by Andrea Bartz
She looked at me a long time. She had the widest brown eyes, a smattering of freckles. The thickest, most beautiful hair.
Her voice a whisper: “That’s okay.”
She took my glass and set it on the coffee table. The world had that wobbling, churning quality, a vortex tugging at the corners of my vision. I reached forward and watched, heart pounding, as my fingertips slid up her thigh, around her hip, slowing at her waist just as the other hand reached her cheek.
When I woke up the next morning, I was in love with her. I stared at her hair, wheat-colored in the window’s winter light, and tried not to audibly giggle. That’s what that feeling had been, all along. When I kept thinking of her, whatever quiet but hilarious comment she’d make about a situation. How I kept relating things to her, to things she’d said, so that more than once, Mom had said, Wow, you two certainly have grown close. It hadn’t even occurred to me to touch her, and now that I had, it was all I wanted to do.
So I did. Twice more that day, neither of us sure what we were doing, kissing and giggling—her sweet-smelling hair, her soft neck, her knees. A dreamy week of work, every glance between us like a cymbal crash, smiling into the oatmeal I cooked for Mom in bulk. Then Bill went hunting again, set up camp in the woods, and I drove the hour to Chris’s home after Mom went to sleep, heat building in my hips as I wove through country roads. I fell asleep in her arms, and in the morning she roused me with the subtlest strokes, her fingers skimming inside my elbows, my wrists, my palms, my hip crease.
“I like all your inner corners,” she whispered, and I’d reached for her jaw and kissed her, hard.
I can see it exactly as Bill saw it: a few feet above and away from my body, as if our consciousnesses melded. Sheets tangled at the foot of the bed. Knotted limbs, subtle movement, knees like pyramids and a round flash of buttocks. Chris’s voice like a whimper, as if she were in pain. It’s odd, how similar the sounds we make are when we’re hurt or turned on. Vulnerable, in both cases.
It was a moment before Chris noticed Bill glowering at the door, and she gasped and stiffened, then pushed me away with both hands. He flicked on the lights and leaned against the door.
What are you…what the…how could…His hand found his left shoulder, then his eyes followed, confused, as if something odd were happening there. And then, with the sudden jolt of someone in a dunk tank, he collapsed.
Oh God—just remembering it sent fresh horror through me. I’d moved quickly, sprinting across the room and checking for a pulse, screaming for Chris to call 911 as I lined up my palms on his rib cage and pushed, rhythmically, everything I’d learned years before in a training course flooding back to me. Chris rushed back in, shrieking her address into the phone, and draped a blanket over me as I beat, beat, beat his heart from the outside in. Chris asked if I was getting tired but I ignored her—I was afraid that if I stopped, his death would be my fault, and so I didn’t let up, not even to dress. I remember the wail of distant sirens, red and blue flares silhouetting the trees, all of it growing, intensifying along with the mounting knowledge that they’d be here soon, that my metronomic compressions were a countdown, my ticking death clock. Bangs at the front door and Chris, bawling, took off in her robe, and then a bright, flapping wave of humiliation as the EMTs burst into the room. It was like being in a dream, that moment when you look down and realize you’re not wearing anything.
Chris vaulted into the ambulance and they left me behind. I sat at the kitchen table and stared out at the woods outside. There were a few deer out there, a clump of does and fawns, clomping around majestically. A pack of coyotes had been picking them off one by one that season; hunters were complaining that their weekend excursions had been fruitless. A doe swung her head my way and stared. Judgmentally, I thought. Finally I gathered my things and drove home, careful not to wake Mom in the early-morning light.
Bill was fine after triple bypass surgery. I knew this because Chris texted me back exactly once, before my texts stopped going through, before calls went straight to voicemail, before Chris disappeared from my social networks and my life, one big Block. “Bill is okay. I’m sorry but I can’t talk.”
