* * *
First I selected a record—Roy Orbison’s Greatest Hits—and threw a Mission apron on over my dress. It was old white cotton, the kind that has been washed a million times, that you see among your grandmother’s dish towels, and the mud from the lake soaked right through it. I pressed my hands to the top, where my bra was, and the last rivulets of red water ran down my legs and formed a puddle on the linoleum floor.
I stepped over it with satisfaction, then put the biggest pot I could find to boil. In the cabinets and fridge I found venison, canned tomatoes, jarred garlic, olive oil, dried pasta, and spices. After an hour of chopping, slicing, sautéing, and simmering, the sauce was delicious. Another pot went on to boil for the pasta, and I turned my attention to the nearest big round table.
I laid place settings for five, with water and wine glasses, cloth napkins, and nice plates. I stacked my new film canisters, taped shut, undeveloped, in the middle like a centerpiece, for what was almost certainly going to be the world’s worst dinner party, and as I did, the front doors of the Mission swung open.
It happened quickly: Their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they walked two or three feet, and then they stopped. I felt their horror, and gave them a deranged smile in return, wiping my hands on my apron.
I was bedraggled—yes—my white dress covered in mud and the apron soaked through with it—yes—my legs and arms scraped up from the bricks. I was barefoot and blond, the leopard coat hanging from a peg behind me, and I was standing next to a dinner table, looking like the very picture of the dead and drowned Carey Magnolia Logan.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Tyler was the first to move. He ran to me. Ignoring the mud, he wrapped his arms around my waist, moved his head to look into my eyes. I peeled his arms off me and handed them back to him.
“What’s happened to you?” he asked, searching me—for damage, for insanity, for something. So kind, so worried.
I regarded him with clarity. “Like I said on the phone: I made dinner. I have something for all of you. It’s about your lawsuit. It’s like”—I rolled my eyes—“a whole long conversation.” I pointed to the table. “Sit! Food is almost ready.”
Jack, Jes, and Marlin hung back, glancing at each other with wild eyes, alarm bells rattling their faces. I saw Jack pointing to me with the edge of his thumb, a kind of incredulous gesture, and I waved at him aggressively.
“Hello, Jack! Yes! We can see each other. Is it the dress? If it’s bothering you, I can take it off,” I said, reaching up, clasping the teardrop-shaped zip between my fingers. It refused to budge, immovable against the wet fabric, and I reached my other hand to hold the neckline in place. Tyler took my hands and stopped me.
“Don’t do that,” he said, fingers on my wrist, feeling the pulse. Tyler was afraid that something was wrong with me—the way something was wrong with her. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Okay,” I said, shrugging, and then I was in the kitchen, picking up a piece of pasta and throwing it at the wall. It bounced right off.
Tyler stood in the doorway, watching me. Beyond him, Jes, Jack, and Marlin took their seats at the table, and Jes was examining the centerpiece of canisters.
“Those aren’t developed,” I said. “Not yet. Can you wait a minute?”
I checked the clock, then threw another piece of pasta at the wall. It, too, bounced to the ground.
“What is going on?” Tyler asked.
“I know. I know what you did.” I put my fingers in the boiling water, letting it scald me as I grabbed a third noodle.
It sailed past Tyler’s head and stuck on the wall.
“Now we’re in business,” I cried out, ladling the pasta into a colander and shaking it dry. “Can you get five bowls, please?”
Tyler complied, ceramic ringing in his arms. I ladled pasta, then the sauce. It ran to the edges, red and bright from meaty chunks of tomato flesh. He watched me from the doorway with terrified sweetness—as though he were watching a nervous breakdown. At some point, I felt my hands pulling my hair back and knotting it atop my head, securing it with one twist of a pen from the bar top, and then I felt more like myself.
I served them, one by one, from the left. I grated Parmesan and cracked pepper from the mill, and then I filled their wine glasses with bourbon, holding it from the base like we did in the restaurant, wiping the drips with a folded triangle of napkin. For Jack I grabbed a can of Coke from the bar and poured it with the glass angled to the side, managing the brown foam.
