Providence

by Caroline Kepnes

  “Me? You want me to get a gift for them?”

  “Yes, you. You’re in a mall and I’m slammed.”

  “What should I get?”

  “Eggie, it’s an engagement gift. You give something that lasts forever.”

  And then she’s gone. Something that lasts forever.

  There’s a store where they sell ripped jeans, a store where it’s nothing but cellphone cases, a store where it’s nothing but bras. I get a flash of Marko and his bride-to-be fucking on my kitchen table and my skin heats up. Fuck them.

  I head to slot 14, the spot formerly occupied by Roger Blair. First things first.

  * * *

  —

  It was hell getting in there, tracking down a security guard to hear me out about the unoccupied space. He’s finally coming and I’m waving him down like some shit-out-of-luck guy on the side of the road with a flat.

  I try anyway, forcing small talk about the mall, the nice light, the sadness of seeing a sporting goods store go under. “Locally owned?” I ask.

  He nods. He scratches his nose. “Listen, I’m short-staffed tonight. If you were hoping to get into this space, I can’t do that for ya. There’s a process and whatnot with the Realtors.”

  I get it. Sometimes the answer is yes. Yes, you have cancer. Sometimes the answer is no. No, you can’t go in. I don’t waste the guy’s time by pitching a fit. It’s not happening today. He drives off on his scooter and I do the only thing you can do when they say no and you want yes.

  I get the hell out of there and find something else to do.

  * * *

  —

  The Bronsons live on a nowhere street in a nowhere part of town. Not enough trees to call it tree-lined but it’s not situated near any homespun five-and-dime. This is a practical place, houses lined up because people need houses. I sit out here for a few minutes, waiting to catch a vibe, a sense of who these people are beyond the basics—the mother works at T.J.Maxx and she’s a townie; the father’s an import, from Scotland, landscapes, irregular, hits the bottle is what I read between the lines, his red nose in the pictures from the Telegraph and his perpetually shifting business, roofing, lawns, back to roofing, as if he mucks it all up and starts fresh, like a kid building castles on a beach.

  There’s nothing else to know about them and their house ain’t talking, so I’m out of the car, I’m on the lawn, walking, trying to get my heart to slow down, my hands to stop shaking. I ring the bell. The father comes, Jed, red plastic cup in hand. I flash my badge.

  He grins, crooked teeth. “Been a while since we heard from the boys in blue.” He has that same Scottish accent he had in the news, when his boy emerged and he scratched his chin for the local reporters, in awe, clearly half drunk. “Come on in.”

  Jed has done this before, he’s an old pro, gesturing toward the sofa, offering me a beer. He tells his story in shifts, there was the first disappearance—We had no idea where he went, if he was dead, if he was here, you know sometimes I’d swear he was in the attic. I tore it apart, took the floorboards up, wife coulda killed me—and he tells me about the return—You can’t believe how big he got, how buff, you know that’s the last thing you expect—and then he talks about the time after the return—You know it’s like I say to my wife, he was never an easy kid, he was never one for people, he was always off with his hamsters, with his newspapers, so is it any wonder that he took off to be on his own?

  “Do you know where he is now?”

  He shakes his head. “But you see, when I was a kid, my old man, he beat the pulp out of me. Oh, you don’t know what it was, a different place, we’re not so soft over there. Anyhow, I turned seventeen, I saved my pennies and I got on a plane and I came here and that was it.”

  “You never saw your dad again?”

  He finishes his scotch. “Nope. Not my mum, nor my sister. And I told Jon about this, oh I told him the thing about being a man, a real man, you leave, you make your own family and you pave your own road and you don’t go squatting on your old man’s turf.”

  He goes to set the boat off, which from the sounds in the kitchen means pour another drink. I pick up a photo album and look at pictures of Jon Bronson young, smiling, awkward. Jed returns, offers me a beer. We aren’t that much different, me and him, this house reminds me of my house, that sadness, that feeling of someone missing.

