Mister Tender's Girl

by Carter Wilson

Richard grabs his wine and takes a larger gulp, either to steady his nerves or to keep his lips from speaking more.

  “Wow,” I say. “I was not expecting you to say any of that.”

  “I know. Maybe that makes me a freak.”

  “No, it doesn’t. I just wasn’t expecting it.”

  “I don’t know what to do now,” he says. “My life is so boring. I just do the same thing every day. And then…what happened, happened. It was like someone injected adrenaline right into my heart. I couldn’t sleep for nearly three days. My mind is constantly spinning. And then you disappear for a few days, and I don’t know what’s happening, and I worry about you.”

  “I’m fine, Richard.”

  “I know, I know. You can take care of yourself. But even…with all the stuff going on in your life, you at least have this excitement going on.”

  “Excitement? Are you kidding me? I would trade the excitement of having a maniacal stalker and panic attacks for a thousand boring lifetimes.”

  “I know. I don’t mean it like that. It’s just that…” He lifts his arm and points to the middle of my living room. “He died right there. A man was tied up and bleeding, and then Thomas just killed him. Right there. And I saw the whole thing. I was part of it. I suppose I’m still trying to process all of it, and part of what I’ve learned in the past week is how incredibly insignificant my life is.”

  “Richard, my life is a constant struggle for air. None of it is fun, or exciting.”

  “I’m not trying to make light of it,” he says, and I can see in his face he means it. “But I want to help. I want to be a part of it.”

  “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “How do you know that? I mean, have you found the guy who’s stalking you?”

  “No.”

  He drinks more, and I feel the need to catch up.

  “Well,” he says, “at least tell me what’s happening. I know a little from what you told me, but…” Then he lifts the bottle of wine. “Here we are.”

  I’ve always felt unusually comfortable around Richard, which is to say somewhat comfortable. And now, in his eagerness to talk, there’s something almost boyish about him, a quality I’d never expect to shine through his hallmark seriousness.

  I lift my now almost-empty glass. “Pour us some more, and I’ll catch you up on the latest episode of Mister Tender’s Girl.”

  Richard smiles, and though his teeth are far from perfect, in this moment, he’s lovely.

  He fills my glass.

  • • •

  A bottle and a half later, my head spins comfortably, like I’ve just walked off a scary roller coaster and survived. Somehow I’ve managed to do all the talking and kept up my share of drinking.

  The wall clock chimes eight thirty, and we’ve had nothing more than smashed grapes for dinner. But I’m not hungry. I just feel a lulling, heavy pull toward sleep. Richard is more awake than ever, energized by my stories.

  “I can’t believe that about your ex-boyfriend,” he says. “I read about that online.”

  “I’m constantly worried my name is going to come up in connection with it. I don’t know how I can keep in front of this much longer. I just want to…disappear.”

  “Seems that’s not an easy thing to do. You tried it before. This Mr. Interested still found you.”

  “All I did was change my name when I moved here, and I wasn’t even aware at the time someone was already watching me. God, I just want a do-over. A fourteen-year do-over.”

  Richard leans his head back on the couch, which is the most comfortable position I’ve ever seen him assume. “But that’s not going to happen, of course. And you don’t really want to keep running, do you? I can’t imagine.”

  “No,” I say. “It’s a fantasy, disappearing. Creating a whole new world for myself. But it wouldn’t matter. I can never escape what happened to me. What’s in my mind. Moving again and getting a new social security number won’t change any of that. Besides, there’re good things in my life, and I don’t acknowledge that enough. I love my coffee shop. The people I work with. My house. And Thomas. I can’t leave Thomas.”

  “So then, if you can’t get a do-over, and you’re not going to disappear, your only other option is to find Mr. Interested and stop him.”

  I nod, almost amused by how simple this all sounds. “And somehow not get tied to the deaths of three people: the drug dealer three years ago, Freddy Starks, and Jimmy. Mr. Interested knows about all of them, and God knows how he plans to use that information.”

  Richard briefly touches my arm, and the graze is so light, it could be an accident.

  “And you think he’s the person who found you the night of your stabbing?”

  “He told me as much.”

  “And that maybe it wasn’t an accident he happened to be there at that time?”

  “It’s hard to say. I mean, could I actually have known him back then? How would the twins know him? According to Melinda, he sent her letters in jail, and she had no idea who he was. But she’s crazy, so who knows what to believe?”

  Richard hmmmms and we both sit and stare forward, each of us slumped on the couch, relaxed, casual, and with less space between us than at the first glass of wine. I never would have thought discussing my stalker with my tenant would lead to a pleasant evening. A day ago, I was curled in a ball in my mother’s house, succumbing to whatever drugs she thought I needed.

  After a long, comfortable pause, Richard says, “There’s something not right.”

  “Not right?”

  “Yeah, from your story. Something’s missing.”

  “I told you everything that happened,” I say. Which is true. Richard now knows as much of what’s happening to me as I do. I told him what we did with Starks’s body, my flight to London, my visit to Gladstone Park. Charles Glassin. The twins. My messages from Mr. Interested. Jimmy. My panic attack last night and my conversations with my mother. Everything.

