“I’m going to stab him in the eye with a seafood fork,” Emerson said. Archie didn’t say anything, because he couldn’t tell if his sister was kidding. She had a dry sense of humor. Perfect for hiding the sharp blade inside her.
He didn’t know how much she knew.
Which was why he had gone to his family’s condo at the Mandarin Hotel in the first place. He’d read Tuesday’s binder of research, about his mother, about what she had done at Arches Consolidated (in a word: manage, and make decisions as though its employees were actual humans). He read about his sister, his mysterious sister, who Tuesday had only been able to sketch in outline: fragments of a public personality, vain and spoiled, that didn’t amount to a full person. Tuesday suspected it was a carefully controlled performance. It was enough for Archie to remember all that he’d forgotten in his fear and his haste: that his sister was the most coolly competent person he had ever met, and it was vain and self-defeating and just plain dumb to take on his brother without her help.
“Look at you,” Emerson had said. She turned him toward her, her finger on his chin. They were back in the living room by then, which showed, in the parlance of every procedural cop show ever, Signs of a Struggle. End tables were tipped. A green glass lamp lay in shards, smashed. Archie’s phone was – somewhere, also smashed. Moments before Nat threw the first punch, Archie had been fiddling with it, panicking that he ought to text Tuesday an SOS.
That punch had come as a crushing relief. They’d only been playing brothers for about ten minutes, but every second of it had been an excruciating eternity.
He’d gone to the Mandarin on Monday evening, after five. Archie figured his mother would still be at the office, but Tuesday’s research said that Emerson’s role at Arches Consolidated was looser, advisory, which meant she could be anywhere. Like home, at the condo. By herself. Archie wanted his mother and his sister back in his life, desperately, but he was also desperately ashamed – of running, of being such a goddamn coward – and he didn’t think he could handle seeing both of them, for the first time, together.
He never thought his brother would be the only person at home.
Nathaniel opened the door and every nerve in Archie’s body went dead, but he was so good at pretending, they were both so, so good at this game – they had been before their father disappeared, and they were even better at it now – that Archie actually felt his face smile. He smiled at his brother, and his brother smiled at him. Eddie—! How the – how the hell are you, man! is what Nathaniel’s mouth said and his arms opened and he pulled Archie across the threshold into the condo and cracked his open palm hard against Archie’s back.
Nat wasn’t supposed to be at home. Nat stopped there on his way to a dinner to pick up something he’d forgotten – a file, a folder, hell, he could’ve come home to do a line of cocaine – but now that his little brother was back, back home, well, he’d – he’d cancel! Sit down, man. I’ll get us some beers.
Archie sat on an unfamiliar couch in the living room, great glass windows overlooking Boston in the gloaming. So many windows. Who knew who might be watching. Please, he thought, please let someone be watching. He took out his phone. Thought about calling 911. Thought about texting Tuesday. But what would he say? What would he—
Help I’m trapped in my family’s luxury condo with my brother who murdered our father and he knows I know and he’s going to kill me too was not the stuff of a text.
Especially not on a flip phone.
Then Nat, walking back in with two sweaty bottles of beer, saw the binder. Archie had forgotten he’d brought it, had set it down on the glass coffee table. He thought his sister would think it was funny. That he’d needed a dossier to be reminded whom he was related to.
Nat, not so much.
“Nice binder, bro,” said Nat, handing him a bottle. Cold and slippery. Good for shattering. “Gonna ace the exam?” Nat sat and pulled the binder into his lap. Opened it. Flipped through it. “Well, this is revolting.” He straightened his tie. “That girl dug all this up?”
Archie didn’t respond.
Nat set his beer down on the table. Archie closed his fist around his own bottle.
“Eddie,” said Nat, and shook his head. He leaned forward and flexed his fingers into fists. He looked at Archie. “I thought we agreed you weren’t going to come back.”
“We did,” said Archie. He sat up straight.
“That’s funny,” said Nat. “You’re funny.” He slapped his palms down on both knees, gathered himself, and stood. “Stand up.”
