Providence

by Caroline Kepnes

  I avoid her eyes. I know it’s odd that Jon doesn’t talk to me about what happened. It’s like he’s always trying to prove that he’s normal. We talk about me, about my art, about his conviction that nothing will ever top Hippo Campus at the Valley Bar in Phoenix, Arizona, on May 7, 2016. But he won’t talk about himself, not really.

  “It’s fucked up,” she says. “You dumped Carrig and you don’t even see Jon. I don’t understand this doormat syndrome.”

  The word stings. “I’m not a doormat.”

  “So why isn’t Jon here right now? You don’t think that’s weird that you never see him?”

  The worst times in life are when you do know and you don’t know. Day after day I ask him to come over for a Middle marathon and he deflects, harps on me to read that Dunwich Horror book. I never ask him why he won’t so much as go for a walk with me. Our connection has always been more about how we implicitly understand each other. I don’t want to prod. I don’t like talking about Jon with Noelle and I bite her head off with words I can’t take back, “I think nothing is ever easy with your soulmate.”

  It was a mean thing to say, the kind of thing that makes her pick up her phone and twirl her hair. There’s a silence now. I know I should apologize and tell her that she’s right, that I do wish Jon would see me, that it’s eating me alive. But the thing about things that break your heart, it’s hard to validate them by saying them out loud. I just keep thinking tomorrow he’ll show up. Tomorrow I’ll be telling Noelle about our first kiss and everything will be normal.

  “So,” she says, in that little girl voice you only hear at times like this. “Are you guys gonna go to prom?”

  I shrug, we’ll see. I drop hints about prom to Jon every day. He never says yes, but then he also hasn’t said no.

  She sighs. “I’ll tell Penguin to tell Care that he can bring his sophwhore.”

  I’ve known about Carrig and the new girl for a week. But still I gasp. “Wait,” I say. “He has a girlfriend?”

  Noelle needed to have something over me, me and my soulmate. I put on a show, playing the exasperated ex.

  “Jon is bad for you,” she says. “You might not realize it, but he’s punishing you for being with Carrig. And you’re letting him. Chloe. The thing is, you’re allowed to be happy. If Jon loved you, he would want you to be happy. You look like a zombie.” She is on her feet, emboldened. “I’m getting you some water.”

  When she’s gone, I look over those last texts with Carrig. He texted me the very first night he met the sophwhore. He was drunk, jealous. He was all over the place, I love you I hate you. I called him the next day to try and talk about it, but he didn’t pick up. He just sent one last text. Don’t remember any of that. Senior moment. Delete.

  * * *

  —

  Later that night I’m tipsy on spiked seltzers.

  I stare at the white space in the chat window, the absence of dots, he doesn’t know what to say to me and I’m too drunk to say the right thing, so I say the crazy thing.

  I want to see you. Really see you.

  And then I see those little dots. Here he comes.

  I know, he says. It’s an infuriating response. Especially because of today. Defending him comes so naturally to me in the moment. But then to come home to him—to my computer—and realize nothing has changed. That today isn’t tomorrow. Today is going to be more texting, more typing. He starts in about an article on the founder of Starbucks that he found online and that launches us into a big talk about discovery and invention and risk and ambition and knowing and not knowing and original thinking and it feels like a dirty trick of the universe.

  We can talk about everything except us.

  I tell him I want to see him and he says it again. I know.

  What does he know? Does he know he’s making me crazy? Does he know I go to sleep with makeup on in case he shows up? Does he know I drive by his house? I see him on the swing set in his backyard. I watch him as he lies to me about being busy. I try to tell myself that it’s got nothing to do with me, that it’s PTSD. But deep down I don’t believe it. People do what they want to do. And if Jon wanted to see me, he would. You can’t make someone love you. He never kissed me when we were kids. Why should it be any different now? I vow to end this thing. Block him. I open the email I keep in drafts, my literal Dear Jon letter where I tell him I can’t do this anymore, can’t set myself up for this daily rejection. The wording is strong, direct. I tell him I’m not a horny monster who’s going to attack him. I will always be here for you if you just want to be friends. Of course, I don’t send the letter.

