by Jamie Mason
There wasn’t one. “It’s nice. Good. It looks big. Like it should be big.” Carly’s expression was tight in concentration. “Is it big?”
“It is, yeah.”
“It’s pretty. But is it weird that I like the other one better, even though it’s not as pretty?”
“No.” Marcelline covered her disappointment with more conversation. “But it’s interesting to know why. Can you tell me why?”
Carly shrugged. “I just don’t feel like I need to look at it for more than five seconds. Like after just a quick peek, I’m all done with it.”
Marcelline nodded. “What about this one?” She flipped to the other saved page and held her breath.
The biggest prize from the robbery of the Gardner Museum was a rare Vermeer, The Concert. When it was stolen, its value was marked at around $200 million. As a black-market trophy, it was almost hard to imagine what it could go for.
Carly bobbed her head, eyebrows up, alert. Marcelline’s heart slammed against her breastbone.
“Same. Yeah. It’s nice, but not as interesting as that other one.”
Marcelline pulled a breath down over the pressure in her throat.
Carly’s back went rigid. She pinched the fingertips of her right hand, massaging them unconsciously. “I’m sorry. Was that lame? Are these special and I missed something? Can I look again?”
Marcelline sagged. “No, honey. Not at all. I mean, yes, they’re special in that they’re works by famous artists, but you never need to apologize for your opinions. There’s no question that if you studied them, you could give a clever analysis. You’re a natural. I only wanted your basic reaction.” She swallowed a hard lump of guilt. It felt shitty to make Carly doubt herself, yanking on her budding confidence. “Please don’t worry. It wasn’t a trick que—” Marcelline shook her head and forced a smile. “There was no right answer. You’re fine. You did exactly what I asked of you.”
The three of them worked and read in companionable silence for nearly another hour. Marcelline stewed in feeling lousy and in doubt of everything she’d done since she’d left. She was sitting here manipulating a sweet kid because she was too chickenshit to figure out how to do what she’d claimed to want more than anything else in the world.
Carly clearly had never seen the other paintings. That didn’t mean anything. The Flinck was definitely in the footage of Carly’s house. A phantom itch skittered over Marcelline’s neck. She drew out her phone and angled it away from the girls and watched the video again. Just to touch base, to make sure she wasn’t crazy. Or not crazy like that, at least.
Later, in the stacks, Marcelline put back the art books they had taken out, but she withdrew, again, a single volume.
“Hey, Carly. One more. What do you think of this one?”
Carly came to stand with her. Her eyes swept over the page Marcelline held open. She had only known Carly a handful of days, but would swear the kid was taller than when she’d first found her. Growth spurt, in both height and art appreciation. Expanding in every dimension. Concentration was cute on her face, but also formidable. Carly could turn off the kid in her like a tap. Then she ran just pure can-do.
“Oh, wow! Yeah. We have that one at home—wait. Ha! No. It’s not the same. Wow, that’s weird. It looks so much like it. What is it?”
“Landscape with the Good Samaritan, by Rembrandt.”
“Huh. I wonder if he did the one we have at home? I mean, not the one, of course. It’s not fancy. It’s just something my mom likes. It was John’s, I think. But that’s funny. It looks a lot like that one.”
“Do you like it?”
Carly grinned and shrugged. “I still like the screaming one better.”
“Fair enough.” Marcelline smiled back, false and genuine both. Carly was adorable, and the Flinck had been mistaken for a Rembrandt landscape for centuries. It was the reason Isabella Stewart Gardner bought it in the first place, and possibly the reason the thieves had bothered with it at all.
The painting was at Carly’s house.
But Carly could not, would not, get hurt in this.
In the parking lot, as Marcelline unlocked her car, the girls moved past her, cheerfully lugging all the art supplies the few blocks back home. Each day after their time in the library, Marcelline had wanted to offer them a ride, wondered if they thought it was strange that she didn’t. They’d never mentioned it or looked put out. They didn’t again today.
