Trouble

by Jesse Kellerman

  The shot continued, static as before.

  Jonah said, “I don’t—”

  “Watch.”

  At nine oh one there was a muffled crash. Because of the camera angle, Jonah couldn’t tell exactly where it had come from. The fire escape? They had put the furniture back before abandoning ship.

  Eve walked into the frame.

  Jonah said, “Fuck.”

  She strolled around the living room, not touching anything. For several minutes she stared out the window near the sofa.

  “I don’t know what she could be looking at that’s so interesting,” Lance said.

  “I do,” Jonah said. The Museum of Human Frailties.

  At nine ten she left the shot.

  “I don’t get it,” Jonah said. “The window—”

  “Wasn’t broken, right? Watch.” Lance picked up the remote control and set the fast-forward to jump one minute at a time. Eve’s onscreen figure zipped and dashed, disappearing from the room at eleven forty-eight P.M.

  “She went out the way she came.”

  “No,” said Lance. “She went that way. She’s sleeping in your room, dude.”

  The clock races forward, seven A.M. Eight A.M. A quarter after eight.

  Eve reemerges, talking on her cell phone. She says something that sounds like—

  “Is she giving out our address?”

  Fast-forward again to nine fifty-eight A.M. A knock. Eve—who has been lying on the floor for two hours—gets up to admit a man in a jumpsuit. He and Eve move off-screen, toward the fire escape. At ten twenty-nine A.M. he leaves the apartment.

  Jonah said, “Who the hell was that.”

  “You’ll see in a second.”

  At eleven twenty-two A.M. she lies down to take a nap. At two forty-seven P.M. she gets up.

  The man in the jumpsuit is back—with a friend. They carry something poster-sized, wrapped in paper. They take it off-screen: the sound of a drill. Forty-five minutes later, they leave. Eve crosses the room, carrying a broom. At four oh six P.M., she lets herself out via the front door, and once again the shot is static.

  “One take-home lesson,” Lance said, “need be, you can get a window replaced same day.”

  Jonah said, “I thought there wasn’t supposed to be a camera in the living room.”

  “Uh.” Lance smiled sheepishly. “Immunity?”

  “WHERE IS IT.”

  “Dude, I di—”

  “Where.”

  From atop the kitchen cabinets poked a barely visible camera eye. Jonah got it down: a square body with a flexible appendage, at the end of which was a lens.

  He said, “Gimme the fucking phone.” He dialed Officer Villanueva. “Stay right there,” he said to Lance, who was slinking from the room.

  Villanueva listened to the new information and promised to call the next day so she could have a look at the footage.

  “I’m sorry, dude.”

  “You’re not coming back here,” Jonah said. “Not until I say. Get it?”

  Lance nodded.

  “You have everything you need?” Jonah asked.

  Lance nodded again.

  “Good,” said Jonah. Then he belted Lance in the solar plexus, dropping him gasping to the floor.

  “Duuude.”

  “We gotta go,” Jonah said, poking him with his toe. “It’s not safe here.”

  • 30 •

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2004.

  CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PSYCHIATRY, WEEK TWO.

  AS THEY WAITED for Yvette’s knock to be answered, Jonah felt mild déjà vu: the hallway, cold as before; the blasting talk show. Adia appeared in the same slinky jeans, over which she had added a ratty bathrobe. She shivered and sweated and clutched baby Marquise to her body, not noticing Soleimani or Jonah as she zeroed in angrily on Yvette.

  “I called the man you told me to, he didn’t do nothing.” She began berating Yvette while Soleimani and Jonah slipped past.

  DeShonna was seated crosslegged on the floor, her hair pulled into tight, even pigtails. She acknowledged their entrance by facing the wall.

  “Did you miss us?” Jonah said.

  She shook her head.

  “Yeah,” he said. “If I were you I wouldn’t miss me either.”

