Providence

by Caroline Kepnes

  She yawns in the doorway, beautiful. “Your phone’s ringing, Eggie,” she says, handing it to me.

  If I was forty instead of pushing fifty, I might silence the phone and make a move, stop her on her way back downstairs. But sometimes when you’re fifty, it’s enough to know what you’d do to the woman in your life. You don’t necessarily have to do it.

  With a sigh, I answer the call. “DeBenedictus,” I say into the phone.

  It’s Joann, the night dispatcher. There’s an incident on Thayer Street. A call to arms. I always feel guilty leaving Lo, but she will nestle into the sofa, she has her kids, her papers.

  Downstairs, her eyes follow me to the unnecessarily wide entrance to our home, the kind of hallway that requires a response from people because they immediately feel thrown off by the expansiveness. Imagine living there, imagine they thought they’d have all these kids, ugh, next time they’re coming to our place, not so depressing.

  “Now where are you off to?”

  “A frat boy dropped dead on Thayer Street.”

  “Brown kid?”

  “Yeah, apparently there was a whole to-do.”

  “Sounds like drugs,” she concludes. I pick up my gun off the table, my piece that would be locked up if we had a kid.

  I feel a little guilty about being so excited to leave. Ever since the business with Chuckie, it feels like the job description changed. I used to get a call and think, God no a dead body, an awful thing, some tragedy, something bad. It’s a funny thing, what changes when your life changes. The split second of gratitude that someone else got fucked over, knowing that this time around I just might be able to make a damn difference, find some goddamn justice, make sense of things, get the goods, answers, peace, righteousness.

  “Be careful, Officer.” She winks at me, a little jab at Marko.

  In the car on the way to Thayer Street, I’m at ease, humming even, thinking about what it would be like to be on my way to Bradley. And the mere thought is enough to throw me. I run a stop sign. Someone beeps. Fucking asshole. Yep.

  * * *

  —

  You always want a witness like Romy O’Nan. Pragmatic, in the scene but outside of it—she’s the coxswain on the crew team, which means she’s about a foot shorter than everyone else, inherently ostracized, observant. And she had a crush on the deceased, so she was watching him like a hawk. She doesn’t say it, doesn’t have to. I can see it in her eyes every time she looks over at the body, back at me. Romy wanted a chance with Krishna Pawan, senior, rower, God, and now she’s not going to get it. You forget about death, how it kills other people’s dreams. As she said when I got here, Me and Krish talked a lot tonight, more than we ever had, I still can’t believe this, like that this happened now, on this night of all nights. It’s not fair. I know how stupid that sounds. And I know I’m in shock. But I mean…

  People are human and humans are selfish. We have to be. Little Romy, she just meant that she thought she was gonna get this guy in the sack tonight. Not that he’d stay, she’s smart, a squeaky thing, freckled, lonesome, but she thought she was gonna have a night. It’s easy to imagine her older, with someone more like her, forever longing for that night with Krish.

  “A heart attack?” she asks. Again. The other kids are bawling and hugging each other, but Romy sticks by me, makes her feel closer to the vic, like she’s his person. Other kids, they got what they wanted out of him and they can wail, moan, they can mourn. Romy wants more.

  “Romy,” I say. “If it’s any consolation, this is a horrible, freakish thing that happens. You know, I’ve seen four kids like Krish, maybe not quite as young, but young, twenty-two, twenty-four, seen them all die suddenly for no reason.”

  She shakes her little head. “No, but Krish is an athlete.”

  I nod. I know the script. “He probably had a heart condition.”

  “He didn’t,” she says. “He was ridiculously healthy.”

  “Nobody’s immune.”

  “No,” she says. “This is insane. This is not happening.”

  “I know how it feels,” I tell her. “But this is the problem with the human body. It lets you down, one way or another. My dad always said the only guarantees in life are death and taxes.”

  “Did you look at him?” she asks. “He was in perfect health.”

