Forty-five minutes later Alexis saw the lights of Linda’s car sweep across the ceiling of the hallway and she slipped out the front door, knowing none of the residents would even turn over in their sleep. In fact, it was two o’clock on a cold, rainy night and no one in the world cared that she was sneaking out of her house, nor would they miss her in the morning if she didn’t come home. In fact, as much as Mr. Kenji and Ursula and Otto and the twins considered themselves friends, as long as she left the sherry bottle out for afternoon tea they’d go for days without noticing her room was empty, her bed not slept in.
The car smelled like fake buttered popcorn and stale beer, and pot; Alexis’s stomach churned. The girls were yabbering away, imitating the green-pea-soup scene and Satan’s voice coming out of Linda Blair’s pudgy mouth. Lisa and Jen didn’t even seem to notice Alexis had gotten in the car. Linda turned the stereo on and they all three started singing to Lily Allen: “Ever since he can remember, people have died . . .” It seemed to take hours, days to get to Jen’s house in Ballard and drop her off. God, thought Alexis, don’t her parents even care that she’s coming in stoned at two thirty in the morning? Doesn’t anybody care? Lisa stumbled out of the car next, her small, rundown house in Crown Hill lit up like Grand Central, the garbage can spilled across the front lawn.
At last the car was empty except for Alexis and Linda, and Alexis climbed across the front seat to sit next to Linda, snagging her silver blouse on the seatbelt buckle. Linda glanced over at her once, then a second time and turned off the radio. “You don’t look so hot.”
That was all it took for Alexis to burst into tears. Linda reached over and took her hand, the car swerved across the center line and then righted. “Just pull over, would you?” said Alexis.
Linda steered the car with one hand onto the narrow shoulder just at the entrance to the Aurora Bridge. Alexis stared through the rain-streaked windshield at the long bridge, deserted at this hour, still intact despite whatever fantastic conspiracy theory LJ had conjured in his last delusional hours. How ironic that Linda had stopped here, as if to remind Alexis of the last friend she’d lost.
“What is it, babe?” Linda asked.
Alexis tried to answer her; she wanted to answer her, tell her everything and let somebody else worry about it with her for a while. But then she was pushing open the car door, the wind shoving it back against her body so she had to throw her weight into it. Rain hit her in the face and the cold was already stinging. She started to run, going forward, wherever forward was, finding herself on the narrow raised walk that rimmed the high bridge across the Ship Canal. She thought she heard the waves slapping against the massive concrete posts that held the span, but when she stopped for breath and looked over the railing she knew, in a dizzy rushing wave, that the water was much too far away to hear. A few small boats anchored below lifted and slapped onto the water with every gust of wind. Farther out the lights of a tug wavered, and she heard the moan of a foghorn calling across the sound. Her dress clung to her legs, the synthetic feathers crawling on her skin, the soles of her silver boots soaked with water.
Then a hand was at her shoulder, gripping her, pulling her, and she would have screamed except that she hardly cared whether someone hurled her off the bridge. It was Linda. Her Linda. Turning her around and wrapping her in her own coat. Suddenly the story was pouring out of Alexis, so fast that Linda put two fingers against her lips, shook her head and said, “Slow. Slow down. You’re not making sense.”
Alexis choked for a moment, rain and tears running into her mouth. “My mother. My mom. And LJ. Everyone’s gone. They’re all gone.”
“Alexis, sweet thing, you are talking crazy here. I know your momma’s sick and all, but nobody’s goin’ anywhere. And least of all me. I’m right here. I am right here for you. Always.”
For the first time since running away from the blinding, shattering blast that took LJ, Alexis felt her heartbeat begin to slow down, could hear her own breath take on a measured, even flow. Linda looked so beautiful to her now, the rain and the night making her coffee-colored skin even warmer, smoother. Alexis had a flash of that scene from Casablanca, where Ingrid and Humphrey stand in the fog outside plane, all the pent-up love they’ve tried to suppress bursting through the screen, Ingrid’s eyes going big and glittery with tears. Edith had always been a crumpled mess of sobs by that point, every time they watched it. Alexis took Linda’s hand and pulled her farther along the bridge, finally starting to talk as they headed toward the center of the span, the lights of the shoreline dimming. “Linda, LJ died tonight. It was on the news—you must have been in the movie. He was in his lab, in Fremont, and there was an explosion.”
