Tuesday Mooney Wore Black

by Kate Racculia

  Tuesday nodded. She stood. Stepped over Nathaniel’s outstretched legs, resisted the urge to clock him in the mouth with her elbow. The world was water. She was slow and far away. Mo brought her a cardboard box from the copy room. One of her coworkers popped her head out of her cube. Her face asked What’s going on? and Tuesday’s face answered Exactly what it looks like. Into the box went her mug, her headphones. Her fuzzy leopard slippers. The Christmas photo of Ollie and Viv and Olive. The packet of Spam. The six pairs of shoes fornicating under her desk.

  Pryce’s obit.

  She put on her scarf and her coat. She nodded at June and the woman from HR. She could see Nathaniel Arches through the glass front of Mo’s office, leaning forward, elbows on knees, smiling with his eyes closed, like he was listening to a sublime piece of music.

  Mo walked with her through the building’s lobby. Tuesday couldn’t look at her until they reached the revolving glass door. By then, Mo’s eyes were wet. Whether they were tears of anger or sadness, and directed at whom, Tuesday didn’t know.

  “Mo,” she said. “I’m so—”

  Mo closed her eyes. “It was great. It was great research,” she said. “I knew it was you. I could tell right away; no one else uses that many semicolons.” She shook her head. “That was so dumb. So dumb, Tuesday. You know how dumb that was, don’t you? For someone so fucking smart, how could you have been so dumb?”

  “I know,” said Tuesday. “I know.”

  “Don’t do anything dumber,” said Mo. “Now get out of here.” She dropped her eyes to the polished marble of the lobby’s floor. “Go on. Scram.”

  Tuesday hitched the box in her arms.

  Her legs didn’t feel like legs.

  “How much?” she asked.

  “How much what?” said Mo.

  “How much did he pay,” she asked, “to get me fired?”

  Mo was gray, the color of heavy clouds. “You got yourself fired,” she said quietly. “And he watched for free.” Sudden, intense pressure rose up Tuesday’s neck, flooding her face, pinching her temples. Tuesday’s heart beat on either side of her throat. And Tuesday thought – how – how stupid she was to think she was worth anything at all. She pushed herself through the revolving door – with a box, so stupid, everything she did was stupid and worthless – and outside the day was crisp and sunny, the sort of perfect fall day she would usually spend taking a long walk to the North End for lunch.

  Tuesday was neither ice nor fire. She was numb.

  She made it as far as the little park just outside the building’s entrance.

  She set her box down on a bench and sat beside it.

  And sat.

  And breathed.

  The park was empty except for the pigeons, the tough city birds – aggressive, bedraggled – that made it their home. She watched them flap around the feet of the benches, scrapping among cigarette butts for the last crumbs of the morning’s muffins and donuts. Rats of the skies, Dex called them.

  Oh God, her parents. Her brother. She was going to have to tell people she’d lost her job. No, not lost – it wasn’t like she’d misplaced it, been let go, downsized with severance; she had behaved unethically and had thought she could get away with it. (Had she thought about it at all?) But she had been caught and fired. She deserved it. She truly did – even for her actual job, it was illegal to look at Nathaniel’s medical records for any reason other than to confirm he’d been a patient. It was illegal to confirm, to write up, and to share with someone outside the hospital that he’d had extensive plastic surgery. She had violated his privacy. It didn’t matter that he was an asshole. She was, in this situation, an asshole too.

  The shame was sour and cold, and she was sore with it.

  Could you collect unemployment if you’d been fired? She had savings, enough for a few months’ expenses, but was she burned, tarred, marked now? Could Mo give her a reference? She had no master’s degree, had a history BA, a minor in film studies, a ten-year meandering career writing, editing, researching, analyzing. She could get another job. Any job. She could buy her own insurance, thank you, Massachusetts. Shit. What about Christmas? Christmas was coming. Oh shit, what if she had to move back in with her parents – what if she had to work at the store – and she still had so many goddamn loans—

  She put her head between her knees. She was not going to faint. No she was not.

  Archie.

  She sat up. Pulled her phone out of her bag and texted him. Her hands were sweaty.

  Archie what the hell happened?

  Are you ok?

