by Andrea Bartz
A tear slid down her cheek and I took a step toward her. “Mikki, I haven’t told you how sorry I am. About everything, but especially about Cameron. I barely knew him, obviously, and I had no idea you two were so close. It’s … a lot.” I reached my arms out for a hug and her shoulders jumped reflexively, one hand jerking toward the big orange lamp on her desk. I looked at it and her fingers retreated; stiffly, she let me hug her.
“I’m gonna go call a car, okay?” I said, and she stared blankly for a moment before nodding. She didn’t move, so I turned toward the door. A few steps later my eyes fell on the craft organizer hanging from her closet door. I saw them all clustered in one pocket, like a deadly bouquet—shiny and sharp, the same tool I’d often seen in her overstuffed backpack on account of all the careful photo cutting she was doing. My chest turned to cold steel, and before I knew what I was doing, I reached out and touched the cap of one, the X-Acto knife’s blade glistening below it.
“Oh my God,” I said. “It was never a scalpel.”
Behind me, a heavy scraping sound. “You don’t understand. If you’d been there you’d understand.”
Scorching heat on the back of my head, then a plummeting sensation. My legs gave out and the floor rammed my kneecaps.
I twisted around and Mikki was murky, swirling, something huge in her hands, round and orange as a pumpkin. I was moving in slow motion, my head drifting backward like I was doing a trust fall.
“I didn’t know it was in my hand,” she was saying. “We were the last ones there, and—and she’d told me about the acquisition and I couldn’t stand it any longer, I said, ‘You know you stole the idea from me.’ And she said, ‘But Mikki, it doesn’t matter. Because I’m the founder, and you’re not.’ ”
Falling, falling, downward, downward, down. My tongue and lips and teeth collaborated, just for a moment: “Fuck you.”
“It was an instinct, it was like in krav maga. Like I was trying to block a blow. I shot my hand forward and it wasn’t until—I didn’t realize until …”
Another sunburst as I crashed to the floor, wooden slats bouncing against my skull. A momentary humming noise, and then, finally, blackness.
CHAPTER 25
Hana
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 10:10 P.M.
Mannheim Steamroller blasted through the taxi’s speakers, each synthesized note like a personal jackhammer to my brain. It’d been four or five years since Cameron came out of rehab, a posh treatment center in Arizona, and as far as we knew, he hadn’t touched an opioid since. The news wobbled through my torso, prickling with pressure.
Had Daniel heard the news? I reread his email to me, the one with Mikki’s pathetic cease-and-desist letter. How hugely, devastatingly sad. Overlooked by her group of friends, betrayed by her best friend, and now abandoned by her secret lover, who crossed a border to try to kill himself in peace.
I spotted a new email from a publicist friend, one I’d worked with years before: “So sorry to hear the news about your friend Eleanor. Let us know when the memorial service will be. You’ve probably already seen this, but I just saw it on Twitter—thought you’d want a heads-up.”
She’d linked to a trashy gossip site that made the Gaze look like the Times. I followed the link, then felt a blast of heady nausea: EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: SEE THE EXACT MOMENT ELEANOR WALSH’S BODY WAS FOUND.
It started automatically—a cell-phone video, shaky and pulsing in and out of focus. Three figures in a bright window. Us. That Friday night, as a drum corps chopped the air on the street below, someone in a nearby building had lifted his lens and focused on the three women—Katie, Mikki, me—silhouetted across the way. The video zoomed in and I watched, rapt, as this small outline of me lifted her phone and pressed it against the glass, then said something, then tapped at the phone. Katie responded, and then the miniature me whirled around and disappeared into the light.
“I’m gonna see if I can get it from the roof,” I’d said, clomping toward the staircase. And that was where my perspective, my eyes on the two women in the window, faded out.
But now, on my phone’s greasy screen, I could see it all. I could see how Mikki’s hand shot to her mouth, how her shoulders tensed before she turned around and took a few furtive steps after me. How Katie had kept her forehead near the window’s coolness, delighted, enchanted, distracted, while Mikki shifted on the balls of her feet, staring toward the staircase, both hands clenched near her mouth.
