But I can’t do that without the risk of killing him.
What I can do is what I do every night at this hour. I pick up my papers and start my shift. My favorite part is Hope Street. There’s a girl who lives in this old Victorian. Crane Comma Florie. That’s what I call her in my head, the way her name looks on her paper. Her car is plastered with bumper stickers: KEEP PROVIDENCE WEIRD, HUGS NOT HORNS. It’s like she’s trying to talk to the world with her little red sedan, hoping somebody beeps back.
I’ve never met her before, but last Christmas she gave me a pair of gloves with a special finger fabric that lets you text.
So you can stay in touch while you help us stay in touch.
Merry Christmas, Theo
I kept the card. It’s on my fridge. Most people don’t give you anything at all. So I do nice things for her. When it rains I double bag her paper. I use two twist ties.
When my shift ends, I park by the Brown chemistry building. I like watching it come to life. Meeney meanders down the street with his travel mug and I can’t see him once he swipes his card and enters the building, but soon enough he appears in his window on the second floor, at his standing desk, where he stretches his arms above his head and starts his day, which always includes ignoring me. Still, I try.
His assistant, Patty, answers. She’s new this month, but we already have a rapport. When I say hello she sighs, exaggerated for my benefit. “Peter, you know what I’m going to tell you.”
“But I have a good feeling, Patty. I just need two minutes.”
She puts me on hold and I watch as she goes to Meeney, as he waves her out of the room.
“He’s in a meeting,” she says, and then she lowers her voice, asks me when I get back from Stockholm. I forgot that I told her I’m on a semester abroad. It was my explanation for why I can’t visit him in person. The sun is getting stronger and the streets around me swell with students.
“Patty,” I say, pleading. “I’m not a reporter, I’m just a psych student and a victim advocate. We just want to ask him a few simple questions.”
“I know,” she says. “And I’m telling you, Meeney would help you if you walked into this room. He doesn’t speak publicly about Roger Blair but we all know how he feels and I know he would come through.” She sighs. “Peter,” she says. “He’s that type, you just have to see him face-to-face, you know?”
* * *
—
When I get home there’s a box waiting for me out front. I climb down the stairs into my hovel and tear into the package. It’s a hat I ordered. I forgot all about it, a baseball cap with three words sewn onto it: I am Providence. That’s what it says on Lovecraft’s tombstone.
I put on my new hat and I put on The Middle.
The wanting overwhelms me, the way it does sometimes. I hit the mute button and I feel my heartbeat quicken as I dial her number. I know I shouldn’t. I know she’s moved on. She’s in New York. I could kill her if I walked up to her, if I saw her, if she saw me. I have to stay away from her until I’m fixed, I have to stay away from everyone. But sometimes you need someone. Sometimes it’s enough to call my parents, I only stay on for a minute—it’s too hard to hear their voices—but the last time I called, my mom said we haven’t heard from her in ages. Time changes people.
She picks up.
“Jon,” Chloe says. “Is that you? Please talk to me. You don’t have to tell me where you are. It’s me. I’m alone.”
I lose my body to my distorted heart, the thing that keeps me alone, alive. It’s like my dream, where her paint runs through my veins, her breath is in my lungs. I’m lost in her voice, so lost that I don’t realize it when I unmute the sound on my TV. And TV is louder during commercials, especially this one, an earworm jingle for a furniture store downtown. Alex Interiors will come to your home. Shopping is tough. Alex Interiors, you’re never alone.
CHLOE
I Googled Alex Interiors while we were still on the phone.
It’s a chain of furniture stores in Rhode Island. There are four of them in the Providence area. And now I know for a fact that Jon is in Providence, that he didn’t want me to know. He hung up when he knew I could hear.
And now I can’t sit still. I’m pacing around my apartment, pulling at the curtains, looking out the windows. He does this every once in a while. Tonight, I picked up on the first ring.