  Call me

  How? How had Archie been so careless? Careless enough to give Nathaniel Arches the means, motive, and opportunity to kneecap and humiliate her, just because Nathaniel wanted to and just because Nathaniel could?

  He didn’t respond.

  Archie, she texted again.

  She had tapped, this is an emergen, when she heard a throat clearing.

  She looked up. Nathaniel Arches was standing over her, red-knuckled fist to his mouth as he cleared his throat again.

  Before that day, Tuesday hadn’t realized there were so many distinct stages of shock. She’d felt cold fear. She’d felt loose, disconnected shame. Now she was – she didn’t know what she was, only that her hands were shaking so hard she could barely hold her phone. Which was silent.

  Because Archie wasn’t texting her back.

  “You never called,” Nathaniel said.

  Tuesday didn’t respond.

  “It’s too late now,” he said. “I’ve decided to go in a different direction.”

  Archie wasn’t texting her back.

  She glared at him. Goading was the only power she had left.

  “Well.” Nathaniel smiled at her. “I wish you all the best in your future endeavors.” He walked toward a black town car idling at the same curb where he’d picked her up six days ago.

  Six days.

  She had wrecked her life in six days.

  Told you, said Abby. Told you this was how you died.

  Cold, thick and painful, poured across her shoulders.

  This was not how she died.

  No.

  She didn’t watch Nathaniel Arches go. She turned back to the little park instead. A ratty pigeon was sitting on the bench across from her. It cocked its head and cooed. It was a dumb bird, incapable of seeing humans as anything but droppers of food, but to be noticed at that moment, to be cooed at with what looked like tenderness, made a tiny bone inside Tuesday snap.

  Her last thought, as helpless as the tears that followed, was that she wanted to talk to Dex.

  It was the second time in her life she’d cried in public. The first time, she’d had more than a pigeon for an audience.

  She was in the final month of her sixteenth year. It was December, a week before Christmas break. The board in Mr. Mulrooney’s homeroom was festooned with silver tinsel, and an antique print of Ebenezer Scrooge humbugging his way down a London street was stapled to the bulletin board above the assignment calendar. Abby Hobbes had been missing for almost six months. Tuesday had been communicating with her regularly, with and without Ouija assistance, for almost two.

  It was a Wednesday. It was two weeks after Tuesday, failing to get any traction – or any response whatsoever – from the mysterious Detective Finch, had taken dramatic action. She had called the Salem PD multiple times, sent letters, identifying herself as a friend of Abigail Hobbes. She had some questions for Detective Finch. For school, she said, for a project, because she needed a reason that sounded more legitimate than because I got a hot tip from a dead girl. None of the messages she left with the desk sergeant and none of her letters were answered.

  You know what you have to do, said Abby.

  “Not exactly,” Tuesday answered. “But I know what you would do.”

  The police department was a neat brick building on Margin Street, almost brand new, about a ten-minute walk from her parents’ shop on Essex. It was a Saturday afternoon.
She’d worked, under duress – it was supposed to be Ollie’s day, but he had “something to do,” which meant “a session of Magic: The Gathering at Chip’s house that might yield a glimpse of Chip’s hot older sister Hallie, home for semester break.” As soon as Leon, the evening-shift guy, showed up, she bolted. Her entire plan was lifted from Mrs. Frankweiler’s infamous mixed-up files. She would hide in the bathroom until the police station closed for the night, then sneak into the detective’s office unnoticed.

  She did not realize that a police station never really closes. She’d been crouching on the toilet in the public women’s restroom, butt perched on the tank, one sneaker on either side of the horseshoe seat, calves cramping, for thirty minutes before she realized her mistake. She was going to have to improvise.

  Tuesday left the bathroom. Loitered in the hallway. Assessed the situation. She could see the front desk and the front door. On the other side of the desk was a hallway with a sign that she couldn’t quite read. The front door swung open and a disheveled-looking man, hair flying, patting down his pockets as if he’d already lost his keys, approached the front desk, muttering about goddamn parking tickets. The desk sergeant greeted him by name – “Hey DICK!” he said, laughing (because apparently even grown men found the word “dick” hilarious in any context) – and Tuesday moved. She slipped behind him – he was pretty tall, parking-ticket Dick – and down the hallway beyond. The sign, now that she was close, read RECORDS.

