I still haven’t found Roger. He’s never at his house when I go over there. But I think he knows I’m coming for him. I feel him in the city. It’s me against him, and when I see my victims in the obituaries, I know I’m winning. City data, crime rates, these things take years to track. The numbers won’t be official anytime soon. But every day the newspapers are talking about me, not me directly but the work I’ve been doing. I’ve taken out three of the most toxic drug dealers in Lynn. Bad guys, guys who send their minions to schoolyards to give kids a taste to take home to their mothers, guys who kick dogs and mix fentanyl into heroin, people who are responsible for ruining lives, taking advantage of innocent people.
People like Roger Blair, people with no regard for human life.
I sit down at my kitchen table with coffee and my papers, fresh, rolled up in rubber bands. You read the Herald like a book, but the Globe is old-fashioned, folded.
Today’s papers have articles about my seventh target, Eddie “Soup” Campbell. Right away I realize that things are more complicated with Soup than I realized. Soup was a drug dealer, yes, but he had cut a deal. He was set to be a witness in a case against one of his suppliers. Without Soup’s testimony, they don’t know if they can nail the suppliers, and my head is pounding. There’s a picture of Soup’s girlfriend, the mother of his children, she’s leaning over the way they tell you to on a plane when it’s gonna crash. She’s wearing two different shoes. They were high school sweethearts, been together since they were kids.
There’s a giant op-ed in the Herald about the uptick in dead drug dealers.
…Our soldiers from the wrong side of the tracks are dying of heart failure. Two is a coincidence. Three is a trend. Seven is an epidemic. I lost my daughter to the opioid epidemic three years ago. There is no way to track the time after you bury your child. Time is your enemy. It’s another day on this planet that makes no sense.
I won’t jump on the bandwagon and declare this a “phenomenon.” I speak with parents in my situation every day. I volunteer at the hospital to hold babies born addicted to heroin, pure souls at a physical disadvantage. I visit women in their late sixties who are acting as mothers, doing the school drop-offs because their children are unable to care for their children.
We live in a world together, where one thing affects another. Is it so hard to believe that these deaths might account for a cosmic, karmic influx?
The opioid epidemic is killing all of us, which means we are all in this together. I don’t know about you, but that makes me feel better.
The columnist has an email address. I could write to her and tell her about my situation, that there is no coincidence, no trend, there is only me. I profile these people for weeks, skulking around in a hoodie, trying to be invisible, keeping my distance, ordering product online to get a sense of how they do business. I have to make sure these guys are as bad as I think they are. I have to know for sure that I’m eliminating evil because once I set out to get them, once my heart starts ticking, there is no turning back.
When I finish reading my papers, I don’t store them in a big plastic box. I toss them into my fireplace and burn them. The papers crumble and shrink, twisting in the invisible hands of a monster. I think of Wilbur in The Dunwich Horror disappearing, leaving no corpse, no trace.
* * *
—
My next target is Casey “Incy” Waterman.
I read about her in an article about the double-edged sword of forensics in police investigations. The example they used was the case of a livery cabdriver who had pulled over to nurse her baby. She was desperate to make ends meet, to feed her baby. Someone murdered her in cold blood for the fifteen dollars in her wallet, wanted to send a message to the neighborhood, left the baby drinking the dead mother’s milk. It was the kind of story that makes people say the world is close to an end.
Everyone knew it was Incy who did this. She shouted her name to the night. This is Incy Town, people. You hear me? But the evidence was compromised, the prints were misplaced, a fiber was mixed up. Incy walked, in spite of the witnesses who heard her boasting, in spite of all the cellphone photos of Incy in the street. The lawyer’s logic was simple, modern: We can’t trust photographs when there is no physical evidence to corroborate these grainy pictures.
Incy got her nickname when she was a kid in the system, shoved from one foster home to another. She spent most of her years in juvenile facilities. She was violent. She came from violence. It was another chicken/egg situation. What to make of these monsters?
Even now, grabbing my keys, my sunglasses, waving ’bye to Chloe’s pictures, I don’t know if what I plan to do is right. Women are different. They can carry life inside of them. You never know what might become of that life. But that’s not fair either, reducing a person’s defining quality to this one thing she can do. I know what Dr. Woo said about Wilbur, I think about it every day, that there was no other possible fate for a creature like that, that it’s not enough to be part human if you’re mostly monster. But ultimately that’s the difference between a made-up story and real life. Lovecraft made all the choices for Wilbur. In real life, you make your own choices.
* * *
—
And there she is. Same place, same time every day, standing with her jet-black hair and her silk jacket with Cantonese writing on it and her black jeans, holes in the knees. Same friend who’s always there, her number two, the girl in the Bruins jersey. Incy is the clear boss. The Bruin supplicates, always facing her superior with her hands latched behind her back, fingers laced together. The Bruin is pregnant and she only releases her hands to light a butt. They have the same conversation a couple times a week. Both their mothers smoked butts and they both turned out totally fucking fine.
