by Jamie Mason
• • •
Emma watched the video dozens of times after June was once again situated for the night.
She read the comments on the different postings, searching through the You go, girl, and cheers and horrid troll commentary for clues as to where this attack had taken place. As to where the painting was hanging right now.
She wrenched her eyes off the taunting wedge of it in the video to study the girl, the street, the direction of the late-afternoon light to orient the house to the compass.
She sifted the internet chatter for leads. She found the police website, and the map of the town.
Her eyes burned. She finished the wine and rolled into a paralyzed sleep. She waited ninety minutes after she woke up, watching the clock in a blank trance, before she set about packing her bag and calling Eddie to plead a case of a family emergency. The fictional family of pain needed her. No one could ask her to deny the drama.
Eddie was sweet and understanding, as Eddie could only be.
She called Samantha as she settled south at highway speed.
“I don’t understand, M, tell me what this video is. Send me a link. Let me check into this.”
“It’s okay. I’ll be careful. I have to try.”
“You really don’t. Just come back. I’ll fly in. We’ll talk it through.”
“Owen thinks I screwed him over. You didn’t see how he acted. He was . . . It wasn’t just the money and going back to the Anningers empty-handed. He was so upset that it was me. He thinks I set him up. I’m the only one who can fix it. It has to be me. If I can bring back the painting, he’ll see—”
“Okay, that’s one hell of an if, and it doesn’t really undo what went wrong that night. Owen has been in the naughty corner with his bosses for four years. Can you imagine how that is for a guy like him? You can’t ever make that go away. I don’t need to have seen him to know what you’re saying. That’s exactly why I’m not convinced the painting can be traded for a clean slate.”
“I want my life back.”
“Um, one small detail—you have to be alive to have a life. You could make a new life if you’d just get out a little bit. I know it’s hard. But you don’t have to be a hermit. It’s making you crazy. This is crazy. Your cover is solid. It’s at least solid enough to try to live a little. Give me some credit.”
“It’s not you. I owe you. I owe you everything. I know that. But it’s not just the painting. What if I could give Jonathan to Owen? Let him see for sure that it wasn’t me?”
“You don’t even know that Jonathan is still in the picture. He might not be anywhere near there. What if he sold it to someone else?”
“Sold the Flinck to some random people who hung it up as a decoration in the suburbs? Come on. It has to be him.”
“I don’t even want to remind you that if you break in and something goes wrong and your fingerprints are on anything—”
“I know.”
“Sure you do. You’re the expert. Oh, wait! No, that’s me. This thing is only as good as you not delivering yourself on a platter to the police.”
“I know.”
“You say that a lot. But if you don’t listen to me now, you’ll definitely know soon, one way or the other, about a great many things. And if it goes a particular way, you also have to know that I can’t help you.”
Emma chewed her bottom lip. “Are you saying that because you think it’ll stop me?”
“No. I’m saying it for the other reason.”
“That it’s true.”
“Yeah, if you think you can trust me,” Samantha said.
“I’m sorry. Shit.”
“No shit, shit.”
“I’ll be careful. I promise,” Emma said.
“Uh-huh. Just call me.”
• • •
Emma watched the exodus from across the street in front of Gordon Hawley Middle School. It felt impossible to sift for any single kid in the liquid rush of young people pouring from the doors. They wore different colors and carried different things, but in the distance, they all seemed as alike as a romp of otters. And just as energetic. You only noticed any particular one of them when they drew some leaping attention to themselves.
Some of the kids split off for a line of buses. Some milled around in front of a queue of cars, waving their goodbyes as they matched to their rides home. But the girl in the video had been walking when she was attacked. So Marcelline looked to the margins of the crowd as it went ragged in all directions into the surrounding neighborhoods.
There. It had to be her. Same hair. Same stride. A plaid shirt tied around her waist an awful lot like the one in the video. Her features had been blurred out, but Marcelline had seen her on the screen so many times now. She was with another girl. It had been eleven days since the attack. Marcelline watched her for wariness.
Marcelline dropped the transmission back into drive and blew out a deep breath. She didn’t know how to follow anyone. She didn’t want to know how to follow anyone. The girl turned the corner with her friend, heading up the hill and out of sight.
Like the inverse of Emma’s family, who had become just images on a screen to her, it was strange to see this girl in three dimensions in plain daylight. Emma had sought her out and studied this girl’s life the way she had her sister’s. Emma felt both predatory and protective of her. Why and how the Flinck came to be in the girl’s foyer, none of this was her fault.
There were roughly a hundred ways this could go once she found the right house. And only if she discovered a streak of stealth within herself that let her get close enough to do anything about it. But sneaking wasn’t much like her. Emma was untested, but Marcelline had always been a by-the-horns kind of person.
She ran her thumb over the braille of her ruined jaw, the pits and peaks of the scar retelling the story of what was lost to her. And with whose help.
Jonathan had only thought he’d found an old painting, but once she’d explained what it was and the infamous Boston gallery heist, they’d decided together to skip the media attention and the pat on the head and the splitting of the FBI reward for only one small part of the Gardner Museum’s lost haul.
