by Sara Gran
We had a deal.
We would find Chloe.
“The last time you saw her, that Thursday night,” Tracy said. “Let’s go over that again.”
Reena bit her lip. “Well,” she began, “me and Alex were watching TV. And—”
“What were you watching?” Kelly asked.
Reena looked at Alex.
“Simon and Simon,” Alex said.
“So we were watching TV and smoking a J and I think I was eating cereal—”
“Lucky Charms.” Alex broke in. He was getting the hang of this.
“And Chloe walks in and we said hi, hello, normal stuff. She looked a little, well, like maybe she’d been drinking a little. Her eyes were kind of red and . . . what’s the word? Bleary. She was bleary-eyed.”
Bleary-eyed, I wrote in my book. Lucky Charms.
“So she got a bowl of cereal and watched TV with us for a few minutes. And then she stands up and says . . . What did she say?”
Reena looked at Alex.
“‘Enough of this shit,’” Alex quoted. “She said, ‘Enough of this shit. I can’t take any more.’ And then she went to bed. Or so we thought.”
“I thought she was talking about the TV show,” Reena said. “Now . . .” She closed her eyes and frowned. “I don’t know. Now I just want to find her. I just really, really want to find her.”
A quivering, shaking look, like crying, passed over her face. She swallowed it away.
“Did she take her keys?” Tracy asked.
Keys, I wrote in my book. It was a good question.
“Uh, I, yeah,” Reena said. “She did. I noticed that when I was looking through her stuff. Her keys weren’t there.”
Next to keys I wrote, Took them. Tracy looked in the notebook. She took the pen out of my hand and wrote, Left, not taken. It wasn’t until later that I realized she meant Chloe.
I looked through my notes and went back to Lucky Charms and wrote down what I remembered from the commercial: Pink clovers. Green horseshoes. Yellow diamonds. Blue stars. Orange Moons. Purple hearts.
We made plans to come over later—Reena had a staff meeting at the clothing store. Alex went wherever he went. Kelly and Tracy and I stayed in the bar and got another round of dollar glasses of beer.
Kelly and I looked at Tracy. Tracy knew Chloe best.
“Do you think she would . . .” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Tracy said. “I mean.”
She frowned.
“We’ll assume she didn’t,” Tracy said firmly. “We’ll assume she’s alive, and out there somewhere, until proven otherwise. Okay?”
Kelly and I nodded; we agreed.
Kelly stood up.
“I gotta go,” she said. “Jonah’s got a show tonight.”
Jonah. Tracy and I must have rolled our eyes because Kelly said, “You bitches just wish you had boyfriends.”
Tracy and I each made a face. Maybe we did wish we had boyfriends. Or maybe we just didn’t want anyone else to have them. Jonah didn’t seem like such a prize to me. He was in a band that played at parties and all-ages punk shows. Kid stuff. He almost never talked to me and I’d stopped trying to get along with him. He didn’t seem to be especially nice to Kelly, either. He was a boyfriend; he was an accessory like a new bag or a new pair of shoes but the best one of all, the one who kept you company when you were bored, the one who made you more interesting to other girls, more desirable to other boys. But I wouldn’t want to actually be alone with him. Sex was more interesting in theory than practice to me and Tracy.
Kelly left. Tracy and I didn’t say anything. Jonah had been occupying more and more of Kelly’s time since they’d been going out, nearly six months now. But this was the first time she’d walked out on a case.
Ever.
“Well,” Tracy said, answering the unasked question. “I guess we’ll begin with their apartment.”
I agreed. I didn’t know Chloe well. Her fondness for Tracy only extended halfway to me and Kelly. She was nice to me, but we’d never spent time alone. I was a little in awe of her. She had short hair that she dyed black and wore long in front of her eyes. She knew all the after-hours spots and every doorman at every club. She knew the bartenders at all the bars and probably hadn’t paid for a drink in years. Everything about her seemed effortless and natural. She was the first girl I knew to get a tattoo, a little bluebird on her back. She’d been an extra in a bunch of Ace’s movies. She wasn’t the prettiest girl—she had an overbite and a wide mouth and she was too skinny, with a nearly flat chest and bones sticking out through her vintage clothes—but boys always liked her. She had a quick smile and a fast tongue, and I’d seen her slap a girl in a club who’d pushed her away and refused to apologize.