It’s been hard to make a move on Incy because she’s never alone. I can’t take them both out. It’s the pregnancy, the reality that two women dying of heart attacks at the exact same time would raise questions. And, of course, I’m getting to know them. I watch them laughing, when they elbow each other and fight over the lighter, over some guy, over the Bruin’s hair. I think about Noelle and Chloe, about Crane Comma Florie, about girls, how they connect, they meld. They talk in their own language, and then again, all the babies they might have, not have, the power either way.
Incy laughs a lot and she kicks the air a lot, high kicks. She drinks Diet Dr Pepper and people know this. I track them on foot and when people see Incy coming by, they wait for her with a Diet Dr Pepper. Incy likes a bottle. Last week this guy offered her a can. She bashed him in the head with it. Then she threw the can at a window in his house. The Bruin doubled over laughing and then Incy punched her in the arm. Let’s fucking go.
Today is par for the course. They head to a couple free clinics to give out free samples, a halfway house where they hide bags in an empty chewed-up Honey Dew polystyrene cup by a dying plant out front. And then they head into the doughnut shop. I lurk outside smoking a butt. (There are things you have to do if you want to be invisible.) Incy gets the usual, a glazed cruller. She chews on the left side of her mouth, as if the right side of her mouth is broken. The Bruin bites into a chocolate chip muffin bottom and Incy laughs, who the fuck eats muffin bottoms, teach your fat ass a lesson about what’s good. This is a running joke, another way in which girls fascinate me, how hard they laugh, how deeply their minds bend together.
Incy’s mom was a junkie, her dad too. Nobody loved Incy, but that’s no excuse for her behavior. She has four kids but she doesn’t take care of them. They’re all in foster care, like she was. She doesn’t try and get them back. I think of those Telegraphs in March, when I was gone missing four months, when there were weeks at a time without a mention of me in the paper. It is terrible to be forgotten. My heart is heating up and Incy’s licking her fingers. I put out my cigarette. I jaywalk to the other side of the street and hang by the front of a packie, watching Incy and the
Bruin begin their post-doughnut ritual. They light up right where I was standing. And again I marvel at my power, or lack thereof. Only seconds ago I was where they are, and were I there now, they would be dead. I know the way I’ve known every day for the past three weeks, this isn’t it. It’s not happening today.
* * *
—
I got Chinese again. It’s something, how easily you slip into a routine. This is my typical day right now. Wake up and read the papers, track Incy, wimp out on Incy, pick up Chinese food, and then drive through town and park across the street from Roger Blair’s house.
Sometimes I swear the police are onto me, the police or someone who knows those heart attacks were not nature’s way. I’ll be ducking my head to inhale my lo mein and I’ll get that spine tingling thing where I know I’m not alone. But there’s no one there when I spin my head around.
I tracked down a couple of his neighbors online and found out what little there is to know about the owner of this house. That guy? He’s never around. I think I heard him the other night. He runs in, out. He’s probably living somewhere else while he fixes up the place. He can’t hide forever. Every week there’s some kind of proof that there is activity in the house, fresh paint, a new mailbox. He replaced the nails that hold up his stupid Life’s a Beach! sign. I’ve staked the place out, but my timing is never right. Sometimes I think he’s avoiding me, that he knows my car. He might have an underground tunnel, an escape hatch.
I close the tab on the polystyrene box of noodles. I don’t know the last time I hugged a person. But then, most people will never know the rush of having saved lives, the satisfaction of the plastic bags snapping as the insidious, poisonous powder drops into the toilet bowl.
I get out of my car and my heart beats faster as I approach his house, as I knock on his storm door, the door I know so well by now, the white border, the freshly wiped Plexiglas. My heart is going pretty good and I ring the bell. I listen for the pitter-patter of feet, a door opening, an escape hatch springing free from a padlock.
Nothing, always nothing.
I head to the side of the house, where there are more windows, always freshly washed, more proof of his presence, his fastidious nature. I try the handle on the back door. It doesn’t budge. I could break in. I could pick this lock. I could hunker down and wait for him. I grip the handle. But then I let go. I hear something. A screen door slamming, and then I hear something else, my heart, pounding. I run to the side of the house and I see him, the tail end of him, that longish creepy hair, the slight hunch in his backside. This is like one of those nightmares where you run but you’re not fast enough.
When I get to the front of the house, he’s gone.
CHLOE
This is my favorite Manhattan.
Four o’clock in the morning and most of the people are sleeping. It’s not true what they say about New York, how they tell you it never sleeps. Out here on Care’s balcony it’s quiet at this hour. You hear things you don’t normally hear. It’s stunning, how it enlivens my senses, almost like a tab of ecstasy. I watch the sky change colors, the inevitability of the sun coming up. Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I smile. This is always when I feel Jon the most. When I imagine his pain if he knew where I was, who I was with.
Carrig’s love is sealing the crack in my heart that Jon made. And I’m fighting it. I’m not painting, not sleeping. I think it’s almost an overdose of love. Different kinds of love coexist in me. I think maybe I’m a sociopath. Maybe I have no heart. Maybe I have a big heart.