  The same way they describe some people as being larger than life, Romy is smaller than life, drowning in an oversized windbreaker. The way mothers call their daughters their mini-mes. That’s what I’d call Romy, a mini-me, there’s gotta be a bigger version out there, life-size. She keeps on that Krish was special. He was gonna be in the Olympics. Gently I ask if there is any chance he’d taken anything harder than a shot of Fireball tonight. She gets teary. “We literally just bonded over how we’ve both never done coke,” she says. And then she starts crying.

  The last few heart attacks were different, smaller crowds, quieter streets, the dead people, they weren’t in college, they weren’t gonna be in the Olympics. The other heart attacks I’ve seen in the past few years, the young ones, the people weren’t special.

  Well, Yvonne Belziki, but I can’t go thinking about her again.

  All of the heart attacks, they were fine, like anyone, all of us plopped onto this planet with crummy hearts, hearts that break in the end no matter what you do. Romy’s just not old enough to realize that. Until tonight she thought death was for grandparents and goldfish. She blows her nose. I tell her she can take all the time she needs. My job is like any quest in life. You get the best story from the person who wants to talk, not the one who has to talk.

  And now she’s ready, all business. “Okay,” she says. “The first thing you should know, tonight only happened because of Ellen.”

  Romy explains that Ellen is an art fuck who goes to RISD. She and Krish were dating, seriously. Earlier today Krish found out Ellen was cheating on him with another art fuck, also from RISD. Romy says Krish was a wreck. “We got together to party and take his mind off it,” she says. “And it was working. We got a keg and we played Beirut, he was okay. But then this hipster dick, you know, the type with a beard and a hoodie and a hat, ugh, he walks in, totally oblivious, barges into Krish.”

  “Did you know this guy with…the beard?”

  The words click with me right away, the beard. I write them in my pad for no reason other than that thing in your gut, that voice that says the beard.

  Romy says nobody knew the hipster. I ask if Ellen might have known the Beard and she rolls her eyes. “The guy she’s been cheating with is the other kind of RISD art fuck, the bald skinny guy. This guy was huge.”

  I write it down: huge.

  “And then Krish snapped,” she says. “He just started beating the guy.”

  “The guy fight back, the Beard?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Did the bearded man provoke him in any way, verbally, at any point?”

  “No,” she says. “Which is actually weird, because the guy was big. Not Krish big but you know…he just took it. Like a lump.” She starts to cry again and I lie to her again, It’s okay honey, it’s okay. It isn’t. It isn’t. She wipes her eyes. “Look,” she says. “Ellen literally broke Krish’s heart. That’s the only way I can believe that he had a heart attack.”

  She cries harder, she wasn’t in his heart, not the way she wanted to be, his heart that isn’t beating anymore. “Honey,” I say. “You’ve been wonderful and we can get you home now.”

  “Wait,” she says. “The hipster guy, is it possible he like, stabbed Krish or poisoned him? Like some James Bond thing, some pen weapon.”

  I pat her on the back. This is also par for the course. Everyone wants to play Let’s pretend someone is to blame, someone besides God or Mother Nature. “No,” I say. “Romy, the EMTs are certain that this was heart failure.” I say the words I’ve had so much tro
uble believing myself.

  “But it was so sudden.”

  “As it is sometimes.”

  A clang over by the coroner. “Jesus,” Romy says. She’s never seen any of this, never seen a person become a body. I promise her this is normal. The waves, the tears. You don’t accept a death all at once. “It’s an awful thing, hon. You take it as it comes.”

  She thanks me and I’m helping her. Sometimes I think I would have been a good father. I offer her a lozenge.

  “Thank you,” she says. She pops it in her mouth. “Oh!” She wrestles the lozenge with her tongue. “One more thing about the guy.” She holds up a finger. “I am Providence.”

  “Who is Providence?”

  “That’s what it said on his hat,” she says. “ ‘I am Providence.’ Can you think of anything more narcissistic to put on a hat? I mean screw you, guy, you’re not Providence. You’re walking around in a haze with your head in your phone. Krish. He was Providence.”

