In the hazy light of dawn, she attempted to distract herself by watching the other people milling about on a Saturday, which amounted to a couple of joggers, some small groups of two or three stumbling guys making their own messy walks home from the night before, and a single, dedicated hooker.
It had been close to six months since she had woken up on a strange couch, four months, minimum, since she was shaken back to consciousness in the backseat of a cab by a driver demanding his fare. Technically, she was only lying to Gavin about her whereabouts, not exactly cheating, though it felt to her like an equal betrayal. What’s worse is that she thought, obviously incorrectly, that she had made progress.
A year or so earlier, when Gavin started working a crushing graveyard shift at a twenty-four-hour news network, their conflicting schedules took a toll. They both found themselves with many unoccupied hours, post-work, which, needless to say, they didn’t always fill with sushi-making classes and gym time. While they never discussed it directly, Betsy sensed that Gavin hadn’t been the poster boy for fidelity, either.
“I don’t envy the single people,” Betsy would say, in a not-entirely-convincing tone, as they walked past endless bars filled with their twentysomething peers casting sullen looks at each other over a feedback-heavy soundtrack of angsty alt-rock. The music on rotation on their sound system at home, pulled from stacks of CDs they piled on the floor—Portishead, Elliott Smith, and Red House Painters when Betsy chose the playlist, and Guided by Voices, Superchunk, and Teenage Fanclub when Gavin was in charge—didn’t distract either of them from those feelings that having a happy, conflict-free relationship at twenty-five was incredibly uncool.
“Yeah, that looks pretty lame,” he would say. “But maybe we should go check it out, have a drink, like we’re performing a kind of social experiment?”
Her love for Gavin was resolute, but her curiosity also ran deep and, like many people who paired off young, Betsy had an itch to explore, or at least observe, her options from a semisafe distance. Her evenings on the town without him would start innocently enough, with cheap happy-hour outings with the few colleagues with whom she’d forged some awkward friendships. She would tell people she was shy, and in return they would offer a sympathetic nod, with patronizing pursed lips and sad eyes, that suggested they understood that she was out of her depth, struggling to keep up. It surprised her how no one could tell that she wasn’t actually an introvert, just an imposter using social anxiety as an excuse to stay away. She danced around making actual friends, but would pull back when she felt them get too close. Once in a while, she gave into Jessica’s badgering her to go out for drinks, and would join her and a few colleagues, including a fastidious young guy named Nathan from Chicago, who was a walking, talking decorative arts catalogue, and Shana, who looked like a Parisian waif, with a jet-black pixie cut, until she opened her mouth and let Port Washington, New York, fall out with her accent. Even though Jessica’s parents had the right zip code in Greenwich, they did not have the usual bankroll that accompanies it, so on the rare occasion when she had to pay for her own drinks her taste was more Pabst Blue Ribbon than Châteauneuf-du-Pape. They would venture well south of 57th Street to some of Betsy’s favorite dives, and she would play nice for an hour, a couple of rounds of drinks, and then inevitably she would wander out alone. That would lead to confessional conversations with strangers (mostly male), which sometimes led to a bump of coke in a graffiti-covered bathroom, and then, to her continued horror, more than a few nights when she didn’t make it home. She worried that the slept-at-a-friend’s-place excuse wouldn’t hold with Gavin much longer. And the guilt she felt for her behavior, that she would betray the one person whom she felt she could trust, was crushing. When Betsy tried to rationalize it, she’d say it was a reaction to her life, which was becoming more sterile and predictable than she’d expected. It wasn’t just about the culture that surrounded her, the grungy, smeared lipstick, don’t-give-a-shit atmosphere of New York in the mid-1990s. She still felt the stinging urge to live dangerously, to creep right along the knife’s edge between her real life, the one in which she appeared to be thriving, had a respectable job, and a happy, committed relationship, and the life of punishment she thought she deserved. Betsy wondered how long she could beat the odds and stay out of harm’s way when she was blackout drunk and alone in the city, or how long it would take before the world discovered she was a fraud.
