by J D Ventura
“Why did you tell her that shit about the wall? If the leadership finds out about that, you could be questioned, or worse. You’re playing with fire. You have to maintain your distance.”
“I’m doing my best, Marc. I didn’t want to invite her to the party, but Lu and Marcus had other plans. I also wanted her to steer clear of Marie and her people. Did you know she and Keith had them over for dinner? God knows how that went. They’re clearly sizing her up.”
“When his interrogation and erasure is done and the files decrypted, they’ll be reunited.”
“But, he’ll be a zombie, Marc. Surely there must be another way. I’m going to convince Lu it’s not our only option.”
“It’s been decided by the Council. Yes, Lu can override it. But she won’t and you need to leave it alone. When it’s all over, neither of them will remember any of this. The doctors will make sure of that. Lu has ordered she be brought in tonight. Orders are orders.”
“Well, Lu also ordered a work-up on her blood, so I’m going to take that as a positive sign.”
Claire’s torso was suddenly floating across the Halls’ front lawn. She couldn’t feel her feet. The adrenaline fought the Xanax and the result was a numbing, dreamlike retreat. Her body was panicking while her mind hummed with a soothing white noise that drowned out most of the fear. Once in the house, she floated up the stairs to her bedroom and sat down on the floor, trying to control her breathing. What in the fuck were they talking about? Am I experiencing auditory hallucinations? “He’ll be a zombie?” Sam? Are they talking about Sam? “…her blood?” My blood?
In the distance, she heard her cell phone ringing. Where is it? Did I leave it downstairs? In the kitchen, maybe? It took her nearly 30 seconds to realize it was in the front pocket of her jeans. Her hands felt as flimsy as wet cardboard. She pushed answer and put the device to her flush face.
“Hello?”
“Babe, it’s Sam.”
She swallowed the hitch in her throat and her eyes filled with tears.
“Sam, oh my God. I, thought you were calling tomorrow. It’s so good to hear your voice sweetheart. I need you to tell me you’re coming home this weekend, like you said. I’m going nuts. Weird shit is happening.”
“What weird shit? Tell me.”
“Just come home, please. I am too tired and confused to tell you over the phone. Please, Sam. Just come home.”
“You need to tell me what you’re talking about, Claire. You have me worried now. Tell me.”
There was something about the way he said “tell me” that sounded angry and impatient. It just didn’t sound like the man she knew. The off-key command fueled her already out-of-control paranoia. She sat in silence and didn’t say anything.
“Claire?”
“Sam, do you remember when we were in Paris?”
There was a pause. “Yes, of course.”
“Do you remember what I wrote inside the heart on the cab window, the night of that protest?”
“Claire, am I on a quiz show right now?”
“Answer the fucking question, Sam!”
“This is ridiculous. Okay. Let me try to remember. Um. You wrote ‘I love you.’”
Claire hung up the phone.
Chapter 11
Claire took Marcy’s taxi back to her SUV and, a few minutes later, she was merging onto the eastbound interstate. At one point, she looked down at the speedometer and she was driving nearly 100 miles per hour. If she could have taken a helicopter back to D.C. she would have. After the phone call with whoever-was-pretending-to-be-Sam, she called Jessica. She left a long, rambling message, complete with choking sobs, in which she declared herself utterly insane, unstable and in need of serious help. “I just hung up on someone pretending to be Sam! Call me back!” she had concluded. Within a few minutes, Jess had called back, and told Claire to come back to D.C. and stay with her. That everything would be fine. That things would get worked out. It was just what she needed to hear.
The rolling West Virginian hills gave way to more congested Virginia traffic. By the time she pulled into a parking space down the street from Jessica’s Capitol Hill apartment in Washington, D.C. she was so exhausted she couldn’t even parallel park the boxy Rover. She left it at an odd angle, with the vehicle’s back tire on the sidewalk. She grabbed her purse and walked the few blocks to Jessica’s brownstone.