Linda stopped walking, stunned. “Oh my God. . . .”
“Wait. That’s not even . . . Linda, my mom isn’t sick. My mom is dead. She died nine days ago.” Even in this gloomy light Alexis could see the color wash out of Linda’s face. “It’s true. She’s in the basement. My uncle’s trying to take the hotel away from me—I’ll end up in foster care.”
Linda crossed her arms over her chest. “So, your mom’s in the basement, or she’s dead? Let’s get this one straight.”
“Both,” said Alexis. “She’s in the basement. Dead. In one of the coffins.”
“Not the coffin we . . .”
“Linda, don’t you get what I’m saying? My mother is dead! I can’t tell anyone—I’m hiding her in the basement. Only LJ knew, and now he’s gone, too.”
Something shifted in Linda’s eyes, a little shadow. “You know what a nine-day-old dead person smells like? You’re telling me all those folks livin’ right up the stairs are just eatin’ their breakfasts same as always? Just a little LJ perfume to cover it up?”
Alexis felt like she had been punched, a big fat hollow place opening up in her gut as she listened to her last friend, her last refuge pulling back from her. “Hey . . . Those coffins have really good seals. Do I have to show it to you . . . her to you to make you believe me? Look, I need help. I’m begging you. My uncle is going to sell the Angeline and I’m going to be thrown out onto the streets. I’ll run away before I’ll let the state tell me where to live. Or if I even have to keep living.” Even Alexis was shocked to hear those words come out of her own mouth, but suddenly suicide felt frighteningly possible. “I’m out of choices here. I’m asking for your help. Look . . . your dad. Or stepdad, I mean. He has money. Can’t you ask him? For me?”
And then Alexis saw panic spread across Linda’s face. Alexis realized she wasn’t even shivering anymore, standing out there in her shiny metallic shirt and feathers, like some gawdy stuffed bird soaked to her bones. Her body was rigid. Linda’s mouth twisted between a pitiful smile and a sneer. She said, “This is insane. I’m sorry. Really. I’m sorry for you, if this crazy talk is all true. But I don’t have so many choices either. My dad hears this, finds out about you—you and me—and we’ll be on the streets together.”
Alexis didn’t answer. Waited, willing to take that leap together if they had to.
Linda shook her head, “I’m a lot of things, Alexis. A gay rico with bad hair, bad grades, and bad reputation—at least when I’m hangin’ out with you at the Angeline. But as far as my stepdad knows, I’m an angel. And I need his money. I like his money. Being a street person isn’t in my plans, if you know what I mean. And if you don’t want to wind up on the streets, too, you’d better cut this out. I don’t know what game you’re playing, but I don’t want any part of it.”
Alexis looked Linda straight in the eye for long enough to understand that she would not back down. Linda, her last friend, for all intents and purposes, didn’t believe her. Alexis turned away and walked farther out onto the bridge, one small corner of her heart still hoping to hear Linda following. But there were no footsteps behind her, and then there was a car—Linda’s car—pulling up on the roadway beside the narrow sidewalk.
“Alexis, please, come back to the car. Let me drop you at the police station.” Linda called.
>
Drop her? She had that right. Alexis didn’t even turn to look at her. Finally, Linda drove away.
The rain had turned to the steady, oozing mist that would last from now until June, colder than the deepest snow. Headlights approached from the south and slowed beside her, a black Mercedes. The window slid down and she heard a man’s voice ask what price she’d take for a car ride down the street. Her fingers were so cold now her hands felt thick and clumsy, but she managed to shoot him her middle finger. As soon as he pulled away she began to cry, leaning on a light post that rose above her and wept rain onto the railings and her hair. The water below her was blacker than any object she’d seen in her life, only the smallest crescents of silver when the lamplight glistened off the waves. It looked warm to her, comforting, like the surface of a deep warm bed. Suddenly she heard something ringing in her ears, taking up the entire space inside her head. As if waking up from a dream she realized she was standing next to a telephone strapped onto the lamppost—one of those emergency phones they’d put out here to stop the torrent of suicides that made this bridge famous in Seattle. Ringing. Ringing. She picked it up. “Miss? My name is Susan. I’m calling from a hotline—we’re here to help you.”