Archie stood and thought that this, at least, was a new game.
“I didn’t come back for y—” was all he got out before Nat socked him across the jaw.
Later, with Emerson, half drunk and drugged but still feeling more pain than seemed biochemically possible, Archie looked at his big sister, really looked at her, for the first time since he ran away. She looked older. Sharper. But so familiar it hurt.
He’d forgotten there were other people in the world who looked like him.
“Nat did it,” said Archie.
“I know,” said Emerson.
That first night, Monday, they didn’t say any more than that.
For most of Tuesday, Archie was asleep in his sister’s room. He woke a few times, though afterward he couldn’t parse his waking memories from dreams. Once, he swore he heard his father’s voice vibrating through the wall behind his head: Get over here, Junior. Another time – and this had felt alarmingly real – he’d gotten up to use the bathroom and, on his way back to bed, bumped into the bottom drawer, half open, of a small dresser. He opened it wider and looked inside. It was full of blue and white postcards, stiff and shiny. On the postcards were photos of yachts. Yachts moored majestically. Yachts plowing the ocean, the sky perfectly puffy-clouded behind them. He crouched on the carpet. The drawer was full of postcards, stacked neatly and waiting to be sent. He reached for one and flipped it over.
Scrawled on the reverse in red ink: I WILL RUIN YOU.
He woke up later, without remembering how he got back in bed, thinking of yachts. Sweating.
Their mother was in North Carolina on a business trip; Archie would have missed her no matter what. At least Nat didn’t come back. “You’re safe,” Emerson told Archie that night. “He has a model in town. That’s where he’s sleeping.” Emerson made dinner and he tried to bring it up, to make Nat did it more specific – he tried to say, I watched Nat kill our father, and yes, our father was a monster, but I think our brother’s worse – but Emerson shushed him. “Later,” she said. “When your head is clearer.” This was a game the Archeses played too: the game of not saying everything. The game of assuming what the other person knows is what you know too.
Wednesday, after noon, his head was clear, all right. Clear enough to realize he had no idea what had happened to Tuesday’s binder of research. Clear enough to grasp that it was possible his brother had taken it. And was armed now with a specific reason to hate and hurt Tuesday.
Not that Nathaniel Arches ever needed a reason to hurt anyone.
He couldn’t call her. He didn’t have a phone anymore. Even if it hadn’t been pulverized, he didn’t know her number. The only thing he knew was where she lived.
So there he went.
And here Tuesday was, exhaling on the hall carpet beside him. He felt her body move and heard her lick her lips.
“Warn me?” she said.
He lay with his head turned, ear pressed to the carpet, protecting his tender nose, and opened his eyes. He saw her cheek, her hair. She had two little commas etched into her earlobe, empty piercings. He was as close as he’d ever been.
If only it were possible, ever, to get closer.
“About my brother,” he said.
Tuesday turned her head so they were nose to nose. She wasn’t as pale as before, but there was a strange flicker in her eyes, a startled kind of sadness.
He was too late.
Go through his pants, said A
bby.
Not that you haven’t already.
“Har har,” Tuesday muttered.
She heard the shower turn on. She pulled her duvet up around her cold shoulders.
Archie’s pants were on the floor. And his shirt and socks. And his boxer briefs, because of course he wore boxer briefs.
Go. Through. His. Pants, said Abby again.
Tuesday rolled on her side, facing the pile of Archie’s discarded clothing. If she thought sex – and it hadn’t been great sex, but good enough sex, sex with potential (she had to imagine it would be much better when Archie’s body hadn’t been so recently pulped) – would take her mind off anything, she was wrong. It had sharpened something. Made her hungrier. Desire, in Tuesday’s experience, was a feedback loop.
She reached across the floor and snagged his shirt with a finger.
I said pants, said Abby, and Tuesday said, “Would you relax.”