No matter how hard she tried to shed her former life, to live in the present without the uncomfortable burdens of the past, she couldn’t. It would inch its way back in like morning fog, and then she’d try to burn it off, by getting wasted with strangers and dabbling in drugs. With the right combination of whiskey or tequila or bourbon and Percocet or Vicodin, or whatever her “guy,” the reedy, nameless punk with a backpack full of any chemical distractions said was an adequate stand-in, she could forget. And that night, she pushed it too far, and ended up on a futon covered with plaid flannel sheets.
When she got to 6th Avenue, she noticed a handful of stragglers leaving the Limelight at dawn. One woman in a filthy vintage slip and a molting stole was walking slowly along the side of the club, which was a converted church, dragging her fingers along its stone facade. Betsy noticed her slow, muddy movements and realized that she must be a heroin addict, about the same age she was. She thought, on paper, at least, how they were slightly different expressions of the same being: early twenties, white, female, damaged beyond repair by some unseeable evil. She paused on the sidewalk to watch her, wondering how alike their stories were.
“What are you looking at?” the woman slurred, shaking the scuffed metallic sandals in her hand at Betsy angrily.
“It’s fox, isn’t it?” said Betsy. “Your stole. I’ve seen plenty of fur in the last few years, and I’m guessing it’s fox.”
“What are you even talking about?” said the woman, struggling to bring her eyes up to meet Betsy’s, though her gaze stopped at her collarbone. “Bitch.”
The Courtney Love impersonators, the women who wore shredded vintage slips and over-the-knee stockings, smeared eyeliner, and tiaras, had either moved on to shrunken T-shirts, L’Oréal Rum Raisin lipstick, and schoolgirl skirts, or were too out of their minds to notice that the rest of the style-savvy world had left this moment behind. This one in the thrift store stole—in August—was one of the leftovers.
“So what happened to you?” Betsy asked, undeterred.
“Nothing happened to me. Nothing I didn’t want to happen to me. Now will you just fuck off?”
“Well, something happened to me. And we might be more alike than you think,” Betsy said. She thought if someone were making a bad movie about this moment, she would offer to buy the junkie coffee. And maybe they would sit in a charming diner and share their stories until she sobered up. The woman leaned against a building and examined her forearm, which she had scratched raw with her own fingernails.
“Me and you? We’ve got nothing in common.”
Then, Betsy thought, maybe she’d reach out and touch her arm and say something like, It’s not your fault. Betsy went on, despite the fact that she was being ignored, as the woman inched further away from her, and she raised her voice to project to this mess of a passing stranger.
“If this were a movie, now is the time I’m supposed to say ‘It’s not your fault,’” said Betsy. “But I have a question for you. What if it is? What if it is your fault? Or my fault? What then?”
BETSY WENT TO the diner anyway, just by herself. She took a seat at the far end of the counter at Joe Jr.’s and ordered hash browns, coffee, and a small orange juice and, newly fortified, made the trek the rest of the way home in the bright sunlight. She was grateful to be alone in their apartment. After a couple of years on the Bowery, they’d upgraded to a slightly larger one-bedroom in an elevator building on East 10th. The galley kitchen was an improvement, and the light streaming in the windows from the sixth floor was cheery enough, even midwinter. It was also close to McSor
ley’s, which made Gavin absurdly happy. The summers, however, were rough. There was a single window air-conditioning unit in the bedroom that was on its last legs and no match for late August.
Ever predictable, Gavin had left a message for her the night before, but he would be deep into the Atlantic on a boat off of Montauk by the time she got it, so she decided to sleep it off first and call him back later. When she woke at around 2:00 with a splitting headache, the apartment was an oven. The windows were open and the traffic noises indicated a busy Saturday five floors below. She shuffled into the bathroom in search of Tylenol, but only after she checked her bag and the pockets of her favorite jeans to make sure she was completely out of anything stronger. She threw on one of Gavin’s old T-shirts and some cutoffs she’d had since college, then she ventured out to the corner deli for a Diet Coke and a turkey sandwich. Afterward, for lack of anything better to do, she rearranged their sagging, homemade cinder block bookshelves, organizing the books alphabetically by title, and debated doing some laundry. She scanned the paper for movie showtimes and decided on The Brothers McMullen at the Angelika. But first, she thought, at about 4:45, she would page the kid.