  I ask him when he last saw his son. And then he sighs. “When Noelle died. You know, the girl in his school. I remember because the wife, she took that hard, didn’t even know the kid, but oh she cried.”

  “Was your son at that party?”

  He shrugs. “Who knows? All I know is he was here that morning and then he didn’t come home and then, well, that’s all she wrote.” He moans, America. “Lorena Bobbitt, the one who cut off her husband’s dick, she also copped insanity, served maybe three months, four, I can’t remember. But there you go.” He raises his red cup. “There you goddamn go.”

  Am I this bad? Do I openly stare into space, trying to figure out what went wrong with Chuckie? It occurs to me that I forgot to buy a present for Marko and his fiancée, that I might be even worse than I realize. Jed Bronson scratches his beard. “I hate a quiet house.” His eyes swing toward the old stereo system, CDs, big speakers. “You mind?”

  “Of course not,” I say.

  Outside, the sky is turning over, giving up, the day is going to end. I’m failing. Jon Bronson isn’t here. You know when a man hasn’t seen his son, the way Jed stands there, licking his thumb, scraping gunk off a CD, waxing poetic about Simon and Garfunkel, America. That’s me, that’s him, that’s any bad father, trying to make it like life is bigger than your son, when, come on, who’s kidding whom? And then he stops his bullshit yammering and he looks at me all at once. “Why did you say you’re here?”

  I think fast. “I’m here because your son might have been a witness to something.”

  “To something like a crime?” he asks. He doesn’t take his eyes off me. Do I look that lost, that paranoid? Do I look that childish, that needy, that sagging skin, those sullen eyes? “Do you have a picture?” he asks. “You know, we haven’t seen him, who knows if we’d even recognize him.” He shakes his head. “I realize how that sounds, but you know, you wonder.”

  And then we hear a car, and we both look out the window. He sighs. “Here comes Penny.” And there she is, slamming the door on her old Saab, she stopped off at the packie, she looks exhausted, still wearing her work smock, the lanyard too. She’s prettier than I expected, but she’s given up, you can see that from the way she carries the bottle of booze with one hand, no bag, not hiding her need for it, same way she doesn’t cover the bags under her eyes, badges of honor, proof that she’s in mourning, forever glum. She pauses when she comes in.

  “What is this, Jed? Aren’t you gonna introduce me?”

  This must look strange, two grown men, Paul Simon blasting, and Jed introduces us then excuses himself to put some Jack in his Jack. When he’s gone, Penny shuts off the music. There it is, in a nutshell, why they belong together, why they don’t, he plays the music, she shuts it down. I think of their boy, in the middle of this fight, on his own in all the pictures. I bet he wanted a brother or sister, I bet he asked them for one, I bet he never got what he wanted, which is why he was clinging to that hamster the day he disappeared.

  “Do you want to see his room?” Jed asks when he returns.

  The three of us file upstairs to Jon’s room. They kept it this way, just in case. There are the Spider-Man posters I saw online, boxes of newspapers—Jon lived for the paper—and upon closer inspection, I see that the pillowcases are also Spider-Man.

  “How old was he when he left?” I ask.

  Penny folds her arms. It’s a touchy subject. “Jon was a kid at heart,” she says. “He was never trying to impress other people.”

  Jed picks up a
Spider-Man pillow. You can tell he’s never touched it before. “Pretty sure we put these on for Pen’s cousin’s kid when he visited though, right hon?”

  Penny doesn’t answer and I lead the way out the door, walking ahead, so they can elbow each other, Don’t lie to the man, don’t humiliate the boy. It’s amazing, how much you can hear in the silence of two married people.

  This is police work, it’s listening, it’s letting the worst of someone, their pain, crawl inside of you and blossom, ugly, awful.

  Back downstairs things relax, a little. Mrs. Bronson doesn’t encourage me to call her by her first name and she doesn’t take off her smock or her lanyard. She is awkward, nervous. Swears she has no clue where Jon is. Uses that word: clue. Means she’s trying to figure it out. Means she has a clue, but I keep this to myself and just keep pushing. “Do you ever hear from him?”