Tuesday slid her legs out from under the duvet. She pressed her toes into the rug and pulled Archie’s T-shirt over her head. He’d explained it was one of his sister’s nightshirts, an oversized concert T from a Mighty Mighty Bosstones tour in the late nineties that Tuesday couldn’t imagine Emerson Arches ever wearing un-ironically. When she asked why he was wearing his sister’s shirt, Archie’s eyes darted back and forth. “Because,” he finally said, “my other shirt got blood on it.”
“Blood from where?” Tuesday asked.
“My face,” Archie said.
He is infuriating, said Abby.
Tuesday picked up his pants. Felt the pockets. No phone, but he did have a wallet. Credit cards. Insurance. License. A few bedraggled bills. Tucked deep into a fold, a small brass key. PO box, said Abby. “Interesting,” said Tuesday. She folded his pants neatly on her dresser.
With the shower still running, Tuesday lifted his ripped jacket off her living room floor. Inside the lining there was a deep, zippered pocket.
She pulled out a spiral-bound reporter’s notebook and a small silver envelope. Addressed to Archie, no surname, at a post office box in downtown Boston. Stamped and canceled, also from Boston. The date of the postmark was one day after the Auction to Abandon All Hope. One day after Vincent Pryce died.
The return address wasn’t an address but a symbol:
Tuesday considered for a moment what she was doing. Standing in the middle of her living room wearing only a prodigal billionaire son’s sister’s Bosstones concert T, with said prodigal billionaire in her shower, having just had decent-sex-with-potential with said prodigal billionaire – about to violate said prodigal billionaire’s privacy.
Hadn’t she just gotten fired for this?
The silver envelope had been slit clean across the top. She slid her finger inside and pulled out a single sheet of creamy correspondence paper, letterpressed at the top with the same symbol as the return address, in bright, bloody red ink.
The dead man’s typewriter had misfired here and there.
Dear Archie,
If you are reading this, two things mus be true: one, you still hold the post office box k y I gave you, long ago. And two, I am dead.
So I am dead! Gracious, what a thought. It is not a surprise – can death be a surprise, rea y, to anyone? – but still it is strange to imagine these words being read after m death. It is wonderful to imagine them being read by y u. You are one of my heirs. I send this letter in hopes that both the news of my demise and this letter may reach yo.
In the afte math of y death, you, and every ne you know, will be invited to play a game. It is imperative tha you do so, and t at you not do so alone. Why? Because I am a horribly old man and must hav a dying wish. Humor me. In playing my game, know that you honor my last equests: that you make your way through this world with curios ty and courage, that you follow strange clues, make detours, and that you do not p ay it alone. Find a partner or two or three or f ur. Cross and crisscross your paths with the paths of others.
I only had the pleasure of being your friend for a short time, but you and your family mean a great deal to me. I have thought of you often, and always hoped, someday, you would find your way home. Despite everything – in spite of certain circumstances – you were dealt an extraordinary hand. Let this be the beginning of everything you ha e yet to becom.
I ave enclosed a key to my home on Pinckney Stre t. No one will find you there.
Your f iend always,
Vince
Tuesday looked up.
At some point, the shower had stopped. At some point, Archie had walked out of her bathroom. He stood in front of her now, hair dripping. He didn’t look mad. Or surprised, even. If anything, his battered face was a mixture of fatigue and relief. His bruises had gone livid in the hot shower, red and purple nebulas swirling up and down his sides and his lower back. Nat, he’d told her when they were lying in bed and he was trying not to let on how much it hurt to be touched – Nat knew where and how hard to hit him, to make him hate every cell, every muscle and bone in his body, for not being stronger, harder. For not being impervious to pain, for never being able to give as good as he got. That was Nat’s perverse superpower and always had been: whenever his brother beat the living shit out of him, Archie always ended up hating himself.
Well, not just himself, he said. He hated Nat too.
Now he was standing in front of her, holding a towel up around his waist, as close to naked as Tuesday thought he was capable of being.
“This is why,” she said.
“Why what?”
“You’re playing. Because Vince” – she smiled a little – “was your friend. Playing was your friend’s last request, and you hired me because he told you not to play alone. What else did Vincent Pryce ask you to do?”
“Nothing,” said Archie.
