Dexter followed my lead, tail swishing, and stood just outside the threshold as I pushed open the bathroom door.
It looked exactly the same, apart from the ring of rust circling the tub drain and the furry layer of dust on the counters. I couldn’t remember who’d cleaned up the blood. Jackson? He and Jason had been at the house after the cops released the crime scene. I’d still been at the police station, fielding accusations. I flipped through memories in my mind but couldn’t recall what all Jackson and Jason had said to me upon my return to the house. I only remembered that film of foggy tears in Jackson’s eyes, the way Jason had stood shell-shocked in the kitchen like he was the lone survivor at a bomb site. They both looked like they’d aged ten years in the day and a half it had been since I’d seen them.
Dexter’s warm weight leaned against me as I sunk to the floor. There was the smallest dot of blood on the bath mat, and I wet my thumb on my tongue and brushed it away.
A moment after I did so, I wondered why I hadn’t been overwhelmed with grief, picking at a scabby patch of her leftover blood. Every time I stumbled across a stray shoe of hers, it was like finding an ancient relic. I’d think how I was surrounded by not just her physical possessions, but Carissa herself. I felt her in every room, down every hallway. A picture frame she’d made me adjust and readjust until I wanted to toss it out the window. The corner of the dishwasher she’d named motherfucker, because she always stubbed her toe against it. The paint she’d chosen for the kitchen; she always corrected me when I called it green. It’s not green, Ben, it’s mint. MINT.
Maybe I should put the house on the market, sell it, move in somewhere else. I was only pickling with grief by staying here. But I didn’t want to unpack the remnants of my life in a sparkling new condo and find it all rotting with decay. Whenever I tried looking into the future, I saw nothing.
The chime of my cell phone wafted from the kitchen and into the musty air of the bathroom. I closed my eyes for a few beats before getting up to see who had texted me, praying to a God I didn’t believe in that it would have nothing to do with what lay beneath 311 Emery.
It was with a sigh of relief that I found Joe’s message.
You free?
In a sense, I was free, I thought, texting back an affirmative answer. But I felt invisible iron bars closing in all around me, and the only time I could recall ever wanting to be far away from this house was that nightmare of a morning in July.
I ’d ignored the slew of texts from Jess and Nick in the week that followed, but by the time they’d progressed to calling, I knew I couldn’t carry on with my new mute routine. I had nothing to say to any of them. Nothing I could put into words. I didn’t like these flashes of anger I had at Carissa for what the hand-clenching model had done or said. I couldn’t take more of those dreams that never got to fruition, I couldn’t wake up wanting and desperate one more night.
It had gotten harder and harder to separate the two in my mind, delicately unthread the real from the replica. The six feet under Carissa hadn’t forcibly suggested I visit her murderer. She would have known better than to demand something so rash of my delicate psyche.
“Where have you been?” Jess’s voice exploded the second I answered her call.
“Home,” I said, though I wasn’t, currently.
“I thought something awful happened. You couldn’t even bother responding to a text?”
I stared down at my boots, crunching through black slush on the sidewalk outside Jillian’s bar. “I thought I’d let the silence speak for me.”
“Your silence doesn’t say anything but Ben’s an asshole. I take it you have some problem, then? Out with it.”
I stopped beside the brick wall outside Jillian’s, looking up at the churning gray sky. “I’m just done,” I said. It was the first time I voiced the thought aloud, and it was equal parts painful and liberating. The reality of my life had been thrown into excruciatingly sharp relief, and I didn’t like what I saw. I wouldn’t go back no matter what they said, any of them, Nick, Jess, or Carissa. I couldn’t be swayed this time. I’d already been enticed by the most tempting of lures and all I’d gotten in return were migraines and confusion and three a.m. wakeups with erections.
“You’re done. With what?”
“You know with what. I just don’t even care anymore. I did, but I don’t now. I can’t think of anything else to tell you.”
