Lingering

by Melissa Simonson

  “Yeah.”

  “You…” her lower lip trembled, her voice warbling over that one little word. “You found out what happened?”

  I walked into her room and stopped beside her bed. “I was there. I headed over after our call got disconnected.”

  Red veins spliced through the whites of her crusty eyes. “So you saw him?”

  “I saw most of it.”

  “What is it they think happened? The police?”

  I sank onto the edge of her bed. “The truth. There was no way I could have fabricated evidence, if that’s what you wanted. I’m not taking the blame for killing him, and I doubt you’d have been down for that. I’m sure they’ll access the video feeds somehow and see it all for themselves.”

  She said nothing, just gazed at me with overlarge eyes that seemed incapable of blinking, so I carried on.

  “I asked one of the officers I know to try to speak with her superiors, try to keep this thing quiet. Off of the news, whatever. I don’t know what story they’ll spin to the media if and when someone comes asking about what happened, but hopefully they’ll come up with something plausible. Something that won’t invite further questions.”

  Jess picked at the scabby pilling of the blankets, swallowing a lump in her throat. “Good. I don’t want anyone catching wind of this. Someone’ll be bound to try to steal his research. He worked so hard on all that.”

  “If you think I give a damn about his research, they ought to give you a CAT scan. I don’t give a shit about his research. I’d have burned the whole place down if I thought I’d get away with it. I don’t want anyone to try to copy his business plan and make someone else’s life hell.”

  She nodded as she shuddered, the tears quivering on her inky waterline spilling over. “I can’t believe this. Any of this.”

  “I can.”

  She looked shocked and shaken, so appalled that I could say such a thing, that it was almost funny. A part of me wondered if I should comfort her, soothe her psyche, but a larger part of me still had nothing but disdain for her. She’d been destructive, willfully blind, just as complicit as Nick in the second-worst thing that had happened to me. Maybe she hadn’t been the mastermind of this fiasco, but then maybe she could have kept walking past me that day in the cemetery. Did she deserve this pain? I couldn’t make up my mind on that front, but she didn’t not deserve it, at any rate.

  I shrugged. “I can’t see how else it all could have ended. He could have learned the first time with Margot, but he didn’t. I’m not sure who else but him is to blame.”

  “Margot was there for three years before she tried anything violent, how was he supposed to know she’d do something like that—”

  “You didn’t see all those videos, Jess. It wasn’t just Margot. You didn’t see the things he did. If you had, you’d know better.” I tried on a gentler tone, wondering if I could manage it. I knew what she was going through, the cold finality, the pain of it, the way your life could be forever changed in a split second. How icy and lonely that moment of acceptance felt like, how dark the bottom of that hole was. I’d never forget that moment I found Carissa in the bathroom, the moment I knew it was real. That night would reverberate in my head forever.

  Why did she let me power her off? She knew what I was doing and made no effort to stop it. She could have backhanded me, thrown me across the room, stomped on my throat. Something other than stand there. Had this somehow proven Nick’s experiment? She wouldn’t have consented to being turned off if she didn’t love me, a part of my brain reasoned, though a larger, exhausted part of it wanted to push it out of my mind. None of it mattered anymore. What would agonizing over it accomplish?

  “For what it’s worth, I know how you feel, with him being gone. But I don’t think this is a hurricane he could have outrun for long.”

  She had a hell of a next few months in store for her, and I briefly wondered whether I ought to bring her into my little grief support group with Joe, until she opened her mouth.

  “You’re an asshole. A complete piece of shit. I never want to see you again.” To illustrate her point, I guess, she threw a pillow in my direction, but it fell pathetically short three feet away from me. “Get out!”

  If I had even a shred of affection for her, I might have recognized that this was the anger stage of her grief bubbling over, but she wasn’t Joe, she wasn’t my friend, so I shrugged again and rose from the bed.

  “With pleasure, and same to you.” I stood, but stopped in the doorway. “Hey,” I said, seized by a fist of savage inspiration. “What would you say if I told you you could talk to him again?”