“Jon,” I said. “Is that you? Please talk to me. You don’t have to tell me where you are. It’s me.” I held the phone like a seashell. “I’m alone.”
I’m never far from my phone because every time might be the time he finally talks to me, the time he tells me why he ran, where he went. I’ve made my life an open book for him. My address, my phone numbers, my website giving advance notice of every move I make, every show. I think of that word. Feed. I’ve tried so hard to feed him; everything is an invitation, Come home, Jon, come back.
And now I’m reading about Providence. There’s a Tenley’s in that city. My heart beats.
This is why I’ve never had a boyfriend, because of these nights wondering, hunting. I’ve put myself out there, I’ve had my flings, my flirtations, but I’ve never been able to make things stick with any other guy. They feel me drifting and they never want to stay the night. I always kiss them goodbye, whimpering, I’m married to my art. They don’t come back. Which is fine.
They know I’m not available, it’s a thing you can feel. I’m buoyed to this process, the search, the wonder.
My freshman roommate in college thought I was nuts. She said so to my face. You can fry your brain if you keep the phone on your pillow. When that didn’t work, she sent me articles about how phone chargers and bedsheets can lead to house fires. I lived alone the following year. And then in my senior year, that reporter from The New Yorker called about a where-are-they-now story on missing kids. I told him I didn’t know where Jon was. They wanted to put one of my paintings on the cover. I said yes. And then my life became what it is now.
I’m an artist. I really am. I’m not a struggling painter and I’m not a paralegal who takes sculpture classes in her spare time. I make money doing what I love, and it’s a wonderful thing, an obnoxious thing, always waiting for the knock on the door, There’s been a mistake, this isn’t your life. And then there’s the reality of how I got where I am. Because of him. Because I missed him. I missed him and I drew him and it could very well be that my art wouldn’t have hit without my story, our story, the one I told to so many reporters.
I could call his mother and tell her about Alex Interiors, but she hates me. She’s called me a vampire and a parasite, an exploitative hack. You made a profit off my son’s tragedy. My cheeks burn. My heart races. All the memories. How hard I tried to help. How many flyers I posted all over town, online. The pictures I drew of him. I still draw him on his birthday. I’ve sent a portrait to his parents every year since he vanished. I took a goddamn class on police sketches so that I could better imagine him now, older, how a nose changes, how skin sags. Last year when I paid to run an ad in the Globe, she huffed, Well, you must be doing well with your art, having that kind of cash to throw around. It stings. And she’s not the only one to make that accusation, but she never liked me and I know there’s a little truth in there. I hesitated over the years, I worried that there was something inherently corrupt about my whole life. But that’s true of everyone, everywhere.
There’s Jon’s father. I could call him. But I know it’s a waste. He never recovered from the first time around. When I think of him, I still see him in the woods, drunk, singing his old songs, preparing for his son to be gone because it’s easier than hoping he’s coming home.
I could call Alexandra, my assistant, the person I pay to groan at me, Chloe, don’t read the comments. Chloe, you gotta put your phone down. Chloe, you need to get out. She’s cool. Literally. Her hands are always cold. Not an obsessive bone in h
er body. I can’t call her right now, I don’t want to wake her up. I also don’t want a rational, cool girl telling me that it was probably a wrong number.
It was him. I know it.
I lie down on my bed. Providence. Sometimes I think it’s my fault. I say too much when he calls. I feel too much, it’s like I’m being pulled underwater and I cringe when I hear myself say his name, my voice turning like milk in the fridge. He was missing when we were kids, but this is different. This time he left. I’m the missing person. That’s what I do all night, all day. I miss him. He’s in my skin, my sleep, the unfinished feeling, the wonder.
But now I have a clue. Alex Interiors will come to your home. Shopping is tough. Alex Interiors, you’re never alone.
I pour a shot of tequila. I mark his call in the notepad on my phone.