I looked at Tracy and I figured she was thinking the same thing I was. That if Chloe could slip away, if Chloe could disappear . . .
Chloe, who seemed so solid, so real.
The Case of the End of the World had begun.
13
TRACY AND I MET REENA back at her and Chloe’s apartment. It was a one-bedroom with a big living room, which Alex the carpenter/boyfriend had split into a living room and a separate, illegal bedroom. In the living room was a futon and a coffee table and a TV on a stand and a bookshelf overflowing with books: Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, The Stranger.
“Those are all Chloe’s,” Reena said. “Mine are in my room.”
“Does she read them?” Tracy asked. She crouched down to see the titles.
“Sometimes,” Reena said. “To be honest, she seems to like start one, get halfway through, and then give up.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. She likes real books but has, like, no attention span. Sometimes she’s holding a book but then when I look at her she’s just staring at the wall. I read, like, V. C. Andrews and Judith Krantz. Sometimes I read romances.”
There was nothing remarkable about the apartment: wood floors, white walls, views to fire escapes and air vents. Everything in it was from thrift shops or street corners. Reena opened the door to Chloe’s room, the real bedroom.
“There you go,” Reena said nervously, as if Chloe might come in at any second and catch us going through her stuff. “Knock yourselves out.”
We shut the door behind us.
It was less than a hundred square feet. A bed, a closet, a desk, an armchair. Messy but not unusually so. On one wall was a Joe Strummer poster, Strummer’s face positioned to watch over Chloe as she slept. On another wall was a Vanishing Center poster. The singer, CC, was bleeding from where he’d cut an X into the skin of his chest with a razorblade. On another wall was a group of five or six postcards.
We stood near the door and looked around the room, both thinking the same thing: What if I were Chloe?
Tracy pointed toward a desk near the door. On the desk was a little bowl of change, a small pile of mail. That’s where she would stop first. Tracy went over and flipped through the mail. I watched over her shoulder. Bank statement, credit card offer, junk mail. You could feel that this was where her keys would go.
Tracy took the letters and put them in her bag, a cheap version of a Dutch schoolbag. Then she went and flopped on the bed. She looked at Joe Strummer.
I looked at the postcards on the far wall. Sid Vicious, scowling at the camera. Iggy Pop, blood dripping from his chest.
“Sid Vicious,” I said. “Iggy Pop. CC.”
Tracy looked at me. I held up my right hand and used it to cut my left wrist.
“They all cut themselves,” she said.
Tracy sat up and looked around. She slipped her hand in the narrow space between the bed and the wall. I came over to help her look. We pulled and pushed the futon to look in its cracks and crevices.
“Got it,” Tracy said after a minute.
“Got it?” I said. I was holding the mattress up and couldn’t see what she was looking at.
“Got it.” She took whatever she was holding and I let the corner of the mattress go.
/> We looked at what Tracy found. Just what we expected: a razorblade wrapped in a dirty paper towel.
Cutter, I wrote in my notebook. Girls like that weren’t rare—when the pressure mounted, they took little nips at themselves to let it out. Neither me or Tracy did it, but we understood it well enough.
Still, though. Chloe? A cutter?
“The truth holds no prisoners,” Silette wrote. “It takes no hostages. And if you don’t want to meet with the same terrible fate, better not to approach at all. Stay on the other side of town, outside of the woods, and do not enter, not at any cost.”
I looked at the floor and shivered. A feeling came over me, a black feeling like I’d fallen into a pool of dirty water. Like I’d stepped into the woods and didn’t know my way back.
Tracy lay back on the bed and looked at Joe Strummer. I lay next to her. The sun came in at its sideways December angle.
