by Averil Dean
I sit down on the bed with a pillow bunched in my lap and the knife on the bedside table. I look at my notes and try to reassure myself. Surely it’s all here. I’ve been watching for months, and writing things down. I’ve done my homework.
After a few minutes I take the pages to the fireplace and lay them on the embers. The flames lick the edges of the paper and die. I stir them with a fire poker, shove them into the coals until they ignite. In a few seconds, all this careful research exists only in my mind.
The room has grown cold. I add some wood to the fire and warm my hands over the flames.
* * *
I can’t sleep now, even as the windows blush with early light. I pace around the house, check the doors and windows, turn on the radio and turn it off again. When the sun rises over the trees, I venture cautiously outside. There is a depression in the grass where he stood. I turn in circles on the spot, trying to imagine what he saw and what he thought, what it means that he was here.
Later in the morning, I find a cardboard box on my doorstep. It’s sealed with packing tape, but has no shipping label or address on top.
I take it to the kitchen and set it on the counter. With a paring knife, I slit the tape—first at the sides, then down the center. Inside is another box of thinner, white cardboard. I lift this out and set in on the counter. One more piece of tape to slice, and there, nestled in a bed of tissue paper, is a third box.
Jack’s box. The one I tried to steal.
I run my hands over the fine-grained cherrywood and trace the inset panels of satiny bird’s-eye maple. The brass hinges are so cleverly concealed and aligned that the slightest touch is enough to open the lid. Inside, the box is lined with black felt and filled with his belongings—and on top, a note, written in narrow black script on a square of cream-colored paper:
Alice ~
I’ll show you mine...
7:00 ~ Jack
Below his name, he’s written his phone number.
I set the note aside and peer into the box, lifting things out one by one and setting them on the counter. A set of spiky metal jacks with a few clinging fragments of blue and red paint; a business card, embossed with the name of an architectural firm in bold letters over the faint design of a blueprinted floor plan—Taylor & Fitch; a pair of heavy, unmistakably authentic handcuffs; a key on a plastic Motel 6 key ring; a piece of wax paper, folded into a square, and inside a perfect four-leaf clover; an old pair of eyeglasses with a crack in the lens; a black-and-white photograph of a dark-haired woman on the beach, winsome and laughing behind heavy sunglasses; a folded-up piece of paper with part of a handwritten Neruda poem; a man’s wedding band, which I slip over my thumb; and on the bottom, facedown, a last photograph. I pick it up and turn it over. A square of yellow window light on a dark wall, softened by a sheer, wavy curtain—and behind that, a wraithlike figure peering out from the space between the curtain panels. I recognize the tattoo on the girl’s arm before I know her face.
It’s me. Looking right into the camera without seeing it, as if at something very far away. He must have taken the picture from the forest behind my house. He must have been there, watching, for a long time. In fact, seeing the top I’m wearing in the photograph, he must have been there more than once. I haven’t worn that shirt in three days.
Awareness swells inside me. My skin is shivery-thin, barely able to contain me.
This is a language I understand. The language of secrets.
I’ll show you mine.
My gaze trails away, over the countertop and past the entryway corner, where I see my reflection in the hall mirror. The photo is pressed to my lips, and the expression in my eyes, caught in a wedge of late-morning sunlight, seems suddenly, vibrantly alive.
I smile, and my reflection smiles back.
CHAPTER FIVE
“How did you find this place?” I ask.
It’s 8:30 p.m., and we’re seated at a tiny table inside an equally minute Thai restaurant in Seattle, across the Sound from Vashon Island. The restaurant’s narrow facade is deceiving. Inside, the ceiling opens to a second-floor dining room with space for only six tables. We have a bird’s-eye view of the kitchen below, where a cloud of steam rises from an ancient hammered pot as the cook ladles up two bowls of soup.
“I came here with a friend,” Jack says. “And left with the waitress.”
A young woman appears at the top of the steps and deposits our dinner on the battered wooden table. When she’s gone, I give him a look.
“This waitress? She looks about sixteen.”
“Different one, actually.”
“And is this safe to eat?” I lift a spoonful of soup. “You know better than to piss off the person feeding you, I hope.”
“What makes you think I pissed her off?”
“Seems likely, let’s say.”
He lowers his head with an amused twist of his lips and begins to eat.
“It wasn’t like that. Her father was the cook. He went down on the job. Right there.” He points the top of his ceramic spoon at the kitchen below. “Had a stroke apparently, and fell into the wok on his way down. Spilled hot oil all over himself. The ambulance came for him and I gave his daughter a lift to the hospital.”
His expression doesn’t change, but I sense the reproach.
I drop my gaze to the table. “You do have a way of making me feel like an asshole.”
“Eat your soup.”