  I think she must have chucked her water jug at me or something, judging by the sloshing kind of clatter, but I’d already started off down the hallway.

  I let myself in through the side door after one a.m. and found Joe sitting at my kitchen table, stroking Dexter.

  “Did Alanna give you any grief about me taking off?”

  “Nah. She said you texted about an emergency. Twins won their soccer game.”

  “Go Sharks,” I said, pulling out the chair beside his.

  When I didn’t say anything else, his eyebrows rose into his hairline. “So. You’re not going to tell me about the emergency?”

  I knew he deserved an explanation, but it wasn’t that non-disclosure agreement that kept me from talking. “I’m still processing everything. I know it sounds like a cop-out. It kind of is. But I’ll tell you eventually. Once I wrap my head around it all.”

  “How hard is it to just spit it out?”

  “You’ll know once I tell you.”

  He didn’t look convinced. I couldn’t blame him.

  “Does this have anything to do with Lingering?” On my reluctant nod, he said, “Tomorrow, then. You’ll tell me tomorrow. Are you going to be busy?”

  I exhaled long and slow, the way Carissa used to blow out her cigarette smoke. “There’s something I wanted to do in the morning, but it shouldn’t take long.”

  Joe stood and stretched, his vertebrae popping rhythmically.

  “Anything new with you, before you take off?” I asked as he pulled the door open.

  “Eh. Not really. I’m thinking of getting a dog.”

  “Really?” I felt a smile break across my face. “That’s awesome. What kind?”

  “A rescue. I’m going to hit up the Humane Society, see who they’ve got.”

  “Let me know if you want company.”

  “Will do.” He stepped outside, one foot on the stoop, one in the kitchen. “Tomorrow, then?”

  “Yeah.” I bobbed my head. “Tomorrow.”

  I knew how to set up all of Carissa’s video equipment because I helped her pick it all out at Best Buy the last time she wanted an upgrade. She’d gone into the store before me as I searched for a parking spot, and, predictably, she had two male employees buzzing around her once I’d found her in the aisle.

  I adjusted the camera, hesitating before turning it on. Filming myself didn’t come as easily as it had for Carissa. But then she’d had years to get used to it.

  “Hi,” I said, once I’d finally pressed record. “Um. I don’t know if any of you know who I am, but I’m Carissa’s fiancé. Or was, anyway. Ben.”

  I cleared my throat and forced myself to look dead center at the camera, though it felt anything but natural.

  “I looked up her YouTube channel the other day for no real reason. I guess I just wanted to hear her voice again, and I found a bunch of comments from you guys reacting to…what happened to her. It meant a lot to me, and I just wanted to let everyone know.”

  I drew in a breath, opened my mouth again, and a flying orange bottlebrush tail whipped me in the face as Dexter flew across the room, landed in my lap, and used my thigh as a launching pad toward the back door.

  “Shit.” I fell back against the chair, spitting hair out of my mouth. “I’m sure you’ve all seen Dexter at one point.” I leaned over to tug open the glass slider, and Dexter slithered out,
likely having seen a mouse skitter past.

  I sat back in the chair and refocused the camera. “Anyway. I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who expressed condolences. I’d never have expected all the support. At the risk of sounding like an asshole, I was surprised to see that at all, considering her channel was about makeup. Which most guys think is…frivolous, I guess, but seeing how important she was to so many of you made me really happy, and I know it would make her happy, too. She read all your comments, every one of them, even if she didn’t specifically reply.” I rubbed the dark circles beneath my eyes, hoping I didn’t look on camera the way I felt, exhausted and ancient. “They caught the guy. The guy who did it. So. That’s something. I can’t really bring myself to celebrate over that, because it doesn’t bring her back, but he’s going to go to jail, trial or otherwise. They’ve got DNA and all. Hard to talk your way past that kind of evidence.”

  I sat there for a second, gaze drifting aimlessly.

  “I saw that some people were asking whether there’s anything they could do for her. I mean, I can’t really think of much, but I’m sure everyone knows she loved animals. Donations to the ASPCA or Humane Society couldn’t hurt. Anyway. Thanks again, everyone.”