  “Don’t you think it’s weird your parents used to hang out with the twins’ parents?”

  “Everything about all of this is weird, that included,” I say. “But on the scale of weirdness, I’d put that way over on the side of not so much. I mean, it sounds like they just got together socially a few times.”

  “It’s hard to wrap my head around,” Richard says, “but there seem to be connections to Mr. Interested and your past. I mean, you even said you think he’s the guy who found you in the park, and maybe he knew what was going to happen. That maybe he wrote the original letters to the twins telling them to hurt you. You’re right in what you told me: he seems to have some kind of hero complex. Hurt you, then help you.”

  “Keep going,” I say. I’ve been through this in an infinite loop in my head, so I’m anxious to see if he has a different perspective on everything.

  “Your father writes the warning message in the book, telling you basically not to trust anyone,” he continues. “You only know he wrote that sometime after your stabbing, but you don’t know who or what he was talking about.”

  “Right. I’m fairly certain it’s his handwriting, and the cover art and first panels are his. But not the other panels.”

  “He was drawing out the adventure story he used to tell you?”

  I nod. “When we were kids. Chancellor’s Kingdom. It’s where Mister Tender came from. I don’t know, maybe he was drawing the whole backstory as some form of closure or something. He only drew the first few panels.”

  “But Mr. Interested somehow got ahold of it. Doesn’t that mean he maybe knew your father?”

  “I thought about that,” I say. “He could have, but he could also just be an obsessed fan and ransacked my father’s place after he died. I have no idea.”

  “There was something your father wanted to warn you about, but he never sent you that book. He never warned you of anything in
the time you spent with him before he died.”

  “No.”

  “So maybe whatever your father was referring to was either not an imminent threat, or he didn’t really believe it himself.”

  “I have no idea. It could be nothing,” I say. “I mean, it was a quote from a penguin, after all.”

  My hand is just next to his leg, the knuckles lightly grazing. It’s barely perceptible, but it feels nice to touch someone.

  “You said Charles referred to bad decisions he’s made. With his wife.”

  “He said…” I close my eyes and see Charles in his little house, wearing his painfully sad expression. “He told me not to chase ghosts. That he and Margaret made some bad decisions. I think he even said associated with the wrong people, or something like that, and he wondered if it affected how they raised the girls. But he never said what those decisions were.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “I wanted to, but he seemed so upset. Then he changed the subject. Asked about my mother.”

  Richard sits up, and I take my hand off his leg.

  “I think there’s something in their past that’s connected to all of this. What was your mom’s reaction when you told her you saw Charles?”

  “Fairly dismissive. But she was surprised, for sure. Said they used to go drinking together, but that she didn’t really care for them. Especially Margaret.”

  “Why Margaret?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “She was like Charles. Quick to change the subject.”

  “So Charles was cryptic and your mom was dismissive when talking about their past. Do you know where Margaret is now?”

  Close, I remember. “Charles said she moved to New York soon after I came to the States myself. But I have no idea if she’s still there.”

  “Let’s find out,” he says. Richard reaches into the front pocket of his jeans and slides out his phone. “Glassin, right?”

  “Yes,” I say, then spell it for him. “But I can’t imagine she kept the same name. She might have remarried, or just changed it because of the association.”

  He stares at the screen, and I lean over to catch a glimpse, and as I do, my hair falls forward against his chest. It’s a small, intimate moment. It catches me off guard for just a second, but I’m soon pulled back into the search results on his phone.

  “A number of hits,” he says, thumbing down through the results. He refines the search to Margaret Glassin New York.

  The very first result is a New York Post article, dated four years ago. It’s an arts-and-entertainment piece about the gentrification of certain sections of Brooklyn and the efforts to keep the character of existing establishments while appeasing millennial tastes. There are several examples of local business owners bemoaning the changing neighborhood.

  One of those business owners is Margaret Glassin, who, according to the article, moved to New York from London over a decade earlier.

  “Holy shit,” I say, reading what kind of business owner Margaret Glassin is. “She owns a bar. A bar.”

  Richard reads from the piece. “‘Margaret Glassin came to New York over a decade ago, hoping for a fresh start after a painful divorce.’”

  “There’s nothing in there about the stabbing,” I say. “No one bothered to look her name up.”

  “No need to,” he says. “Just a fluff piece, really.” He keeps reading. “‘She’s currently the owner of Maggie’s on Franklin Avenue, in a building where a bar in one form or another has operated for over fifty years. Glassin told us her drink menu consists solely of ale, gin, whiskey, and beer, and she actively resists all hipster demands for elaborate mixed drinks.’”

  This is the extent of Margaret’s mention in the article, but it’s enough to make me certain it has to be the same person. Charles and my mother never referred to her as Maggie, but still, it lines up perfectly.

  “Google the bar,” I say.

  He does. “Still there,” he says. “What are you thinking?”

  I rest my hand on his arm. “I’m thinking I should go talk to Maggie,” I say.

  He smiles and nods, and I expect him to ask to come along. But he doesn’t. Then, as I look back down at my fingers on his forearm, I once again notice his tattoo peeking out from under his sleeve.

