Lingering

by Melissa Simonson

  She turned her head slowly until I could just make out the tip of her nose over her shoulder, moving her heavy curtain of hair. “Think you could zip me up?”

  I closed the distance between us and rolled the zipper back up to cover her spine, sinking my teeth into the silicone on the side of her throat. There was no salty tang on my tongue from her skin; no scent at all when I flattened my lips on it, pressed my nose against her neck and inhaled with all I was worth, clutching her so hard against me the veins in my arms bulged under the strain.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Mr. Hayden?” she murmured, leaning into me as my hand wandered up her chest, catching the back of my head in her iron grip, digging her nails into my flesh. It hurt, but I didn’t care, I didn’t even think I’d care if she ripped me apart. “I don’t think you could take me if push came to shove.”

  Sweat pearled along my hairline, one fat drop sliding through the gap in my lashes.

  “Looks like you’ve got it bad,” she said, pivoting on her heel, her face upturned to look into my eyes, and she had me shoved against the bedroom wall in less than a second—

  I woke up in a cold sweat to the end of my bed shaking, and for one wild moment, I thought she’d finally shown up, ready to take this from dreams to reality.

  Fumbling for my phone, I turned on the flashlight app. The beam fell across Dexter, illuminating his yellow eyes as he froze, staring back at me, one leg arced up by his ear. I’d interrupted a bath, it looked like.

  I kept the light trained on him for a few seconds, but he didn’t move a muscle, didn’t blink, didn’t do anything at all but stare back into the harsh glare of the flashlight.

  I nudged him with my foot, dropped my phone so the light shone on the ceiling, and reached out to grab him. His purring revved up as I cradled him like a baby, his eyes slitting as he blinked, but the filmy inner lids stopped halfway over his irises, slicing them in half.

  Rhythmically, I squeezed his lanky limbs, up and down and back again, feeling his slender bones, just to remind myself that he actually had them, and not cording and cabling beneath his orange coat.

  T he last time I’d clinked glasses with anyone had been sometime in June. I had a misty memory of it being someone’s birthday, the venue some overpriced dinner cruise on a yacht at the harbor.

  Now I was reluctantly toasting to closure—the next time I heard that word, I’d jamb my fingers in an electrical socket—with Jason and Jackson while Lexi watched it all with solemn, sober eyes, her giant head resting on the oversized paws Carissa swore she'd one day grow into.

  Carissa had loved Lexi aggressively, the way she’d loved every animal she’d met, even the ugly, ratty Chihuahuas with overlarge eyes. There was something so strange and so intrinsically Carissa, the way she’d sprawl on the floor with Lexi, heedless of her expensive clothes. Last New Year’s we’d stumbled out of Jason and Jackson’s place at three a.m., and when I’d gotten a good look at her under a streetlight, I’d found wiry German Shepard hair coating her beaded Great Gatsby dress.

  I downed a sip of the single malt scotch Jason had given me and said wryly, “Don’t people usually toast with champagne?”

  “Jackson said champagne was too celebratory.” Jason thumped his empty glass on the coffee table, ignoring the coaster, color rising high on his cheeks as he adopted a lofty British accent. “And we all know he fancies himself the master of protocol.”

  Jackson sighed, picked up Jason’s glass, and deliberately set it down on top of the coaster. “And I meant it. What’s there to celebrate, really?”

  “Justice and the American way?” Jason offered, his voice heavy with sarcasm as he sloshed more scotch into his glass.

  “You’re Bulgarian,” I pointed out.

  “Oh, right.” Jason suppressed a belch. “Well I’ve pretty much lost the accent from the motherland, so I think I’m fine.”

  Jackson’s look of fond condescension was achingly similar to the one Carissa wore whenever I’d done something endearingly stupid. Like buying a little girl a gift certificate. After the silence had hung in the air like toxic fog for a few seconds, that look slid off Jackson’s face.

  “She called me her Queensguard, you know.”

  Jason laughed a little dryly, but I just blinked at them. “What?”

  “Like in Game of Thrones. The knights who guard the queen. Whenever she wanted a cigarette at a party, she’d grab my arm and say she needed her Queensguard to escort her outside.” His eyes welled, and the contrast between his hard exterior and those tears made a fist of some unfathomable emotion seize my throat. “I know I had no reason at all to be there when it happened, but I keep thinking that I should have been. I’m never going to meet anyone like her again.”