The first time he called was the month after Noelle died. I was still reeling, staring at her Dartmouth pen every day, feeling the bite marks. The two people I knew best were gone, ripped away. I wondered if I was cursed, indulged in this dark fantasy of me, the poisonous one. And then my phone rang, as if he was reading my mind, as if he knew I needed him. It was 2:45 A.M.
“Jon,” I said. “I know it’s you.”
He hung up right away. There’s no pattern, no way to make sense of his calls. The timing isn’t romantic. He’s doesn’t call on my birthday, on Christmas. This is how you drive a hamster nuts in an experiment. You give it treats for no reason. At random. You don’t let it learn how the system of rewards works. I look at the painting I was working on, the painting I can’t even look at right now, the painting I can’t finish because now my mind’s on Jon.
JON
I shouldn’t be calling her. And it’s stupid that part of me expected her to show up in Providence, stupid that I wanted to go to Alex Interiors and wait for her. But I looked the place up online and there are four showrooms in the city and there’s only one of me and beyond that, above it all, I know what could happen if I were to see her, hold her.
I’m supposed to be finding Blair, learning about what he did to me, how it can be undone. This isn’t one of those stories where she and I fix things together. I was kidnapped, not her. I am poisonous, not her. I have to do this, not her.
I put on my new hat. I am Providence.
It would be easier to stop calling Chloe if I didn’t know so much about her. I’ve seen her on Facebook, pictures of her, videos. I’ve watched her go to college, to New York. I saw her on the Today show after the world went crazy over her New Yorker cover and she became this overnight adult, this artist. And her hair got even shinier and her art was for sale. She’s let me into her whole life, her apartment, the pictures she posts of random things in her kitchen. I know what her coffeemaker looks like and I know what my eyes look like from her perspective. She tells people I’m the reason she’s an artist: she was drawing pictures of me for the police, trying to keep me alive with her paintbrush, her pencils. You could even say that my going away was the best thing that ever happened to her. People do say that kind of stuff in the comments of the articles about her, but other people stand up for her. You’re forgetting the fact that she clearly LOVED the guy and was drawing him because she missed him so much. It’s not like she put him in the basement. Duh. Sometimes the other people are me; I make up a fake name, I get in there.
She’s not married. She doesn’t have a boyfriend. She keeps all of her pages open to the whole world and sometimes it feels like that’s a magic trick, that every time she looks into a camera with those searching eyes, she’s looking at me, for me, wanting me to know she misses me.
After I called her, she posted a blurry photo of the moon with no caption.
I’m pretty sure that was for me. I pick up my coat. I gotta eat something that doesn’t come out of my freezer. And it’s finally late enough for me to be out in the world. One thing I’ve noticed about my power, if that’s what you want to call it, it’s nothing without my feelings. If I don’t get worked up, agitated or excited, if I’m chill, then I can do things like get a snack, go for a walk. People in the middle of the night are mostly mellower, they’re tired, they keep to themselves, they don’t look at you if you don’t look at them. And if one of them does look at me, if I do start to feel something, anything, then I know by now what I have to do.
I have to run. Fast.
* * *
—
I forgot about Thirsty Thursday. College kids get wasted at the bars and the parties and then they want falafel. They’re all so together, in heaps. I remember thinking I’d go to college and be in a heap of people, and it’s weird to see the heaps, the madras shorts, the BROWN CREW windbreakers, and know that Roger or no Roger, this never would have been my life.
I walk slowly. I keep my head down in a crowd and pretend to be doing things in my phone, like some random guy would. In the notepad part of the phone, I write to Chloe as I walk inside.
What’s up nothing just waiting for falafel I couldn’t help it you know when you gotta have it you gotta have it haha how are you?
Because my head is down I don’t see the guy. I bump into him or he bumps into me, I don’t know how it begins, whose fault it is. I only know that he drops his falafel, splunk, and the sauce spatters. He screams. Fuck. His shorts are plaid and his legs are long and his eyes are wide and he smells like beer spilled on a floor and then attacked by a mop. I bend over to pick up the falafel but he kicks it like a soccer ball. “The fuck is your problem, you pussy? You walk around with your head in your phone walking into people, the fuck is wrong with you?”