It was unethical and clearly against her contract’s details, but in a business that dealt with rarities every day, the truly unique was understood to be tempting, and not terribly difficult to get away with.
Collectors who bought on the sly tended to stay sly about it, and their impulsive purchases could change the lives of garden-variety art dealers. Most of these transgressions were forgiven in principle, with the understanding that if you got caught, the payoff had best be enough for you to fade into an entirely different circle of friends and colleagues.
Still, even as the doldrums set in and her thirties became the fixed grind that they were for most everybody, it wasn’t anything Marcelline had ever entertained. She’d gotten out on the wrong side of the bed on the morning she’d met Jonathan, and not figuratively. Normally she slept on the right side of the bed, with the left side too-long vacant until the next time she fell in love, or at least into deep like.
But on that day, the sooty morning light had put an end to a night’s restless sleep. She’d woken up before her alarm went off, way over to the left side of the bed, stuck in a sweaty tangle of sheets. She’d kicked them away and crawled out, feeling headachy and off and in the perfect storm of a weirdly expectant mood. Ultimately, it didn’t disappoint.
After lunch, a guy walked in off the street with a photo of the Flinck on his phone and the skeleton of a story of wanting to sell it.
After the decision to go rogue with the painting, and after too much wine and kissing beyond that, the next morning the left side of her bed was full of a hungover Jonathan. Always just Jonathan. He never told her his last name. He wouldn’t. He thought it was funny.
And a few days later, he had left her to die. It could possibly have been forgivable. Anyone would be afraid. Something had gone horribly wrong. Anyone could panic.
But Jonathan hadn’t been panicked, and that’s what was unforgivable. She never saw a ripple of raw worry on his face. For all the world it looked as if he’d shaken off the shock of it as if a fly had landed on his sleeve. He’d knelt and looked her over, but not into her eyes. He was measuring. Adding. Subtracting. He’d pinned her hands down as she tried to hold in her own blood. He looked across the lot to check how far away Owen was. Calibration. Triangulation.
And he knew the shooter. For fuck’s sake, Roy! Get the hell out of here!
Jonathan had looked up at the sky, shaken his head regretfully, almost annoyed, mouth drawn tight. Marcelline had seen the decision settle in through his shoulders. Her fear, the warm river of blood pooling under her shoulder, the look in her eyes, none of these things figured into his sum. She grabbed his wrist. She believed the last thing she’d ever feel was fury. He would look at her, goddammit. She wasn’t letting this go without that. He would look at her.
But he didn’t. She’d had the strength of cobwebs, and he flexed his wrist in her grip and brushed her fingers clear. Then he ran. The scene went dark and silent, and the next sharp moment was realizing that she had become something like Owen’s catch-detainee-responsibility-pet.
Now she was close to . . . well, something that was the next part of this painting’s story.
The two girls came back into sight as Marcelline’s car slowly crested the hill. Jonathan might not be a part of this scenario. If he was here, if he was still part of this story, well, that particular what-if dead-ended at a curtain. But she wouldn’t look behind it until she knew for sure.
Marcelline unclenched her teeth. The ruined side of her jaw was aching. It reminded her to be angry. The watch-and-wait phase was a whetstone for sharpening that feeling into something useful.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
* * *
In the two weeks since it had happened, Carly always called it the thing. She didn’t know what else to name it in her mind because it wasn’t just what the guy had tried to do. It was what had tightened and sharpened in her while watching the playback of it. In seeing what she’d done, seeing what it looked like to be better than she thought she was, all the good and the terrible of that day had become bound up into one electric, snapping thing.
On the second day after the thing, Carly’s gym teacher started calling her BK Liddell. BK stood for Butt-Kicker, and she liked it. She laughed along with everyone else. Carly figured that under his mostly gray buzz cut, Coach Marshall was really thinking Ass-Kicker, but he made a big deal about being a deacon in his church, so he wouldn’t say ass to a bunch of eighth graders.
The next day, her math teacher had hugged her on her way into the classroom. The principal knew her name all of a sudden, and the janitor high-fived her and called her Girlie when he’d never called her anything before.
It didn’t matter that the police had scrubbed her face out of the video. The neighbors saw the cops and the fire truck and the news vans on their street. Her friends recognized the rest of her—her hair and clothes and her backpack, and her house. Then those kids showed their parents. It didn’t matter that it was over so quickly. It wasn’t hard to put together. The next day it was all over the place.
The thing spilled over the borders of the school grounds. The desk clerk at the Y asked her if she was the one, and Carly had to try to not giggle because it sounded so high drama, like THE ONE, in her head when she heard it. The high schooler at the ice cream kiosk in the grocery store kept checking her recognition against Carly’s actual, not-blurred face by staring and trying hard to look as if she weren’t.
Every several hours that passed from the thing to whenever she noticed again, it seemed that the catalog of new reactions had grown by half. So many variations on a theme. It got to the point that she could feel the eyes on her, scuttling over her like butterfly feet, but soon she didn’t need to turn to find the source. It didn’t matter who it was. They needed to look, but she didn’t need to look at them looking.