“Who was this man,” she asked him, “who could get people to do so much for him, for so little?” She paused. “What game are we playing?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do,” she said. “You don’t want to tell me.”
Archie took the notebook and the letter out of her hand, stuffed them both into his jacket, and tossed everything on her love seat. He stepped closer. Slid his palm, still damp, to cup her face.
“If I ask you to trust me,” he said, “will you lie and say yes?”
Tuesday was tired of lying. Kissing him, while still a game, at least felt like a form of truth.
15
DEAD MAN’S PARTY
Dorry had been to exactly one funeral before the funeral of Vincent Pryce. Two, if you counted the funeral of the goldfish she won at the Topsfield Fair when she was eight.
The other funeral had been her mother’s. She didn’t cry at her mother’s funeral at all. At least, she didn’t think she did. Large sections of that day, those days, she did not remember. The things she should have remembered, she didn’t. She didn’t remember what her mother’s face looked like in the casket. She didn’t remember what her mother had been wearing. She remembered she wore a white shirt, because she read online that it was traditional at Buddhist funerals to wear white instead of black, and though her mom was only sort of Buddhist, she liked the idea. She remembered eating a Lorna Doone. She had never heard of, never even seen, a Lorna Doone before. There was a small basket of cookies and crackers beside the tissues in the family parlor, off the main room with all the chairs and the big line of people who showed up to shake her hand and tell her How Sorry They Were. She knew there were plenty of things in the world that she didn’t know, but those alien Lorna Doones, cheerful yellow wrappers shining side by side with the Oreos, made her feel like she’d slipped into another dimension. Lorna Doones didn’t exist in her world. This had to be another world entirely.
Vincent Pryce’s funeral was another world beyond that.
The lawn of Boston Common, the low sloping part from the merry-go-round and the frog pond to the road that cut between the Common and the Public Garden, was a crowd. Of all sorts of people, old and young, black and Asian and
white and brown, skinny and fat and short and tall, and they were all in costume, and because they were all in costume, it was like looking straight into their hearts at what they loved or who they wanted to be. There were Poes and ghosts and cats and ravens and Spider-Men and mermaids and fairies and grim reapers and Leatherfaces and a freaky good Jason Voorhees – he was huge, scary huge; when he passed Dorry, she was eye to belly button – a bat, an Uno card, Dracula vampires, Twilight vampires, their faces brushed with glitter, some Red Sox, some Bruins, a Celtic who could have been Kevin Garnett, but she couldn’t get close enough to tell for sure. Someone was dressed as Mayor Menino. Someone was dressed as Kermit the Frog. Someone, a guy, Dorry thought – he had big shoulders and an Adam’s apple – was dressed as Cher, which Dorry got only after Cher came up to Ned and said, “Prince!” and Ned said, “Cher!” and they hugged, because even though they were strangers, they knew each other.
She hadn’t known what Ned’s costume was until then. He was wearing a purple jacket with big shoulders and skinny black pants and a curly wig, and he’d grown a scrubby little mustache that shouldn’t have been cute but was stupid adorable. Maybe because he was still wearing his glasses. He had blobs of red makeup smeared all over his face, which she still didn’t get (was he zombie Prince?). But he’d known right away who she was – “Hey, Death!” he said as she walked up to the bus stop by the Dunkin’ Donuts on Highland – so she was too embarrassed to ask who he was trying to be.
Ned’s big sister, Cass, was dressed as Nefertiti. Dorry recognized her right away; she’d been obsessed with ancient Egypt in the fourth grade. Cass was a junior at MIT and had the best posture of anyone Dorry had ever met. Her eye makeup was like Dorry’s, only much better. She wore a white toga with shiny gold belts wrapped around her waist and under her arms, and sandals, and a short denim jacket, because, despite the pretty warm weather, it was still October. When they got off the T at Park Street and stepped into the cooling night, Cass bobby-pinned a large, blue and gold paper headpiece over her hair. She kept reaching up to make sure it was secure.
Tuesday Mooney Wore Black Page 29