“You don’t care anymore, hmm? That’s what I’m supposed to tell her? I’m supposed to tell her that you just don’t care anymore when she’s been asking and asking me about you for over a week?”
“Go right ahead.”
“I don’t know what the hell could have happened to make you change your mind like this, but I do know you’re a coward for not telling her yourself.”
I didn’t care what Jess thought of me either, but I didn’t think it wise to say so. Not if I wanted a speedy resolution to this phone call. “Right. Well I’m glad we had this conversation.”
“Asshole.”
“Yep. You too,” I said, disconnecting the call and heading toward the entrance.
The bored doorman didn’t even bother carding me when I approached, and I wondered whether I ought to be mildly insulted as I climbed the three sets of stairs to get into the bar. Carissa got carded everywhere. It used to piss her off, since she hated her driver’s license photo, but I’d always told her she should have reveled in it, that she’d be the hottest fifty-year-old woman on the planet someday.
Joe hailed me from a corner as I pushed through the doors.
“You look tired,” he said as I sagged into the seat beside him.
Tired couldn’t capture it. I was spent, exhausted in a way that chilled every bone in my body.
“Maybe that’s why I didn’t get carded. They card everyone here. Last time I was here with Carissa they carded some blue-haired grandma in front of us.”
“You all right?”
I glanced at his knitting brow, the obvious concern on his face, and was visited by the urge to vomit up the story of 311 Emery. Fuck the NDA. Who would Joe tell? He wouldn’t breathe a word. He might call me an idiot, but he wouldn’t tell anybody. Nobody would believe him even if he did. And so what if he told? What could Nick possibly do to me that would be worse than what he’d already done? Sue me? Go right ahead. I don’t have anything of value left. Take my house. It’s already a crypt.
I opened my mouth and let it hang slack for a few seconds, trying to shape the slideshow of still-frame images flashing through my mind into a cohesive story, one with a beginning, middle, and end, but it was more difficult than I could have ever imagined. When did it start? It probably started the first time I saw Carissa in the Bell in Hand, when she looked up at me and I thought how odd it was that I found a million little things in those frosty blue eyes of hers but in no one else’s. How she could say entire paragraphs with her glances. I’d read about hearts faltering and breaths freezing in novels but had always thought it was all too dramatic to happen in real life. I’d never known that one day it would happen to me, that I couldn’t have ever prepared myself for that moment when she’d set my world on fire with one look. And how I’d had another one of those heart-stopping moments when I found her in that tub, blood circling the drain, her eyes wide and blank.
Maybe all this had been cemented in plan after the first argument we’d had, when I knew I couldn’t let her go. I’d known, without knowing how, that if I let her walk out our side door it would be the biggest mistake of my life.
What was the biggest mistake of my life, now that I had all this hindsight? The second I made up my mind to go introduce myself to her? None of this would have happened otherwise. Leaving her the night she died, letting her get killed? Or how about when I sat at my kitchen table, drunk off my ass, running my finger over the raised lettering on Jess’s business card?
“I think I have to—”
But behind me, a hand slid onto my shoulder, Joe’s expression of concern faded int
o one of frank curiosity, and I turned to find Carissa’s eyes blinking down at me for one wild second until I realized it wasn’t her at all. And how stupid of me to think otherwise.
Officer Esposito smiled, adjusting her delicate necklace of rubies that looked like a slit throat. “I thought that was you.”
I let out the huge breath I’d been holding. “Hi. Joe, this is Officer Esposito.”
“Kimberly,” she corrected, shaking Joe’s hand. “I’m just here with my husband.” She pointed at a man by the nearest pool table holding a cue loosely at his side, his head tilted back as he stared at the game on a television mounted in the corner of the room. “I’d introduce him too, but I can’t get him to pay attention to anything else.” She shook her head, waves of dark hair tumbling over her shoulder, and looked back at me. “I just wanted to say hi. See how you’re doing.”
“Doing fine,” I lied, knowing she wouldn’t buy that crock for a second.