And then the camera canted upward, dizzily, too zoomed-in for a huge maneuver, and found me picking my way across the roof.
Fingers shaking, I closed the video and called Mikki. Straight to voicemail. To the right, a sign rolled past the window: LAST EXIT BEFORE TOLL.
“Take the exit!” I yelled, so loud it spooked even me. “We’re going back to Greenpoint.”
I thrust a fistful of bills at the driver and hurtled up Mikki’s stoop. I leaned on the buzzer the way a bored cabbie leans on the horn: absurdly, forlornly, relentlessly.
“Jesus! Who is it?”
“It’s Hana. Let me up.”
“I was sleeping. Did you forget something too?”
“Let me up.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Mikki, I know you knew Eleanor was on the roof.” I leaned into the speaker, listened to her Darth Vader breath. “Why are you covering for Cameron?”
Sobs, splintered and crackly through the intercom. “Just let me go to sleep, Hana. Just let me be.”
“Let me up or I’m calling Ratliff.”
More crying, and then next to me, so loudly I jumped, the screeeeeeh of the door unlocking.
Mikki peeled the door open gingerly. A dim lamp cast shadows into the corners, and everything else—the hallway, the TV, the air around us—was waiting and dark. She had a hoodie on over her pajamas, and her eyes were swollen and squinty, two pale pieces of puffed rice.
“Mikki, it’s okay.”
She stuffed her hands into the front pocket of her sweatshirt and flopped onto the couch. On the coffee table, a lighter, pipe, and small mess of weed sat in a jumbled pile.
I perched on the sofa. “Just talk to me! I don’t want to get you in trouble. I wanna help you.”
She took a long, unsteady breath. “How did you know?”
I held out my phone. “This video. I saw how you didn’t want me up on the roof.”
Wind yanked at the windows as she watched it. Finally she pressed the screen against her knee and closed her eyes. “I didn’t do it.”
“But you knew she was there.”
“Can we talk about this tomorrow?”
“Mikki.”
She swiped at a tear. “I don’t know why I helped him.”
I waited. Her heater clanged, as if it, too, were growing impatient.
“He called and told me what he’d done.” She dragged her sleeve against her nose. “He said he was going to turn off the lights and lock all the doors. And that he’d go into the janitor’s closet and get out all the cleaning supplies, not let the blood get onto anything it could stain. I said I’d be right there.”
Say no to Cameron, Mikki, I pleaded silently, like she could change how the story ended. Tell Cameron to fuck off. “Why?”
She turned. “Why, what?”
“Why did you go to him?”
Mikki frowned. “I don’t know. He knew about the Jinny situation, obviously. And we were—we talked every single day. When we saw each other, it was … electric. We never talked about trying to turn it into a real relationship or anything, but …” She shrugged. “Love makes you do crazy things.”
She wiped both eyes at once, then looked at the tears glistening on her index fingers. “When I got there, Cameron was calm. He’d been thinking. He said we couldn’t take her out of the building, because someone would see us carrying her. It was the beginning of that cold snap, so he had the idea of hiding her on the roof until we could come back in the middle of the night and get rid of her.”
Somethin
g surged up my throat, acidic and foul, but I kept listening.
“He carried her upstairs and left her behind the stack of lawn chairs. I helped him clean. He kept saying we just needed to buy enough time that no one would look there until a bunch of other people had passed the spot. But of course, there was still the issue of everyone looking for her. She had that presentation the next day.”
I gripped my fists under my chin, thumbs digging into my windpipe. No, no, no, no. Mikki’s face softened. “But Cameron had an idea. Apparently she’d come to him with questions about getting a fake passport. So he knew she was hiding something too. We got out her phone, and it’s turned on by face recognition, right? So Cameron ran back to the roof and, and held it up to unlock it.” Her eyebrows flashed. “We were shocked to find all this stuff about moving to Mexico. It felt like a gift from God. If we could just make her seem alive while people noticed that, we’d be in the clear.”
