She did not feel her knees buckle, did not feel them hit the floor. There was no pain in her chest. People were suddenly rising, coming at her in a wave, and she was terrified. They know now. They know what I did, and they’re coming to make me pay.
That was her thought as the darkness washed over her face and she fell into a big black hole.
Fell.
Fell.
It was not the first time Rain Thomas died.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
She saw Yo-Yo standing by a parked car, cigarette between her fingers, studying the world with calculating eyes.
Yo-Yo stood hipshot, with one arm across her waist and the elbow of the other resting on it, with the hand holding the cigarette folded back. She stood like that a lot, watching, knowing she was being watched, her eyes filled with challenge and bad promises to anyone who messed with her. Yo-Yo was nearly six feet tall, and a three-way racial split of Greenpoint Polish, Manhattan Heights Dominican, and the Chinatown in Flushing. Most people who looked at her guessed she was either black or a mix of black and Puerto Rican. She never corrected them. Her family tree was complicated, and Yo-Yo wasn’t wanted by any of them.
She was ostensibly Rain’s sponsor, though she preferred to call herself a “coach.” Sometimes she was that, and sometimes she was a bully, and sometimes she was an ally. Yo-Yo had her own stuff, though, and Rain knew that just because her friend had five clean years didn’t mean she was less a junkie. They would always be addicts. Always.
“Girl,” said Yo-Yo, shaking her head, “you look like shit.”
“Gosh, thanks.”
Yo-Yo took a last drag and then flicked the cigarette away and chased it with an exhalation of blue smoke. Then she reached for Rain and pulled her into a hug. Yo-Yo was a hugger. Not with everyone, but with a certain few. Rain and the two Bobs. The four of them. The charter members of the Cracked World Society. That’s what Gay Bob named it. It was a reference to an old Leonard Cohen song, about how it was okay that there were cracks in everything because without them the light couldn’t get in. Straight Bob gave everyone a T-shirt once, but they were ugly and no one wanted to wear them. Not even Straight Bob.
“What’s going on with you?” asked Yo-Yo.
“Bad couple of days.”
“How bad?” asked Yo-Yo, leaning on it.
“I already told you, it’s not that. I haven’t used.”
“Then what?” demanded Yo-Yo. “You break up with the boy toy?”
“His name is Joplin. And, no. Besides we’re not an actual couple.”
Yo-Yo made a face. “Yeah, yeah, just the longest running series of booty calls in the history of no-obligations, can’t-commit sex.”
“Stop it.”
“He’s got a nice ass, though,” said Yo-Yo philosophically. “Really nice ass. If you ever kick him to the curb, I’d be happy to console him.”
“We’re not a thing. He’s free to do whatever.”
“Uh-huh,” said Yo-Yo. “Well, if it’s not painter boy, then what is it? You look like you got mugged and they weren’t nice about it.”
Rain tried to smile but it felt like a wince. “Close enough. Tell me, can life mug you?”
The taller woman snorted. “We’re a couple of users going to meet a couple more users, and we all met in NA. Is that a serious question?”
“No.” Rain looked around. The storm had stopped hours ago, but it was cold and muggy and the streets still glistened wetly. “It’s been really weird lately, you know?”
“Weird how?”
Rain shook her head. “If I’m going to go over it, I need coffee.”
They began walking. Most of the brownstones in her neighborhood were only half occupied, so only a few windows were lit. Rain felt the empty ones watching her. Cars moved up and down the street, their tires making hissing sounds on the wet asphalt. Yo-Yo had longer legs but she walked with a mincing step because she had on shoes that looked good but didn’t feel good. Rain had no trouble keeping pace with her.
The usual neighborhood suspects loitered in doorways, hoods pulled up, hands in pockets, heads tracking to follow everything that moved. Some of them nodded to Rain; one guy called out a crude comment to Yo-Yo, but she fired back a suggestion that he go do something that was improbable, obscene, painful, and which involved close relatives and livestock. The other gangbangers cracked up and gave their friend playful—but hard—punches and shoves, all of them accepting the fact that the tall black woman had clearly won that exchange.