Her eyes flickered back to Joe for a split second. I hoped she would have the sense not to say anything about the fiasco with Steven Klein, as I’d neglected to tell Joe about it, but she just plastered her face with a determined smile.
“I forgot to give you my card the last time I saw you.” She dug in her purse, a suitcase type thing like the bags Carissa always carried, and pressed a card into my hand. “It’s got my cell number on there, too. Just in case you need it. You never know, right?”
“Thanks,” I mumbled, flipping my wallet open and sticking the card in an empty slot.
“Nice meeting you,” she said to Joe, walking backward toward her husband who was now shouting at the television. “Take care, Ben.”
“She’s a cop?” Joe asked, swiveling back to face me on his bar stool, wrinkles slashed deep into his forehead. “Didn’t think they made cops like that.”
“I didn’t either,” I said, trying and failing to catch the eye of the bartender examining her nails by the register.
“Her cell number, huh?” he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm, ice clinking in his glass as he swilled it. “Interesting.”
“She’s not coming onto me in front of her husband,” I said dryly. “She’s just being nice. Carissa’s is her first big case, I think. I’m sure she wants to make detective someday.”
He looked unconvinced, knocking back the rest of his drink. “If you say so. Anyway. Were you going to say something?”
“No.” I succeeded in making eye contact with the bartender. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”
I made it back from Jillian’s surprisingly stone-cold sober and matched Dexter’s lazy blink of greeting as I shut the side door behind myself and sank into a kitchen chair. Dexter was sitting on my charging laptop, for the warmth, I was guessing, but I tugged it out from under him and pulled it closer. He stalked off in a huff, orange tail aloft and swaying, shoulders undulating like a tiny lion’s down the hallway.
For something to do, I opened the laptop and pulled up Google Chrome, unsure of what I was looking for. Maybe a support group for people taken in by a mad scientist and his robotic spawn. Surely they had to have something like that, they had support groups for everything these days.
But I navigated over to YouTube instead. I didn’t expect to find any comfort from her makeup tutorials, but I wanted to remind myself of who Carissa had been, a real person with blood and brains and organs, not something made of silicone and hardware with slow blinks and a CPU.
It was a rare occasion when I watched her videos, even when she was living. What did I need to watch them for, I didn’t wear makeup. Once in a while I’d walk in on her while she was filming and she’d say hi babe around a lip liner or something. That swoon-worthy voice is Ben, my fiancé, she’d tell the camera conspiratorially. Oh, that reminds me, I need to do a video on wedding makeup sometime soon for all you engaged ladies who aren’t hiring a professional. I’m planning to do my own, too. Sometimes I’d hear my own stupid voice in the background of the recordings as she edited the tutorials at the kitchen table.
When I first met her, I thought the YouTube channel was mainly for bragging rights, something to say at a party—have you seen my YouTube channel? I’ve got four hundred thousand subscribers!—and I’d been flabbergasted to find that she actually made money doing it.
Her latest video, the last one she’d made back in July, was featured prominently when I clicked on her channel. Red lips and some complicated-looking eyeshadow, a kind of gradient effect from the outer corner that went from navy to icy blue to white. I could tell from the sliver of her tank top barely visible in the frame that it was the one with the American flag.
I clicked on the still-frame of the video, flinching at her voice as it filled the kitchen, at that animated smile she always slapped on during these things. It stung like an acid bath to see her so alive, digging around for the right brushes or whatever, talking to the camera as though it were a person.