Even after years as a loyal customer, she did not know his name, and he claimed not to know hers, though he must have scanned a pile of mail on his way out of their apartment at least once, or noticed their last names (Young/Davis) on the buzzer.
At 5:10, the buzzer rang.
“That was impressive,” said Betsy, when she greeted him at the door.
“You know.” He shrugged, swinging a heavy black backpack off of his shoulder. In a backward Yankees cap, a plain white oversized T-shirt, baggy khaki shorts that fell just below the knee, and a hormonal constellation of acne across his scruffy chin, this entrepreneur looked twenty, tops. “I was in the neighborhood.”
He wandered over to the small table with two ladder-back chairs pushed against the living room wall, where she and Gavin ate when they weren’t “dining” on the couch. He unzipped the bag and pulled out a well-used tackle box. Betsy propped herself on the arm of the sofa, trying to look nonchalant. At first, she’d page Ian only when Gavin was home. Now, it was something she did almost exclusively when he was out, and more frequently than she wanted to admit.
“I’m running low on the Vics, but I’ve got this killer new stuff called Oxy,” he said, unfastening the latch of the box and peeling open its hinged drawers and dividing it into sections with his thumbs like he was separating orange slices. “I think you would be into it. Wanna try? I’ve also got this crazy good bud from Hawaii. Smells like Christmas.”
“It better not be as strong as that other stuff,” said Betsy, who lost two or three unaccounted hours last time Ian had something new to share.
“Aw, come on, old lady. What are you, twenty-nine? Thirty, tops.”
Betsy clenched her teeth. She hated when people thought she looked older than she was. It was her eyes. The hollows aged her. She watched as he plucked a few large, white pills from one of the middle drawers and slid them into a small Ziploc.
“Ziploc!” announced Betsy. “Aiding and abetting criminal behavior since 1968.”
Ian turned to look at her
“That’s what you think I am? A criminal. What does that make you? My accomplice?” He shrugged. “Selling it, buying it, we’re in the same boat.”
They avoided eye contact as he pinched the murky pink weed into an expert joint.
Betsy moved to the sofa to find her water glass and took one of the pills with a single, swift gulp. Ian lit the joint, took a drag, and passed it to Betsy. It still scorched her throat every time. She would start to worry when it didn’t.
“I don’t think I’m better than you, if that’s what you’re implying. The way I see it, we are more in the same boat than you realize,” she said, as she stifled a cough. “I’m not as innocent as you think I am.”
“Oh, so seventy-nine has a past. You and your man, Mr. Decoy, on the run from the law?”
“Not exactly running, I don’t know. I guess we’re running from something, but we’re not wanted in ten states or anything.” She motioned with one hand to clear the smoke while she reached for the joint with her other. “I think that what I’m doing could best be described as avoiding, which is like a passive running.”
He nodded, silent. The kid wasn’t much of a talker, which made Betsy talk even more.
“I had some dark days. I lost my best friend. I let her die.”
Four months earlier, in March, Scottie McRae had been tried on five counts of first-degree murder in an Alachua County courthouse, and the details of the student murders in Gainesville once again flooded the news. Betsy thought about calling Caroline at least once a day in the weeks after the verdict was read and he received the death penalty, but she didn’t have her number, and was too chicken to call her mom, Viv, at her Miami office to get it. Now that she knew he was behind bars, with no possibility of parole, Betsy was desperate to tell someone what had happened, and thoughts of Caroline kept surfacing. Eventually, she got a recommendation for a therapist from Shana at work and called her instead. It worked for a while. Then she found herself confiding in Ian.
“I knew he looked familiar,” said Betsy, wondering how long she’d been talking, how long Ian had been sitting on the chair opposite her, leafing through a year-old issue of The Atlantic, listening. “Once I saw his face in the papers, it haunted me for weeks. I said to myself, ‘He looks so familiar.’ It was eerie as hell.”