A kid on a skateboard rolled past, his back turned to them and a hat pulled down low to cast his face in shadow. He wore a backpack that rattled with musical metallic sounds. Rain watched him, but the gangbangers ignored him as if he wasn’t there.
Rain and Yo-Yo passed a long wooden fence that had been erected in front of the building that had burned down the previous month. Even after all this time, there was a heavy stink of wet charcoal and burned plastic. People had posted all kinds of posters and handbills on the wood, gluing, stapling, and tacking them up. A lot of religious ads for a new local church called the Lamenting Apostle, which Rain thought was a great name for a nineties post-punk band but a stupid name for a church. There was an hysterical spray-painted scrawl warning The Shadow People Are Coming!, and Rain figured it for either the rantings of one of the many, many local nutjobs or some kind of in-crowd code for something like an off-the-radar rave. There were ads for mattress blowout sales, a store that sold discontinued medical equipment, a company that bought any kind of gold, and a bail bondsman. There was a cluster of letter-sized Have You Seen Me? posters. Each one of those showed an unsmiling face, and Rain wondered why people didn’t put smiling pictures on that stuff. Then she thought maybe people wouldn’t scramble to find people who looked happy. She was almost past the sad array of pictures when she suddenly jerked to a stop and stared at one. It was a color picture of an old woman with a heavily lined face, sad eyes, horn-rim glasses, and hair pulled back into a gray bun.
Rain touched the picture and murmured, “What the…?”
Yo-Yo walked three more steps before she realized what had happened, then turned and came back. When she saw the picture she said, “What’s wrong? That one of the old broads who lives in your building?”
“No … I … wow, this is so weird.”
“Everything’s ‘weird’ to you today.”
“It really is,” insisted Rain. “But this is … well, this doesn’t make any sense.”
“What doesn’t?”
“Yo, I know this woman. I mean, I saw her. Talked to her.”
“Oh, damn, I didn’t know she was a friend,” said Yo-Yo quickly. “I’m sorry, girl.”
“No, you don’t understand, I met her today. This morning. On the train.”
Yo-Yo frowned at the handbill. There was no date to say when she went missing and the paper was weathered by more than one rainfall. “I don’t think so,” she said. “These pictures have been up here for a couple of weeks.”
“Not this one. It can’t have been,” insisted Rain and quickly related the encounter on the train. She dug a hand into her purse, rummaged around, and then brought it out, holding a pair of glasses. “See? They’re the same. Look at the lens. See that little crack? It’s exactly the same.”
“Oh … shit,” murmured Yo-Yo, taking the glasses. She cut a look at Rain. “This was today?”
They looked from the picture to the glasses in Yo-Yo’s hand and back to the picture. The paper was stained by exhaust fumes, tattered by days or weeks of weather.
“That’s some freaky-deaky shit right there,” said Yo-Yo, handing the glasses back, almost forcing them into Rain’s hand.
“What does it mean?”
“The hell should I know?” Yo-Yo pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and took several photos of the handbill, making sure to get clear shots of the old woman’s face and zoom images of the glasses; then she took photos of the text. There wasn’t much. Have You Seen Me? and a name, Dolo
res González; and below that a phone number with a Manhattan area code. They called the number and leaned together to listen to it ring. Six times, eight times. Ten. No answer.
Yo-Yo tore the handbill off the wall, folded it, and put it into her pocket.
While they stood there, too confused to say much, a big, old-fashioned car came rolling down the street, its windows so dark that they couldn’t see who was inside. It slowed as it passed, creeping by as Rain and Yo-Yo turned to look at it. Then it moved along, picking up speed as it went. The car turned at the corner and was gone. The two women stood and looked at the empty corner. They both shivered, but neither noticed the other doing it.
“Come on,” said Yo-Yo, taking Rain’s hand. “Let’s go find some light.”
It was an odd bit of phrasing, and Yo-Yo paused, frowning at what she’d just said. Rain nodded, though. It made sense to her.
They hurried through the dark.
INTERLUDE THREE
NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS MEETING
St. Jude’s Catholic Church
Thirteen Months Ago
Rain wondered if she should scream.
That seemed like the kind of thing someone should do when they fall off the edge of the world and plummet into the big dark. A scream. To let someone know how far she was falling.