  Penny shrinks up into herself. “No. No, I don’t.”

  She’s lying. She said No, I don’t, separating herself from her husband. She would have said No, we don’t if she was telling the truth. Jed has no idea. The boy must call the mother. It’s like me and Lo, when someone asks us how Chuckie’s doing, I nod and Lo does all the talking. I’m quiet because I’m a liar. The most I’ll say is Good, I heard he’s good. And that’s the equivalent of No. No, I don’t.

  She asks if I have kids. Without meaning to, I lie, tell her I don’t.

  JON

  I search for Incy and it’s begun. Her body was discovered. But the reports are confusing, they bury the lead, they bury her name. The news isn’t so much about Incy’s body, her untimely death. She’s mentioned in passing, an afterthought for the real story, what they found in her basement, what’s drawn the attention of the national news: five young girls. They were bound and gagged. The video is the kind of thing that sets the world on fire, these girls released, broken, shielding their faces as they file out of Incy’s house. I remember what Roger said to me in that letter. You are free. I wonder if these girls feel that. It doesn’t seem remotely possible. But it’s a comfort to know that they’re on their way to something else, something better. I ended Incy’s ruthless reign (that’s what the local paper called it).

  It’s not what you think. I’m not a monster. I’ll never rejoice in ending anyone’s life no matter what. But this particular case is special. I made the national news, the New York Times. (Indirectly, but still.) This is the kind of thing they describe as a miracle. I watch the coverage and for the first time in my life since all this, I’m almost grateful for my power. Finally, something good came of it, something as magical as innocent girls exiting a house of horrors. The firemen came when the bathroom flooded and started an electric fire. I did the right thing leaving her in the bathroom. And that wasn’t easy, but I did it. And because of me, those girls are free.

  I order myself a reward, the best cake in Lynn, strawberries and cream from D’Amicis. My doorbell rings and the guy pounds on the door. “Peter Feder?”

  It’s weird to hear my fake name. I crack the window and whistle to the guy on my stoop. “Hey buddy,” I say. “Can you leave it by the door? There’s five bucks under the mat.”

  The delivery guy waves. “Thanks!”

  The smell of the bakery floods my whole apartment and I breathe it in, close my eyes. Chloe Smells Like Cookies. I eat the cake right out of the box the way my mom did sometimes and I read everything I can about the girls, their parents who were scared, their friends who thought they were gone. One girl was kidnapped in Vietnam. Another girl is local, from Southie. More is coming out every few minutes about the level of horror in that basement. Incy brainwashed them with SpaghettiOs and heroin, she forced them to eat the noodles from the can, take the needle, inject themselves. She was working for a larger human trafficking conglomerate, the worst guys, the worst guys that can be. I hear Magnus in my head.

  We did good work down here, Jon.

  I finally made those words come true. And there is no we. It was only me. I rescued those girls, even though I didn’t know I was doing it, the truth is simple. If I hadn’t walked into her house and surprised her in her shower, those girls would still be down there, trapped. I put on some Hippo Campus and I look at what’s left of my great big cake, it looks like a wedding cake, like the bride and groom got to it and everybody laughed.

  The wanting begins, and I don’t fight it, not tonight. I go with it. I daydream of holding her, sharing my cake with her. I missed this, I missed her, I picture us standing before our friends—her friends—and our families, and she’s in a white dress and I’m beside her, my hand is on the small of her back. She’s offering me cake and I’m shaking my head and then she smothers me with it, frosting in my mouth, filling my eyes. There’s so much laughter you can’t hear anything above it until she wraps her hand around my head and pulls me in for a kiss, strawberries, her tongue, different from Florie’s.

  Things are gonna be different now because I’m gonna be different now. No more guilt. No more doomsday. I start a deep clean on my apartment, I want things to feel good because I feel good and I pour bleach into a bucket and mix it with water. And then my phone buzzes, a Google alert about Chloe. I get these all the time, they’re usually nothing too exciting, she’s in the listings for an art show, something like that. But this is one of the good ones because this is my day. I sit on the floor of my nice clean kitchen with my back against the oven and I open the email. I picture her next to me. I can imagine that. In a way I couldn’t when I was so gloomy.