She heard herself talking, how much she sounded like a stoner, and she hated herself for it, but she couldn’t stop. She told him about the dreams, the persistent visions she had of the night Ginny was killed. Warmth radiated from the base of her skull, forward to her hairline, and down her spine. The new mystery pill she swallowed was doing its job.
“I knew I had seen him before, but where? I couldn’t figure it out. Then one night, I don’t know when, maybe in June, while I was hauling bags of groceries back from Gristedes, I figured it out. It was one of those quiet, warm nights with no sirens wailing, and I felt calm and still even with two heavy bags in my hands. Even that sweet, rotten smell that comes up through the subway grates, you know what I mean when I say sweet? It didn’t bother me.”
“It’s rat poison,” said Ian, nodding intently. “That’s what my grandma says.”
“Oh God, really? That’s depressing. Well, even that sweet, rotten smell didn’t bother me that night. It was like my brain was turned on to some different frequency, or something.”
Betsy had pieced together a profile of her friend’s murderer from newspaper clippings and interviews with McRae, which had been published after his conviction the previous year. From what she had read, McRae dropped out of high school and spent his late teens and early twenties in a constellation of prisons across the South, robbing stores and stealing cars. He had been abused as a boy by his father and his grandfather, both mechanics with anger issues, and had his wrists taped to his brothers’ and been shoved to the floor more than once, just for sitting on the furniture in muddy jeans. Then, he was the one who started taping wrists, and found the power too delicious to resist.
She knew she’d seen his face before, but she couldn’t place him for months.
“So one night I was walking home from the grocery store after work, like I said, and I got about twenty feet away from our building and I just stopped. I dropped the bags on the sidewalk and I thought, ‘Taco Bell.’”
McRae was the loser on the bike at the Taco Bell, the one she saluted, the words echoed in her head. McRae handed Ginny the marker at Walmart.
“Aw, man, I could use some Taco Bell right now! Stat!”
“No, you don’t get it. I saw him, and my friend Ginny did, too, at Taco Bell. She wasn’t a random victim. The guy who killed her chose her. Or worse. Maybe he chose me and got the wrong girl.”
She could picture him standing in the kitchen of Ginny and Caroline’s apartment waiting for them, the water d
ripping from his hair onto the linoleum floor in steady, rhythmic drops as he raided Ginny’s fridge. According to the press, it’s what he had done in all of the apartments. He came in, searched for snacks, and took his time looking through the rooms. He couldn’t have found much. There was rarely more than a couple of bruised apples, a brown banana, a few condiments, and some expired yogurt in the fridge. She imagined his gloved hand moving along to the cabinet, over a jar of popcorn, a bottle of expensive maple syrup, and a box full of flavored instant oatmeal. And he took a shower.
Her vision of him was so vivid that she could smell his stench from sleeping in a tent in ninety-five-degree heat, the camp he set up in the woods off of 34th Street behind Bennigan’s. It was secluded enough, hidden from the street by the thick overgrown scrub around it, but easy to get to through a hole in the fence at the far end of the bar parking lot. How many times had Ginny driven by, not knowing what or who was hiding back there? He would find a neglected pool to jump into when he couldn’t stand his own filth. When he needed to rinse off the blood, he found a hose for a quick blast over to clean his hands and drench his shirt and filthy jeans. He was almost caught once, by a superintendent of one of the large apartment buildings nearby, who saw the man rinsing clothing from the hose in the back of the building and threatened to call the cops, but never did. But once he was inside the girls’ homes, he was concerned that they would notice his foul smell and sense his presence, so he cleaned himself up. In his mind, it was a seduction. He needed to think that the women wanted him, and he was making himself presentable, more desirable. An actual shower, with soap and hot water, had become a rare event, and he likely took his time, and breathed in the scent of Ginny’s shampoo, which smelled like the tropics.
She pictured him toweling off, rifling through the medicine cabinet. Caroline had done the same thing dozens of times at parties around town, so it was stocked with prescription bottles written to at least five different names. Maybe he stashed the Percocet in his pocket for later. He needed to stay sharp.
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