—trying to anyway—and I pound on the glass like RIP Melanda and the guitar stops and the lights come on all at once.
His hair is slicked back—no Figawi hat down here—and he shakes his head. “My, my, my,” he says. “Looks like someone’s got some cleaning up to do.”
It’s not my blood and it’s not my mess and a woman died in here and look at her note. Single White Female. It’s almost like she knew this was coming, like she knew I’d need a reminder that I’m not psychologically damaged like her.
“Okay,” I say. “I think there’s been a big misunderstanding.”
“So you didn’t just dump a body in the mud, my friend?”
Yes but no, and Mr. Mooney would tell me to know my enemy. “Who are you?”
He waves like a bougie hippie at Pegasus on open mic night. “Oliver Potter,” he says. “Any requests?”
I don’t make a request and I don’t like the joke and he thumbs my guitar and he’s a full-blown Angeleno, Mary Kay, ice water in his veins, smug as Patrick Bateman with an American Psycho thin-lipped smile. He’s laughing at me—who tuned this guitar?—and I need to focus.
I’ve been here before and I got out before—You set yourself free, Joseph. I just turned the key—and he strums and the feedback zings and he covers the mic and winces. “Apologies, my friend.”
A real psycho wouldn’t be so considerate; Oliver is just someone who aspires to be a psycho. He has a Glock—a gun in a barrel, a barrel in a gun—and my weapon is superior: my brain.
“So,” he says. “Walk me through it, Goldberg. You kill off the stage-twelve clinger bestie…” Lie. I didn’t kill Melanda. “And then you win your little MILFy librarian over with a six-string? And then you set a jealousy trap and just like that, boom, you’re back in Pac Pal with Love?”
His theory is a scratch on the record and he is wrong. I don’t want Love. I want you. And this is why I’m in the cage, to learn, to face the reality that I’ve been fighting, that I do feel guilty about shifting gears, not missing my son as much as I once did, accepting our fate to be apart. You see it in memes all the time. Life is change. But change is hard. Look at RIP Melanda’s blood letter. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t come to terms with the person she was, the person she wanted to be. B
ut I can. Oliver tunes my guitar and sneers—Your D string is about to pop, Goldberg—and I won’t pop. I study my enemy; his T-shirt is old, not vintage. He didn’t drop four hundred bucks for it in some Hulkshit man-boutique in Venice. He grew up in that shirt. There are pit stains. Grease stains. The logo is BAXTER’S BOATHOUSE and that’s probably some waterfront dump in Florida and I shrug. “I don’t really have a plan, honestly.”
“Well,” he says, really going for that aspiring sociopath—psychopath?—vibe. “If you ask me, my friend, your MILF’s not worth it. Too much baggage. And Love’s not really the jealousy-trap type. You would have been better off with your first plan, which I can only assume was to win her back with your music.”
You are not a MILF. You are a fox. And I am not Phil. “What’s Baxter’s?”
Oliver looks down at his shirt as if he forgot that he was wearing it and he’s insecure. That’s good news for me and he pulls at the hem. “Well, actually,” he says. “I used to work at this place in high school, the first family that ever owned me, pre-Quinns. Seems you and I have that in common.”
“The Quinns don’t own me.”
“You keep telling yourself that, my friend. See the key to life is knowing that you are owned and maximizing the potential of said ownership. I wrote a pilot about Baxter’s. Shitty script, but it got me my first agent because the bones were there.”
I think of RIP Melanda’s bones, the animals that might be finding her at this moment and oh God, Oliver is a writer. I play along. I tell him what he wants to hear, that I never thought about it that way, that I worked at a bookstore in high school, that the owner did kind of own me. He nods, pleased, because writers don’t want to write. They just want to be right about every stupid fucking thing in the world. “Well, yes, my friend. Oh also… cute cats you got. Three of ’em. Quite a statement.”
They’re kittens, asshole, and I hang my head in fake shame. Writers are narcissists who want to tell their stories, so I ask Oliver where he’s from and he says he grew up on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
“Do you know where that is, Goldberg?”
Fuck you, I’m not dumb. “Yep. How did you meet the Quinns?”
He wants control—typical writer—so he tweaks a knob on the guitar. “How do you deal with this, Goldberg? Your G string is mad fucked.”
His hand slips on the guitar and he blames my string, the way a bad tennis player blames a racquet and then he puts the guitar on the floor and now I guess we’re supposed to pretend he never touched it. “You seem pretty calm for someone in a cage, my friend.”
“Well,” I say. “You made a good point…” Praise the writer. “The Quinns own this house, technically, so it was only a matter of time.”
“They really screwed you with this shit box.”
“Are you kidding? Did you see my view?”
“Yes, Goldberg. You live in a house on an island. And you have a view of… the other side of the island. Well done there, my friend.”
STOP CALLING ME YOUR FRIEND, YOU PIECE OF SHIT.
I calmly tell him that I found the house myself, that Winslow is ideal because you can walk to everything. He strokes his chin—why do bad guys always have strong jawlines?—and he says that he would have chosen Rockaway or Lynwood and that’s another thing about sociopaths, Mary Kay. They like to talk about real estate. I am patient. The goal is freedom so I tell him that I agree—I don’t—and he picks up the guitar—no—and whines about my B string and guitars really do bring out the worst in men, don’t they?
“Come on, Goldberg. Let’s be real. What is there to walk to around here?”
“Everything. The main drag is right down the street. You know, where you saw me.”