The liquid slides down my throat, tangy and unctuous. Slices of sour cucumber float in the broth.
“What happened to the old man?”
Jack pours out some fresh tea. A thread of steam rises from my cup.
“Dead,” he says. “Probably never felt the burns at all.”
He seems to consider this for the first time.
He didn’t ring the doorbell when he arrived at my house earlier this evening. By tacit agreement, we’ve already abandoned the notion of privacy. I left the door unlocked, and he simply walked in and came looking for me as if he owned the place, as if his previous visit had not been an illicit one.
I was at my dresser, clasping a fine silver chain around my neck.
He came to the bedroom doorway, leaned his shoulder against the wall, his sweater pushed up over his forearms. Clean jeans, clean work boots. I wondered what he thought of my clothes, which an old boyfriend described as having been “put together by a twelve-year-old gay boy with a boot fetish and twenty bucks to spend.” Lots of vintage and secondhand. Little discretion.
I cut my own hair, too. With the straight razor from my kit.
“So what’s that about?” he says now. “You follow guys, break into their houses and steal shit that has no value to anyone but them. Why? What’s so interesting?”
“Everything.”
He leans back, waiting.
I set down my spoon and cup my tea in both hands, prepared with my story this time, set to deliver it on cue with a face full of rueful honesty.
“Have you ever been in a crowd—at a concert, maybe, or on the street—and noticed the way all the faces seem to blend together? But when you pick out a single person, suddenly he’s not this anonymous guy anymore. He’s somebody. An individual. You know?”
Jack nods.
“Well, I became sort of fascinated by that. I’d ask myself questions about the guy. Like, I wonder where he lives. I wonder what’s in his refrigerator. Or his sock drawer or DVD collection. What’s his name? How strong are his glasses? What’s in his medicine cabinet? It was a game. But after a while, I started to wish I could check my guesses to see if they were right.”
“So you started breakin
g in.”
“Yeah. I knew this girl once who taught me how to get into houses. Where people hide their spare keys, how to break a window quietly. She could get in anywhere.”
“Who was this?”
“Just someone from the foster system. I roomed with her at the Center for a while. She’s a wizard, smart as hell. Anyway, I discovered that it’s actually really easy to get in and out, provided no one’s around.”
“You never got caught before?”
“No.” I raise my chin. “And I wouldn’t have with you, either, if you hadn’t picked that day to forget your phone or whatever.”
He looks at me skeptically. It’s impossible to tell which part of my story he isn’t buying. I pretend not to see the doubt in his eyes. I’m locked into my bluff now and need to ride it out.
“And is it only men who interest you?” he says.
“Yes.”
“Never followed a woman?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I already know about women.”
“Hmm. So what did you find out?”
“That most men are perverts. That they collect weird things like agates and toy race cars and Asian porn. That every guy has at least one picture of his dick—God knows why.”
He laughs, and I find an odd, sagging comfort in the sound.
“That they always hang their pictures too high—present company excepted—are strangely attracted to futons and can’t keep their houseplants alive.”
I take up my chopsticks.
“That’s it?” he says.
“Pretty much.”
“And what do you leave with?”
“Just the box.”
“Not the stereo, not the TV. Just the box?”
“Right.”
He tips back in his chair, watching me eat.
“You’re an odd little chick, Alice Croft.”
I shrug. “Everyone’s odd.”
“So how long were you following me before I found you in my closet?”
“I don’t know. Two or three weeks, maybe?”
The corner of his mouth twitches. I feel his gaze on me and a tumbling fullness in my stomach.
“So for three weeks,” he says, “I’ve had this gorgeous little thief following me around, just dying to get into my bed, and I didn’t even know it.”
I set down my chopsticks and wipe my mouth. Take a sip of tea.
“Your bedroom, maybe. Not your bed.”
His gaze slides from my face, down the front of my Pink Panther T-shirt and up again.
“My mistake,” he says.
By the time we leave the restaurant, the ever-present clouds have dissolved into rain. Jack opens his umbrella and pulls me underneath, his arm around my waist. His sweater feels comforting against my cheek, a nubbled cushion over the firm bump of his shoulder. The city around us vibrates with the energy of a million lives, with ten million boxed-up secrets. I feel myself at the center of them, small but protected, my feet slapping the rain-sluiced sidewalk and Jack’s falling into step as he shortens his stride to match mine.
“My friend has a boat,” he says. “Would you like to see it? We could walk there.”
A warm, fragile bubble of happiness swells inside my chest.
“Yes, I would.”
* * *
The boat turns out to be a small motor yacht, moored in a slip at the end of a long wooden dock. With a long sleek nose and shining chrome rail, it bobs on the dark water like a shard of wet ice.
“You have some fancy friends,” I say as Jack reaches out to help me on board.