  Her voice trails off, and then more tears. I scribble the words in my notepad: I am Providence.

  “Where did this guy go? Did they get him in a bus to a hospital?”

  She shakes her head. “I have no idea. He just disappeared.”

  * * *

  —

  There is no case. This was a heart attack. We get the security footage and Romy described it to a T. The Beard is lost in his phone, oblivious. He bumps into Krish. Krish goes berserk. He pounds on the Beard. Until Krish clearly goes into arrest. People swarm, and the Beard slinks away, for the most part his hat blocks his face. But who wouldn’t get outta there? All that madras, all that noise. The Beard probably figured he caught a break, slinked off to one of the local hospitals to get his wounds licked.

  But then I call the local hospitals. I call all of them. The campus infirmaries. I call every CVS, every pharmacy. Nothing. No Beard.

  I watch the video again, but there is nothing there either. No clue about the Beard.

  I go to Stacey, Stacey, who’s seven months pregnant, tearing the lid off a yogurt. I tell her about the video, the kid Krish beat up, how he’s nowhere to be found. She eats her yogurt with that stupid plastic spoon they stick at the top. She has a metal spoon right there on her desk.

  “Krish had a heart attack,” she says. Declares. That’s the word.

  “While beating the hell out of this kid. Gave the kid a cracked rib, at the very least, a broken nose.”

  She licks the lid of her yogurt, as if it’s so delectable, as if it isn’t just yogurt. “Eggie,” she says. “Krish was an Ivy League Olympic contender. A good kid. This kid you can’t find, hanging around Thayer Street. He’s probably a dealer. A bad kid.”

  I make a mental note: a dealer.

  She glares at me. “But he’s not our problem and he didn’t throw a punch.” She glares harder, a mother, a mom. “Krish is a good kid, Eggie. We’re not gonna go making him bad, trying to look for a connection that isn’t there.”

  * * *

  —

  An hour later I still want to know what happened. I get like this. It’s the cop in me, the true detective. Stacey is in this to protect and serve but I am a bloodhound. Like Lo tearing through one of her books, wanting to get to the end, I am the same way. I have to know what happened.

  I am Providence. It sounds like the kind of thing some shit-for-brains politician would say if he was trying to get elected. I write down all my young kids, the ones whose hearts gave out on them. I wonder, did they know the Beard? And that’s when it’s time to go home, when I need to go upstairs to my office, when I start to wonder.

  JON

  I didn’t have a nightmare last night. I don’t even remember dreaming. Not having the nightmare is worse than all the nightmares combined. It means I’m getting used to this.

  I tear the sheets off the bed and shove them in the washing machine. Then I go online to punish myself with all the stories about Krishna. It’s a relief that it hurts my soul, that I’m crying, that the pain is a dagger, the guilt. He was a good fucking guy. He was the oldest of three kids, Seat Four on the Brown University crew team. He loved Harry Potter. His friends called him Krish Potter, Krish-P. He was Harry Potter every Halloween, this giant guy in these little glasses and this cape that’s not big enough.

  The New York Times talks about him being a minority on the water and the Pro Jo praises him, he was good for our city. His parents are said to be broken and he’s never alone in any of the pictures unless it’s part of a joke, like he’s standing by a statue of a bear, posing. He was gonna win us some Olympic medals. In this fucked up way that I can’t even wrap my head around I didn’t just kill a person, I killed America.

  I check my Peter Feder mail and there’s a form letter response from Lynn Woo, a Lovecraft expert I found online.

  Hi Peter,

  I wish I could respond to all inquiries personally, but I’m on the road right now. As you might suspect, I’m sharpening my talons for NecronomiCon in Providence, where I’d be happy to answer your questions. Tickets are on sale now.