Alexis held the phone out in front of her face as if she might see a pair of lips moving in the mouthpiece. “What?” she asked, putting the plastic to her ear again.
“The hotline. The suicide hotline. Someone called in about a kid walking along the bridge. Talk to me. We’re here to help you.”
Alexis pressed the phone harder against her face and knew exactly what she wanted to say, as if she had heard a voice as clear as her own mother’s saying the words inside her head. She knew exactly what she was going to do. “You want to help me? Here’s what I want. Here’s what you and the Man can do for me. You tell them all to go fuck themselves. I’m buying the Angeline, and no one’s going to stop me.”
CHAPTER 16
KAREN FINNEYFROCK
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN a week, Alexis got lucky. The stop for her bus line was a short walk away and her bus was only a ten-minute wait. The other riders—a shifty-looking man with a Seahawks hoodie pulled low over his brow and another lonely seeming teen—didn’t look at her twice. Actually, they didn’t look at her once.
It must have been nerves, that knee-jerk sleep that wakes you up hours before your alarm goes off on a big day. Something kept Alexis from snoozing past her stop. She stepped down, said thanks to the driver, and turned her feet in the direction of the only home she knew. If there was anything Alexis needed more than food, sleep, or love, it was the feeling of safety, a door to close on everything.
Capitol Hill knows nightlife. There is barely an hour of the morning that doesn’t see kids in tight jeans trying to get home from the clubs or the bars before the rain ruins their hairstyles. Alexis passed six groups bustling home from various after-parties, looking for a few hours of sleep before breakfast, but she wasn’t really aware of any of them. She was barely aware of anything. She was a body, walking.
It was still dark out, the night that you could almost call morning, when Alexis turned her key in the Angeline’s front door. The first sound she heard was the TV. Even at this hour, it was still on.
“Reports are rolling in slowly on what police are calling the largest explosion in Seattle in twenty years. The Fremont Inferno has claimed one life and more than twenty businesses. Police are following leads about the blast, but no suspects have been named.”
So the explosion was huge, Alexis thought, but at least LJ hadn’t killed anyone. Well, anyone but LJ.
The television was whispering in the common room, the volume nighttime low. The light from the screen flickered on the door the way sunlight strobes through trees. Alexis walked toward it and into the living room.
Mr. Kenji, legs crossed on the couch, a bonsai and a pair of pruning shears in his hands, sat watching the reporter. He turned to Alexis as she entered but didn’t say a word. He held the shears raised in his right hand as if he were caught mid-snip.
His look was knowing and sympathetic. His look was vacant and dark. Alexis was tempted to spread her arms and fall into the sofa like it was a swimming pool, to go under and never surface.
“Terrible night in Fremont,” Mr. Kenji said, the shears still held at the ready. “LJ’s business is in Fremont. The police might come here, looking for information.” His voice was steady and firm. His eyes were still hard to read.
Of course. She was wasting time. It would be hours, minutes maybe, before the police arrived, looking for LJ’s next of kin, looking for someone to inform, looking for LJ’s computer files, looking for her. She owed it to LJ to protect him. She owed it to herself to know as much as she could. From the couch, Mr. Kenji said, “I’ll just stay up a while longer, in case anyone knocks.”
Alexis turned toward the stairs, forcing her shaky legs to take them two at a time. Fingering the passkey around her neck, Alexis stopped outside LJ’s door and took a nervous look right and left before stooping over to slip the key in the lock. She slid through the door in the thinnest way possible, the way a letter slides into an envelope. The door clicked behind her as she raised a hand over the light switch.