He grins. “This one thinks so. I keep having to remind him about the time he pissed his pants in second grade, just to keep his ego in check.”
I turn in a slow circle on the wooden deck, looking around. The rain has subsided, leaving a blanket of fat raindrops over the seats and metal railings. Jack unlocks a metal box under one of the benches and takes out a rag. He wipes down a seat and part of the railing, then tosses the rag back where he’d found it.
“I have some weed,” he says.
“So do I.”
He laughs and pulls a plastic-wrapped joint from his pocket. “Well, make yourself comfortable.”
We settle on the vinyl seat, half facing each other. The seat is too high for me and my feet dangle, so I curl one leg up and tuck my foot behind my knee. He gives me the joint and lights it with a yellow Bic. We pass the weed back and forth as we talk.
“Where did you grow up?” I ask.
“Upstate New York. My dad owns a chain of liquor stores in the city. I came out here to go to school.”
“Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“A brother. Much older than me. He was already in high school when I was born.”
“You were an afterthought.”
He squints at me through a curl of sweet-scented smoke. “Yeah. Thanks for noticing.”
“I’ll bet you were spoiled.”
“The hell I was. My dad was a hardhanded son of a bitch.”
“But your mother stuck up for you, didn’t she. A middle-aged Italian lady with a baby? Don’t tell me.”
He leans back, drapes an arm over the back of the seat.
“You’ve had a head start. You’ve already been in my place, sniffing around. What did you learn?”
“Not much. I wasn’t there very long. I found the ships, the blueprints. Are you an architect?”
“Used to be.”
“So what are you now?”
“A carpenter.”
I frown. “That’s kind of a step down, isn’t it?”
“You could say that.”
“Did one of your buildings collapse or something?”
He smokes the last hit and tosses the roach overboard.
“No, actually I was a very good architect. Everything I designed is still standing, as far as I know.”
“Then what—”
“Curiosity killed the cat,” he says. “Something you might want to consider.”
“She had eight more lives if I remember right.”
I get up and move to the end of the rail, letting the buzz wash over me. The waves slosh languidly against the side of the boat.
“I looked you up,” he says. “Alice Croft, author of Zebra Crossing. ‘A beguiling, gripping read.’ ‘Dark and dazzling.’ Very impressive.”
I shrug. I hate talking about my work, and especially about reviews of my work. No one ever asks the right questions, and my answers always seem stilted and inadequate. As soon as the books come out, I stash my copies in the closet and try to forget about them.
The Zebra series was a fluke as far as I’m concerned. Something about the motley collection of boys—albino, meth addict, freerunner, clairvoyant, all trapped inside a Scottish neo-Gothic boarding school—captured the public’s attention. So much so that Gus Shiroff has signed not only the foreign rights but film and TV, as well. Nothing has been done with them so far, but there is talk of a cable series and wild speculation about who might be cast in the lead roles.
For me the whole thing is bewildering. Before the Zebra books I had never written for anyone but myself. I sent out my original queries on a whim, expecting a much longer apprenticeship before any of my writing became publishable. But Gus liked the first book right away, and suddenly I found myself with a career and what seems like a never-ending procession of deadlines—all good things, but for a loner with a serious lack of
business sense, it’s a bit much. On Gus’s advice, I’ve tried to isolate myself as much as possible and concentrate on finishing the series.
“A lot of loneliness in those books,” Jack says.
I accept this in silence. It’s a common observation.
“What about your family?”
“Dead.” The word seems flat, so I keep talking to fill the silence. “My grandmother died when I was nine, and my mom a year and a half later.”
“And your dad?”
“Don’t know him.”
“So who do you hang out with, then? What do you do?”
“Write.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. Very glamorous, this lifestyle.”
“No boyfriend?”
“Not at the moment.”
He is quiet, looking at me. When he speaks, his voice sounds different, lower in pitch.
“Not at the moment,” he repeats, as if to himself.
He gets to his feet and moves toward me, hands in his pockets, his face lost in shadow. For a second I forget what he looks like. His features won’t come together in my mind.
He stops, leaning against the rail.
“Last night you had a knife in your hand. Now look at you.”
I glance around at the deserted docks, where rows of boats bob silently in the inky water.
I don’t like this, I want to say. Take me home, I want to go home.
My empty fingers curl into a fist, pressed to my thigh.
“You wish you had one now,” he says softly. “Don’t you.”
He closes the distance between us, lifts his hand and traces the column of my neck, down the front of my T-shirt—the barest brush with the tip of his forefinger.
A bone-deep shiver breaks inside me, as though my gears have slipped and are juddering for purchase.
He turns away and disappears through the cabin door. I close my eyes, waiting. A minute later, a familiar song seeps into the cool night air, a haunting, languid groove, and he’s back, his hand outstretched toward me. He pulls me into his arms.