  I turned the camera off, didn’t bother with any attempts to edit the film, and logged into Carissa’s YouTube channel, having done it plenty of times before. Every Wednesday, like clockwork, she needed to upload a new video. Once in a while she’d have some appointment she couldn’t miss and would ask me to do it for her, so, with the password still fresh in mind, I uploaded the video to her page.

  P acking up Carissa’s belongings sounded better in theory than when I actually started. How could I willingly part with her things? Would she have forgiven me for giving away the clothes that had cost her a small fortune? There was easily fifty thousand dollars in just her shoe section.

  Seriously, Ben, the Balenciaga heels? Are you trying to break my heart? I had those ordered a year in advance!

  I supposed I could get in contact with her female friends, ask if they wanted to have a look and take their pick. It seemed better than shipping everything to Goodwill. Maybe Kylie would want it all once she grew up. She’d always watched Carissa get ready with naked awe shining on her little face, like she couldn’t believe this Disney princess who’d come to life was her aunt.

  Soon-to-be aunt, rather. Never-to-be aunt in actuality.

  The jewelry would be Kylie’s, I decided. Alanna could have a look, too, but she didn’t often wear jewelry or anything fancy, not with three kids to get ready each morning.

  I pulled open her drawers, plucking out random articles of clothing, and I realized as I was sorting sweaters from blouses that they were much more than clothes. Each one had a memory hanging from it like a price tag in Bendel’s. We’d signed the papers to buy the house while she was wearing this frosty blue cardigan that hung off her slight frame. Dexter’s hair forever clung to the black fibers of that turtleneck that hugged her like a second skin. I didn’t know how or when it had been decided that my high school wrestling shirt had become part of her pajama collection. If my seventeen-year-old-self had known one day Carissa would be wearing it, I’d never have believed it.

  It felt odd, sorting memories into piles to be given away to other people, and I was on the verge of changing my mind, re-packing the drawer, when my fingers caught on a stiff envelope halfway stuck between the back of the dresser.

  I waffled somewhere between trepidation at what I’d find and the desire to slit it open immediately. What would she have needed to hide from me in the back of her dresser? Some kind of proof she’d been cheating on me? An old marriage certificate she didn’t want me to know about? She could be oddly secretive about things she didn’t need to hide. Like stopping by Alanna’s for coffee. I’d find out a week later that she’d visited and never thought to mention it. Why? She’d always argued that she hadn’t thought it worthy of a mention, that if it had been, she would have. Obviously I would have, Ben, but we didn’t talk about any hot new gossip or anything more interesting than Declan’s new NASA obsession. I’m sorry, I hadn’t realized how vastly interested you were. And why did I have to turn everything into some type of conspiracy? Was I projecting? Was I hiding something?

  Did I even want to open it? What if whatever was inside marred that perfect image of her I still held so close to my heart?

  But I was nothing if not a curious masochist, so I jammed my finger beneath the slit and shook out the contents.

  I couldn’t make sense of any of it, at first. A mess of glossy photos and sheets of paper torn from a notebook covered with Carissa’s spiky handwriting. She always capitalized her r’s, wrote her e’s backward, starting from the tail. The dots above her i’s looked like apostrophe’s, and everything veered slightly to the right. I scanned the jumble of words until my eyes hit on a familiar one. Kylie. They were all addressed to Kylie. All the photos were of the both of them, Carissa and Kylie.

  Digging through the jumble, I found stray envelopes with the familiar words open when scrawled across them. Open when you first get these letters, open when Ben and I get married. I’d suggested Kylie join the wedding party in the capacity of flower girl, but Carissa had shot me down, citing that Kylie was at that strange in-between age—still little, but old enough to want to feel like a ‘big girl’, old enough to know that dumping flowers down an aisle was far beneath her, so when she approached Kylie with an offer, it was that of bridesmaid. She’ll be able to pick out her own dress that matches the color scheme this way and stand up there with us with a bouquet and whatnot. I think she’d like it better than skipping down the aisle throwing rose petals around.