  Gemini.

  Then another word suddenly pops in my head.

  Twins.

  Isn’t that the symbol for Gemini? Twins?

  I remove my hand and straighten on the couch, no longer feeling quite as comfortable as I was a moment ago. It’s a stupid tattoo, and it doesn’t mean anything other than his astrological sign, and I would normally think nothing of the association with twins. But there’s that always-present question, the one etched in my memory with my father’s perfect, flowing script.

  Alice, what did the penguin always tell you?

  Forty

  Friday, October 30

  Now then, if you get the sudden urge to start trusting someone, be smart and do away with it.

  That’s what Ferdinand the penguin would tell the Thomas and Alice of the Chancellor’s Kingdom adventures. And he was right, because in my father’s stories, there were many occasions where any degree of trust was eventually used as a weapon against anyone who dared to trust in the first place. And though he had a relatively minor role in the bedtime tales my father wove, there was no more duplicitous character than Mister Tender, who would pour you a special elixir and, as you sipped and slipped into a place of deep, trusting comfort, would slowly extract your most personal stories, know your deepest hidden fears, and, most importantly, discover what you most desired. The one thing you wanted more than anything else, the thing you were certain would make you complete. Then, as your head swirled with thick, intoxicated dreams, Mister Tender would place his elbows on the bar, lean in to you with a jackal’s smile, and always ask the same thing:

  What would you be willing to do for it?

  And no matter the patron, under the deepest of Mister Tender’s spells, the answer would also always be the same:

  Anything.

  As I drive to New York City on Halloween eve, I wonder what I most desire. The one thing I need to make me complete. The easy answer is what I told Richard: a do-over for the last fourteen years. A normal life, a body without scars, even just a single night of eight peaceful hours of sleep. I would wish my father never came up with the idea of Mister Tender, and that my family remained intact in London.

  But I don’t live within the pages of the graphic novel, and dreams of rewinding the past can’t come true, even if I would have to do some very bad things to make them so. Instead, I’ve had to do some very bad things just to keep moving forward with my broken life, and the idea of some kind of mental peace continues to live on the other side of a wall that grows a brick taller by the minute.

  I left early this morning, knowing it would take four and a half hours to get to Brooklyn, making no arrangements other than telling Brenda I wouldn’t be at work, which she’s so used to at this point, she sounded surprised I even bothered to let her know.

  Richard did finally ask if I wanted company for this trip, and I turned him down.

  Cars whoosh past me, and I have a vague sense of going too slowly on the interstate, but my mind is occupied with a thought that has kept coming back, over and over, taking little nibbles out of me until last night it finally started drawing blood.

  Is Richard part of the community?

  He’s not Mr. Interested—he’s far too young. But is he involved? Could he be one of the small legion of fans tracking the movements of Alice Gray?

  My instincts tell me he isn’t, though logic forces me to consider otherwise. Richard sits right above me in the Perch. He’s so close. Maybe he’s figured out my alarm code and has broken into my house. Taken pictures of me sleeping. Maybe Richard is the documentarian, and he sends the photos
to Mr. Interested in London, who renders them into illustrations in the style of my father.

  How messed up would all that be?

  But how does that explain the one photo I saw on the website, the photo of my home in summertime, which clearly shows Richard looking down from the Perch. Richard didn’t take that photo. Who did?

  In an attempt to stop the cycle of obsessive thoughts, I scroll through the playlists on my phone and shuffle my classic rock compilation. Janis Joplin starts breathlessly screeching at me, and any escape into her world is immediately halted by the refrain, a metaphor to her, but something potentially literal in my life.

  Take another little piece of my heart now, baby…

  I skip to the next song, grateful for Dire Straits.

  • • •

  I roll into Brooklyn just a little after eleven in the morning. Franklin Avenue is flanked by four- and five-story brick buildings, all varying shades of sun-stripped tan and white, pockmarked by time and neglect, piles of garbage bags heaped on the sidewalk like sandbags trying to hold back an imminent floodwater breach.

  I don’t see the bar yet, but I take advantage of an open parking spot and ease into it. When I step out, I’m greeted by a stiff New York wind, cold and hostile.

  Three doors down, I find Maggie’s, a sliver of a brick building shared with a shoe-repair shop and a Chinese takeout restaurant. The upper floors of the building hold apartments. An old man leans out an open window—not caring about the cold—and surveys the street like a crow, ready to caw out a warning if it senses danger. He watches me with a furrowed brow and wrinkled forehead but says nothing as I walk up to the building.

  The sign for Maggie’s is attached to a ground-level railing, but the bar itself is below ground. With each of my descending steps, the world around me grows darker. At the bottom is an old wooden door with iron bars over a small, eye-level window. Another larger window is next to the door, its shade closed from the inside. A small neon sign buzzes the word OPEN, and a faded black-cat cutout decoration, taped to the door, represents the extent of Maggie’s Halloween decorations.

  I push the door open and take my first step into Maggie’s, and in this instant, I feel like I’m entering another time, one in which I don’t belong.