  Not a bad place to start.

  The door to the records office was locked. So there were parts of the police station that closed. She was surprisingly not nervous, even though she was definitely somewhere she shouldn’t be, doing something she shouldn’t be doing. She was excited. Excited almost to the point of laughing, and sort of pleasantly frustrated by the locked door. It was a challenge. It felt like a game. She wanted to win.

  She swung her backpack around her shoulder to her stomach and unzipped the front pocket. Her wallet was inside. What could she sacrifice? She decided on her Blockbuster Video card; her library card was too precious. The Blockbuster card was still new and stiff, perfect for doing that credit card trick. She slid it along the frame between the door and the jamb, brought it toward the knob, and wiggled.

  She could hear herself breathing.

  She was breathing too loud.

  Something in the latch caught, and she did laugh.

  Holy shit, said Abby, look what you did!

  “Hey—” said a voice behind her, quiet at first, and then, when the voice realized what it was seeing – a teenage girl breaking into the Salem PD records office with a Blockbuster Video card – it shouted “HEY!”

  But Tuesday was already gone.

  At that first, gentle hey, the fear and trepidation she should have been feeling all along exploded in her solar plexus. Adrenaline shrapneled through her and she ran. Her sneakers squeaked when she cornered into the front hall; her elbows, her knees, her heart pumped. She squeaked again by the front desk and threw the full weight of her body against the crash bar on the door, and if anyone had been on the other side, she would have pulverized them. But nothing got in her way. She escaped. She didn’t turn around as she ran straight up Margin Street because she was exposed – the street was open sidewalks and strip malls. She would be easy to follow if she were being followed – was she being followed? She didn’t have time to turn around and see. She ran and ran, all the way back to her parents’ store, to Mooney’s Miscellany, which seemed random at first, gasping for breath, holding herself upright on the postcard rack, sick, stomach-cramped, and panicked, until she realized some deep, lizard part of her brain had led her there to hide, had been too afraid to go straight home. A confrontation was already waiting. She had never gotten away at all.

  She’d left the Blockbuster card in the door.

  The store phone rang and Leon picked it up.

  “Yup.” She could barely hear him over the blood booming in her ears. “Yup. Yup.” He looked at her. “Yup.” Then he held out the receiver. “Yer ma,” he said.

  For a moment she thought she was going to throw up all over the floor of Mooney’s Miscellany. Instead, she fainted. Fainted dead, and took the postcard rack down with her.

  The consequences of her adventure, as her parents called it, were various and wide-reaching. She was grounded, for a start. “Immediately and without hope for parole,” her father said, and her mother said, “For at least two months. We’ll revisit for good behavior in February.” Her parents escorted her to the police station to apologize, and to explain herself, to none other than the infamous Detective Finch. Finch had been catching up on paperwork that Saturday and, irony of ironies, she had been the shouter, the very person who caught Tuesday in the act, who discovered the incriminating Blockbuster card. She wasn’t the cop who’d interviewed Tuesday over the summer, but she looked a little familiar – Tuesday might have seen her around Abby’s house, talking to Fred, after. Mostly she looked pissed. She was short and stocky. Her cheeks had a permanent flush and some freckles, her nose was perky, her eyes very blue. She looked like an angry leprechaun. Tuesday figured she’d have to be pretty tough to be that short and that cute, not to mention that female, and still be a detective.

  “Hello,” she said to Tuesday. They were sitting in a room next to the chief’s office. It was probably his special interview room, for when he needed to shake down people like politicians. It was way cozier than Tuesday had been expecting. The carpet was squishy and blue, the drapes were bright red and fancy, like bunting, and there were three framed seals on the wall. The middle seal was the Salem police insignia: an outline of a witch on a broom flying across a crescent moon, the founding year 1626, the words THE WITH CITY. The table was so shiny she could see herself in it.

  “Hi,” she said, looking at her reflection.

  “Please look at me,” said Detective Finch, and Tuesday looked up and murmured sorry.

  “Sorry doesn’t get either of us anywhere,” she said. “An explanation does. What were you doing?” She didn’t sound as pissed as she looked; she sounded concerned, curious, like she wanted to help. Maybe she always looked pissed no matter what she felt. Maybe her face couldn’t help it.