Jessica must have spotted her approaching from behind the iron-bar-covered front bay window, because she was waiting for her at the top of the red stone stoop. She was wearing sweatpants and a “Georgetown University” tee shirt. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she was holding a mug of tea in her delicate hands. To Claire, she looked like an ambassador from the United Nations of Sanity.
Seeing her friend’s obvious disarray, she put the tea down at her feet and opened her arms wide. Claire accepted the hug as if it were a life preserver thrown from a rescue ship. “Thank you so much,” she said into Jessica’s ear. “You don’t know how much I need you right now.”
As distraught and emotionally fatigued as she was, Claire was still able to appreciate the beauty of Jessica’s home. One entire wall of her friend’s living room was exposed brick, on which a massive modern art piece hung, an explosion of blue and pink and yellow. A tinted-blue crystal vase on a silver plate contained a massive bouquet of yellow gladiolas, which served as the centerpiece atop a rounded glass and chrome dinette. From a high-gloss, rectangular coffee table the color of soot, Jessica picked up a red kettle she had on a black walnut trivet, and filled a clay mug with chai.
“Sit, sit,” said Jessica. “Let me take your bag.” Jessica took Claire’s purse and put it on the open kitchen’s gray quartz countertop. “Do you have a suitcase in the car?”
“I didn’t pack one,” Claire said, flopping onto the overstuffed sofa and dabbing her lower eye lids with the unbuttoned sleeves of her blouse. “Your house looks so pretty.”
Jessica pulled up a black leather cantilever chair she’d retrieved from the dining area and positioned it directly in front of Claire. She pulled it close to the sofa, so that when she sat in it, their knees were touching.
“Now, look at me,” she said to Claire, pinching her chin with her thumb and index finger and gently raising Claire’s downcast gaze. “Nick has the kid all weekend. I’ve cleared the decks. And you are going to tell me what in the fuck is going on with you?”
Claire willed her bottom lip to stop trembling. She inhaled deeply, opening her hands wide and moving them down her jeans before grabbing her knees and straightening her spine. She shook her head slightly from side to side, as if to wake herself from sleep, and looked directly into her friends imploring eyes.
If you tell her everything, Claire, she will think you’re certifiably insane. Maybe you are losing your mind. Maybe coming clean about all the chaos in your head is the only option left. Maybe you need help. Real psychological help. Is it possible both you and your husband are losing your minds together? Is that a thing? Claire realized she hadn’t responded to Jessica’s question. Instead, she began giggling uncontrollably.
“What’s so funny?” Jessica said, hesitantly smiling.
Claire’s giggles erupted to a full-on belly laugh. She lay back on the couch, holding her stomach and twisting her body from side to side. “I, I-”
“What? You what?”
Claire was gasping for breath, trying to compose herself to no avail. “I am totally losing my mind I think. Sam and I are going batshit crazy. Together!”
“That doesn’t seem very funny, Claire,” Jessica said plainly, which inspired anew Claire’s dwindling giggles. “Claire! You are freaking me out now. What is going on with you?”
“Oh, and I fell – actually, no, I fucking jumped, if I’m being honest – right off the wagon. Yippee!” Claire exclaimed with a squeak.
Claire cast her gaze away fr
om Jessica as a heavy silence filled the small space between them.
Jessica broke the silence with a resigning sigh. “Thank God. What are you having?”
Claire blushed, now allowing herself to make eye contact with Jessica again. “Wine. White. Californian.”
“You have pretty discerning tastes for a drunk,” Jessica said, as she got up and made her way into the kitchen.
Claire got up from the sofa and walked over to the bay window. You have to get that pregnancy test. Test! Test! Test! She parted the sheer drapes and inhaled deeply, like a diver preparing to leap. Outside the summer heat was almost visible. A city work crew was sweating in the wavy haze, patching a pothole on the opposite side of the street with clumpy black asphalt. A man in a business suit and an orange safety vest rode a red bike down the sidewalk, weaving around a young hipster couple, he, sporting a man bun, and she, a dandelion-covered sundress. Another man sat in a black sedan, intently reading a magazine.