Nobody spoke. Everyone stared at me with agonized regard. They couldn’t figure out if I was more of a danger to myself or to them.
At last I sat. My heart beat overtime, the thump of it in my jaw, in my fingers. Washed through with nervousness, I could barely look at them.
“Um,” I said, twirling the wine stem in my fingers, the golden thick of the bourbon swirling in circles. “Whew! This is a lot more difficult than I thought it would be.”
Jack leaned back in his chair defensively; Jes and Marlin grew stiff; and Tyler turned his body into mine.
“I don’t even know where to start. I guess, with gratitude. Thank you, for having me here. I know that I’m your guest. I know that you gave me access to the world that you made. And I don’t want to break that world. I want to help. But—I do know, now. I know what you did.”
Not a single one of them moved—they didn’t look at each other, they didn’t let their faces betray shock—nothing. I was on the right track. I took a huge bite of pasta. The sauce ran down my chin. I wiped it away with the back of my hand, then continued.
“You have explicitly refused to give Carey what she wanted. And I get it. I would not want to watch a film of anyone I know dying. I wouldn’t want anyone else to watch it either. I couldn’t bear it, probably. It’s horrible.”
Nobody responded. They were waiting me out.
“Maybe it’s not even that. Maybe there’s something else on the film? I don’t know. I’ve only seen part of it.”
“I thought you took care of it,” Jack said to Jes.
“Not quite.” She frowned.
Tyler shook his head at them, the tiniest bit. I used my fork to point at the canisters in the middle.
“Well, I made you something to give to the judge. Instead of—instead of whatever you have. And even if in the long run, it doesn’t work, it’ll buy you a lot of time.” I pointed to the canisters again. “We all have the same problem. You don’t want to give up the film; I can’t have anyone in my studio. So. Go on. Take it.” As I shoveled the pasta in my mouth, I realized it was the only thing I’d eaten that day. I kept going—I was starving.
“What’s on it?” Jes asked, leaning back in her chair ever so slightly. All eight of their eyes flew to the canisters.
I explained between bites. “It is a film of a woman who looks exactly like Carey Logan walking into a lake and disappearing under the water for over ten minutes. It is filmed from two angles, wide shots, at the lake, with the Eliot property in the background. She does not resurface.” I released the pen from my hair and pushed the turban over it, then reached over and took Tyler’s sunglasses from the V of his neck. “I bought cat’s-eyes, but they sank. I had freckles earlier too, and lipstick, but most of it washed out. Anyway. See?”
“That’s not—” Jes stopped herself from speaking. She reached for a canister, but Marlin’s arm shot out and stopped her.
“Don’t touch that,” Marlin said.
“It’s not right?” I asked, still eating, though everyone else’s plates remained untouched. “I know, the original was underwater. But—it’s exactly what the notebook says. I used vintage thirty-five millimeter film stock from Jes’s studio on a double reel, which makes it about twenty-two minutes long. I don’t know where you found her body. Possibly the angles will be off? But does it matter?”
“It’s fraud,” Marlin said immediately. The woman I’d known thus far as a soft freckled smile was suddenly all angles. “How are we suppo
sed to resolve that? It’s first-degree fraud.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it is explicitly fraud. It is a course of a conduct with intent to defraud ten or more persons by false or fraudulent pretenses to so obtain property with a value in excess of a thousand dollars. And for you personally it is criminal impersonation in the second degree.”
“So then…” I drummed my fingernails against the table. “…don’t give it value in excess of a thousand dollars. Don’t let Eliot&Sprain sell it,” I said. “Let them have it, to display, or loan, but…explicitly state that it does not have a value. I mean. It shouldn’t have one, anyway. I don’t even know how you would calculate that. Are there…what are they called, actuarial tables for this? What’s the going rate for watching someone die?”
“I—that’s not a bad idea,” Marlin said, her frown dissolving. She eyed the others.