She was quiet long enough that I cleared my throat. Mikki had accessed all of Eleanor’s plans for escaping to Mexico—this was unfathomable, but it was my one shot, my chance to ask what I couldn’t ask Eleanor herself. “Did she say why she wanted to leave? Was it the blackmail—she thought she was close to being ratted out?”
Mikki stared at me, her eyes stony but small muscles contracting around her nose and mouth.
“I don’t know. She didn’t say. I don’t know why Eleanor did anything she did.” Mikki spoke faster now, like she was eager to get the rest over with. “You know how this ends. Cameron sent out a few emails and texts from her phone the next day. And then when it was clear you and Katie were onto her, had figured out her Mexico plans, Cameron sent that final email from her laptop. We still had no plan for the body, though. Our luck was up on the security cameras: I asked a lot of questions and learned they were back up and running.”
“Oh, Mikki.” The air around us was charged, staticky with the knowledge that this was the very last time things would be okay. Could she feel it too?
“Then once you found her, I was taking it an hour at a time. And I was grieving—it was almost like I’d convinced myself she really was in Mexico, before that. When the Walshes invited us to Beverly for Christmas, I thought getting away from New York could be good—plus I could check on Cameron, make sure he was solid. But seeing Gary and Karen was awful. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking.”
We sat like that for a second. The heater hissed.
“You need to tell Ratliff,” I said. “I’ll come with you—we’ll tell them everything. It won’t be so bad if you’re cooperative, if you’re a witness for the prosecution.” With a prickle of fear, I realized she’d slipped my phone from her lap down under her thigh, out of reach.
“But Cameron’s gone—there’s no way for me to prove it was him. There’s no point.” I thought I heard a thunk from the hallway and we both glanced that way. It was too cold and too late and too dark; the night was careening away from me.
I leaned forward. “Mikki, they found Cameron. In Canada. Gary just called me.”
“No.”
“It’s true. He’s in custody.”
Another thunk and I sat up, twisting my trunk, then turned back in time to see Mikki’s hand emerging from the pocket of her hoodie.
Her movement was so swift, so precise, it was as if she’d been practicing for this moment. A little “hah!” escaped from her lungs as her arm shot forward, then hard pressure on my lower-right ribs. My chin swung down to take it in: The entire blade swallowed by the flesh below my bra. Blood oozing out around it like wine soaking into a tablecloth. I thought, oddly, of Mom, the cancer in her breast, scalpels rooting around for the poisoned tissue.
A second passed, then another, and then, with the brutality of a stampede, sudden, epic pain. The last thing I noticed was Mikki’s knuckles, still wrapped around the X-Acto knife’s handle.
CHAPTER 26
Katie
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 10:25 P.M.
An earthquake.
I kept my eyes closed because the earth was shaking, tectonic plates shifting and I couldn’t let the ceiling fall in on me, or slip into a crevasse and let the ground swallow me whole. I squeezed them shut and then had an idea:
Open them.
The earth wasn’t shaking: I was. I was in the fetal position and my hands in front of my face were an odd color, orangey white. I couldn’t get a good look because they were quivering, and my head, too, my vision, nothing but shakes.
I tried to loll my head back and something burned the back of my skull, a branding iron, and through my shuddering jaw I moaned. I tried to sit up, failed. Banged my cheek back down on the iron below me.
Iron—iron bars, below and in front of me. I looked beyond them and made out a wall of brick a few feet away, spotlit in the dark by the same orange glow. My logic kicked in, stitched the world together: I was outside in the freezing cold, without a jacket. I was … it came together, a pouncing revelation, I was on Mikki’s fire escape, the one I’d seen in her bedroom, dumped and left to die. Why was I out here? Why did my head … she’d hit me, right? I tried moving my neck again and found the white-hot patch.
I had to think. Thinking was hard, slow, thick, thoughts like crankcase oil in a freezing cold engine. The first order of business was warming up. I needed to get inside. I ordered my hands to collect under me and was alarmed when they only half obliged. I wrenched open my chattering jaw and tried to scream, but what came out was a dry rasp, a white cloud, there and then gone. My heat—warmth from the inside, from my lungs, I needed to conserve it.