“It’s like he was watching her,” Tracy said.
“But was he helping?” I asked. “Or was he, I don’t know, judging? Like, looking down on her?”
“Good question,” Tracy said.
We looked at Joe.
“Helping,” Tracy said, gazing at the poster, falling under Strummer’s spell. “I think he would definitely help.”
On our way out we saw a photo-booth picture of Chloe and Reena that Chloe had stuck in her mirror. There were four pictures on the strip: two of both of them, one of Reena alone, and one of Chloe.
Tracy took the strip and ripped the picture of Chloe off and stuck the rest back in the mirror.
“Let’s go,” she said.
That night I had a dream about Chloe. We were near the edge of a woods, on the border of a dark clearing lit by thin moonlight. I’d never seen a woods before, not bigger than Central or Prospect Parks’, but in my mind it was clear and vivid. Enormous trees rose up hundreds of feet into the air, thick dark red bark wrapped around them. Green piney needles covered the forest floor, and new shoots clustered around the base of the trees. In the clearing, little yellow flowers shot up around giant clovers.
Chloe and I sat next to each other on big mossy rocks at the edge of the clearing. We were dressed as we would be for a typical day in the city: boots, vintage dresses, leather jackets. We were talking softly, trading secrets and whispers.
Then, suddenly, Chloe was naked. Her ribs and hips stuck out painfully through her skin. Her face was turned to the ground. When she looked up, her face started to turn black—or rather, little holes of blackness appeared where her face fell apart. One bit at a time her face collapsed into itself, leaving a black emptiness in its place.
I woke up talking, twisting and turning in bed, not sure if I was trying to get closer to Chloe or run away.
14
San Francisco
NINETEEN DAYS AFTER Paul died, I got a phone call from an EMT in New Orleans. When you answer the phone at three in the morning and someone says “Is this Miss Clara DeMitt?” you know it isn’t good news.
“Yes,” I said. “This is, I mean, I am. Claire. Clara. Clara DeMitt.”
“I have some bad news, Miss DeMitt. Bad news, but he’s going to be okay.”
Andray, I thought. Andray’s been shot.
Instead the EMT guy said: “Clara, Mick Pendell has had an incident.”
“Incident?” I said. “Did someone shoot him?”
“Overdose,” the EMT said. “We think it was intentional. He’s in Touro.”
I felt a strange lump in my throat when I realized that sometime, no matter how long ago, Mick—or anyone—had put me down as his emergency contact.
I hadn’t seen Mick since the Case of the Green Parrot in New Orleans. Mick had worked for Constance, like I did. Before he met her Mick was on his way to a life of domestic terrorism, prison, and bad tattoos. He started riots in the Pacific Northwest and chained himself to redwoods in California. He helped people escape from jail and firebombed politicians’ houses. But there’s a series of fine lines between fighting for a cause and just fighting. He stole from the rich and gave to the poor—first among them himself—until he tried to rob Constance. Constance was one of the rich—the Darlings had reserves to keep them flush for generations.
Constance helped Mick see that there are never any sides. Only things we understand and things we have chosen to pretend we don’t understand. Only those we admit we love and those we pretend we don’t recognize.
Mick was a detective. He knew it while Constance was around to tell him, and forgot after she died.
After I hung up with the EMT, I called the hospital. I was transferred around a few times until I reached a nurse on Mick’s floor.
“He’s stable,” she said. “They pumped out his stomach.”
“What’d he take?”
“No report yet but I’d guess a bunch of stuff. He on any meds?”
I nodded and then I remembered she couldn’t see me and I said, “Yeah.” I wasn’t certain but suspected that he was taking a big mess of prescriptions: antidepressants, antianxiety drugs, sleeping pills. He hadn’t weathered the storm well.
“Some of it hit him,” she said, “but he’ll be okay. Just, you know, got to deal with whatever made him do this.”
She sounded sympathetic, but tired. I asked if I could speak to him. She said he was sleeping.