She didn’t scream. Couldn’t. You need breath for that, and Rain did not think she had any. Not anymore. Her chest was still, her lungs sagging, her muscles going …
Dead?
Yes.
That was it, and she knew it.
Rain understood what that felt like.
It wasn’t the first time she’d fallen like this. Though, admittedly, after all the bad things she had done over the last nine years, it was probably true that she was falling from a lesser height. The first time she’d been sixteen. She hadn’t had enough time to rack up many sins. She’d slept with Noah once and never again. With the pill, she should never have gotten pregnant. But look at that—a miracle. Almost a virgin birth. There should be wise men and gifts and singing animals. Or something like that. There should have been a star in the sky.
As there had been when she died nine years ago.
It had been so bright, that star. Not stationary but pulsing. Steady and true.
A bright, shining star that burned above her in the darkness. So bright. So beautiful. Clean and pure. She’d remembered that.
That first fall had been on the day she had Dylan. Everything had gone wrong. The doctors later told her that it was an amniotic fluid embolism that resulted in cardiac arrest. Something Rain had never heard of. Something no one figured was a real threat in a healthy young girl.
She’d died with her baby still in her.
The doctors had cut Dylan out, but a C-section takes time. They had to use the paddles to bring her back. There were lights, too. Big ones. Like flashes from nuclear explosions, filling every part of her with light. If she had been awake, she would have been terrified that the electricity would have hurt her baby. The doctors had an answer for that, too. The jolts went in a straight line, directly to her heart. They did not touch her baby. That’s what they said.
Rain knew they were wrong.
Dylan had felt those blasts. They’d done something to him. In that same moment, the pulsing light she saw changed. It became much more intense. Like a laser. No, like a searchlight in all that blackness.
Searching and finding her.
That’s what saved her.
Her baby’s soul, his heart light, was so bright, so steady that it showed her the way. It was what drew her up and gave her a direction in which to swim. And she had swum.
Up and up and up, gradually becoming aware of the pain as her nerve endings reignited. Aware of the indignities and violations of them cutting into her, stretching her wide, taking the baby.
In the darkness, Rain had felt him go. Felt him taken away. Felt the cold bite as they cut the umbilical cord.
It was the worst thing she had ever felt. For a moment, just a moment, she had almost stopped swimming. Almost let herself drift down into the painless, bottomless darkness.
She didn’t, though.
Dylan had called her back. He wanted her to be alive. She’d followed him back from death.
That was then. Nine years ago.
Now she was falling into darkness again, but there was no heart-light to show her the way.
There were the drugs they shot into her. There was the false light of defib machines. Those were the things that brought her back. Not coaxed her, not led her. They dragged her back.
Inside of all the noise of EMTs and doctors and nurses and machines, there was her mother’s voice, clear as day, maybe talking to a doctor, maybe on the cell phone to a friend. Saying, “God help me, but maybe it’s for the best.”
She woke in the hospital three days later and felt the total absence of Dylan. The complete and utter aloneness. And the knowledge that two years into being clean, all her escape hatches—LSD, VOID, crack cocaine—were all welded shut.
That was thirteen months ago. Rain had gotten out of the hospital, gotten well, gotten stronger, went back to meetings, lived her life. She did not use, but God oh God how she wanted to. And Doctor Nine was always there, just beyond her line of sight, waiting, smiling, patient.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
There were several diners in that part of Brooklyn, with names like Lucky Pete’s, Stella’s, American Dollar. But this one was just the Diner.
That’s what it had on a neon sign above the door. As far as Straight Bob was concerned—and he purported himself to be a serious expert on diners from sea to shining sea—it was a classic example of the type. A big wraparound counter with a break in the middle for the entrance to the kitchen. Red Naugahyde covers on the seats. Menu signs with white plastic letters on black felt. A row of hot plates for coffeepots. Ancient miniature jukeboxes at each booth, though none of them had worked for as long as Rain could remember. The singles on offer were for the latest releases by David Bowie, Prince, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, and Amy Winehouse. Like that. No one who was still alive. Rain knew that wasn’t intentional, but it worked out that way. Sometimes she thought it was retro cool, and sometimes it was just plain creepy.