  I didn’t know what I could possibly say to comfort him. I felt the same way. It wasn’t just that she died, it was the absolute, cruel suddenness of it, that it was nothing anyone could have prepared for, nothing we could have predicted.

  Jason studied the floor, lips mashed together, shaking his head slightly, almost as though he didn’t realize he was doing it. “How could you even stand to look at that guy?”

  “Steven Klein?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I couldn’t. Not for long, anyway. I threw up.”

  Jackson cracked his thick neck. “I’d have stormed into the room and cold-cocked him. They’d have had to drag me out of there.”

  “You didn’t ask to talk to him?” Jason grimaced, swallowing his last mouthful of scotch.

  “No. What the fuck would I say?”

  Jason consulted the ceiling as though it would give him the answer. “I don’t know. Anything. I hope you rot in hell. I hope you get an extra friendly roommate in prison. I hope you get the fucking gas chamber. May you be reborn as a slug.” His pupils, pinpricks while staring into the chandelier’s light, dilated to black holes when he focused in on me. “Whatever you’d need to say to get your closure.”

  Closure. As if I’d get that through one conversation with Steven Klein. There would be no closure; it wasn’t in the cards, not when there was something paradoxically alive but not really living beneath that old mill. Steven Klein had killed her, but Nick had reanimated her in silicone and hardware, a pale ghost of who she’d once been, just as beautiful but terrible too, what with her clenching hand and slow blinks and deliberate movements. That Carissa didn’t kiss me like her, chain-smoke cigarettes and wake me up in the middle of the night, her arms snared around my waist, because she’d had a nightmare that I’d died, and she needed to make sure she could feel my heart beating beneath her fingers. I’d lived her nightmare for months, and she was never there for me to cling onto; I couldn’t press my hand into her chest and feel her heart pumping, her pulse pounding. All I had now were these dreams—or were they nightmares?—where I woke up sweating and panting and hard, wishing to God I could have slept just five minutes later. I wanted more of these dreams, and to banish them, simultaneously. I wanted to walk into 311 Emery after hours and bring those dreams to life, and I also wanted to never set foot in the place again.

  Somewhere deep in my mind’s eye, I saw myself looking over my shoulder on the thorny path I’d taken, knowing painfully in my gut that I’d chosen wrong at that fork in the road. Wishing I could go back to that snowy night of December 1st and tell myself to ignore Jess’s business card, throw it in the trash where it belonged.

  A hand found my kneecap. I blinked and focused on Jackson’s watch, the light fracturing over the grooves in the platinum. No diamonds to be found. Carissa had been right. Again.

  “I’m fine,” I said automatically.

  “No, you’re not.” His fingers squeezed my knee once before he withdrew his hand and stood. “But you will be. C’mon, Lexi.”

  She bounded down from the couch and skidded after Jackson as he headed outside.

  When I heard the door shut firmly behind them, I got up and moved closer to where Jason sat. “Have you bought the ring yet?” I whispered
.

  He chanced a glance through their glass French doors. Jackson stood there with his back toward us, clapping as Lexi ran her usual figure eights in the backyard. “Yeah. It’s in the bedroom. Come see.”

  I followed him inside, where he got down on the hardwood, screeched his bedside table aside, and fumbled for something near one of the table’s legs.

  “Quite an involved hiding spot,” I said.

  “Has to be involved. That man cleans more than anybody I’ve ever met. He’d have found it in my underwear drawer in a hot minute.” When he pulled his hand out, a little velvet box sat in his palm.

  I joined him on the floor as he opened the box and turned it to show me.

  “This looks like Jackson,” I said, lifting it out of the box. Solid platinum with two grooves running the length of the band. Not plain, but not gaudy. Timeless but modern.

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Jason smiled down at the band, then up at me. “I knew I was right, asking you for help. See? You don’t have bad taste.”

  He loved it because it hadn’t been my pick at all. Carissa was the one to choose it after I’d shown her the possible choices. She could be a small part of their wedding, even if she was dead.