“I’ll ask Jeff,” Tyler said to her. He turned back to me, looking carefully into my eyes. “And—it’s undeveloped. You want us to give undeveloped film to the judge.”
“Sure. Why not? I didn’t develop it. I’m not a filmmaker. It’s as it would have been when it came out of the lake. I mean: Do whatever you want with it. But I think you need it.”
They looked at each other, exchanging information without speaking, and then when one of them nodded, so did the rest. Tyler walked to the bar, pulled a number from his phone, and dialed.
“Jeff, hi, it’s Tyler. Yeah…I know it’s late. I’m sorry. We have—we have a better solution. We’re willing to hand the film to the judge, but it’s not been developed…” There was a long pause. “She would order it to be developed. Are we supposed to?…No. The plaintiff will? Okay. That’s fine. No. Can we ask them to submit a proposal for the development? Can we approve it? Okay. Let’s draw that out as long as we can. Okay…And the other thing is that—it cannot be valued. That’s right. It does not have a value. No, it can’t be sold…Uh, sure, it can be loaned. But right, yes, exactly…it has no value…That has to be the condition…You’re the lawyer…Good…We don’t—okay.”
He came back and sat at the table. “She bought us ten months. Maybe a year. What do you want to do?”
“That doesn’t change anything—” Jes wasn’t finishing any of her sentences.
“I know,” Tyler said, throwing his hands in the air. “I know.”
“We’re still split,” Jack said. “I won’t change my mind. I’ll lose my job. I’ll lose my family.”
“I know,” Tyler said, wearily. From the look on his face, they’d had this discussion one or two million times. “I know we are.”
“Jack, it’s going to come out. You have to see that by now,” Jes said.
“Shut up, Jes,” Marlin growled, and she was that different Marlin again, someone angry, someone new.
“What did you guys do?” I asked.
Nobody answered.
Tyler shook his head and turned to me, genuine concern sunk in every fine line of his face. “Why did you do this? Why did you make this for us?”
“Me?”
“You.”
“Well…” I drummed my nails on the table again, their rounded ovals of bright-red paint now slightly chipped and packed with dirt. “I think that DROP OUT deserves to exist. As an idea, at least. Carey wanted it to, so in that way, it’s not even up to you, though obviously one of the problems is that she did leave it up to you. However—I think that it doesn’t necessarily matter if the film is real or if it’s fake. I don’t believe you have a moral obligation to disseminate the real film, because the only people for whom the real film has a specific meaning is you. And you’ve watched it. A public audience needs only to believe that whatever they’re seeing is real in order for it to serve the point. And even then—they can wonder if it’s fake. The wondering itself is part of the work. The genuine article is completely unnecessary. And like I said, because I really need there to not be a police search of my studio right now. But most of all, it’s because of Max.”
“What about Max?” Tyler asked.
“Max is going to write about Carey and DROP OUT in her book because, you know, Carey’s notebooks have been sitting in her library for three years and memoirs need news hooks.”
Shock rippled across their faces, from Tyler to Marlin and back again; they hadn’t known about Max. “Max has a lot of things, but she can’t have everything. I don’t think it’s quite fair for a woman who is going to inherit an entire town in Connecticut to profit from the literal dying body of a working-class hero. This is my way of interrupting that. She won’t know the difference, but I will.”
Jes snorted with laughter. She didn’t like Max either.
“What exactly did Max write?” Tyler asked.
“I haven’t read it. My guess is that it’s probably a description of the work itself, followed by Max’s personal narrative about Carey. She’s citing Lee Lozano”—I raised my fingers, one for each point—“that guy who sailed his boat into the Atlantic and died; the German woman who wrote that manifesto; and Hannah Wilke. Fleur, her collaborator, is probably the only person who’s read it, but they’ll send it to an editor, soon, I would think. Oh, and Max thinks you all hated her. Carey, that is.”
I was looking down when Jack hurled something across the room. By the time my eyes found it, there was a long crack in the window, the thin brown soda already pooling with the curlicues of broken glass across the floor. The violence sucked all the air out of the room.