Just looking was good enough for most people, but some kids, and even some of the grown-ups, insisted on more. They were positively itching to see what Carly was about in real life. And it wasn’t enough just to stare. It needed to be a circuit with Carly actively looped in while they checked what they could tell about her with their naked eyes. They measured her to see if she matched up to the video.
Some maneuvered into her peripheral vision and got so obvious about it that she had to peek over at them just so that she didn’t seem weird. There was on-purpose paper rattling and throat clearing to draw an involuntary glance from her, which some people would then make into an invitation to chat. Much of it was friendly. They wanted to say they’d seen the video, that they were glad she was all right. Sometimes they wanted to tell her about something that had happened to them, or to say they thought it was cool what she’d done. But sometimes they asked her to tell them the step-by-step details, to narrate their memory of what they’d seen on their screens. They wanted her fear and her pain and her almost-maybe-dying without thinking about how she might feel about the thing she’d actually lived through.
But whatever looks or words they wanted to trade with her, what Carly understood was that none of this was the real want, the real need. They wanted her to look at them, yes, and they wanted her to know what they were thinking about when their eyes met. But the demand of attention, even from across the room, was a type of touch. As much as if they’d put their hands on her, it was a reach and a catch that she saw with her eyes, but felt in her throat.
Her bad thing was any bad thing—accident, illness, attack, ruin in all its million forms—that everyone, not so deep down when they looked at Carly, knew was possibly close by. Maybe even standing invisible at their own shoulder in that very moment. Any bad thing could be on its way to them. Their lives could be on the to-do list for disruption, or even disaster. And so they forced Carly into contact, and it was a weird little bravery for them. They wanted to touch it before it touched them.
Strangely, she didn’t mind. She felt like a freak, but it wasn’t unpleasant. It made her feel real. Somehow, and with a pang, she knew this feeling, this certainty, wouldn’t last. It would end. She would forget. She was already forgetting.
The Carly of two weeks ago felt far away. The reality of Other Carly was fading. Normal life was blocking the view. Right at first, she’d been like the Venus flytrap on the windowsill in the science lab. Sticky and spiny, grabbing things that landed on her attention and then digesting the idea of them, breaking them down to know what they were made of. But now sometimes she was just what she was. She forgot to pay attention. Dumb as a regular plant.
She was still changed. She thought she was. What if she wasn’t? What if she didn’t get to keep it?
Whenever this thought nipped at her, she located that feeling she’d had since seeing herself on the security camera, the glue and the grip of it. It lived behind her eyes. She turned it up and pointed it at loved ones and strangers alike. Use it or lose it, BK Liddell! He made them scream back Yes, Coach Marshall! when he hollered out his encouragements like drill orders and laughed into his whistle as they ran or jumped or did sit-ups or shot baskets.
In line with Ada at the doughnut shop, Carly watched the cashier scramble through order after order, and the girl with the black headset and cool nose ring running the drive-through, and the couple bristling at each other at the only table she could see without being too obvious about it. She chewed over their gestures and postures, trying to glimpse everything more in their movements, everything she knew was there in every moment. The fishing was good today, and every day that she remembered to try. So many little things she could catch that were always happening everywhere.
The lady in front of her turned around and put her hand on Carly’s arm. In the past two weeks, there had been other people like that. Carly told her friends they were freaky, but in truth the touchy ones were usually nice.
“You don’t know me. My daughter goes to your
school. She’s over there at the table. She’s in the seventh grade, so you probably don’t know her. Anyway, you’re wonderful.” And then to the cashier: “And I’ll pay for whatever she’s getting.”
The lady smiled back to Carly, and Carly looked at Ada, drop-jawed at her side.
“Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t realize the two of you were here together. Of course, you, too,” the lady said to Ada. “Both of you get something. My treat.”
Carly paid more in thank-yous and blushing than she would have in money for the sweet coffees and sprinkled doughnuts. She and Ada walked back through the crush of people, their eyes on the goal of the last two swivel stools at the window. The line was from the counter to the door, packed with Friday-charged students and a few adults.
A boy from her class stepped clear of a knot of other kids in the middle of the line. His name was Dylan and Carly had hated him since the third grade. Dread pulled down on her stomach, even as her heart sped up to pounding. Dylan had his phone pointed toward her, tracking her, recording.
“Oh, look! It’s the famous Carly, gettin’ free eats. Maybe we can catch her doing something awe-some. C’mon, Carly, do something awe-some.”
Carly could handle the tickling curious looks from regular people, but the bully’s spotlight pressed hard. Dylan wasn’t the beat-you-up kind of scary. He was just mean. And he was on all the time. Ready constantly. A real asshole. She wanted to say it, to give him the finger and coolly walk out. She daydreamed the scene right where she stood, with Ada and everyone else looking at her, waiting for their cues. She imagined rolling right out the door and leaving Dylan to deal with the drag of half the crowd’s expectant attention and the air-sucking awkwardness of the other half who were averting their eyes.
But the load was all hers. She owned the hope of everyone pretending they weren’t leaning in for the payoff—either a sad story for them to tell in school next week about the poor picked-on girl, or a triumphant one about the whip-snap burn served up by the one who didn’t care at all about a reject like Dylan Davis.