  “I was trying to – find information. A record on Abby. Abigail Hobbes.” Tuesday tucked her hair behind her ears. This room made her feel like a little kid.

  “Your friend. I bet it’s been hard. I bet it’s been very, very hard to lose a friend like that.” Detective Finch sounded positively nice. “Has it been hard to feel okay? To feel like yourself, since?”

  Tuesday nodded. She felt her mother’s hand on her back.

  She wasn’t going to cry. She took a breath.

  “Abby’s dead,” she said. “She was murdered.”

  Detective Finch was still.

  Her parents went from stern and supportive to fully agitated. “What?” her mother said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t have any proof and I don’t have any suspects. But I know. I know,” said Tuesday. She looked at Finch. “You have a theory. Don’t you?”

  Finch didn’t flinch.

  “Tuesday,” said her father, hovering over her left shoulder. “That is a serious thing to say. I’m not doubting – you, per se, but – why? How do you know – we’re all still hoping—”

  “Fred isn’t,” said Tuesday, a little surprised by how nasty her voice sounded.

  “What do you know?” asked Finch.

  “Well.” Tuesday swallowed. She was starting to feel more like herself, more grown up. It had something to do with the way Finch was watching her. “I know Abby wasn’t suicidal. I know it could look like she was, but that’s just how she dressed and what she loved. And I know she didn’t do drugs and she wasn’t in any kind of cult. And.”

  “And?” said Finch. “How do you know, about the drugs?”

  How cliché does she think I was? said Abby.

  “She told me,” said Tuesday.

  “She to
ld you,” repeated Finch. “She told you what? When? Was someone threatening her? Was she afraid? Did she have any boyfriends?” Tuesday shook her head no, no. No.

  “I mean she told me – uh.”

  Put me in, coach! shouted Abby. I’m ready! I can do it!

  “She told me a little before Thanksgiving.”

  Finch blinked.

  “A little before—” Her father’s voice skipped. “This. Thanksgiving?”

  “She talks to me,” said Tuesday. “All the time. It started – I have her Ouija board, and one day she just – said hey. And now she doesn’t shut up, frankly.”

  Real nice, said Abby. Like I have anything better to do than chat your ass off all day. I’m DEAD.

  No one was speaking. Finch had lost her seriousness, her intensity. She was looking at Tuesday coolly. This was what she looked like when she was legitimately pissed off.

  “Oh Moonie,” said her father. His voice was kind. Too kind. “Why didn’t you tell us? We can deal with this.”

  Tuesday said, “I understand it sounds—”

  And that was the moment Tuesday realized she’d opened the door to the Much Worse.

  The Much Worse was gentle. The Much Worse was cottony and condescending. The Much Worse was Oh honey. It was Don’t worry. It’s not your fault. The Much Worse was a nice woman with glasses who took notes while Tuesday talked to her, tried to explain that she knew it sounded crazy and maybe it was, maybe IT was crazy, but Tuesday wasn’t. Tuesday was fine. Tuesday was sane. Tuesday missed her friend, of course she missed her friend, but regardless of how she was processing her grief (or not), it didn’t change the fact that her best friend was dead and now everyone was more concerned with Tuesday being crazy than with finding out who killed Abigail Hobbes. The Much Worse was Oh my GOD, why won’t anyone believe me, why won’t anyone listen, why won’t anyone do something? Why won’t you help me find out what happened? The Much Worse was one conversation after another, with her mother and father and her brother and that otherwise nice woman in glasses in her nice office that was so pale and nonthreatening it may as well have been fog. It was always the same conversation, but no one heard it. No one listened. No one believed her, and it made her so sad to be so misunderstood. To be so invisible. Tuesday felt herself floating away. She started to doubt or forget things about herself. It was like she’d woken up in a glass box, and the world was in another glass box, and the person she thought she’d been was in another glass box entirely, so everything was flat and cool and sealed under glass and she could see that other her, sometimes, from the outside. She could watch her own self screaming and pounding inside the littlest glass box, the one at the heart of her, and she would think, That girl can pound and pound, but I bet that glass will never break.