  Getting her to look at them—let alone respond—took a while. Soleimani managed to extract the fact that DeShonna’s aunt hadn’t been home in a week, and Adia had declared herself in charge.

  “Where did she go?” Soleimani asked.

  “She left.”

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  DeShonna looked at him as though the question was woefully stupid.

  In the other room, Adia raised her voice several notches. Fuck that. Fuck that.

  “If you want to tell us anything,” said Soleimani, “we are here to listen.”

  DeShonna looked at Jonah. “I don’t want to.”

  Soleimani said, “Why don’t I go see how Yvette’s doing out there.” He winked at Jonah and shut the door behind him, muting what had by now become an honest-to-goodness verbal brawl.

  “She’s loud,” said DeShonna.

  “How do you feel about her?” Jonah asked.

  “I hate her.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I wish she died.”

  “Sounds like you know a lot of people like that.”

  DeShonna nodded.

  “Does she smoke around you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is there someplace you can go when she’s like that?” he asked. “A friend’s?”

  DeShonna shrugged.

  “I’m here because I care about you. We all do. We all came back just to see you. That’s three people who think about you a lot. It might not feel that way sometimes, but I promise you, I’ve been thinking about you all week.”

  “Yeah right.”

  “You think I’d ride in that smelly elevator for fun?”

  She smiled weakly. Giving him an A for effort.

  “I’d rather stick my head up a monkey’s butt.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Maybe you should go do it right now.”

  “I will. And I’ll stick your head up a monkey’s butt, too.”

  “No.”

  “It might help you feel better. It’s nice and warm inside a monkey’s butt.”

  “Ew, no.” She giggled. “Fuck off.”

  “You have some vocabulary,” he said. “I bet I could learn a lot from you.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You could.”

  Evidently, Yvette had pushed a button, because after Jonah said good-bye for now to DeShonna, he found both the doctor and the social worker under siege, Adia alternately shrieking at the top of her lungs about Social Services and coughing phlegm into a paper towel. Yvette vainly explained that she didn’t work for DSS; she worked for the hospital. Adia called her a dumb trick and Soleimani a terrorist and waved the baby around like he was a magic wand. She trailed them into the hall, still yelling.

  Yall walk out, you go on.

  She got in the elevator with them, followed them out of the building and across the courtyard, lobbing epithets as they walked away. Jonah worried about her standing out in the cold with the baby, a concern neither Yvette nor Soleimani seemed to share as they beat a hasty retreat.

  IT WAS EIGHT O’clock before he trudged up to the dorm. The security guard was drunk as usual, his breath spicy as he asked Jonah what he wanted for Christmas.

  “Ah…haven’t…made up my mind.” He was having trouble finding his ID.

  “Forget it, forget it,” said the guard, waving him through.

  “Thanks,” Jonah said and started to step inside.

  “Hey,” said the guard, snagging Jonah’s sleeve. “You dint answer my question.”

  Jonah glanced up the block. Nobody: the sidewalk clear to the corner save for a heap of trash bags and a dilapidated nightstand blocking the building’s service entrance. “I really have to get upstairs.”r />
  The guard frowned. “Am I gonna have to twist your nuts.”

  Evidently, it was his day to be molested by substance abusers. “I’d like a periscope,” Jonah said.

  “A wha?”

  “Look it up,” he said.

  Inside Vik’s apartment he returned a voicemail from Officer Degrassi.

  “We spoke with Ms. Cove this afternoon. She said she doesn’t know what we’re talking about. We instructed her to leave you alone.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I’m afraid there’s not much else we can do at the present moment.”

  “But the video—”

  “Officer Villanueva and I, we don’t feel it would be expedient to pursue that element of the situation any further. Ms. Cove denied being in your apartment—”

  “You can see it on the tape.”

  “I get where you’re coming from,” said Degrassi. “But let’s think here. Now I haven’t seen the tape, but let’s assume it shows what you’re saying it shows. She broke your window and then had it fixed. She didn’t rip you off, and she didn’t harm you.”