  My heart beats before the link even opens, a great big article about her in Nylon magazine. I’m happy to see her back in the news like this, I like the idea of us both making something of ourselves at the same time, in our own ways. And my heart is racing, that little beach ball of death is circling, I haven’t allowed myself to do this in a while, to read about her, to look at pictures of her. And it felt like a two-way street, the way she slipped offscreen, as if she and Doctor Actor were on a permanent break from the world. I bet they broke up. I bet she started painting a lot. I bet that’s what this is, a return.

  And then the page opens, all the bright colors, her bright eyes. Chloe.

  First I look at the pictures, her face is more of a heart than circle now and her eyes are lined in this way they never were before. She’s a little older, a little paler, a little more beautiful. She’s in a shirt I’ve never seen, a New Hampshire ringer T-shirt that says Live Free or Die.

  “I miss you too, Chloe,” I tell her. I put my hand on her shirt.

  The next three pictures of her come from a photo booth. She’s open in the first one, smiling. She’s goofy in the second, and the third ones gives me the chills. Her eyes. Same as they were that day I got home, when she fainted, when she saw me.

  The article starts out talking about her painting. She’s doing landscapes now but Chloe’s landscapes are creating a need for a new genre of upside-down kitsch. Her paintings are selling like crazy in New York, but also in other parts of the world, Paris and Amsterdam and Stockholm. I knew she’d come back, but I’d be lying if it didn’t sting a little that this is the first article I’ve ever seen where they’re not talking about me, the inspiration behind her eyes.

  And I shouldn’t be upset to see that she’s left my eyes behind and moved on to sweeping New York views. I’ve changed. She’s changed. We’re supposed to change.

  The next part of the story addresses her love-hate relationship with social media. And then an ad for laser therapy interrupts the story, an ad I’ll remember forever because of what comes next.

  “I believe in privacy,” she says, sipping her extra-foam latte. “I think that’s the New Hampshire in me. You know, we’re actually going home next week for our engagement party.”

  Sayers, who is engaged to financier Carrig Birkus, says she rarely discusses her personal life. “But you get engaged, it feels like you should tell everyone,” she says, bea
ming.

  To wit: Sayers and Birkus grew up together in Nashua, New Hampshire. They then grew apart. “One night I’m at a gallery and they tell me someone from school is here and it was him and that was that. We moved in together pretty quickly and we like to laugh. He had the wall space, I had the art.”

  Sayers glances at this reporter’s recording device. She winces. “This isn’t as cheesy as it sounds,” she says, wrapping her hands around the cup as if it’s warm. It isn’t. “It’s like art. You throw paint, you don’t know what you’re doing. A few hours later, a few days, this canvas, those hours of your life, have dried, they tell you what they are, what they need. Dried time.” She breaks into laughter, releasing her hands. “This is why I never talk about my private life,” she says. “It leads to me saying things like that.”

  Sayers and Birkus will celebrate the engagement in Nashua with a “backyard party.” When asked why New Hampshire instead of New York, she looks out the window, resumes cradling her cold coffee. “This isn’t home,” she says. “Not yet.” She then directs her disarming gaze to this reporter. “What about you?” she asks. “Are you married?”

  She is most relaxed now, her eyes alive, inquisitive, curious, as in her work.

  When I vomit, it’s strawberries and cream. And then I vomit again because of what I was thinking only a little while ago, that this was our wedding cake, that we were in this together even when we were out of touch, that Doctor Actor was a season, no different from a winter, that every winter ends.

  And now there’s nothing left in me but bile. There’s no stopping the cramping in my soul, my gut, the idea of Carrig being the one to hold her, to walk down the street with her, to eat eggs with her, the idea of her art coming from his home and his bedroom and his love.