  Cthulhu you there,

  Lynn

  I throw my sheets in the dryer. How can I go to the convention? There are so many people. I can’t control my powers. And unlike Wilbur, I blend in. Lovecraft went on and on about how weird Wilbur was, chinless and pale, growing too fast. And that’s fair. The townspeople were right to be suspicious, wary. The playing field is leveled when you can identify your enemy, when you can protect yourself. Everyone could look at Wilbur and sense that something was dangerous about him, off. But I look like a hipster who eats bacon and has a girlfriend and a bunch of plaid shirts and plans on Friday night. I could have a Twitter profile with retweets, a hangover from cheap beer, and tickets to a sweaty concert where I’d bounce so close with all the other sweaty people. You look at me, you assume I have ex-girlfriends and pictures of me doing stuff with these girls, picking apples out near Johnston, going to the old movie theater on Thayer Street, pushing our way through all the people to the bar at Paragon to get drinks and talk about the movie and laugh and then go for falafel because we’re drunk and we need to eat before we have sex.

  Sex.

  My dryer buzzes. I take my hot sheets and wrap them all around me. I think this is how sex would feel. The other body would be hot and it would be like a blanket touching you in all different places. The warmth of another thing.

  I call Chloe and I get her voicemail. It’s just as well. I don’t deserve the sound of her voice, not today.

  Sometimes you can’t win, but the second I get better, I’ll tell her everything. I’ll apologize for being such a douchebag, my mixed messages, for disappearing. I’ll be the person I am, the person I was before he took me, a good person. And I’ll never be that person if I don’t do everything I can to try to find a cure.

  It’s the sick truth of what Magnus said, We did good work down here, Jon.

  I may not like the work, what he did, but he worked hard, he did it. He made me this way. And now it’s my turn.

  Ya gotta try.

  It isn’t safe to go to Lovecraft, but it wasn’t safe to cut through the woods all those years ago. You don’t win without risk.

  CHLOE

  There’s a crack in the ceiling and an old couple bickering about a pillow-top mattress. It’s my third Alex Interiors in one day and it’s the smallest yet, there’s no chance he’s here. There’s no clearance section, no walk-in closet where fabrics hang like skirts.

  Another salesman approaches. “How are you today, miss? You dreaming? You browsing?”

  I tell him it’s a little of both and he says he can help me. “But I’m not a helicopter,” he says. “You want my help with something, I’m right back there in the chair.”

  He can’t help me. No one can. But I do the same thing in this store that I do in the others. I test sofas. I pretend to b
e shopping, to be interested in the foam cushions, the available fabrics, the delivery time. I might be having an actual nervous breakdown as I sink into a clunky leather sectional. I didn’t feel so crazy when I decided to come here, when I was in Penn Station running like a girl in a movie, exasperated, shoving my credit card into the machine, buying a one-way ticket to Providence.

  I knew it was only a commercial. I knew there were four furniture stores. But then it hit me. He knows I know. So it made sense that he might be waiting at one of these stores, that it was on me to come here. Sure, I’ve been leaving a trail of breadcrumbs since he disappeared so many years ago. He could come find me if he wanted.

  The salesman comes back with a transparent pillow. “This will give an idea of just how much you’re abusing yourself with that old mattress of yours.”

  I sit up and nod along as he lectures me about dust mites and coils, as the old couple shake hands with the woman helping them—I knew you kids would come together one of these days! I wonder what it’s like to be old, with your person. I have never felt so lonely in my life.

  “So,” the salesman says, offering his transparent pillow. “Do you wanna give this a push, see for yourself?”

  * * *

  —

  An hour later I’m walking along the riverfront. They have something here called WaterFire where there are lanterns on boats. There’s excitement for this, families around, college kids on mushrooms. I didn’t make a plan. I didn’t bring a suitcase. I don’t know if I’m staying overnight. I don’t know if there are hotel rooms available. I don’t know what I’m eating for dinner.

  The only thing I know is that Jon didn’t send me on a scavenger hunt. I’m here alone.

  * * *