“Here we are,” Jessica announced, setting a serving tray with two white wine glasses and a Sonoma Chardonnay on the coffee table. “Your truth serum has arrived, my dear.”
It was all Claire could do not to just grab the bottle and empty it with several hearty chugs. The first sip was as comforting as regaining your footing before an imminent fall down a steep staircase. Ah, this is what I need. A glass of chilled stability.
“So you got my message?” Claire was already nearly done with her first glass of wine.
They both sat side-by-side on the couch and Jessica, feigning a surprised look, refilled Claire’s glass. “Baby doll, that message made no sense. I mean, really, I was going to send the truck from the loony bin to go pick you up. For real. You sounded unhinged.”
“I don’t know where to begin, Jess,” Claire said, appreciating the alcohol’s first tickle of warmth up and down her tense shoulders and arms. “Sam left for work unexpectedly a few days ago, even though he was previously fired, or put on medical leave, and since he has been gone, really weird shit has been happening in my neighborhood.”
“You had said. Something about some kids chasing a dog? That doesn’t sound too weird to me, babe, right?”
“Yes, but then I called our neighborhood’s security guards and they chased them with a van and, and, fucking tased them, Jess, and threw them in the back of the van and, and then, just sped off.”
“Okay, that is a bit fucked up,” Jess said, pulling a pack of cigarettes, a tiny Bic lighter and a brass ashtray from a drawer in the coffee table. “Want one?”
“Um, I shouldn’t,” said Claire, reluctantly waving them away. Test! Test!
“Okay, so, totally devil’s advocate here, but I once saw these mall cops in Indiana beat the shit out of these teenage shoplifters,” offered Jessica, lighting her cigarette before turning her head to the right and reflexively blowing smoke up and out the side of her mouth. “That type of guy gets so bored. You know, they wanted to be real cops and they sit around all day nodding at pretty housewives like you-”
“Yes, but-”
“But nothing, Claire. So, listen, finally, these deputy dogs have, you know, like a mission, and they overreact. You know what I mean, they take the little power they have and they just take that to an unnecessary level. It happens all the time.” She inhaled deeply and then exhaled a large smoky cloud.“It’s all over YouTube.”
“I guess that’s possible,” said Claire, taking a deep pull of the secondhand smoke through her nose.
“Besides, you don’t know the back story, right? I mean, those kids are probably huge pains in the ass. And, for starters, they were trespassing. They’re lucky those guys didn’t call the real cops.”
“But then they drove them out to the woods,” said Claire. “A few miles from the development.”
“Probably just trying to scare them,” said Jessica dismissively.
“Okay, maybe, but what about the dog? The dog they had been chasing. I think I mentioned this in my message…”
“Did you?”
“They were chasing a dog, Jessica. A dog I had seen before in my neighborhood.”
“Okay, and?”
“That dog walked up to the guards, they touched it, and it just collapsed.”
“Maybe they taught it how to play dead,” said Jessica, pouring them both more wine before extinguishing her cigarette in the ashtray with a quick twist of her wrist.
“It didn’t look like a trick. I can’t explain it. I mean, it just lay there, and then one of them picked it up and put it in a plastic bag.”
Jessica was smiling now.
“You don’t believe me. See, this is why I think I’m going crazy.”
“I believe you, but, babe, maybe it was some kind of new-fangled doggie crate. I saw a guy the other day in the park with a fucking bulldog in a papoose around his neck. And how far away were you when you saw all of this, anyway?”
“A few hundred feet,” Claire mumbled, reexamining the memory as she nervously chewed on a hangnail on her index finger. “I was tired. And hungover.”
“Exactly!” Jessica exclaimed triumphantly, as if she had finally proven her point in front of a riveted jury.
The reasonable doubt Jessica was infusing into her thinking set off a chain reaction of skepticism in Claire’s mind. She wanted so desperately for Jess to be right. She craved the comforting normalcy logic promised to deliver. Maybe Sam just forgot about the details of Paris, because – hello Claire! – your husband has early-onset dementia. Maybe Stephanie and Marc weren’t talking about her and Sam. That’s what you get for eavesdropping, Claire!Claire allowed herself a relief-filled giggle. Jess laughed along with her.