But the risk. Marcelline couldn’t run into Jonathan by accident. She was too close already. The town wasn’t a tight knot, but it was still only a few miles in all directions. The chance of just bumping into him wasn’t zero. She’d played the scenario through, rehearsed what she might do if he’d shown up for some reason at the library. A big public place had its advantages. But getting caught on his street or idling in his driveway while his stepdaughter collected her things—no.
Ada was pulled off course by a woman walking a dog in front of the book drop.
Carly lingered and asked, “Is everything okay?”
This throwaway line was something people said more as filler than real inquiry. Like How are you?, your response was supposed to be Everything’s great. But not this time. Carly was asking the actual question.
“Absolutely,” Marcelline said.
“I just wanted to say thanks, in case we didn’t get to do this again.”
“We’ll get to do this again.”
“Okay. It’s just most grown-ups can’t do this kind of thing all the time. And your out-of-state plates . . .” Carly shifted the art case in her arms and put a toe up toward the bumper of Marcelline’s car. “I just don’t know what you do. You know, for a job or anything. I didn’t know if you can keep doing this with us, if this is something that can just keep going.”
The back of Marcelline’s neck went cold in the breeze. “I’ll be around. I’m enjoying the nonstop art party.”
“Me, too. Us, too. It’s been weird lately, you know, with the . . . Did you watch the video?”
A spike of alarm straightened Marcelline’s spine. She didn’t think Carly could have seen her at the table.
“I mean, it’s okay. Everybody has. And the first time you saw me, Dylan was making such a big deal about it, so I figured you had seen it at some point.”
“Yes, I saw it.”
Carly looked over at Ada, who had the dog on its back, leg pedaling from a belly scratch. “You know what the weird thing about movies and books is? You get all into it and it seems real, even though everything that happens is crazy different than regular life—but then it just ends. They never explain how anybody just does their usual stuff again after the aliens leave or the monster gets killed, or . . .” Carly stared past Marcelline’s shoulder. “Or the bad guy gets stopped. They never show how it goes back to normal.”
“I guess that’s not the part everyone finds interesting.”
“Unless you’re one of those people in real life. I’d think it was interesting.” Carly looked at Marcelline’s scar with open curiosity.
“You’ll get back to normal,” Marcelline said.
“Did you?”
The question crackled in the air. Carly couldn’t possibly know what she was asking, but Marcelline had the uncanny feeling that, on some level, somehow she did.
Carly didn’t yet understand how far from normal that video had taken her, or that it had brought the two of them together on this sidewalk outside the library. Her stepfather’s shadow covered both the video that had turned Carly’s life upside down and the scar that had spurred her to ask that incredibly intimate question.
Carly didn’t know that the turn back to everyone’s normal was still well ahead of them.
But what Marcelline knew about Carly’s circumstances and near future made sense. What Carly understood about Marcelline’s was pure dialed-in attention.
“Normal? I don’t know,” she said, and thought of years’ worth of nights spent sketching and drinking and clicking through the intern
et. Carly had been just as unreal to her, just as out of reach on the screen as her own family was. But Carly was here now, right in front of her. Carly was real. So was she. The sun warmed the space between her shoulder blades. “It’s there if I want it enough.”
Carly opened her mouth to ask more. She was about to go full geyser with questions, but Marcelline shook her head. “Not now.” They left it at a shared smile.
“Carly! Let’s go!” Ada called.
In the car, Marcelline typed fast into her phone, hitting send before she could talk herself out of it. S, I’m going to get it. This is going to work.
The car was too hot. Marcelline started the engine. Her phone finally lit up.
I don’t know what to wish for you. Maybe just that there was another way. But no matter what, just get back to one of your lives alive, please. And call me when you can.
A tear splashed the glass of Marcelline’s phone. She wiped it against the leg of her jeans. She put the car into drive and pulled out of the library parking lot.