  “I hope I didn’t put a damper on the impending proposal, coming here with news of Steven Klein.”

  Jason snapped the box closed, returned it to his hiding place, and pushed the bedside table back where it belonged. “Hell no. That’s one of the best wedding presents we could have ever asked for.”

  Y ou’re upset.”

  I looked up from my hands and into Carissa’s face. “I’m fine. Just tired.”

  A corner of her lips quirked upward as the fingers of her right hand curled into her palm like a scythe. “There’s not much use in lying to me, you know.” When I just looked at her, she said, “Does this have anything to do with Steven Klein?”

  “Who?” Nick lazily spun his phone on the table, glancing between me and Carissa.

  “The man they think killed me.”

  “No shit?” Nick elbowed me in the ribs. “They found him? That’s good, right? Shouldn’t you be happy?”

  “Nick,” Jess hissed, “Just shut up, would you? What’s he got to be happy about?”

  Carissa answered the question I hadn’t asked, the soft smile I’d loved seeing on her living face spreading over her lips. “There’s a Google alert on my name so I can read anything new that pops up on the web.” She jerked her head at Nick. “I’m not sure what his excuse for not knowing about it is. He programmed me with the alerts. Surprised he hasn’t done the same to his cell phone.”

  “When did you find out?” Jess asked, ducking her head to meet my wandering gaze. “Has it been on the news? I haven’t seen anything about it.”

  “You wouldn’t, you never watch the news,” Nick said.

  Jess cut a hard look at him, her narrowed eyes morphing into thick black slits before she turned back to me. “I would have called you if I’d known about it. See how you were coping.”

  “There was a small press conference that was televised,” I said through a sigh, pushing back from the table. “But I found out the day before yesterday.”

  Joe had watched that press conference with me, standing in front of the TV with Dexter winding his lanky body around Joe’s ankles. “She really was beautiful, you know,” he’d said, head cocking to the side. “Almost like one of those James Bond femme fatale villains, like she wouldn’t mind taking a bite out of you.”

  In all the pictures they’d displayed, she’d looked simultaneously soft and sharp, the way roses had thorns to protect themselves.

  “How did you find out?” Carissa asked, unfurling her fingers, the fingers that just last night had had my pants around my ankles in less than a second, but of course that was the point in which I’d woken up, frustrated and flushed and depressed, Dexter staring at me from the end of the bed, as if to say, you sad, horny fool.

  “The detective in charge called me, asked me to come into the station.”

  “And did you see him?”

  “Who? Steven Klein?”

  She must have figured the answer was so obvious it didn’t deserve oral confirmation.

  “I saw him over a monitor.”

  “You didn’t ask to speak to him?” she asked, staring somewhere above my head.

  “Why does everybody think that’s a thing?” I demanded, slapping the table. “That doesn’t happen in real life, only in those stupid TV police dramas.”

  Her blank blink reminded me of Dexter’s. “I guess I just assumed you’d ask to talk to him, all things considered.”

  “And say what, exactly, thanks for ruining my life?”

  “That might be a starting point.” One eyebrow lifted delicately as she looked back at me. “Your life?”

  I opened my mouth, a furious response jagged in my throat, but she was quicker.

  “You’re probably wondering who the hell I think I am, acting indignant over what happened, because I’m not her, am I?” Her arched brow dropped. “But I think I am. I know things about me that you don’t. I’m the closest thing to her that exists, so I’m allowed a fraction of annoyance about being offed by some fat fucking freak, wouldn’t you say?”

  And however icy her looks could get in life, they were nothing near the frostiness of the expression this new incarnation now wore. Watching her clench and unclench her fingers as though she was itching to squeeze something—my throat, perhaps—made a fine mist of hair rise on my forearms.

  Nick barked out a startled laugh. “She kind of has a point.”

  “What did he say, this Steven Klein?” she asked, her painted glass eyeballs reflecting nothing, her tone dull and flat.

  I cleared my throat, hoping my voice wouldn’t crack open and expose my fear. “He said you two were having a secret affair. That you used a burner phone to contact each other.”

  “No points for originality, then.”

  “So, you know for a fact you never used a prepaid phone?”

  She didn’t say anything; she must have figured her withering look was enough of an answer.