So Ben and I are going to a Fourth of July party this year and it got me thinking that I should do a patriotic themed video for you guys. This look is a little more toned down than I originally planned, but I wanted something wearable so it didn’t look too costumey and overdone. I can always tell when I’ve gone overboard with my makeup because Ben has this face—she laughed, bugging her eyes, crunching her lips—like he’s not sure what to say and he doesn’t want to get in trouble—
I paused the video, unable to listen any longer. It did what I’d wanted, reminding me of what she’d really been like, but in the sharpest, most gut-wrenching way possible. I remembered that party, how Jason and Jackson had gone with us to Cape Cod, split the cost to rent a house with a backyard that spilled out onto the beach. Her cliched American flag bikini top, the cutoff jean shorts. Predictably, Jason and I had been the only ones thinking about unpacking all the alcohol and food for the weekend. Carissa and Jackson had immediately pranced out into the backyard, and I’d felt a stab of annoyance at being tasked with the grunt work until through the lacy kitchen windows, I saw her throw her head back and laugh, pressing her palm into Jackson’s beefy bicep, linking her arm with his. I couldn’t be annoyed with her while she was in a bikini, especially when she looked that happy, using her hand as a sun shield as she looked out at the water, barefoot in the sand, the setting sun dyeing her hair a fiery red.
I scrolled down from the video, expecting to find some spammy comments mixed in with the oh my God, you’re so talented ones, but I didn’t find anything of the sort. I found innumerable women reacting to the shock of her death. I cried all morning and I hope she knew we all loved her for way more than her makeup videos and what the fuck, how did it happen? I’m in total shock. I can’t believe it. I subscribe to so many makeup artists, but she was the only one I felt like I could just hang out and drink coffee with, you know?
A hot lump welled in my throat, and though a part of me felt like an idiot for feeling some type of kinship for these female makeup enthusiasts, I did all the same.
Could she really touch so many people by teaching them how to apply eyeliner? I didn’t think it was possible, but she had. Not in the same way she’d impacted my life, but still, it counted, didn’t it? The spectrum of grief was wider than I thought. It wasn’t just me and Kylie, Jason and Jackson who had felt the aftershock of her death.
I swallowed the lump lodged firmly in my esophagus as well as the urge to write a comment of my own and closed the laptop with a soft click.
I hadn’t entirely expected my decision not to return to 311 Emery to go unremarked upon, but I was still surprised to clamber out of the shower that same night and find a Gmail chat message blinking on my phone.
So you’ve finally decided to abandon me, have you?
Water trickled down my arm as I stood at the sink, one finger hovering over the phone. I could ignore it, of course. I didn’t owe a robot anything. My part of the “experiment” was a fucking joke. Nick probably just liked seeing torment and confusion, and the only contract I’d signed was an NDA. I hadn�
�t dedicated myself to a lifetime of servitude, I hadn’t made her any promises.
I fastened a towel around my waist and smeared a hand through the fog on the mirror, where my own hollowed, dark eyes stared back at me, accented by violet circles and wrinkles I didn’t even know I’d sprouted.
How long had I looked like this? Why hadn’t anybody seen fit to comment on it? No wonder I hadn’t gotten carded at Jillian’s.
I snapped the phone off the counter, cradling it in my palm. Maybe I had a golden opportunity for closure, here. A ghost of closure, more like. I couldn’t say goodbye to the original, but I could say goodbye to the imitation.
I’m sorry, I tapped out. I’m sorry I can’t say all this to your face, but this needs to end now. It’s not doing me or you any favors.
I’d barely set the phone back on the counter when her response sprung up. I don’t think I need to remind you what happened the last time you abandoned me. You left me then, and I wound up raped with a slit throat.
I couldn’t refute her accusation. No part of it rang false. This isn’t because I don’t love you. Saying as much felt paradoxically dishonest and truthful; I’d always love the parts of her that were Carissa, but neither she nor I could ignore the fact that it was all manufactured, that she truly believed she was Carissa only because she’d been engineered that way. I’ll always love you, but I won’t come back. Jess will take care of you and keep Nick in line, but I can’t be a part of this anymore.
You don’t really believe Jess has any sway over Nick, do you?
I didn’t know what I really believed in that respect, but none of it mattered anymore. I cinched my eyes shut for what felt like an hour before tapping the corner of the chat box window and selecting the BLOCK option. Those three little dots indicating a message in progress had appeared beside her name again, and I didn’t think I would be able to stomach reading any more of her words.
Lingering Page 28