  “Not yet.”

  “And at the present moment we don’t have anything to suggest she would.”

  “She came into my house when I wasn’t there,” Jonah said.

  “Exactly,” said Degrassi. “So she couldn’t’ve done anything to you anyhow. And—hang on a sec—she says you were there.”

  “I was there?”

  “She said you were waiting for her in the bedroom.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  “Look,” Jonah said. “Either I was or I wasn’t, and this isn’t a court of—yes, as a matter of fact, I can. I’m staying with a friend, he’ll—”

  “I understand your frustration. But we’re not going to pursue it. Okay? I’m tryin to be helpful here. She doesn’t have a criminal record, she’s employed, and she sounded in control of herself when we talked to her.”

  “When she talks to you,” Jonah said, “fine, but that’s what you’re missing here, how she acts when she’s around me is—”

  “I’m not going to arrest her,” said Degrassi, “because if I do, they’re gonna let her go. See what I’m saying? She’s in and out of there next day. She’s a pain in the ass, grant you that. But that’s not a reason to bust her. Some people are by nature a pain in the ass, and there’s not much you can do about it. If she continues to bother you, give us a call. If she does anything to threaten you—”

  “She has.”

  “—physically, to threaten you physically…or verbally—and it’s credible, then you give me a call back.”

  Jonah said nothing.

  “Okay then?” said Degrassi. “Take care.”

  “Wait,” Jonah said. “You said she’s employed.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I ask where she works?”

  The officer sighed.

  “I won’t go start with her,” Jonah said. “I’m giving you my word.” He paused. “I’m curious. I never knew she had a job.”

  Degrassi chuckled. “Well, you’re gonna soil yourself when I tell you what it is.”

  The tony preparatory preschool where Carmen Cove taught kindergarten was on the Upper East Side, a quarter-mile from the HUM dorm. Degrassi said, “It’s one of those places they test the kids with blocks before lettin em in.”

  That night Jonah had a hard time studying, his focus cracked by the knowledge that, whether at work or home, Eve was at most two miles away. He had no plan of action, no legal recourse; he was at her mercy.

  To calm himself, he thought about DeShonna. Things could be worse.

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2004.

  “I fly down on a week from today,” George said. “They supply the transfer to the boat. My flight’s at six. I leave for the airport at four thirtyish. If you’re here by noon I’ll give you the rundown. That’s the—the eighteenth. You’re all set to—”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Good.” There was a click; Jonah wondered if George had hung up. “Jonah? Quick question. What are you doing that night?”

  “Which night?”

  “The night before, Friday. The seventeenth.”

  “I’m going to be in the City.”

  “Doing what?”

  running scared “Doing whatever I feel like doing.”

  “Okay. Cause I was wondering if you might come out here.”

  Jonah said, “You were wondering that.”

  “Do you think you might be able to?”

  “You haven’t asked me—”

  “No, I know,” George said. “But look over your schedule for me, would you? If you could make it, I’d appreciate it.”

  “You can’t get on the ship early.”

  “I thought it might help, to integrate you, so that if you have any last-minute questions I can be there to answer them.”

  “Whatever you want to tell me, tell me now.”

  “I’m saying if questions come up.”

  “Then I’ll ask you that morning,” Jonah said. “I don’t understand the need for me to come out early if—”

  “Then never mind. If you’re okay, I’m okay. If it’s possible for you to come out, I’m asking you to consider it. Cause you may think you know your way around the house, but things come up, there’s bound to be errands I need to do. You know? Or if I wanted to go out and grab myself a bite to eat.”

  “When.”

  “That night, Friday night. I wanted to get out of the house for a bite.”

  Having sailed the Caribbean with his family, Jonah knew full well that luxury liners carried half their weight in comestibles: enough for theme dinners, flambé surprises, the midnite choco-buffet. You didn’t need a last supper to survive the week.

  “You want to go to dinner with Louise.”