“He got family?”
Mick had no one and he had nothing. He taught criminology and ran a drop-in center for homeless children. He used to just volunteer there. Then they lost their funding and the director moved on and Mick couldn’t stand to let it go so he didn’t. His biggest donor was Anonymous and if he’d known who Anonymous was he might not have taken her money.
Mick—my Mick, Constance’s Mick—was not going to die or come close to dying alone. I booked a flight for New Orleans the next evening. Something fluttered in my chest, some feeling of life, of direction, of being needed and busy and a part of the human race.
A few hours later, before I started packing, Andray called. It was the only time he’d called me since New Orleans. It might have been the only time he’d called me ever.
“Mick was in the hospital,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I heard.”
“Oh,” he said. “You knew.”
He sounded disappointed.
“Thanks,” I said. “You seen him?”
“While he was still there,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I said. “He’s out already?”
“Yeah. Let him out this morning.”
“Where is he?” I asked. “Is he okay?”
“Home,” Andray said.
We didn’t say anything for a minute. I didn’t know how Andray was going to stay alive another year. He had been shot once since I’d been gone, his fourth bullet diving neatly into the top of his right shoulder and through the other side. No one in New Orleans had called me when it happened. I’d found out from the lama.
I knew I wouldn’t have made it without Constance. Andray had me and Mick. Put us together and we weren’t a quarter of her. As evidenced by the fact that both Mick and Andray were very close to dead.
“You been okay?” I asked Andray.
He made a noncommittal sound: Uh-huh or I-’ont-know.
“You see Terrell?” I asked.
“Yeah. Few times,” he said.
“He doing okay?”
“Not really.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But. You know. The only way out is through. That’s what they say.”
Andray didn’t say anything.
I thought about Andray and Terrell all the time. I didn’t know if I’d made their lives better or worse when I came to New Orleans on the Case of the Green Parrot. At least I knew that before me, they’d had each other. Now Terrell was locked up and Andray was floating through life alone.
I wanted to say I will do anything I can to get you out of this. I wanted to say I will pull you out of this black tar pit of death and sorrow and drag you to the shore. The way some
one had dragged me out of that black pit.
When you love something so much, the thought of doing it but not doing it well hurts almost more than never trying. Almost. You wouldn’t know until you tried it that failing is actually better.
“Well,” Andray said. “Just lettin’ you know.”
He hung up. I rummaged around my coffee table, through unpaid bills and unread magazines and cups of undrunk tea until I found what I was looking for: a little bag of cocaine Tabitha had left here a few nights ago. I opened one of the magazines, the New Journal of Criminology, ripped out a stiff subscription card, and used it to scoop out a bump of cocaine and snort it.
I called Mick. He answered, groggy.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” I said.
“Me? Ellie?”
He was still high off whatever he’d used to try to end his life. Ellie was his ex-wife, the wife who’d left after the storm.
“Claire,” I said. “Claire DeWitt.”
“Oh, hey, Claire,” he said, disappointment audible. “I’m sick.”
“I know,” I said. “The hospital called. They told me.”
He didn’t say anything.
“What the fuck?” I said. Suddenly I felt insulted, as though he had tried to leave this mortal coil only because I was in it. “Seriously?”
He sighed and didn’t say anything.
“You want to come out here for a while?” I said. “I could—”
He sighed again and didn’t say anything. He sighed like I’d said the dumbest thing in the world, like I understood nothing and never would.
“I have a ticket booked for tomorrow,” I said. “I figured I’d come and see if—”
“This isn’t a good time for a visit,” he said. “Listen, Claire. I don’t feel. I. I mean.”
“Okay,” I said. “Can I call you later?”
“Sure,” he said. But I knew he wouldn’t talk to me later, either.
“You sure you’re okay?” I said. “I mean, I could come and—”
“Yeah,” Mick said, clearly not fine and clearly not wanting to talk to me. “I’m fine. I’m totally fine. We’ll talk soon, okay?”