It had only been hours since she had seen LJ’s apartment for the first time, and now it wasn’t even LJ’s apartment anymore. It was a dead man’s house, a shell on the beach, a museum dedicated to one man. The sadness was crushing. There was LJ’s bed he would never sleep in again, his sparkling kitchenette he would never use, flowers he could no longer smell.
Life felt so small to Alexis then. She touched her own arms to confirm she was still living, still warm and intact. Life felt thin and fast, an elevator ride to the top floor that eventually returns everyone to the basement. She ran her hands down her arms to her torso. The feathers. That absurd silver-and-feather outfit. Stupid excuse for a good-bye present. Pathetic, pointless inheritance.
“LJ?” she said out loud into the room. She cleared her throat. “LJ?” she repeated louder, hoping another ghost had come to populate her family of specters. “Mom?” she added, waiting for her mother’s voice to float from the basement and direct her actions correctly. “Anyone?” she said desperately to the air, to the room full of photographs, to the silent, unforgiving house. No one was answering. Maybe even ghosts have to sleep.
Alexis pushed herself back from the wall, struggling with the weight of the task at hand. She went over to LJ’s desk.
Lots of things are hard for a normal fourteen-year-old to resist. Pizza. Staying up all night. Texting over the limit of her cell-phone plan. But chief among the list of teenage temptations is discovery. The events of the past ten days were forming themselves into a line, and that line seemed to be developing an arrow and that arrow must be pointing toward something. Alexis felt like some necessary truth was burned onto that CD, a truth currently more important than sleep.
She opened the drawer. There it sat. ALEXIS: LISTEN. She moved the mouse on LJ’s computer, hoping to wake it up. A message popped up from the sleeping screen. It said:
Sorry pigs. This computer’s been scrubbed. If you’re looking for information on the people working to liberate our nation from the terrorism of endless war, then start by reading A People’s History of the United States. I have lived among you, but I have never consented. I have worked alone and am entirely to blame for this action. Sincerely, Lynn J. Robinson.
Alexis read the screen again. Then again. Then she just read the word “Robinson.” Then she said it aloud. “Lynn J. Robinson.” Then she turned to the bank of windows lining the apartment and said to the new sun, “Is everything a lie?”
She turned back to the screen and punched a few keys. Same message. She slid the “Alexis” CD from its pouch and attempted to insert it into the thin slot on the hard drive. The computer spit it out without fanfare. She tried to push the CD back in, but it was a futile battle of wills. LJ left fresh flowers in his apartment, but his computer was locked as tight as a jail.
Exhausted, hungry, numb from being hit by a battering ram of grief, Alexis dropped her head into her lap. An observer would have guessed she was practicing to be in a plane crash. She hugged her knees and wished that crying would relieve something, if only the desire to cry more.
That was how she was sitting when she heard the knocking on the front door, and the voice rising up from the street saying, “Seattle Police,” and Mr. Kenji shuffling from the living room, bonsai still in hand, to answer the door, and her mother’s voice saying, “Alexis, take the CD and get to our room.” And she did. But before slipping out the door, taking as many fingerprints as possible with the edge of her skirt, she reached over to the wall of black-and-white photographs and she snatched the one LJ refused to tell her about—the photograph of the mysterious man with the collar up around his chin.
CHAPTER 17
ROBERT DUGONI
ALEXIS SLAMMED SHUT THE DOOR to the apartment and turned the deadbolt. She grabbed the knob at the end of the chain lock and attempted to fit it into the slot, but her hand shook so bad she couldn’t get it in. She missed. Missed again. Swore under her breath.
Watch your language, young lady. Edith’s voice was as clear as if she were in the room.
“Not the time, Mother.”
Alexis found the slot, slid the knob to the right. She turned her back to the door, fell against it, heart racing, mind swimming in mud. She couldn’t think. Downstairs she heard Mr. Kenji ranting at the police and their retorts. Good God, she hoped he’d put down the gardening shears.
She heard someone say her mother’s name. “Edith. Edith Austin.”
They were coming. Without an elevator they would have to take the stairs. That would buy her some time, but not much. Not enough.
Now what?
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