by Julia Dahl
Trevor got in. They rode in silence to the harbor. Ridley pulled the car into the hull of the ship and parked behind an Audi.
“I’m going to get a drink. You want a drink?”
“No.”
“Fine,” said Ridley, shutting his door. “Be back here when we dock.”
Trevor waited a few minutes for Ridley to get in front of him, then took the stairs three flights up to the top deck and watched the lights of the island fade away. The air was cool and the breeze picked up as they moved. I’m on the ocean, he thought. Am I on the ocean? He took a picture of the life preserver at the prow that read MARTHA’S VINEYARD in red letters. He had a feeling he’d never be back.
Trevor returned to the Tesla as the boat backed toward shore. Ridley was already in the driver’s seat.
“Do you want to listen to something?” he asked. “It’s a good four hours to the Village. Which podcasts do you like?”
“I don’t really have time for podcasts these days,” said Trevor.
“They’re working you hard at school? Good, that’s good. That’s what you’re there for, right? Chad hasn’t complained but to be honest, we’re not that close. His mom pretty much raised him. How about music? What’s your favorite band?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Okay. What about decades? Forget it, we’ll do eighties. You’re okay with eighties? Fine.”
At some point, after the sky went dark and the red and yellow lights on the road started to sting his eyes, Trevor let himself nod off. A dream came immediately: He was knocking on Claudia’s dorm-room door. He was drunk, head spinning, words tumbling out like rocks from a bag. The door opened; when he saw his mom and dad the words turned to sounds. He was grunting and spitting like an animal, kneeling on the floor. And then, from behind him, a hand on his shoulder and her voice: “Trevor, it’ll be all right. I promise.”
He awoke with a gasp. Ridley had turned down the radio.
“I was going to let you sleep.”
Trevor straightened up, looked out the window.
“Mohegan Sun’s coming up. You want to stop off? Play some games? Get a steak?”
Was he serious?
“I’m good,” said Trevor.
“Cool. Just trying to be friendly. Figured you might want to blow off some steam.”
“In a casino?”
“Okay, that’s not your thing.”
Ridley dropped the subject and turned the music up.
“Do you think I’ve forgotten that you robbed me?” Trevor asked. “Or what your son did to Claudia? And me?”
“I’m sure you haven’t forgotten any of that.”
“Then what are you doing? You want to take me to a casino? For steak?”
“I suppose it’s my way of apologizing. Trying to set things right. I’m a lawyer; I like the scales to balance.”
What a terrifying person, Trevor thought, looking at Ridley. Could anyone in this man’s life, anyone on this earth, divine whether he was telling the truth?
They crossed into Manhattan and when Trevor saw the tip of the Empire State Building he told Ridley he would pay back the $2,000 bail.
“Forget it, please,” said Ridley.
“No offense,” said Trevor, “but I don’t want to be in debt to you.”
“Stop. You act like I did something so horrible. I’m protecting my son. I’m sure your father would do the same.”
Trevor decided to stop talking. He’d be home soon.
“I get how much you like Claudia,” said Ridley when they pulled up to the curb outside the dorm. “But I want you to ask yourself this question: Is she really worth it? If she cared about you even half as much as you care about her she would have at least paid your bail. Has she called you since they found her? Texted?” Ridley saw the answer was no. “No. She’s moved on. She used you, son. And now she’s done with you. If it were me, I’d be pissed.” He pulled out his business card. “I hear the NYPD wants to talk to you about Jeremy. I can help with that. As I’m sure you know, a good lawyer doesn’t come cheap. What I’m hoping you’ll do is keep me informed about Claudia. If you hear she or her family are thinking about going to the cops or the media, call me. I’ll pay you $10,000 for a tip. Nobody wants that video out there, son. None of us.”
“Fuck you, Ridley,” said Trevor. He opened the door and climbed out of the low car and onto the sidewalk. “There is no ‘us.’”