“This is not how this goes,” he said, pushing away from the table. “We worked so hard. You know, I lied to my wife. I lied to my sponsor. Where’s Max? Let’s—” He started going through Marlin’s pockets, looking for her keys.
“Stop it.” She grabbed both of his hands and stood up. “Jack, you have to stop. There’s nothing we can do.” Jack ripped himself away from her and began to pace back and forth.
“We knew this would happen,” Tyler told him calmly. “We’ve talked about this. A or B.”
“I don’t want A or B,” Jack shouted. Anger—ugly, a slur—transformed his face. He no longer resembled the man I’d met that summer. He didn’t look like a man at all. He looked like a scared, suburban teenage boy.
“There’s nothing else to do, Jack,” Marlin said soothingly. “We’ll all figure it out.”
“This is going to ruin my life,” he snarled at her. “You don’t understand.”
“I’m on your side, Jack. I have always been on your side. You and Bell and Audre.”
“You remind me every single day. But my children are not your problem.” He spat the words at her with surprising venom. Yet—Marlin didn’t flinch.
“That’s—you know what—that’s cruel,” she admonished him. “You know why they’re not mine, Jack? Because I was so stressed out, over all of this, that I didn’t have my period for most of my thirties. You wouldn’t lift the pressure. And then—you found somebody else.”
“You did this for yourself as much as anybody else.”
“No,” Marlin said. “I did it for you.”
“We all did it, okay?” Jes shrieked, pounding the table. The three of them looked at her, stunned. “Pick A or pick B. I don’t care anymore.”
Silence descended over the room. Marlin swallowed her wine glass full of bourbon in a series of long gulps, refusing to look at Jack. Tyler put his head in his hands. Jes stared at Jack. Jack stared out the window. They seemed to have completely forgotten that I was there.
“What did you do?” I asked them.
When nobody responded, I turned to Tyler. “What did you do?” I asked again. He didn’t look up.
“This is it, Ty,” Marlin said. “You’ve been voting A for three years. Pay up.”
“No,” he said. “We have to agree.”
“You’re kidding,” I asked. “Right? After all of this? You won’t tell me?”
Tyler raised his head, those green eyes looking right through me. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “No. I won’t
.”
I’d never heard a no that held such clarity. It broke me right down the middle.
By contrast, Tyler’s ardent refusal seemed to change something in Jack—as if he had been yanked from a reverie with the snap of someone’s fingers. Jack took his seat at the table, patted Tyler on the back, then turned to me.
“What do you need?” Jack asked me, in this explicit way, like we were making a deal—like I was a man he was paying to stay away from his daughter.
Tyler wouldn’t look at me.
“I don’t want anything from you,” I said. “All I want is to be left alone to finish my paintings. No police, no Charles Eliot, no trouble. I’ll be gone soon.”
I pushed back from the table and walked to the door.
Chapter Twenty-Four
In the morning, all of their cars were gone. I stopped in the Mission to find sunlight bleaching the naked wooden circle of the table we’d sat at the night before. The canisters were gone, too.
I drove to the studio with a rock in my stomach.
Fifty feet away, I spotted the edge of Marlin’s black truck, parked in front of my studio, where the front door was wide open. I slammed on the brakes, jammed it in park, and ran full-speed toward the studio. Were they touching my paintings? Were they ruining my life?
Panic pushed me forward, filling my lungs, pumping my legs up and down. I gripped my keys so hard they drew blood. I don’t know if I’ve ever been as terrified as I was during those fifteen steps to the door, and I burst through it like a bomb, the scream already forming in the bottom of my throat.
All four of them—Tyler, Jes, Jack, and Marlin—were sitting patiently on the hayloft steps in the back, coffee mugs in hand. Jes was reading my notebook. I ran, scanning my paintings, out of breath, sweat running down my inner arm. Nothing—they hadn’t moved anything. That I could see.
“What are you doing in here?” I shrieked.
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