The Bobs were seated at the big booth in the back. Yo-Yo slid in next to Gay Bob and Rain sat across from them.
“Wow,” said Straight Bob, giving Rain an up and down, “what’s with you? You look like shit.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“I always look like this,” said Straight Bob. “What’s your excuse?”
“Been a weird day,” said Rain.
“Good weird or bad weird?” asked Gay Bob, but before Rain could answer, the waitress appeared. She did that. One second she wasn’t there and the next she was.
Her name was Betty, and it was Straight Bob’s assertion that all diners should have a waitress named Betty. Or Babs. Maybe Brenda or Bernadette. Something with a B. This one was a Betty, and she was every bit as much a classic as the diner, with mountains of frosted hair sprayed into submission, a huge matronly bosom, half-moon glasses perched on the bridge of too much nose, and really good legs for a middle-aged woman who was on them all day. Couple of pins on her uniform—cats, dragonflies. Once in a while she’d switch them to something seasonal. Christmas tree or a Halloween jack-o’-lantern. Lipstick in a medium red shade that was never sexy or pushy, and a perfume that wasn’t expensive but nice to smell.
“Getcha?” asked Betty, holding up a pad and pen.
“Coffee,” said Yo-Yo, but Betty gave her a “no shit” look. “And pancakes with hot maple syrup, bananas, and walnuts. Oh, and bacon. Crisp. I don’t like it limp.”
“None of us do, honey,” said Betty, and Gay Bob grinned and held a fist out for a bump. Betty withered him with a raised eyebrow, and he took his hand back. Betty turned to Rain. “And for you?”
Rain was about to order an omelet and then realized that she’d burned through most of h
er budget on the Chinese food. But Gay Bob came to her rescue.
“Dinner’s on me tonight, kids,” he announced. Gay Bob had money from a slip-and-fall lawsuit, and he liked spreading it around. Everyone at the table tried their best to pretend to say no, but they caved very quickly. Rain ordered her omelet with mushrooms and spinach, turkey sausage, and potatoes. Straight Bob ordered a second short stack, having already finished the first. Straight Bob had a comfortable belly and liked to keep it entertained.
Betty went away, and Straight Bob held up a hand for silence until they heard the waitress bellow the order through the little serving window.
“Nice,” he said.
Straight Bob and Gay Bob were regulars at the local meetings. They were completely different from each other in virtually every way except that they were both Bobs. Not Roberts, Robs, Bobbies, or any other variation. It was a thing with them. Just like Rain was not Lorraine or Lori. She was Rain, a name she’d started calling herself in kindergarten.
Straight Bob was short, round, balding, mildly pedantic, and kind. He was a knower of things. He knew about diners, about trains—real and HO scale—classic cars, folk music, the history of guitars, the complete biographies of each of the Beatles, Beat generation literature—he could recite “Howl” from memory—and dozens of other subjects. Rain sometimes wondered if he was somewhere on the spectrum. He had moderately good social skills when he wasn’t going through one of his increasingly frequent bouts of depression. He was obsessive with learning everything about any subject that interested him; and it was important to him that he knew more about those subjects than anyone else.
Gay Bob was a completely different physical type. He was tall, lean, muscular, and a fitness freak. He had a great body, and Yo-Yo once confided that if Gay Bob wasn’t gay she’d have “climbed him like a rock wall.” Rain could appreciate that. Gay Bob had a waist as narrow as Joplin’s but shoulders a mile wide, but he wasn’t bulked up like a muscle freak. More like one of those Olympic swimmers. Great skin, too, gorgeous blue eyes, and a smile that made people of both orientations want to disrobe. Not that he played on that much. He wasn’t exactly celibate, but he wasn’t actively on the hunt. He worked as a bouncer at Pornstash, which was a glam bar for the leather crowd, and on his off hours, he was trying to be a novelist. He wrote decent song lyrics, but his prose—those sections Rain had been allowed to read—was god-awful. Gay Bob thought he was writing a novel that would be short-listed for everything from The New York Times to the Pulitzers. Rain was a lot less sure about that.
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