Bill didn’t contact my editor or the nearest major newspaper or threaten me or do any of the things I’d envisioned as I cried in my childhood bedroom; instead, he, his brother, and all other Northern Sky Labs employees just refused to speak to me from that day forward. It was a brilliant, passive checkmate: The book was ruined. Chris was cut off from me like a limb. And it hurt like a sickness: all the nerve endings in my head and neck and chest, crying out like a choir, ow, ow, ow. I didn’t have enough material to write the book, and even thinking of trying made me nauseous. I stayed cooped up inside for my last six weeks at Mom’s, watching movies with her at night. She didn’t ask about the book, why I was no longer out reporting, and I was grateful I didn’t have to lie.
I cried for a few minutes, gazing out the window onto the Walshes’ snowy street. I thought about the deer again. The coyotes too—all social creatures, like us. But a herd’s primary purpose is to keep the highest percentage of its members alive. Evolution doesn’t care about the individual, about survival of the least-fit. We team up for the most selfish reason possible: self-preservation.
Ted had said something odd, earlier, something that was bothering me, and I waited for my pulse to slow enough that I could search for it. Something about a ticket that for some reason was Ted’s problem…even though they lived in different cities. Cameron here in Beverly, Ted in New York.
I’d dealt with a parking ticket once, when a meter in the Bronx expired on my rental car. So I knew that you could go to New York State’s janky website and pay it online. All you need is a license plate number, which I had thanks to Cameron’s profile picture: tailgating at a Patriots game from the back of his SUV. I typed it into the online portal, and there it was: recorded at 11:56 p.m. on Monday, December 16. The night before the Herd’s big announcement, hours after Monday Mocktails, after the last known sighting of Eleanor, a traffic cop had tucked a ticket under the windshield wiper of Cameron’s black SUV. It was illegally parked in front of a fire hydrant near Watts and Varick.
A block and a half from the Herd’s front entrance.
The revelation lit my body like a Lite-Brite—suddenly everything was alive, thrumming, blazing from the inside out.
“Okay,” I said aloud. “Okay, okay, okay.”
It took longer than I would’ve liked for my thoughts to organize themselves into something coherent. I whispered them aloud, as if setting them on a mental workspace:
Cameron was in town the night of the murder.
Cameron’s car was found within a few hundred feet of the murder site.
Cameron had that photo of Eleanor, the one that ended up in a chatroom devoted to people’s hatred for her.
I tried calling Ratliff and hung up with a groan when her voicemail clicked on. I called Hana, then Mikki, feeling the precious seconds pass as both went straight to voicemail.
Whoever was behind this—they’d done what every smart predator would do. They’d separated us from the pack, nudged us into our own corners. I stood and gazed out the window toward the Corrigan house, the white columned one Mikki had pointed out on the drive here. But condensation coated the window, and impulsively I reached for the old-fashioned latch and the pane swung toward me with a little snap.
Silent night, dark and dampened with snow still swirling off of trees and bushes and onto the street. So quiet, peaceful even, until—
A scream. Unmistakable. Before I could think, I’d yanked on my boots and was sprinting down the driveway, the wind jabbing me through my sweater, cold lunging at my scalp and throat. I barely noticed, didn’t care, as I slid on a slash of snow, skidding to my knees and then taking off again, wet moons stamped across the top of my shins.
Because I kept hearing it, over and over in my m
ind, as though it were still playing out, a loop broadcast across this tiny little neighborhood.
Because the scream.
It sounded like Hana.
PART IV
CHAPTER 20
IF STEVE WERE EVE: LANDMARK MOMENTS FROM
THE CAREER OF APPLE FOUNDER EVE JOBS
By Katie Bradley Published to Gleam On June 24, 2017
Ed. note: On June 19, a New Yorker profile of Gleam founder Eleanor Walsh called her “Steve Jobs if Steve were Eve—young, pretty, and obsessed with makeup.”
1985: As Apple’s retail spaces were gaining steam, Eve Jobs remembered an especially beautiful stone sidewalk she’d seen on a trip to Florence, Italy. She calmly insisted that her stores line their floors with authentic Pietra Serena sandstone from a particular quarry in Firenzuola, Italy. Some reasonable (male) VPs pointed out that concrete could mimic the stone’s texture and color, but Eve could not be swayed, citing her own exceptional taste. Due to her frivolity and poor financial instincts, she was promptly removed from the company.