• • •
She’d wanted a swim, to cool down to the temperature of the water and let it block her ears and turn everything a shimmering blue for a while. She wanted to exhaust herself with laps so there would be no fighting sleep afterward.
She checked the clock.
It wasn’t too late in the day to do something. Confront him. Or don’t. Blow up Carly’s life. Or don’t. She’d already made the vow to get on with it to Samantha. But S would only cheer if she broke it.
Tomorrow. She would swim, sleep, then do something tomorrow.
Her YMCA membership was good for a dozen guest passes to the facilities here. She’d walked over from her hotel on her first night in town and had been back every night since. The gym was nothing special, but the pool was brand-new and glorious.
Memory is a weird thing. Marcelline had been preoccupied with the nagging uncertainty that the picture of Jonathan in her mind wasn’t accurate. The placeholder for his face in her plans was fuzzy and generic.
The mechanisms of recall are mysterious, even to science.
In the parking lot of the Y, a skinny man with his hair rucked up at the back of his head, as if he’d slept on it wet, was crouching in front of a red sedan. It was a strange thing to do. He reached out, set something on the curb, then straightened up quickly. He swept the parking lot with an exaggerated swivel of his head and shoulders. Everything about him was begging not to be seen.
Marcelline froze behind the wheel to keep from drawing his notice. Then froze again from the inside out.
Some things were completely clear in her memory from that night. If she cast back for it, she could still feel the sickening hot tickle of blood sliding backward over her scalp, not like liquid but like a feverish finger tracing the base of her skull, a thin snake parting her hair like grass. She’d felt herself weakening. As if she’d been pinned to the earth. Heavy. Then heavier. Then pulled motionless against the ground, metal to magnet.
The one thing she remembered without a doubt was amazement—Jonathan, kneeling beside her, then looking over his shoulder, calling back to the shooter in an angry whisper:
For fuck’s sake, Roy! Get the hell out of here!
For all the worry that she would not recognize the man she’d seen in broad daylight, the man whom she’d vaulted her good reputation for, whom she’d slept with and stood next to at the most ill-advised betrayal of her common sense in her entire life, it was with all the wrenching brilliance of being struck by lightning that she instantly recognized the man who shot her.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
* * *
Roy wanted a bottle of iced tea. But if he bought a scratch-off lottery ticket instead, and if it paid out even $5, he could get the tea and put a gallon of gas in the Explorer. He stood at the door to the refrigerator case, not letting his focus fall on any particular flavor in case it would tip the craving over into a decision before he was ready.
His pay had been docked for leaving equipment out. The stuff hadn’t been stolen, but it was a lesson. That’s what they’d said, a lesson because they’d told him before to make sure everything got put away. So the $40 John had given him instead of a beating hadn’t lasted. He hated to bother him again, and especially so soon. But John had missed the six o’clock check-in.
If Roy got the lottery ticket and it didn’t pay, he still had an empty tea bottle in the truck that he could fill with water from the tap in the bathroom. It wouldn’t be as good as tea, but it would be okay. And he probably had enough gas for tomorrow. Maybe.
He left the wall of cold drinks and walked over to the colorful spools of scratch games to see if it felt lucky. The woolly-bearded cashier scowled and tracked him across the room.
The bell on the push bar of the door clanged as someone came in, and in a storewide reaction to the jangle, the new customer took all the eyes off Roy. The cashier looked over to the door. The sneering pockmarked guy with the knit cap who was keeping the cashier company looked over, too. The only other shopper, a guy in workman’s coveralls, with a can of WD-40 in his hand, glanced up from the row of air fresheners shaped like Christmas trees. The waitress who was always there, running the half dozen diner tables, turned to see who had come in and what it might mean for her.
Roy didn’t look. He just enjoyed a moment of everyone’s attention being elsewhere.