  “It’s our anniversary,” George said.

  It no longer amazed Jonah, this spiky mixture of sympathy and anger. This was the way the world worked. He said, “I’ll think about it.”

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2004.

  He woke late. Vik had already left for his post-call day; also gone were Mike and Cutler, who jogged in the mornings. Jonah perused the kitchen, scrounging a half-eaten box of instant rice, some soy sauce, and a stockpot. He set about preparing himself an austere version of the Traditional Japanese Breakfast. As he checked beneath the sink for a colander, a toilet flushed down the hall.

  “Hello?” he called.

  A woman’s voice answered. “Mike?”

  “It’s Jonah.”

  “Hey you.” Deanna, Vik’s girlfriend, appeared. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “I’m crashing for a little while.” He expected to have to give a reason, but she didn’t seem to care. She retied her kimono and pecked him on the cheek and said, “Good to see you. What time’s it. My word, I just woke up. You want some coffee?”

  “I didn’t know you were here, either,” he said.

  Deanna pulled open a cabinet and made a face. “Gross. I had a red-eye from Hong Kong. I got in at seven. Vik doesn’t know I’m here, I came straight from Kennedy. Is there any coffee in this apartment.”

  “How was your flight?”

  “Lousy. But I got eight thousand miles out of it, which puts me over the top. I can fly my nuclear family plus our dog to the moon and back. And Cathay Pacific business class gives you goodies.”

  Deanna Girardeau had benefitted from the mid-90s revival of 1950s style: the belted dresses she chose complimented her pinched body, and drastic cosmetics gave her heart-shaped face a black-and-white glow, classily defiant of the modern world’s three hundred million colors. Her hair was swept back with chopsticks; her pedicure a vampy violet. “I think we’re Starbucks-bound. Want to come?”

  “Sounds good.”

  Makeup ate up a half-hour, as she styled her bangs, widened her eyes with mascara and grease pencil, thickened her lips cherry red.

  “Very Gwen Stefani,”
he said.

  “I was thinking more Jayne Mansfield,” she said, “but so be it.”

  They took umbrellas. The guard—still hammered—burped and saluted as they exited the building. Halfway down the block a long wolf-whistle made Deanna smile.

  Over coffee she talked about work. She hated her job but was a good solider. “I chose it,” she said. “I am a free agent.”

  As they left, the wind inverted her umbrella, snapping two of its ribs. Jonah sheltered her as she waited for a downtown cab to do her holiday shopping. They stood hip to hip, her hand clutching the back of his jacket: after all her effort, she was desperate not to screw up her hair.

  A taxi slowed and Jonah opened the door for her. “Here,” he said, handing her his umbrella.

  “You sure?”

  “Lady,” hollered the cabbie. “You getting my seat wet.”

  She said to Jonah, “You’re a doll,” and smooched him on the cheek, leaving a lurid smudge. He turned up his collar and hurried back to the dorm. He hadn’t been outside in twenty-four hours, and now he was soaked. Upstairs he hung his wet clothes in the bathtub.

  • 31 •

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2004.

  CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PSYCHIATRY, WEEK THREE.

  HE EXPECTED HIS last week on the job to bring mixed feelings: regret that he could not follow the cases of kids he’d grown attached to; relief that the semester was over; a measure of pride at being able to look back and see how much he’d learned.

  He did not expect to be whisked off the floor at eleven in the morning by a man he’d never met in person. He did not expect to be brought to Dr. Soleimani’s office and invited to sit down. He did not expect to be fidgeting like he had a tarantula locked in his rectal vault. He did not expect to have to defend himself.

  “You have to understand,” said the psychiatrist, “the legal issues involved.”

  The man sitting on his left nodded.

  Soleimani said, “I am responsible for you, Jonah, so I have to ask you straight out if there is any truth whatsoever to—”

  “No.”

  “All right…” Soleimani mopped his brow with his handkerchief. “I am asking a question, that is all.”