TREVOR
He returned to freshman life. What else could he do? When men with visitors’ passes carried boxes out of Claudia’s suite, Trevor said nothing. When someone in his Great American Cities class brought up what happened in the Mews and the conversation became about opioid abuse and gentrification, he said nothing. When Whitney gossiped about Claudia having a nervous breakdown, he said nothing. Whitney was easy to ignore if he didn’t go to church. And he was done with church for a while.
“If you need Jesus we’ll have Bible study here,” said Boyd the Sunday night after Trevor’s misadventure. They’d eaten stale pot gummies and were drinking what was left in the bladder of a box of wine Boyd brought home from a party.
“We’ll do it all,” continued Boyd, standing up, turning the conversation into a performance. Ad-libbing a monologue. “Old Testament, New Testament. Eye for an eye, radical love. Everything.”
“Great,” said Trevor. “How about forgiveness? Can we do forgiveness?”
Boyd was the only person at school that Trevor told about Martha’s Vineyard, and his roommate swore to keep the foolish pilgrimage to himself.
“Can we do forgiveness?” Boyd guffawed. “Christ is forgiveness.”
It was good to laugh. For a moment he forgot about his heart, which felt a hundred years old. Life was now split into before and after spring break. Who he’d let himself become after seeing that video. What he’d done. What that meant. It was never going to go away.
“Praise Jesus,” said Trevor, lifting the plastic cup for more.
When he woke up, hungover and hurting in the middle of the next afternoon, he had a text from Claudia.
hi. i hope you’re okay. i know you probably wish you’d never met me, but I’m going to leave for the city for a while and i’d love to talk if you’re willing.
Two hours later he was on East Twenty-Second Street. The town house Claudia lived in was almost as tall as Ben’s brownstone, but where Ben’s seemed to be hiding behind walls of ivy and spindly potted plants, hers stood out proudly, whitewashed brick and black shutters and a neat box of red geraniums outside each window.
The smile she greeted him with was mirthless, but sincere.
“It’s good to see you,” she said.
Claudia’s hair was slightly damp, as if she’d just washed it. She shuffled inside in slippers and sweatpants. You know a girl likes you if she dresses up a little, Mike had told Trevor once. This was not going to be the beginning of their love story. What he’d done for her was humiliating. She was probably embarrassed by it, too.
They walked inside, into an enormous living room warmed by the sunlight coming from a wall of windows in the back. Just like at the house on Martha’s Vineyard, the furniture and the lighting and the art and the knickknacks created a tableau: A successful family lives here. A healthy, happy family. But Trevor knew too much about the Castros now to be fooled.
“Do you want to go out to the garden?” she asked.
“Sure.”
The garden was brick-paved, with a canopy of flowering trees above. A spiral staircase connected the patio to a balcony two floors above.
“This is nice,” he said.
“Thanks.”
She sat down in a cushioned outdoor armchair and he sat opposite her, at one end of the matching sofa.
“Are you coming back to school?” he asked.
“No, I’m gonna go to the Vineyard for a while.”
“What about the fall?”
Claudia shook her head.
He didn’t blame her. If he had her money
he’d drop out, too.
“Have you told anybody?” she asked.
“I told my brother,” he said
“I didn’t know you had a brother.” All they’d done together, and she didn’t know basic details about his life. She hadn’t asked and he hadn’t offered. “What’s his name?”
“He’s not going to say anything.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Claudia.
“Well, he’s not.” Trevor was angrier than he wanted to be. She was never going to look at him the way he wanted her to. He was always going to be the person who’d been with her at the rock bottom of her life.
“I believe you.” She looked down. “This is probably weird but I want to give you some money. To try and make it even. I mean, I know it’ll never be even. Nothing’s ever even. But if you’d given my phone to Ridley you’d have twenty thousand dollars. So I owe you twenty thousand dollars. That’s how I see it.”
Trevor wasn’t surprised.