  Nick leaned forward, his torso on the table, fingers splayed across the stainless steel. “How does that make you feel?”

  She blinked, turned her face toward him slowly. “How would you feel, knowing you were raped and murdered and violated further after you’d died by some swine's lies?”

  “Probably not great.”

  “Yes, thank you for summing it up so succinctly. I feel not great.”

  I didn’t know why Nick seemed enthralled the angrier she got. The cold venom splintering through her voice had me shrinking back, suddenly aware that she could kill us all if she had a wish to, and I didn’t believe for a moment that Nick would be quick enough to press that kill switch he’d mentioned before.

  “You’re upsetting her.” Jess slipped a hand on Carissa’s shoulder, and the way Carissa leaned into her touch like she needed the comfort made my brain fizzle, my throat seal. I wanted her to lean into me like that, like she’d done last night in my dream, one hand slithering down my boxers, before I’d woken up and thrown my alarm clock across the room, where it landed with a crash and sent plastic bits flying around like shrapnel.

  She shouldn’t be acting like this. She wasn’t real. Carissa was dead and buried, Steven Klein had made sure of that. An odd prickle of irritation came over me, at odds with the other part of my brain that still lingered over the dreams—it was almost like she was stealing my grief, making it out to be nothing in comparison to hers, to this replica who hadn’t felt the beating Carissa had taken or the knife drawn over her throat. She hadn’t looked up into those vacant piggy eyes and known this is it. This is how it ends. In a bathroom with a murdering rapist, fiancé nowhere to be found.

  But she looked so upset that I wondered if I ought to give her more credit.

  “I’m sorry,” I heard myself say, suddenly realizing I didn’t want this version mad at me any more than I�
��d welcomed the real Carissa’s anger. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  She stared down at her open palm, the fingers bent so far backward they almost curved. “I wonder if Steven Klein is sorry.”

  “I’m sure he’s sorry he got caught. I doubt he’s truly sorry.”

  Her eyes snapped up to mine. “He’s gonna be. I hope he gets the needle.”

  I paused at the one-way glass in the vestibule on my way out of the building, and, not for the first time, I had cause to wonder if Carissa could see through it, the way her fake eyeballs homed in, dead center, on mine.

  D etective Matthews blinked at me over the rim of his Dunkin’ Donuts cup, his eyebrows slightly raised. “I think you’ve been watching too much TV. Do you really think that’s a good idea?”

  “If that guy in there—” I jabbed my thumb over my shoulder in the direction of the hallway, though I had no idea where Steven Klein was at the moment, “had killed your wife, wouldn’t you want to talk to him?”

  “Having the urge to talk to him and it being a good idea are two very different animals.” He set his coffee down and tented his fingers on the desk in his cubicle. “I understand why you’d want to get into a room with him, but what are you hoping to get from this? You don’t honestly believe he’ll tell you anything, do you?”

  “Maybe not. But he’s claiming he had an affair with Carissa. He had the nerve to violate her all over again, even after he killed her,” I said, regurgitating the robotic Carissa’s words, sitting up straighter in Detective Matthew’s visitor’s chair. “It’s bullshit that he gets to spout lies with impunity, assassinate her character without any consequences.”

  “Those consequences are coming, Ben.” He traced the rim of his travel cup with a forefinger. “He may be able to invent stories about some secret relationship, but the DA won’t let that go uncontested.”

  District Attorneys lost cases all the time. Juries got bogged down in stupid, unimportant details and returned not guilty verdicts in what seemed like ironclad cases. George Zimmerman, Casey Anthony, OJ Simpson. I wouldn’t place all my faith in the hands of some DA who knew nothing about Carissa, nothing that mattered, anyway. They knew her eye color, how much she weighed, that it had probably taken her somewhere between thirty seconds and a minute and a half to bleed out, but they didn’t know that she hated mushrooms, that one sip of champagne went straight to her head and made her instantly loopy, that she had running conversations with Dexter all day, her fingers twisting through his fur as he used the edge of her laptop to scratch his cheeks. They didn’t know how hilarious she found it when men called one another “ladies”, that she frequently used full-name scolding and would always default to ‘Marie’ if she didn’t know the proper middle name (ergo Jackson Marie Bryant!).