Roll call: Knees? Present. I awkwardly army crawled across the cold iron until my shoulder hit the window. I tried to look inside: darkness, the door between her bedroom and hallway closed. I rocked away and then slammed against the glass, once, twice, explosions of pain and the knowledge this would never work—it wouldn’t open it, wouldn’t attract attention, nobody would hear it in the cold with their windows sealed so tight, if only it were summer, in summer people are—
Focus. I was four floors up. Too many to jump, and in this state, my arms and legs shaking so violently I couldn’t see straight, I wouldn’t make it down three ladders. I wanted to cry, to scream, let the shaking overcome me and roll me right off the side.
One floor: I only had to go one floor to be on someone else’s fire escape. I closed my eyes for a moment, listening to my own gasping breath, to the pounding of blood in my ears. I heard distant Christmas music, the honk of a horn. I said a silent prayer, and then I moved.
I made it down two rungs before my hands, stiff like Barbie’s, failed me and I fell hard onto my tailbone. The impact jolted me but didn’t hurt, and in a faraway, filmy way I knew this wasn’t good, this indicated something bad. I stared at the stars overhead, a few visible even here in our huge city, with all its light pollution and pollution-pollution and people, people are garbage, there’s so much garbage in the city streets, it flies up from the sidewalk and smacks into you when you—
A strange scraping sound. “Are you okay?” It was a girl’s voice, a kid or maybe a teenager, and it took me a moment to realize that since it was a question, I was supposed to answer.
“Eeugh.” I wasn’t sure what I meant, but that’s what came out. I heard her gasp and step away from the window and I started to cry, please don’t leave me, please stay and—
“Yes, hello, there’s a woman on our fire escape, it appears she fell coming down and she’s not wearing a coat, she’s shaking pretty violently, she could be—ma’am, are you drunk? Are you okay?” It was a woman’s voice, an adult, and she appeared above me with a phone pressed to her ear, and I pointed a shaking hand at the back of my head, sucked cold air into my lungs, and said the one word I’d been unable to utter for months: “Help.”
The woman and her daughter brought me inside and spread me on the floor with a blanket over my body and a pillow under my head. The shaking intensified as heat worked its way back into my limbs, firecrackers f
rom the inside, heat and light. My brain still felt sludgy, logy, slow. I heard sirens warbling through the night and for the first time in months, I didn’t tense, didn’t summon Chris and with her a rushing meteor of shame and heartbreak. I was grateful for them. Eager to get to the hospital. Then I could tell—
The EMTs arrived and none of them would listen, none could hear what I was trying to tell them. I kept pointing at the ceiling and they kept tucking my hand back under the blanket. Finally I sat up and touched the back of my head, the wound there, flinching.
“Mikki, upstairs, the apartment right above this one—she did this,” I said. “You need to get her now—I think she killed my friend.”
But EMTs aren’t cops and so they told me they’d send the nearest squad car, and it arrived, lights flashing, right as they were lifting me in a gurney into the back of the ambulance. They’d strapped me down and had just slammed the doors when there was more commotion, shouting, walkie-talkies crunching and snapping and medics hustling back outside. The woman from upstairs was going to ride with me—my angel, her name was Sue, I never did see her again—and she saw the alarm in my face and said she’d try to figure out what was going on.
The ambulance door flew open and they were lifting a second body into it, a stranger, who the hell was this? I watched as the body, unfamiliar, foreign, was locked into place next to me.
And then it was like the big twist in a movie, the huge reveal, the unfathomable surprise, the bombshell that leaves you almost elated with its unexpectedness, how everything you thought you knew was wrong.
It wasn’t just a body. It was Hana.
CHAPTER 27
Hana
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25, 6:51 A.M.
In my mind, Katie had gotten older just three times in her life, time standing still and then bounding forward in great leaps: once while I was a teenager in California, another while she was in college at NYU, and then finally while she was in Kalamazoo helping Mom. During those periods, the Disney-like spell had lifted, months could pass, and when I saw her again she looked different, older, more mature. The rest of the time, everything about her stayed the same, as if the ravages of radiation and worry and other things that left us pockmarked with each passing day didn’t apply to her.