“Why didn’t you just pay my bail?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“My bail. In Martha’s Vineyard.” Claudia looked confused. Was she playing dumb? “They arrested me for being at your house. They weren’t going to let me out if I didn’t pay two thousand dollars. That probably sounds like nothing to you but I don’t have it. I don’t think my parents do, either.”
“I didn’t know,” she said quietly.
“You didn’t know because you didn’t care.”
“That’s not true. I told them I’d said you could be there. We told them to drop the charges.”
“Okay, but did you, like, call to follow up? To make sure I wasn’t still sitting in jail?”
“I didn’t know I needed to.”
He didn’t say, If it was Ben, you’d have made sure he was out. You’d have called and called until you knew he was free. What did it matter now?
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Trevor sighed. “It’s okay.” And maybe it was. Not good, not what he wanted, but okay. “I know you’ve got a lot to deal with.”
“You could have called me,” she said.
“I thought about it. But I didn’t end up having to call anybody. Ridley Drake paid the bail. Then he drove me home.” Claudia’s mouth dropped open. “He’s scared of you. He offered me ten thousand dollars for information about your family.”
“What kind of information?”
“He wants to know if you’re going to show the video to the cops or the media. I think he probably wants to be prepared. Get his lawyer-shit together. I told him to fuck off.” He paused. “I don’t think I should be taking money from any of you.”
Claudia winced. “I get it.”
City noises filled the silence that followed. An ambulance on a nearby street; the rat-a-tat of construction a few houses down.
“Have you heard anything about Jeremy?” Trevor asked.
“Sort of,” she said, and told a story about Jeremy’s brother at the Port Authority, and how he’d come to the town house, with a gun.
“Nobody got hurt,” she said. “And the lawyer thinks it’s actually kind of a good thing for us.”
“Us?”
“You and me. Our security system has a picture of his brother on our stoop and his family knows that if they steer the cops our way, we’ll report him for armed robbery. And our lawyer also says that the police don’t have any footage of what happened in the Mews. So I think we’re okay. I mean, I don’t want you to worry. They don’t have any proof of anything. If it comes to it, I’ll say it was me. But it won’t. Our lawyer used to be a DA. People owe her favors. So don’t worry. Okay?”
Did she have any idea how she sounded? Was he supposed to trust her? Of course she didn’t need to worry. Of course she was going to be fine. And maybe he would be, too. Maybe. But he had a feeling it would be a very long time before he stopped being afraid.
“Did Ridley say anything about Chad?” Claudia asked.
“Not really,” said Trevor. “I saw his Instagram, though. I guess he’s in L.A.”
“I haven’t been online.”
“He’s declared himself a victim of the Subway Slasher.”
“What?”
Trevor took his phone out of his pocket and handed it to her. She scrolled and the color drained from her face.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have brought him up. I should probably go.”
Claudia handed him his phone.
“Thanks for coming,” she said. Thanks for everything. For being my friend. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
“You might have called your family,” he said. “Maybe that’s what you should have done.”
She smiled at him, another smile without joy. A smile beneath now-falling tears.
“Maybe.”
CLAUDIA
As soon as she closed the door behind Trevor, Claudia went to her room and dug her phone from her bag. Since buying it in Midtown, she’d used it for almost nothing. She hadn’t synched her email or her photos or her contacts. Trevor’s new number was the only one programed. But now it was time to reenter the world.
She downloaded Instagram and sat on the edge of the bed, her blood hot and sputtering inside her like oil in a pan. Chad had posted four times since she’d left him bleeding in the hotel room ten days ago. The first was a photo of an IV stand in a hospital room. The caption read: #nyc can suck my dick #recovery #subwayslasher #staystrong. There were nearly six hundred likes and almost a hundred comments. omg!… so crazy!… thoughts and prayers!… luv u! The next photo was a vase of flowers with a “Get Well Soon” balloon attached; caption: #blessed. The third was a series of three female nurses posing like Charlie’s Angels: these bitches give good stitches. And finally, the most recent: Chad’s bare feet on a lounge chair with the ocean at his toes. #Cali #bestcoast #recovery #staystrong. Each post had more likes, more well-wishes.
