The Curiosities

by Susan Gloss

  “No,” Annie said. “Heroin? You’ve got to be kidding me. In addition to having no idea where a person would even get something like that, it goes against the whole point of my project, which is to bring awareness to—”

  Josh cut Annie off with a sharp look. To the officers, he said, “That’s quite a leap, don’t you think?”

  Schultz shrugged. “It’s what we have to do. We’ll leave it to Ms. Beck to tell us the whole story.” He handed the baggie to Officer Green, who put it inside an evidence bag and slapped a label on it. She was about to do the same with the camera, but Annie begged her not to.

  “You can go ahead and take the box and what was in it,” Annie said. “But not the camera. I’ll tell you whatever you want about it. I’ll even show you the pictures that are on there, but please don’t take it away.”

  “You said you took pictures of the deceased,” Green said as she placed the camera in another evidence bag. “So we really don’t have a choice but to take this.”

  Josh gave Annie a gentle nudge with his elbow. “Leave the talking to me, okay? You’ll have a chance to say whatever you need to, but please wait until you and I have had a chance to talk privately.”

  Josh went over to Nell and said quietly, “I’ve got this. I’ll go with her.”

  “Thank you,” she said, touching his arm. Josh nodded in acknowledgment, but didn’t make eye contact with Nell.

  To the police, Josh said, “Since you haven’t arrested her, I’m assuming you’ll have no problem with Annie riding with me to the police station? I’d like to have a chance to speak with my client privately before she’s interviewed there.”

  Green waved a hand. “Go ahead. We’ll meet you there.”

  After they’d left, Paige sat down on the stairs and said, “What the fuck just happened?”

  “I have absolutely no idea,” Nell said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Annie

  PIECE: Catalog for Annie Beck’s Elysium exhibition, New York.

  The drive to the police station wasn’t very long. When Josh parked the car, Annie grabbed the door handle, ready to get out, but Josh stopped her.

  “I still have some questions for you,” he said. “We could talk inside, but it’s more private here. Let them wait a little while. You still haven’t told me how you and Caroline met.”

  Annie sat back in the passenger seat. “It was Craigslist,” she said. “I placed an ad.”

  Josh pulled out his phone and gave it to Annie. “Is the ad still posted? Can you find it?”

  Annie tried to type on the tiny screen, but her hands were still shaking from the shock of the last few hours. Josh noticed her struggling and took the phone back. “Here, I can do it if you tell me where to look,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Annie said. “It should be under Creative Services. I haven’t had very many responses, so I’ve kept it up, in the hopes of getting more participants.”

  “Is this it?” he asked. He read from the screen:

  I am a visual artist with four decades of experience documenting social and political issues. I’m working on a photo essay about the opioid epidemic, for display at a gallery exhibition in New York City. If you are interested in sharing your story of addiction and recovery, please contact me.

  “That’s it,” Annie said. She remembered typing up the ad just a few days before she left New York to come to Madison.

  “How many people have you photographed?” Josh asked.

  “In New York, more than a dozen. But in Madison, just a few. But Caroline was the only one who was consistent about coming to our scheduled sittings. I think she saw it as part of her recovery process, telling her story.” She looked down at her hands. “Her kids were taken away, you know. They live with her ex now. She knew she needed to get clean if she was going to have a chance of getting them back.”

  Josh grabbed his briefcase from the back seat and scribbled some notes on a yellow legal pad. When he stopped, he looked up and gave Annie a puzzled look. “So explain to me how pot came into the equation.”

  Annie hesitated, unsure of how much she should tell Josh. Sure, he was acting as her lawyer, which made what she told him confidential. But he was also married to Nell, and Annie wasn’t sure how realistic it was to expect that he wouldn’t tell her whatever they talked about. And Annie wasn’t sure how Nell would feel about what she’d been devoting her time to since arriving at the Colony. On a personal level, Annie got the impression that Nell was pretty open-minded. But it was also Nell’s job to direct the Colony and, given how new it was, to establish its reputation in the public sphere. A police search and criminal charges were probably not the sort of thing Nell had in mind for getting things off to a good start.

  As if he’d read her thoughts, Josh said, “I’m ethically prohibited from sharing with anyone else what you tell me. Even my wife. But if you don’t feel comfortable with me helping you, you’re entitled to find a different lawyer. No hard feelings whatsoever.”

  “It’s okay. There’s nothing I’m going to say now that Nell and the others wouldn’t have found out eventually. I was just hoping to keep my project under wraps until after the residency was over, so that I didn’t have to pull the Colony into any sort of controversy.”

  She had never been worried about controversy before, but that had been when she hadn’t been close enough to anyone who might get hurt by her actions. Her mother, when she was still alive, had long since accepted what she called her daughter’s “nonconformist” tendencies, and didn’t ask too many questions about how she went about exercising them. Annie had had lovers throughout the years, both men and women, but she always chose them from a circle of like-minded individuals. When tensions arose, Annie just moved on. Now, she worried—albeit too late—about how the risk she’d taken would affect Odin and Paige, who were so much younger and had more to lose. She also worried about how it might affect Nell’s ability to attract other artists to the Colony in the future. And she realized she was having these thoughts too late.