  He pops up in a chat window. Chloe, are you home? I should ignore him. Noelle says you have to train men like dogs. Marlene says to buck up and ask him to prom. But I’m afraid of what he might say, that he doesn’t love me, that I come on too strong, too hungry. It’s easier to slip into conversation, into Hippo Campus. As always, it gets late, really late, and he drifts away from the chat. It was the opposite with Carrig. With him, I was always first to go. I miss the power that comes with being the one who doesn’t say goodbye, the one who just disappears.

  JON

  I always log off first.

  I know it’s a shitty thing to do, to leave her hanging. But this thing in me, the thing that might be in me, the invisible poison, the thing I have no name for, the thing I call my jets, the thing that kills dogs and makes my dad pass out, this thing is scary. I don’t know how it works. So far it only seems to work when I’m physically close to people, but Roger said I’m growing. And if he was talking about this thing, the power, then who’s to say it’s not strong enough to worm its way through the computer, into Chloe?

  I think I’m paranoid. And maybe crazy.

  Sometimes I think he only gave me this book and this letter to fuck with my head, that this is just the kind of thing an evil person does. I grab my jacket, I look in the mirror and I think, Just do it, go to her house or show up where she works and kiss her already.

  But then I remember Kody’s little body, the stillness.

  I’m running out of time. Eventually she’s gonna get sick of me. She’s gonna want more, she’s gonna want less. Every day I expect her to say the terrible words, We need to stop talking. But she must feel it too, the connection, this thing between us, a vine.

  My shrink Beverly says I’m not a parasite. She’s older than my mom but younger than a grandma and we Skype like this once or twice a week. I’d never tell her about my Dunwich theory, but it’s nice to pretend she knows it all, to think of her thinking she has the whole story.

  “So,” she says. “Did your mom get her test results?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “She doesn’t have lupus, they don’t think.”

  “Well, good,” she says. “That’s good news, Jon.”

  She’s a little too cheery sometimes, or maybe she does that on purpose, to set me off. I start ranting at her about how it isn’t that simple. Good. My mom is weak and sick and she passes out all the time, she has no balance, she gets bloody noses. My dad nods off. They’re both sick and no doctors can figure out what the hell is going on.

  Beverly says what she always says. “It’s not your fault, Jon.”

  This is the hardest part of the session, when I want to tell her that she doesn’t get it, that it might be me, that I might be making them sick. Literally. She talks about emotions and stress but she doesn’t understand that this thing in me, it’s not in her books. And if I told her, she’d probably make me go into a hospital where you do puzzles and take drugs.

  And then she says the thing she says every week, the warning about so much in my life, Our time is up.

  I still haven’t found Roger, and the cops have no leads and in all the crime shows it’s harder to find someone every day. After I talk to Beverly, I always call Detective Shakalis.

  “Hi there,” I say on his voicem
ail. “It’s Jon Bronson. I was just calling to see if there are any leads on Roger Blair.”

  A few minutes later he sends me a lame-o email. Take it easy, Jon. Be happy you’re in such good health. Try to be happy, Jon. We’ll let you know if anything comes up.

  But I can’t be happy. I have too many questions for Roger. I’ve marked up every page of that stupid evil little book and I can’t figure out what he meant by it. Lovecraft talks a lot about Wilbur being an albino, and I asked my parents if we have any albino blood in our family and they looked at me and laughed and my dad said, Scottish is a euphemism for albino, son, what made you wonder about that? I lied and said it was something for my GED class.

  I pull the blankets over my head. I try to cut through four years of fog. I walk through the woods in my mind. Didn’t I hear something in all that time? Didn’t my eyes open once, commit one image to the back of my mind? Did Roger carry me or did he stuff me into a wheelbarrow? Did he have a friend waiting with a car or did he act alone? Did he mumble or was he silent? Did I struggle?