She’d sliced him, in part, to create a warning. As she stood over him with the box cutter, she imagined that every time Chad Drake met someone new they’d be suspicious; what had he done to get such a dramatic injury? She’d thought she was changing the story, but she hadn’t counted on how easy it would be for him to do the same. All those people on Instagram believed his lie about the Slasher. They felt sorry for him. He wasn’t humiliated; he was a hero. Nobody would ask what he did to deserve it. Nobody would ask what he was wearing, or what he’d had to drink. Poor Chad Drake was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
If she posted the video he made how many likes would she get? How many comments? Would she be a hero for surviving? No, she’d be a joke. Dude, she peed. It would be carved into her gravestone. What did she expect? She knew he liked her. She shouldn’t have flirted. She shouldn’t have had so much to drink. She should have known better.
Fine. Now she did. But she also knew she wouldn’t be the last. She knew that if she didn’t do something else—something, unfathomably, more than slicing him across the face—all she would have taught him was to be a little more careful when he wanted to fuck someone who didn’t want to fuck him. Drop the camera, fly solo. How many women would he offer to drive home after they’d had three too many? What a nice guy, they’d think as he folded them into his fancy car. Out in L.A. his pool of victims would grow. What a story! He’d survived the Subway Slasher.
Claudia had to shut the door on all that. It wasn’t enough to mark him in the dark. She couldn’t leave anything open to interpretation. Symbolism was for critics and collectors; in real life, you have to point and say “rapist.”
But say it to who? The police? Ridley would get any charges dropped to nothing: Chad would end up picking up trash on Park Avenue every other weekend. Ten years from now, people who knew him would refer to the whole thing as a bit of youthful legal trouble. A reformed bad boy and boom: a whole new set of women ready to comfort him. A whole new set of victims.
Claudia put the phone face down on the bed. In a frame across the room was a charcoal d
rawing of a dancer she’d done the year before in high school. Most of her art classes had focused on “fine art,” art for art’s sake, but spring semester of senior year the studio teacher decided everyone needed something “practical” in their portfolios to graduate. Each student was assigned a client—a club or group or team at school—and told to create an image, one version on paper, one digital, that functioned as an advertisement for their performance or product or big game. Claudia was paired with the dance troupe who wanted to spread the word about their graduation show, proceeds to support Ballet Bushwick. She attended rehearsal after rehearsal, trying to get inspired, trying to come up with something to say about what their movements meant or at least what they evoked. She went to the Bushwick studio and took photographs, collected bits of ribbon and chalk; a Band-Aid, even a condom wrapper she saw in the bathroom trash can. She took it all home and came up with nothing. In the end, she turned in a simple charcoal drawing of a dancer, arms raised; the only flourish was her gold dance slippers—glitter nail polish on the original that she presented in class. She’d basically drawn a Degas and sprinkled Damien Hirst at its feet.
The teacher praised her.
“This is smartly done,” she’d said. “You’re most skilled at sketch and I like that you stuck with that. Commercial work isn’t about taking big chances or showing off. It isn’t about you at all, other than that they’ve hired you and, presumably, like your aesthetic. It’s about the client. How do you best use your skills to please the client? Have the dancers seen this?”
Claudia answered yes.
“And?”
“They like it,” she said.
“But you don’t.”
Claudia shrugged. She wanted to make Art. She could identify it, she was drawn to it, and she could pay for it—but she couldn’t seem to create it. She excelled at figure drawing and still life. If it was there in front of her she could imitate its contours. What she couldn’t do was bring it to life. The dancer on her wall conveyed a sense of movement, maybe even grace, but she couldn’t manage to blow a spirit into what she drew. Nothing she’d ever made—not her tries at sculpture and mixed media, watercolor, or photography—opened anyone’s eyes any wider. Real artists could show you the truth you hadn’t noticed. Real artists had something to say.