Providence

by Caroline Kepnes

  After all, there have been exactly zero noteworthy fatal heart attacks in young people in the area in the past year. Nobody sporting an I am Providence hat has been spotted at any crime scene. I don’t talk about him on the job, I don’t think about him on the job. The Beard. But he’s still in my gut. When you’re a gut person, there’s an actual digestion process where you finish with someone, shit them out. I’m not done with the Beard.

  “Eggie,” she says, fast on her feet into the kitchen, the refrigerator. “What are you doing?”

  “Heating up pasta.”

  “Well, don’t stand at the microwave. That’s bad for you.” She slams a cabinet.

  “Slow down, Lo. You’re making my head spin.”

  She rolls her eyes. Sorry. Lo is different lately. I’m still not used to her with her new hair. Shorter, barely reaches her shoulders, that hair is her way of punishing me. It’s three years now, three years since I’ve seen my son. If she didn’t care so much about looking normal for her students, she’d probably shave it all off.

  I take the pasta out of the microwave and she grabs the bowl.

  “Eggie, you have your physical today. You can’t eat before a physical.”

  “I almost forgot,” I say. An outright lie. I canceled it last week. I bailed on my last appointment too. Lo has been on me to go, the twinge in my side, the burn when I piss. But that’s called getting old. I don’t need some doctor to tell me that.

  She waves at the steam. “And anyway, who eats spaghetti for breakfast?”

  “It’s pasta,” I say. “The little shells from last night.”

  The old Lo was careful with her words. Short hair Lo has no patience. She isn’t as tedious. I miss her tedium. But then, marriage is change. I’m different too. We had one of those fights six months ago, a real sit-down kind of fight where she flat-out told me that I had to close the boxes once and for all.

  “You can’t see your son? Fine.” She sucked in air. “But that doesn’t mean you can sit up here doing whatever it is you do, just making yourself crazy.” She blew it out hard.

  I promised her I was done. And it’s true. I’m not out there looking for the Beard, same way I haven’t written to any of the autism doctors in ages. But of course you never stop being you. I started Lovecraft, reading about him, just because of that hat. I am Providence. The other night there we were, me with a biography of Lovecraft, Lo reading a story by one of her kids.

  “Edward Softly,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Lovecraft, that’s one of his fake names.”

  “Pen names.”

  “Same difference.”

  “No,” she said. “A fake name is something you use to get away with something. A pen name has a creative purpose.”

  Our conversation ended then, thunk.

  We’re growing apart. We pretend that I’m reading about him because she likes him but we both know. You know what your spouse is doing. Like her hair. She knows how much I love it, the feel of it in a ponytail. We got this thing growing between us, this quiet lie. We pretend that she’s not mad at me, that I’m not looking for an I am Providence hat every time we walk into a grocery store, into a movie theater. Hell, it’s part of why I even go to the movies half the time. Sometimes I think we’re just two kids waiting for some outside force to smack us, call us out.

  She pours the sauce in my bowl back into the jar. “What am I gonna do with you?” she asks. “You know if you eat they can’t do a lot of the tests and you still have to pay for the appointment.”

  “I’m sorry, Lo.”

  Lately, she is no longer playful when she says What am I gonna do with you? She means it. She’s contemplating her options. And I have nothing to do but stand here. “Eggie,” she says. “You gotta be more on top of things.”

  I can’t tell her how wrong she is. I’m very much on top of things. I canceled the appointment for my physical when I realized it was on the same day as the main event at the Lovecraft festival. How’s that for on top of things? I expect something to happen today, something big. Not in the reasonable way, in the gut way.

  “Thank God for you, Lo-Lo.” I kiss her little head. She breaks away from me, eyes first, like two skates rolling away.

  * * *

  —

  The lobby of the Biltmore never changes, thank God, and I’m canvassing, calmly, a far cry from the way I was last year, going bonkers over that squeaky door.