  Some of the envelopes were sealed; others weren’t. A few letters seemed finished while others ended in hanging sentences. I could only assume Carissa had been working on it all for some time, had planned for these notes to span a decade of Kylie’s life, because I doubted Kylie would any time soon need to read the open when you have your first breakup letter.

  Hi Kylie,

  I’m not sure when you’ve opened this, obviously, but I hope it’s sometime before the Inevitable Ugly Scene that typically accompanies first breakups. Depending on circumstances, I may or may not still be a part of your life. If I am, and you need to talk, you probably know where to find me after you read this.

  Unless he’s done something that’s godawful and unforgiveable, just be Zen about the whole thing. There’s nothing you’ll regret more than losing your shit over something that won’t be such a big deal later on in life, once you see this for what it is, some silly adolescent vow in a Friendly’s parking lot. It may seem like the end of life as you know it now, but I’m here to tell you that you’ll do many things much bigger than dating some star jock (I’m extrapolating) in high school.

  I’m trying to think of a way to phrase the story of my first breakup. It wasn’t pretty. He wasn’t very nice, but he was very popular, however, which meant that after he sexually assaulted me one night, most of the people in school started calling me a whore and other colorful variations of the same meaning.

  I should have gone to the police, but I didn’t. If something like this has happened, you need to call the cops. And then call me. Because I’m not letting some other asshole get away with this shit.

  Assuming nothing that happened was inappropriate and/or violent, give yourself a few days to wallow, but eventually you need to get up, get out of the house, and get on with your life. I’ll stick a Sephora gift certificate in here or something, they don’t expire and retail therapy can’t

  And that was where it ended, unfinished, just like her life.

  She’d never told me the story of her first breakup, probably never told me many of the anecdotes she’d included in these letters. A part of me wanted to believe she eventually would have, but I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t know if she’d be annoyed if I snooped after her death.

  After a short deliberation, I figured she may have been ir
ritated about that, but above all she’d want me to make sure Kylie got the letters, so I did what I could to organize the mess, settled back against the dresser, and got to know my fiancée a little bit better.

  I stuck my hand between the metal bars of a cage, and a tentative, floppy pink tongue lapped at my fingers.

  “How does a Golden Retriever strike you?” I knelt down, craning my neck to get a look at the name tag on the crate—Goldie. Jesus. I jerked my head at the tag. “No points for originality. But she’s sweet, right?”

  Joe knelt too, slipping his hand between the bars. “She’s a sweetheart. The right age, too. Doesn’t this place make you sad? All these big eyes staring at you.”

  “Carissa would have wanted to bring them all home. She hated those ASPCA commercials, she couldn’t ever watch them without getting depressed.”

  Goldie’s big brown eyes stared at us solemnly.

  “Think she’s making eyes at you,” I said, withdrawing my hand. “You may not have a choice in taking her home.”

  ““Goldie came to us malnourished with missing patches of hair. She’s a sweet girl who loves belly rubs and affection,” Joe read off the description tacked up at the corner of the cage. “Christ, this shit is awful to read.”

  “Poor thing.” I sat back on my heels. “Just buy her already, I can’t hear any more.”

  Something poked me in the thigh then, and, startled, I whipped around to find a huge paw sticking out of the cage beside Goldie. Another pair of big brown eyes stared out at me, though the dog they belonged to looked more mischievous than solemn.

  ““Autumn is a sable Husky and Malamute mix,” I read aloud to Joe. “Her first family couldn’t cope with her needs and surrendered her to us three months ago.” Jesus. That sounds ominous. I bet she’s a handful.” I dragged myself over to sit in front of her. She was a monster, all huge paws and shiny white new teeth, but the way her black lips pulled back looked like the Cheshire Cat smile. She looked like autumn, fluffy chestnut fur with threads of gold, like she’d sparkle in the sunlight. Beautiful and wild, I was guessing, and not necessarily in that order. But it was her little Get Off Your Ass and Play with Me snort that made me laugh. She banged her paw against the cage, let loose a ratcheting sneeze that shook even her heavy, hairy haunches.