  Annie shifted in her seat. “It’s a long story,” she said. “The pot was a way to keep people coming. Because I realized that if I was going to get addicts to show up and sit with me and let me take their pictures, I had to give something to them, too. I offered some of my first subjects pot as one of many things I thought might make them feel comfortable—a cigarette, a coffee, a snack. But then I heard back from people that they thought it really helped with some of the lingering detox symptoms, like nausea and anxiety and insomnia. So I started making sure I had it available, and people told their friends about it, so word got around and I got more subjects that way. At least, that’s how it worked in New York. Here, it’s been harder because I don’t know that many people.”

  “Did you pay money to any of your subjects for sitting?” Josh asked.

  Annie shook her head.

  “So, it was pot for pictures.”

  Annie bristled. “I’ve never looked at it that way. Not everyone who sat for me smoked. But many did.”

  “Look,” Josh said in a softer tone of voice. “I’m on your side. But I’m just trying to ask you the same sort of questions you’re going to get when we go into the interview room. Along those lines, did it ever occur to you that it might be dangerous to provide any sort of drug to an addict, even if it’s not the drug they’re addicted to?”

  “There’s quite a bit of evidence out there that marijuana helps with the opioid withdrawal process. You can Google it,” Annie said. “I’m not a doctor, though. I’m just an artist, so my job is to see things. And make other people see things. I promise you I had nothing to do with whatever it was that Caroline took.”

  “What about where she got it from? Do you have any idea?”

  Annie shook her head. She thought about the conversations she’d had with Caroline over the handful of sittings they’d done. “Caroline mostly talked about her life before addiction, and how badly she wanted to get it back.”

  “She never as
ked you about obtaining anything else? Anything stronger than pot?”

  “Never.”

  Josh nodded and looked down again at the ad on his phone screen. “What’s the ‘gallery exhibition’ you mention here?”

  “It’s with one of the galleries that used to show my work in New York,” Annie said. “They’ve been waiting for something new from me for years. I submitted a few projects, only to keep getting rejected. The feedback was always the same. The curator wanted something more current. More ‘now,’ he said.”

  “Well, opioid addiction is definitely a ‘now’ topic,” Josh said. “Unfortunately.”

  Annie nodded. “Yeah, but I didn’t start off photographing addicts. I started by photographing sick people. Dying people.”

  She told Josh about how she stopped making art for almost a year to care for her mother after she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She had never been so close to another person’s physical pain before. After her mother passed away, Annie got back to work. She started taking pictures—something she hadn’t done much of since art school. She made it her passion to document the raw humanity that accompanied terminal illness and chronic pain. She also wanted to help ease suffering in a way that hadn’t been available for her mother.

  “New York had just launched its medicinal marijuana program,” Annie said. “But it was still in the early stages. Finding a doctor to prescribe the drug was hard enough, and then you had to navigate all these rules just to fill the prescription. You could only fill it at a state-approved dispensary, and there weren’t many around. The people I photographed complained about it all the time. They didn’t have time to fill out a bunch of forms and travel all over the city and wait in lines while the state program got its shit together. They were dying.”

  “I think I know where this is going,” Josh said, scribbling furiously on his notepad to keep up with her story. “But go on.”

  Annie explained how, in exchange for her subjects’ consent to be photographed, she provided free pot for those who wanted it, organically grown by a farmer friend of hers upstate. Her one condition was that people had to smoke it there, at her apartment. She didn’t want word getting out that she was dealing drugs, because that wasn’t the way she saw it.

  When Annie showed a few of the early pictures in her death series, Elysium, to the gallery’s curator, he loved them. He put together a small, invitation-only showing of the photos for his longtime customers. Not to sell them—neither he nor Annie felt right about selling the photographs—but to raise awareness of topics that were often taboo: death and pain. At the same time, they’d be getting people into the door of the gallery, thereby raising its profile and bringing Annie’s name back into relevancy in the art world.

  “I thought it went well, though some of the reviewers disagreed,” Annie said. “The curator told me that if I could deliver another series along those lines, but with a new theme, we’d do a big, public retrospective of my work. We’d show the photos, which wouldn’t be for sale, but we’d also show some of my earlier works, including some pieces that the gallery had previously rejected because the curator didn’t think they could ‘stand on their own.’ The gallery and I would take a portion of the proceeds from the sales, and then donate the rest to a national nonprofit for addiction and recovery research.

  “My project was going well, and I’d built up trust with some subjects who were willing to sit for me and have their photos included in the show. But then I got kicked out of my apartment and the project came to a standstill. Until I moved here.”

  “Why did you choose addiction to focus on?” Josh asked. “Or, I guess, why didn’t you just stick with photographing dying people?”