My heart is starting to tick in the bad way and his friends are gathering and there are too many people, so many people.
“Sorry,” I mumble and put my phone in my pocket. Burger King has a drive-through. I can go there. I should go there. I will go there. I start to walk but he pushes me.
“The fuck do you think you’re doing, phone boy? You just walk in walk out.”
“I’m sorry.”
He mocks me. “I’m sorry.”
Some of his friends laugh and some have their phones out and a girl slings her arms over a guy’s back. I have to leave. My heart is involved and I know what will happen if I don’t leave now. I say I’m sorry again and I start to walk but he grabs my shoulder. No. His hand is too big and strong and he won’t let me go and his friends want him to calm down. They say his name, he has so many names, Krish and Potter and Swain and Krish-P and Krish-P Kreme, and he is spitting at me, swearing at me. I try so hard to calm down, I say my sorrys and every time I go for the door he stops me. His hand. His big hand. There is a wall of madras and spandex and shiny windbreaker material and I can’t get through it and my heart is on fire.
The first blow is to the back of my head and I hit the ground hard. There is screaming and giggling, all the nervous sounds, scared sounds, some people want this and cheer and others are afraid. The falafel guy at the counter, he’s calling the police and I can’t move, I hear my ribs crink and my face splooch. I smell my own blood as he turns me over. Punches me in new places now, my cheek, my chest. Telling me this is real life not your phone you piece of shit. I try to stop my heart before it can stop his. His friends try and pull him off me and they can’t. I can’t. They can’t. Oh no. No.
Alarms sound all over my body and my heart churns, oh no. I think of Krish as a kid, a kid I would have wanted to be friends with, even as he punches me in the ribs, crink. I think of him as an old man deep into the future. But my heart beats faster and blood leaks from my cheeks, split open. He knees my groin.
By now I know what it feels like when my heart takes over. The earthquake inside when the jets fly out of me and they zoom into him and he can’t punch me anymore. His nose bleeds, his eyes freeze up, and only I am close enough to hear the death rattle, the breath caught in his throat as he stops breathing, stops living, sinks onto my body, thunk. He is dea
d. I know it and nobody else knows it yet and I am stronger by the second, I can hear my ribs reconnecting, feel my skin resealing, a fast-forward video of a scab, healing. You have power. You’re welcome, Jon.
There is screaming now as people try to figure out what happened, as if I stabbed him, as if I did something.
I tried to leave. I did.
The heaps of people come to save him because he is the friend and I am the alone guy, the random guy that nobody knows, scrambling to my feet. I am healing up so fast, the fastest rewind you can do and I have to get out before the madras people realize what I did, what seems impossible, what should be impossible. To kill someone without a knife, without a weapon, without a fist even, to kill someone with your insides, your heart. This is mean magic; my body took his energy and used it to pull my skin back together, to line up my ribs.
I back away from the heaps of people, the screaming and the crying and the swarm of plaid, the love, the squeak of their jackets and the shrieking, and there is a girl and she’s gonna ask me if I’m okay. I can feel it, feel her eyes, her wonder.
I have to go. Now. I grab my phone, my hat. I am Providence.
It doesn’t matter what I meant to do. It only matters what I did.
EGGS
It’s almost three when I hear Lo up and puttering. It sends my whole body into high alert.
I don’t know how anyone gets through life alone. If she died, I’d be dead straightaway. We’ll be those people you read about where one goes, the other goes within seventy-two hours. She’d be okay without me though. If I croaked, she’d keep teaching, keep going to events, keep buying coffee. I think that might even be why we’re such a good fit. Someone’s gotta be the iceberg and someone’s gotta be the sun. She’s walking up those stairs, not charging, this won’t be a fight.
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