2003: Eve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. For the following nine months, she refused her clinicians’ orders to undergo radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery, instead pursuing such alternative therapies as juice fasts, acupuncture, herbal remedies, and veganism. She reportedly even visited a psychic. Due to her unbecoming stubbornness and silly, girlish devotion to the oft-mocked Church of Wellness, she was promptly removed from the company.
2005: Speaking of juices, Eve Jobs ordered a fruit smoothie in a Whole Foods in California, and when the elderly barista didn’t make it to her specifications, she flew into a rage, screaming about the employee’s “incompetence.” The event was captured on film and ruined her career immediately. Due to her nasty, entitled disposition, she was promptly removed from the company.
2008: Apple’s much-anticipated MobileMe system, meant to sync mobile devices with users’ computers, was a disaster from the start. After a Wall Street Journal article tore it to pieces, Eve called a town hall meeting on Apple’s campus. With shrillness, an ugly shade of lipstick, and tremendous hate in her heart, she publicly berated the team for more than thirty minutes, noting, “You should hate each other for having let each other down.” Due to her out-of-control temperament, she was promptly removed from the company.
2010: At a conference, Eve Jobs for the first time presented a tablet called “the iPad.” The announcement was met with shock, disgust, and mockery thanks to the name’s obvious ties with female menstruation. The product launch was quickly canceled, and due to Eve’s poor judgment and female sexual organs, she was promptly removed from the company.
CHAPTER 21
Hana
MONDAY, DECEMBER 23, 5:37 P.M.
Cold had descended on everything again, bitter wind and puffs of feathery snow rolling across the street like tumbleweeds. The road hadn’t been plowed yet, so I walked carefully along a track carved by car tires. My toes felt frozen inside my winter boots, and I couldn’t tell if moisture had seeped through or just coldness.
Katie…and Ted. Ted…and Katie. When…what? I knew she’d met him the night he’d come to reset the router—the night before our Christmas Lights outing, which felt like a century ago—but she hadn’t mentioned him since. So what the hell was that? Yes, people seek comfort in others in grief. Yes, some people turn to sex the way others (e.g., Karen) turn to alcohol. But I couldn’t stem the outrage: It wasn’t even six o’clock, their friend had been found dead less than three days ago, and those two couldn’t keep their hands off each other?
A car flashed its high beams and I shuffled onto the slush-covered curb. There were no sidewalks here, just hulking old mansions with neat front lawns abutting the street. I hurried the last few yards and turned into the Corrigans’ driveway. Icicle lights hung from the roof, in front of the pillars, but all of the windows were dark. I curved around to the brick-and-white cottage out back and rang the doorbell. Finally the door swung open, belching heat into the night.
“Hi.” His hair was back in a little ponytail, his cheeks flushed.
“Hey, Cameron.” I stuck my hands in my pockets. “Can I come in?”
He held the door open and I took a few steps forward before another voice made me jump.
“Hiii, Hana!” Mikki, leaning back from the living room sofa at the end of the hall, her voice a singsong. “What’s up?”
“Oh, hey! Didn’t know you were over here!” Cameron followed me down the hallway. I’d matched Mikki’s cheery tone, but something was off about this whole diorama. And not just the mess, although that was apparent: the movie cliché of a thirtysomething’s bachelor pad, with dishes piled in the sink, mounds of dirty laundry dotting the hallway, and several bags of snacks yawning open on the coffee table.
“Just needed a break from Gary and Karen,” she said. “Er, I guess I should say I wanted to give them a break from me. They seem exhausted.”
“Totally.”
“You want a soda?” Cameron called from the kitchen.
“Got anything stronger?” I asked, then cringed as he said no: former addict, zero substances, that’s right. “Whatever you’ve got is fine.” I dropped into a recliner and turned to Mikki: “I was thinking the same thing. About Gary and Karen? They were so insistent about us coming but looked like they regretted it immediately.”