  This is gentle police work. I could never get in trouble for smiling at people at random, interrupting their conversations about Glug and Dagon. And in my cheeriest voice I ask if they wouldn’t mind telling me if they’ve seen this guy around. And they say yes—they’re yes people, the Lovecraft people—and then I show them the picture of the Beard, the security-camera picture from the falafel. The terrible picture, grainy, blurry. So far, there hasn’t been a bite. One kid said, This is a joke, right? I almost smacked him, No, this festival is a joke. But I don’t really believe that. If anything, I’m the joke. These people, their passion is real.

  The elevator dings and I take it up the one flight. (Imagine what the doc would have to say about that laziness.) There are hordes of people here, willing students, volunteering to sit and be lectured. Imagine having that kind of passion. But none of them knows the Beard.

  I flop into a wingback chair just inside the door to the main event, that door they closed because they’re about to get started. You can feel the energy, the love for Dr. Woo. Back again this year to expound on Lovecraft’s monsters. A smarter man would go into that room, maybe learn a thing or two. But Dr. Woo isn’t the kind of doctor who can cure autism and my attention span is shot these days. Why hasn’t anyone died?

  Lo texts me: How did it go?

  I write back: I’m afraid it looks like you’re stuck with me.

  She writes back: Good. Eat. xx

  I pocket my phone. Those words are already haunting me. Good. Eat. She’d never leave me, would she? Dr. Woo pounds her fist on a podium, as if she knows there’s someone out there not listening. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, H. P. Lovecraft described death as ‘merging with the infinite blackness.’ So let’s pause on that. The infinite blackness. What else does that sound like to you? Something murky and infinite?”

  A pin-thin pixie boy in the back row screams, “Love!”

  People laugh. They exchange looks, hold hands. Dr. Woo keeps on about the idea of death and love being built upon disintegration of the individual and the individual interests. I think of me and Lo, her life in the kitchen, my boxes in my room. I must change. We must change. Dr. Woo wants to end on a light, dark note.

  “As H.P. said, one could drown in ’06 just as easily as in ’05 and ’04. So everybody, thank you for coming. Don’t drown today. Drown next year so we can all get together again!”

  And all hands in the room come together, thunder, love. There is clapping and whistling—only a couple of these kids know how to whistle—and they chant Woo woo and I’m happy I came today. I’m happy I can be here on my feet, thinking that I have a new feeling in my gut, just as strong as my feeling about the Beard. It’s simple. If I’m sneaking around like this on a secret hunch next year, Lo won’t be with me. It’s a scary realization and I could act on it, I could leave now. But my gut. My gut.

  I take my badge out and move around the line, all the way back to Dr. Woo’s table. I stand off to the side while she poses with a fan. She smiles for the camera. “I sense a police presence,” she says. “Are you here to arrest me?”

  The fanboy getting his picture taken screams, “I love you, Dr. Woo.”

  She smiles. “I love you too, Harry.”

  When he leaves she motions to the helper gal with the lanyard around her neck to put things on hold. She rolls her sleeves up and comes over to the side.

  “Dr. Lynn Woo,” she says, extending her
hand.

  We shake. “You realize you just told that young man that you love him.”

  She nods. “There’s never enough love in the world.”

  “But do you though?”

  She looks at me. “Yes,” she says. “I love my readers.” She says this as if these people belong to her, which they don’t. Take a look around, lady. This is Lovecraft land. She raises an eyebrow. Of course she can do that. I can’t. Neither can Lo. “Are you a reader?”

  “No,” I say. “No, I’m here on business.”

  She smiles. “I was kidding. You have to forgive me. I get worked up at these things, you know, I spend so much time alone and then I get here, to this and the love and the energy, wooh!”

  I tell her it’s okay and I reach into my jacket breast pocket and she clamps her hands over her mouth and gasps. “Am I being served?”

  “No,” I say, newly embarrassed. “No, it’s nothing like that.” I unfold the picture once, twice, and then I press it with my hands. “Sorry,” I mumble. “Been a long day.”