  “Addiction seemed like a natural spin-off from my series on death and pain management,” Annie said. “And on a personal level, I’ve known more than a few people in the art community who’ve been lost to heroin overdoses.” She paused and took a deep breath. “If I’m being completely honest, though, it’s because addiction was what the gallery wanted. Robbie—he’s the owner—thought addiction was a more controversial topic and, therefore, more like the sort of thing people were used to seeing from me. Death was, as he put it, too ‘boring.’”

  Josh exhaled and set down his pen. “I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that what you’ve been doing is not exactly all aboveboard. I can see that your initial intentions were good, but there are a lot of details here that the DA might not view quite as sympathetically.”

  “What do you think we’re looking at, for charges?” Annie asked. She’d been arrested and charged before. She’d been in court and in jail before, too. Those things didn’t scare her. But the thought of being kicked out of the residency program—and losing whatever chance she had left of making a comeback in the art world—did.

  “The drug charges are what I’m most concerned about,” he said. “There’s a Good Samaritan law that prevents you from being prosecuted for drug possession, since you’re the one who called 911 to get help. And, like I mentioned before, the DA doesn’t prosecute simple possession cases anyway. But the law doesn’t protect someone who gives or sells drugs to another person. So that’s likely what you’ll be charged with—possession with intent to deliver THC. It’s a felony.”

  The tears Annie had been holding back started to seep out of the corners of her eyes as she thought about Caroline and her children, now motherless.

  Annie had known she was treading in gray territory. She’d known that what she was doing could be seen as endangering, enabling, and worse. But taking pictures of people was deeply personal, and required trust. In order to gain that trust, Annie had had to risk something. She’d had to venture closer than ever before to the line where her comfort zone ended.

  “I’ll admit to everything I’ve done,” Annie said. “But you have to believe that I had nothing to do with whatever killed Caroline.”

  “Okay. I believe you.” Josh rubbed his temples and said, “The question is, will anyone else?”

  Chapter Twenty

  Nell

  PIECE: Catalog for first Art Basel Miami international art show, canceled due to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

  At first, on the day after Annie’s arrest, everyone sat around in the living room with the fireplace lit, as if holding vigil. Paige sat in a leather wingback chair, scrolling the screen of her phone and biting on her lip. Odin leafed through art books, pulling one after another from the shelf. Nell made every effort not to check her own phone, instead pacing the floor from the kitchen and back, bringing plates of crackers no one ate and cups of coffee that grew cold.

  Eventually, Paige excused herself. “I’m gonna go upstairs and try to work. You’ll let me know if you hear anything?”

  Nell promised she would, and Paige went up, leaving Nell and Odin alone. A charged silence grew between them. The last time they’d been alone, they’d almost kissed. Nell had wanted to, so badly. Even now, with everything that was going on, she felt a strong, pure pull of attraction to him, even though he was across the room. It was such a different sensation than what she felt with Josh.

  With Josh, everything was . . . complicated. Even before their recent fight about the credit card debt, Nell had felt like she and Josh were on completely different pages, in the lengths they were willing to go to have a child, and in the way they mourned the one they lost. Josh mistrusted her now, and rightly so.

  The mistrust went both ways, though. Since Josh seemed to have moved on from their loss more easily than Nell, she had stopped revealing her deepest emotions to him. She didn’t trust Josh to understand without judging her, without thinking she was somehow broken. As a result, it had been a long time since Nell felt like anyone had really listened to her. But Odin had. And Nell had been so starved for connection that for a few moments late last night, she’d contemplated cheating on her husband. She wasn’t sure what that said about her marriage, or about her. She’d have to answer those questions at some point, but at the moment, she
had much bigger worries to deal with.

  Now, Odin got up from the couch and cleared his throat. “I think I’m gonna get back to work, too,” he said. “I need to get my mind off things.”

  By “things,” Nell guessed he meant Caroline and Annie. But she wondered if he was thinking, too, about what had transpired, or not transpired, in the office last night.

  Nell envied the fact that Odin and Paige had their work to distract them. Sitting alone in the big living room, Nell stared at the hole in the wall above the fireplace. It occurred to her that, based on his last phone call to her, Grady and his subcontractors should have been out to the house by now to finish the wiring. She was beginning to wonder if the hole would ever be patched up. It seemed symbolic of the rift that the events of the previous night had torn through the balance of work and life at the Colony. She couldn’t stand to look at it.

  She went out to her car and got her running clothes. She usually waited until after work to run, but she needed to clear her head. She changed and set out along the sidewalks, winding her way down Gorham, past James Madison Park and toward the university campus. She wondered what was taking Josh and Annie so long at the station, and decided it couldn’t be a good sign.

  She ran until she could strip away, at least for a couple of miles, the shock of the last day, the marital stress of the last few weeks, and the grief that had clung to her heart for months. She knew it would return, all of it. But for a little while at least, she focused on the soft thump of her shoes on the sidewalk and the quick, simple cadence of her breath.