“Main drag? You mean that strip of menopause wine bars that shuts down at eleven? You call that a main drag? You lived in L.A., my friend. Come on now. Be real with me.”
My heart beats for you, for the power to shatter this glass and throw him in the water for daring to slander our home.
Oliver pulls my keys out of his pocket. “All right,” he says. “I know your story so I suppose it’s only fair if you know mine. Basic chords are as follows. Born and bred on the Cape. Burnt my wrists on the fryolator. Went to Emerson, wrote some good plays, wrote some not so good plays…” His plays are all shit. “Hightailed it out to L.A. when I got a gig on a Law & Order spin-off…” That word should be banned: gig. “Banged out an episode of Law & Order: Los Angeles but the show went away…” As did his career. “Waited tables. Kept in touch with a consultant from the show who was a PI. He convinced me to get into that game, which he said would actually be better in the long run, in terms of my writing…” Like I give a fuck and writers assume readers are stupider than we are. “Got into the PI game, got my brother Gordy into it when he came out west…” It’s a turning point when he mentions his brother because for the first time, Oliver doesn’t seem entirely deluded and narcissistic. He is proud of what he did for his brother and he sighs. “I had a mentor. I had it made. But the Quinns did to us what they did to you, my friend.”
“What’s that, Oliver?”
“Gordy and I were doing really well with Eric. Eric was my mentor…” Say it again, Oliver and I hope I don’t repeat myself this much. “The Quinns wanted Eric’s help with their piece-of-shit son, Forty. Eric had a rule. He would do anything for the Quinns, anything but help that piece-of-shit Forty.”
I stare the fucker down. “You know my kid’s named after him, right?” And this is why I told Love that saddling our son with that stupid, tainted name was a bad idea.
“Yes, my friend, and I feel for you. I do.” And then he sighs, wanting to get back to his story. “Long story short…” It’s a little late for that, Oliver. “Eric turned down the gig. The Quinns turned around and offered the job to me and Gordy. And we’ve been working for them ever since.”
“What a nice story.”
“Joe, Joe, Joe, I’m not the bad guy here. I hate the Quinns just as much as you do. You should see where they’re putting me up, this second-rate motel with powdered eggs in the lobby and a mattress so thin I can barely sleep, which is why my back is fucked up and I can’t get the right angle on the strings on this piece-of-shit Gibson.”
“Well, maybe you should file a complaint with HR.”
“Look, my friend, I’m trying to make you see that the Quinns have me locked up, just like you. They gave me a job. They gave you this shit box. But they own us, Joe.”
I go into RIP Melanda mode. I can’t help it. “Oliver, you locked me up in here. Our situations are nothing alike.”
“Are you kidding? I saved Forty’s ass on a rape charge before he kicked the bucket. You got in through the sister. We saved their precious fucked-up kids. We both took their money.”
“I didn’t get in through the sister, Oliver. I loved her.”
He smiles. “Does your MILF know that?”
I ignore the question and he sighs. “You say you want out. But do you mean it?”
“Yes, I mean it. Let’s talk out there. It reeks in here.”
“I’m talking big picture, my friend. Why are you living on this poor man’s Nantucket?”
“I chose to move here. That has nothing to do with the Quinns. I wanted to leave L.A. and I wanted to live here and I chose this house.”
“Ah,” he says. “So you wanted to abandon your son?”
“Fuck no, Oliver. That’s different. I didn’t have a choice about that and you know it.”
Oliver nods. Smug. “And finally, light dawns on Marblehead.”
Oliver’s just like RIP Melanda, Mary Kay. He doesn’t believe that people can grow and change their minds and I don’t want to be analyzed by this failed writer turned Privacy Invader and I tell him he’s right—it hurts—and I ask him what happens next. Any good writer should be able to answer that question but Oliver failed as a writer.
“We’ll get to that,” he says. “First, I gotta know. What was your magic number?”
; “You mean what did they pay me? Oliver, they pointed a gun at my head. I had to sign the contract.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was it? Eight mill to leave your kid? Ten?”
This is why I’m in the cage. Oliver isn’t entirely wrong and I did it. I took the money. But I didn’t sell my son.
“Four million,” I say. “Plus the house.”
“The house they bought for you.”
“The house is in my name.”
“Well, isn’t that nice of them? My Benz is in my name too. Thing is though, I can’t afford the payments if I quit working for them.”
I don’t want to be like Oliver and I am not like Oliver. “Okay,” he says. “Brass tacks. I have video of you and the dead chick…”
Woman not chick and I tell him I didn’t kill her and he sighs. “Well, my friend, if I called the local yokel cops right now and they saw you in that room with her blood on the walls…”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“It doesn’t matter, Goldberg. All that matters is how it looks. Now listen up. I sent those pictures to Gordy but Gordy has not shown those pictures to Ray… If he does that, you’ll get thrown in jail, and they won’t need me to watch you anymore. I’ll be out of a job. The Quinns will win.”
“What do you want?”
Oliver settles into his chair like any aspiring writer about to pitch his shitty story and I am the executive so I lean forward because I have to lean forward. I want to buy his pitch. I want to get the fuck out of here and be with you. “You and me are from the wrong side of the trust fund, my friend. The Quinns found us. They see our potential, our brains, and they like to squash it because their own kids never had what we have. We’re not a part of the old boys’ club and we never will be, but what we have here is an opportunity to create a young boys’ club. A poor boys’ club, if you will.”
You Love Me Page 17