I love Jon, obviously. He’s in my mind, he’s a part of my story, I’m a part of his. But I love Carrig too, the shape his face takes on when he’s nervous, confused, when I told him I didn’t have pierced ears and he blushed. Really? He has a strong really. A loving really that reveals the depth of his desire to know me. To know me more than Jon knows me. But we don’t talk about Jon.
Well, except for that one time.
We were having a bad couple of days. Care tagged me in a picture on Facebook and I flew off the handle, untagged myself, accidentally blocked him in the process. I said what I had said since we first got together, that I was trying to have a private life and that I wanted this to be special. I pointed to my career. It’s just better if people wonder about you so they can more easily project onto your work, you know? He still didn’t buy it; he knew me well enough by now to know when I’m lying. I couldn’t tell him about Jon, this hybrid of paranoia and hope that he’s watching me. So I told him another embarrassing truth.
“I’ve never really had a boyfriend since, you know, you.”
“Are you serious?”
I blushed. He hugged me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just thrown off.”
He was exasperated. He didn’t understand how someone like me had gone through life alone. And I didn’t say it. I didn’t have to say it. Jon.
Carrig left to meet his friends and I stayed in his apartment. We weren’t quite used to each other yet. When he got home, he was wasted, tequila wasted.
He flopped on the couch. “Jon Bronson,” he said. “He really fucked you up didn’t he?”
I didn’t answer.
He laughed. “It’s cool,” he said. “Don’t worry. It’s not a deal breaker.”
I did make an effort to get through to him. I backtracked and assured him that I was normal. I’d had plenty of sex, flings that lasted a few weeks, maybe even a month. But he’s not a listener. I know this about him. It’s not a deal breaker. He patted the couch and I sat there with him and watched Entourage, but the whole time I was in another world, lecturing myself. Is this what you want? Some guy who thinks of your relationship as a contract? I told myself I was being harsh. That wasn’t him. That was the tequila. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was me. Lying to him, to myself. What fucking bullshit, Chloe. You’re lying and you know it. You’ve been with Jon since you were eleven years old.
I realized that there was no sound coming out of the TV. Care was watching me. He was still drunk.
I blushed. “What’s wrong?”
“Sometimes you go away,” he said. “You know I feel it, right?”
I turned into Sweet Girlfriend Girl who climbs aboard my boyfriend, and it felt honest to hold him, to say things like, Honey, you need water, let me get you a snack. He tried to follow me into the kitchen but he banged his leg and fell. He was gripping his knee and thinking out loud: Why are you ashamed of me? If I was him, if I was him you’d tell everyone cuz he’s a smart fucking dork and that’s what you want? Isn’t it? You don’t want me. You don’t do you?
The next morning he didn’t mention the night before.
So here we are, together. And in the beginning, when things were normal, this is when I would be painting. But then, normal is a bogus word. There’s no such thing as normal, not for anyone.
And now here I am, awake on Care’s terrace, same way I am every day, paint drying while Carrig sleeps soundly. Out here, in no-man’s-land, in the desolate hours between night and day when I can’t hurt my boyfriend’s feelings, when it’s not a betrayal, I give in to it. The obsession. Sometimes I just think, but tonight is one of those nights I have to do something. I’m not in the state I was before I got together with Care, no more clutching my phone in a movie theater awaiting a call from Jon, no more pointless trips to Providence.
But this part of me won’t die no matter how many times Carrig leaves work early in this completely undramatic way, shrugging, blushing, I just missed you, babe. I am loved. Craved. I am babe. I am held.
It’s the opposite of Jon. But then I can’t wrap my head around my own bitterness. I have no right. I wouldn’t have a career without him. And the truth hits me and I have to sit down.
This is why I’m not painting. Because of Care. Because I don’t think I deserve to have Carrig and Jon. Because I think of my career as being a result of Jon’s dis
appearance, a response on my part, not something born of my heart, my mind, but something pulled out of me by the pain, the horror of his disappearance. The feminist part of me kicks back. Bullshit you wouldn’t have a career. You’re an artist, Chloe. Stop undermining yourself. If it wasn’t his eyes you were trying to draw, it would have been something else.
So why haven’t I painted a single fucking thing in almost a year?
* * *
—
Carrig is knocking on the doorframe, a familiar knockity-knock-knock.
At some point I must have fallen asleep, because this is me waking up, jet-lagged from perpetual insomnia. I don’t want him to know how tired I am, how much I wish he would leave so that I could close the blinds and miss the daylight part of the day. But he’s a morning person. And I believe him when he says that morning people are happier people.
He opens the blinds. “My mom says you have to do this first thing because it’s good for your body,” he says. “She would go into all our rooms and yank the curtains all the way open. You shoulda heard the screaming.”
“Well,” I say. “I wouldn’t object to a little screaming.”
He’s still in his boxers, awake in that morning man way. “I can help you with that.”
* * *
—
One thing I’ve learned about being with him: I like to cook.
I’m terrible at cooking, but I’m at my happiest in Carrig’s kitchen, with Carrig’s utensils, iPad propped up on a stand. I’m whisking egg whites and he’s singing along to some song he learned about from Entourage in the other room.
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