“Yeah, they’re not doing great.” Cameron handed me a Sprite and then crashed onto the couch, and as he did I watched Mikki’s eyes float to the floor under the coffee table. I followed her gaze and saw it—a little purple cotton bralette, the kind flat-chested Mikki favored. I looked up at her and for a second, we were like bad actors in a telenovela: My expression read WTF, Mikki stared at Cameron with desperate, help-me eyes, and Cameron looked back at her in confusion, his brows and head slightly askew.
It went through me like a gunshot, and for a second I considered pretending I hadn’t seen anything. Instead I laughed and said, “Didn’t realize this trip was gonna be such a fuckfest.” It felt good, the brashness. I saw why Katie must like it.
Cameron coughed. “No, we were just—”
“Cameron, stop,” Mikki said. “Yeah, we have been…hanging out, when we see each other. For a few months. Sorry I didn’t mention it, but I know you…”
She hesitated and I thought she was about to say have a crush on Cameron, which would of course require that I kill myself or her or all three of us on the spot. Cameron looked at her curiously and she continued, “You have a lot of loyalty toward Eleanor and might think it was weird I was hooking up with her ex.”
“Huh.” I leaned into the seat’s leather back. I knew this changed something, the social web I’d mentally spun around Eleanor, but I wasn’t yet sure how. Katie and Ted, Mikki and Cameron—I’d somehow become a fifth wheel. “Did Eleanor know?”
“No way. She’d be weird about it.” Mikki shrugged. “I didn’t want to make her jealous or anything. Cam and I just…hit it off, that’s all.”
Would Eleanor have been jealous? She never mentioned Cameron. “When?”
“I went down to visit Ted in October,” Cameron said, gesturing with his can. “We ran into each other.” They didn’t exchange looks, besotted or otherwise. None of this felt particularly romantic.
“And it’s been on since then?”
“No, we haven’t—”
“We’ve barely seen each other since then,” Mikki finished. “Sorry to…keep a secret, or whatever. But.”
“It’s fine.” I took a long sip of pop. The revelation was like a branding iron on my chest, and I fought not to let it show. “Hey, you know what’s weird? I just walked in on Ted and Katie hooking up.”
“Just now?” Mikki yelped, at the same time Cameron said, “Wait, Ted and who?”
“Yeah, just now. With my sister. I thought they’d bar
ely said two words to each other.”
“Whoa.” Mikki shook her head, amazed. “Okay, now your fuckfest comment makes more sense. Were they embarrassed?”
“They hadn’t closed the stupid door properly. We were all equally mortified.” I started to giggle and it turned into a choking noise.
“Aw, Hana.” Mikki shot me a sympathetic look. “I keep doing that. Starting to feel normal and then bursting into tears, because, shit.” I nodded, pulled myself together. “So you’re done being mad at Katie?”
“Well, I’m still mad, obviously, but I wanted to talk to her because…” I strained to remember—my memories were floating around like snowflakes, Ted’s creepy stalker file, Karen robotically pouring wine. Then I remembered: “I found out the strangest thing about Eleanor. It all started ’cause I spotted her yearbooks, and it reminded me that she skipped over seventh and eighth grade….”
I recounted the story, my gaze bouncing between the hallway, the ceiling, my Sprite, before settling back on Mikki just as I finished. I leaned forward. “What, what is it?”
She opened her mouth, then stopped herself with a little snap of laughter. “I haven’t told anyone this and I can’t believe you’re the first to catch it,” she said. “None of that happened to Eleanor—it happened to me. In middle school. And I told her about it at some point, maybe like sophomore year, and then she brought it up years later when she was starting the Herd.” She swept her hair together, then tugged it over her shoulder. “She asked if she could, quote, ‘borrow’ it, because it worked so well with the brand narrative. But she also said the post and press release and everything else were already written and approved and about to go up.” She looked away. “It kinda felt like she was announcing, not asking. Letting me know as a courtesy, like, ‘Oh, by the way.’ ”