  “They should get you boys some iPads.”

  I smile. “They did.”

  She laughs hard, too hard.

  “Well,” I say. “It’s a terrible picture and it’s a long shot on a lot of levels, but I’m wondering if you might recognize the man in this picture.”

  She sets the photo on the table and looks at it the way you look at a Monet.

  “See,” she says. “If you had an iPad, I could zoom in.”

  I reach for the photo. “I can let you go back to your fans.”

  “Readers,” she says. “And yes. Yes, he is a reader. Oh, yes.”

  Yes. Yes! I take out my pen, my notepad. “You saw him today?”

  “No,” she says. “It was last year. He missed my lecture, but talked to me outside the hotel.”

  Here. He was here and I missed him. And of course I did. I watched the door to the lecture room, not the hotel. And I even stopped doing that when I thought I had him, when I dragged that poor kid from Wareham, Massachusetts, out of here.

  “He was sweet,” she says. “Seemed very down. I believe we talked about The Dunwich Horror. I can’t remember exactly, you know, it’s a lot of little conversations. What I remember is the feeling.”

  “And he was wounded. Bruised.”

  She shakes her head. “No. Not at all.”

  Fuck. “Dr. Woo, the man in this picture was savagely beaten. If he was here, he would have been covered in bruises.”

  “Well, he must have special healing powers,” she says, patronizing. “Because he was here, and he was fine.”

  “And you’re sure this was him? You would swear on it?”

  She smiles. “I love my readers,” she says. “But you’ve seen them, you understand why the man in this picture…ahem…stood out. Look at those cheekbones. He was striking. That’s the word for it. Striking.”

  She’s so authoritative, so sure.

  “And I doubly remember all this because while I was talking to this poor guy, I got a bloody nose. I mean I had this wave of nausea, I almost passed out. These conferences are long days.” She sighs.

  “Did he tell you anything about himself, anything that might help us locate him…his name, anything like that?”

  She smiles at me. “Officer, I meet hundreds of people a year.” She looks at her crowd. “In fact…”

  “Did you consult a physician after your nosebleed?”

  “No,” she says. “One minute that boy was here, my nose was bleeding and I thought I was getting sick, fluttery, and the next minute he was gone. He was gone and I was fine. As I said, it was a long day.”

  I scribble those words in my notepad, he was gone and I was fine.

  “Officer,” she says. “He didn’t do anything wrong did he?”

  I close up my notepad. I wish her the best with her readers and I give her my card. “You know,” I say. “In case that nose starts bleeding again.”

  Dr. Woo goes back to her podium and mingles with her fans, hugging, posing, signing, leaning in. He was gone and I was fine. The words loom in my gut. Loud, steady.

  JON

  I have friends now, sort of.

  About a year ago I found this podcast, these two guys from New Zealand. Kiwis. Their names are Guy and Tim and all they do is analyze Grown Ups 2. It’s the greatest feeling to hear them talk, they notice all the stuff I notice, like how you can’t tell what the director wants you to see. The podcast made me realize why the movie was relaxing in that way. The lack of direction or something, like how it is with The Dunwich Horror and Roger’s letter, me not knowing where to focus, what I’m supposed to see, what to do. I’ve listened to every episode three or four times. It’s not interactive, but sometimes I’ll talk to them as if it’s the three of us at a bar. I hold on to the wheel, I half expect them to respond, to say my name. And it’s a good thing to find people you have something in common with, even if you can’t know them, it’s like all those Lovecraft people.

  My phone rings. The caller is UNKNOWN. My heart pounds, weaponizing, ka gung, ka gung. I pull over. I put the car in park. I cough. “Hello?”

  I haven’t spoken out loud in a few days. I have a New Zealand accent that I must have picked up from the podcast. There is no voice on the other end of the line. So I say hello again and again, I sound like a freaking Kiwi. But it isn’t Chloe, it isn’t my parents who magically tracked me down with a detective, or an Internet wiz. It isn’t Professor Meeney.