  My mom knocks on the door. “Hungry?”

  The comfort of her overcooked broccoli, my dad’s scotch in red Solo cups, it isn’t the same as it was when I first got home. I’m too old. I’m in the house too much. I don’t fit here. We all know it and things are starting to get tense.

  The only thing we can talk about with ease is Roger Blair. My mom is always game to rave about the fact that my school should have known he was fired from Brown University. Shoulda been locked up then. My dad’s sick of seeing Blair’s co-workers on TV, telling stories about how weird he was, so why didn’t they speak up back then? My parents blame everyone for everything. They blame Roger for the kidnapping and they want to see him fry. They blame Harvard for educating him, Brown for employing him, my school for not running a stronger background check, the mall for letting him keep that lease when he never even opened a shop.

  “You know,” my mother says. “The Ellen show called and they still want to fly you out for the special. And the invitation’s not gonna last forever. It’s been a few months now, Jon. It’s time to act.”

  My dad sighs. “Penny.”

  My mom puts her hands up. “They would settle for a Skype.”

  “Mom, I mean it. I don’t want to be Basement Boy anymore, okay?”

  When she drinks wine, she gets gloomy. She talks about justice. “They’re not even looking for Blair anymore but if you put yourself out there, they’d have to.”

  “Penny,” my dad says. “He doesn’t want to go on TV.”

  “You mean he doesn’t want to leave Chloe.” She pounds her little fist on the table. “Jon, the girl won’t even eat supper with us and you put your whole life on hold for her.”

  My dad butts in. “Pen, leave it alone.”

  “I won’t leave it alone. The girl is sucking the life out of him, I’m not gonna stand by and watch it happen. Her texting and her emailing all the time.”

  “Mom, I told you, that’s how we like to hang out. I just don’t feel like going out and doing stuff.”

  My mom rubs her forehead. “I think this wine is bad.”

  My dad laughs. “You wanna switch to the hard stuff?”

  But my mom is on a mission. “See, you boys don’t understand. It’s a civic duty. The man kidnapped you and for all we know he could be out there kidnapping someone else. You do everything you can to stop that, to hold him accountable, to keep your story in the news. You want to sit around here and go on and on about it and talk to your little friend Chloe at all hours, but this doesn’t do anything. You need to talk out there.”

  My dad kicks me under the table. He winks. Once he told me that my mother is a cat, you have to play with her, let her chase the string. She gets going like this, you can’t stop her. She says we all deserve a little sunshine, a free trip, she’s sick of being here, sick of seeing me waste my time up in my room. My dad tries to lighten things up, makes a joke about how this is just Mom’s ploy to go find Dr. McDreamy.

  But she isn’t laughing. “It’s McSteamy,” she says. “The one I like is McSteamy.”

  My dad looks at me. “Chime in here anytime, son.”

  But our house is sour and I can’t fix it. My mom sighs. “You know, unlike you two, I live in reality. And the reality is that before you know it, some other kid’s gonna get kidnapped. The Ellen people will be all over him. Nobody stays in the news forever, Jon. Just think about it. You’ll feel better with some structure in your life. That’s all I’m trying to do for you.”

  I see her trembling. I gulp. “I know, Mom.”

  When I speak, the whole atmosphere changes. It’s hard to explain. It’s my fault. It’s their fault. We don’t know how to have dinner together. They got used to me not being here. We all know this isn’t fun for anyone, it’s not what any of us expected. None of it is.

  I don’t ask if I can leave the table to go up to my room anymore. I just pick up my plate and put it in the dishwasher. They wait until I’m gone to talk about me, but I can always hear them as I reach the top of the stairs, Well, what does the shrink say? It hasn’t been that long, he’ll get bored of that room eventually, right?

  I close my door and I see her green light. Relief.

  Chloe

  Jon

  Hi

  Hi

  Chicken?

  Salmon. My dad’s going to McDonalds lol.