“I love you, Jess,” Claire said, inhaling deeply, as if surfacing from the darkness of a deep dive. “God, I feel so much better.”
“Good, now, look, call Sam. He’s probably worried sick about you. You did hang up on him like a lunatic, because you thought he wasn’t your husband, if I’m remembering your crazy voicemail correctly. In a few days, you’ll see him and everything will make perfect sense. Okay?” Jessica poured the last of the white wine into their glasses. “If you want some privacy, babe, feel free to call him from the veranda.” The word was funny given her tiny balcony leading off the master bedroom. They both smiled.
“Thanks,” Claire said, as she scaled the single flight of oak stairs leading to the second floor. Jessica’s master suite was just to the left. A four-poster, mahogany canopy bed took up nearly the entire room. The piece was masculine, yet tamed by two feminine sheer swags, draped dreamily over the top of the coffee-colored frame, the posts of which were intentionally distressed. The bedding, right down to the collection of neatly arranged pillows, was a crisp, bleached white. A door leading to the en suite bathroom was off to the left. Claire caught her reflection in the mirror above the vanity and slowly approached it, as if greeting a stranger.
She barely recognized the woman staring back at her. Her hair was snarled and uncombed. The tee shirt she wore – some beachy print she’d bought on a cruise she and Sam had taken what felt like a century ago — was wrinkled and a bit too small. Absent any makeup, and slightly sunburnt, her face looked puffy and slept on. There were purplish half-circles under her eyes, which were bleary and bloodshot. Her visage was the epitome of stress and worry and she impulsively turned on the faucet and filled her cupped, trembling hands with cold water, which she splashed over her face. The gesture felt clarifying and almost baptismal. No more of this bullshit Claire! Time to be a big girl.
Claire opened the French doors leading out to the tiny balcony. The air was hot and thick, and the sounds and smells of the city assaulted her senses. For the first time since she’d left West Virginia, she pulled her cell phone from her pocket. She had five missed calls from Sam and two voicemails. In his messages, he sounded truly concerned. Before he even picked up, she felt a rush of blood to her cheeks.
Her behavior was, at best, embarrassing, and, at worst, psychotic.
As the phone rang in her ear, Claire fixated her gaze on a brownstone that had been converted into law offices across the street. A large second-floor window afforded an end-to-end view of a conference room. A woman, who looked to be about Claire’s age, was wearing a stylish white blouse and tight black A-line skirt and making a presentation to several suited men around a large, lacquered taupe-colored table. She looked poised and confident, pacing in front of an easel, to which she occasionally pointed. Her audience nodded in collective agreement, laughing at what Claire imagined was the cleverness of the presenter’s delivery. The woman looked happy and in control.
“Claire, what is going on? I have been worried sick about you,” said Sam, dispensing with any sort of greeting. “I almost drove home early I was so worried, but I called Stephanie and she said she’d check in on you and call me back. She just called me a few minutes ago and said she saw you getting into a taxi this morning? Where are you?”
Claire turned her back on the office scene and looked instead at her reflection in the glass patio doors, which were cloudy with road dirt. “I’m at Jess’s in D.C. I just needed to clear my head, Sam. The battery on my phone died. I didn’t mean to hang up on you. Then I got in the car-”
“Why did Stephanie say you took a cab?”
“It was so strange. The Rover wouldn’t start in town, but I didn’t want to wait for triple ‘A.’ It was getting dark, so I cabbed home and then back again. When I got back to the car, it started fine. Weird, right?”
Sam was silent.
“I know, it was probably stupid, driving it to D.C., Sam. But, I was lonely, I guess, and I needed to see Jessica and, well, here I am. I was thinking that maybe we could grab some dinner in the city tonight. You and me. Where do they have you staying? I could come to you. What do you think?”
He was silent again.
“Sam? Are you still there?”
“Babe, I have some bad news.”