  I thought he might call because this morning I snapped. I sent him a cryptic email from my Theo Ward account.

  Dear Dr. Meeney,

  I have reason to believe that you can help me. It’s a life or death situation. I’m not being dramatic. I’m not a student. I’m not trying to get your attention. I’m trying to get your help. And there is no money involved. I just need you to hear me out.

  You know who this is.

  But it’s not Meeney. He probably thought my note was spam. The call is just a robot trying to clean my carpets. I scream into the phone, I have wood floors, asshole!

  Just like that, I sound like me again.

  I should have known it was no one. It’s been a year of no one, nothing. Dr. Lynn Woo’s words felt like the truth. I stopped calling Chloe. I didn’t delete her number or anything like that but not calling her became a thing I do, the way some people go to the gym. And she’s different now. She uses more hashtags. #SaturdayVibes. Today she was at Sbarro’s pizza in Midtown. She wrote: can’t come here without thinking of Michael Scott.

  We never watched The Office together. She’s probably watching it with some new guy, some new friend.

  I still keep up with her art online. She’s making eyes, but they’re wilder now, almost monstrous, as if something upset her, something irked her. In the media, she says it’s about growing older, wiser, more cynical, leaning into that darkness in facing the unknown of your future self, realizing…this is it, how it is now. I read every interview and then I close my eyes and remember seeing her at Lovecraft. The memory doesn’t fade. I won’t let it.

  I open up the paper and there’s an article about Dr. Meeney. He’s sponsoring a science program at Hope High School. There’s a picture of him with a bunch of public school kids and they’re all smiling. There’s a look in people’s eyes when they have so much ahead, the prom, their futures, the science they’re doing with this big shot professor. I study myself in the mirror, my blank eyes, my puffy face from not talking so much. I don’t have that future sparkle. When I smile, my eyes stay the same. I don’t look happy. I look dead.

  * * *

  —

  Hope Street is darker than normal because of the mist, low and thick. I turn on my brights.

  I slam on the brakes. There are hands, two of them on the hood of my car. Now there is laughter and the mist clea
rs enough where I can see more, the arms attached to the hands, bottoming out in an electric-pink sports bra.

  And when I see what house I’m in front of, I realize who it must be: Crane Comma Florie.

  It turns out that she’s young and she has frizzy red hair. She’s breathing heavy, she’s closer now, leaning into the passenger window. She’s catching her breath, laughing at the mist, how thick it is, how blinding. I smell her sweat.

  She laughs. “Oh my God—this must be you. We meet at last for real. It’s Theo, right?”

  She bends over and I see her boobs, the space between them, the darkness. Her mouth never stops moving. She says she’s been wanting to meet me. She yawns. “Sorry,” she says. “I just got back from L.A. and I have jet lag up the wazoo.”

  I tell her it’s okay and she peers into my car. She hears the Kiwis talking, I forgot to shut them off.

  “Is that a podcast?” she asks.

  “It’s these guys in New Zealand,” I say, surprised that I can speak. “They talk about the movie Grown Ups 2.”

  “Amazing,” she says and she drums her hands on the side of my car. “Do you ever listen to How Did This Get Made?”

  I shake my head no.

  “Theo,” she says, as if my name is a new shirt she’s trying on. “Theo, you would love this podcast. It’s literally just people being like, How did this movie get made? It’s amazing. And it’s not mean, you know? It’s coming from this place of love.” She pulls a red pen from her pocket. “You have to give me your email so I can send it to you.”

  And then she’s writing my Theo email address on her arm. I have a friend, I think. She yawns, she’s out here looking for her disappearing cat. “His name is Muse Frontman,” she says. “And he is not a homebody.”

  I laugh and she keeps going. She says she didn’t get into grad school like she wanted. She switched majors at Providence College because she wanted to study the brain because the brain is where it’s at.