  Ha. We had chicken. My mom’s plotting to take down the Nashua Police Department.

  Ah, Friday.

  Ah, Family.

  Jon.

  Chloe.

  Silence. This happens sometimes. And then I see those dots and relief washes over me.

  Sorry. Getting stuff together for prom tomorrow…

  Prom. Cool.

  Do you want to see my dress?

  Of course I want to see her dress. I want to stand next to her. I want to hold her hand and wrap flowers around her wrist. The wanting sets off my jets. The Dunwich sizzle. I close the computer. This might be me blowing my chance, again.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning I have a Google alert about Roger Blair.

  A woman who runs a shelter for battered women in Portland, Oregon, wrote an article about Roger Blair. She knew him as Magnus Villars. She met him while she was an undergrad at Harvard. He was doing research on solitary confinement. She was strapped for cash, so she signed up. She says she was in dozens of experiments. There were things going on with her family, she was all over the place and she didn’t realize that the release forms weren’t standard issue. He put her in a room and he turned off the lights. He released rats. She could hear them and she bloodied her hands trying to get out of there.

  When he finally turned on the light, there were no rats. It was only a tape.

  She didn’t report him to the school. She just left.

  I Google the name Magnus Villars and the first stuff that comes up is Chianti, but then I go to Twitter and there he is, @MagnusVillars. His profile picture is a hamster eating an Oreo, and the goosebumps are immediate, the chills. He hasn’t tweeted in years, but when he was active, he was a vicious bitter nutcase, assaulting Science magazine, prizewinning professors, tagging Harvard and Brown, accusing them of being closed-minded hacks. He sounds like someone who really did lose his mind, as if his mind fell out of his skull and into a gutter. The relief is enormous. Nothing is as scary as it was. He’s crazy. He fucks with people’s minds but he can’t really do anything. He got to me. But now I see him, all of him.

  I grab The Dunwich Horror and read the letter he wrote me and it doesn’t feel mysterious now. It sounds loony. I leaf through to one of the parts he underlined in the story, a part that I now think is important:

  …the diary as a madman’s raving…

  I forgot that the world is messy. Girls
faint. Small dogs die. Boys get kidnapped. It’s not a symphony; it’s just life. Meanwhile, I reactivate my Facebook account just so I can see her. I have to see her. Prom pictures are starting to show up. Chloe’s dress is a two-piece and her hair is swooped up like you’re not allowed to touch it. She looks sad. I did that when I blew her off. But it’s still light out. I can fix this.

  I open my door and scream, “Dad! Do you still have your tux?”

  That got my mom’s attention and it’s the first time she’s bouncing around since she lost Kody. Maybe you’ll be prom king, honey! My dad rummages through his closet for his old tux and my mom claps the dust out of his dress shoes. It’s like Shakalis and Beverly are always telling me, PTSD is a monster, but one of these days, boom, you’ll feel better.

  My dad pulls the suit out of the closet. “Jon,” he says. “She’s all yours.”

  * * *

  —

  It’s true what they say about riding a bike, you really don’t forget.

  The wind whips at me and I’m pumping, I forgot how beautiful the world is when you’re a part of it this way, when the sun is relenting and the moon is rising and the night is magic, it can change your life if you let it, if you pedal. I haven’t even kissed her yet, and already I feel different.

  I am nervous, but it’s the good kind of nervous. Chloe’s at Noelle’s with the whole mess of friends for pictures, and I’m almost there, slowing down as I approach Noelle’s street, as my heart expands, a balloon. I’m not used to exercise, not used to love. I see them all, exactly as they were online, the girls in bright dresses, the boys in tuxedos, lined up on the front lawn of Noelle’s house, posing. I slow down the tiniest bit. I’m scared. I wish I was on a motorcycle instead of a bike. But then again, I’m kind of like a celebrity around here. None of them got invited to go on Ellen. And when they see how much Chloe loves me, the smile that will spread over her face, the way she’ll run over to me, they’ll be on board with it, me.