He was in here all the time and had never shoplifted so much as a candy bar, but they always watched him as if they were sure that their staring at him was the only reason he hadn’t. When he had money, he filled his gas tank here, and he sank quarters into the laundromat attached to the store, and he ate in the diner whenever he could. They made really good tuna salad. He always told the waitress so. Sometimes he bought scratch tickets, and whenever he won anything, he went straight to their aisles and spent that money here, too. But it didn’t get him anywhere with the staff.
He turned his back to the room and studied the tickets. He was going to get one, he’d decided.
Someone came up and stood beside him. Roy stepped to the left to let them see the rack of lottery choices. In his peripheral vision, he could see it was a woman, almost as tall as him. He edged a little farther away to give her more space.
But she turned to face him and leaned in. “If I screamed that you tried to kill me, do you think you could make it to the door before they tackled you?”
That she’d spoken to him at all startled him out of truly taking in what she’d said. For the most part. Some of the words had gotten straight through. Scream. Kill. Tackle. And you. A yammering terror collapsed his throat, and his heart was floundering in arcs as if it had gotten loose in his chest.
“What?” He looked at her and felt the breath and bones go out of him before he’d consciously connected this woman with a solid memory. It was bad. There was only one thing that bad. Oh, God.
Her voice was low and shaking. Her whole body was shaking.
“I said, do you think you can get past them? How many hero types are between you and the door if I scream?”
He’d seen her only one time, or really two times in one night. He’d watched her from where Jonathan had told him to wait, hidden from view of the open lot where he was supposed to go once everyone got there. She had strode up the sidewalk right past him, hands shoved into the pockets of her long, flowing coat, her boot heels striking the concrete like a metronome, even and solid. She was glowing. Drawn straight and tight as a bowstring.
She was the kind of person you couldn’t help but look at. Everything going crazy didn’t change that. She’d whirled to the clamor that Roy started, those first shots a mistake, a complete surprise to everyone, including Roy. Her coat flared out around her in the turn; the streetlight ran a halo over her shiny cap of hair; her surprised expression lit up and fell into shadow as she moved.
The aim follows the eyes. He hadn’t meant to do it.
Her hair was long now. She was wearing regular clothes. Her face was rounder, but her
jaw tapered away at the right side, uneven. The edge of a thick, pitted scar twisted up her neck and disappeared into the curtain of her hair.
Roy’s eyes burned. She’d spoken quietly, but he had only enough air in him for a whisper. “I’m so sorry. So sorry.”
Her face trembled with rage. “Don’t you fucking dare. If you say sorry again to me, I will scream and say anything it takes to make them beat you to death right here.”
The cashier called out to them. “Everything okay, ma’am?”
She stared into Roy, fighting to keep her shoulders from heaving with her shuddering breaths, quaking. John had told Roy that he’d killed her. This should be better. It was better. And it was breaking him. He thought his throat would tear from the cry trying to come up over top of the breath that was trying to go down.
“I’ll do whatever,” he whispered.
The woman glanced back at the cashier. “Yes. It’s fine.” She turned back to Roy. He couldn’t stand her looking at him. He wanted to die. “We know each other,” she called over her shoulder.
The woman scanned the layout of the little store. “We’ll go sit down.”
Roy waited to follow her over, but she didn’t move from facing him. With a furious double tick of her head toward the diner, he felt stupid. Of course she’d never turn her back on him.
That was new and awful. No one trusted him to get things right. In this place they didn’t even trust him not to steal. But no one had ever been afraid of him before. He had to go first so she could keep watch on him. It felt strange to lead the way.
“Wait. Give me your keys.”
Dozens of times a day, Roy patted his pocket for his keys with an irrational lurch of terror that somehow they wouldn’t be where they were since the last time he’d panic-checked. The loaded truck was literally all he had. But he handed this woman his keys without hesitation.
The waitress came over, one eyebrow already high with skepticism. She looked between Roy and the woman, back and forth more times than could be mistaken for anything other than making a point. She wasn’t buying it, whatever it was that was happening here, and she wanted them to know it from the outset.