In the Grip of It
Page 8
“No. Knew my father from where?”
He pauses in his approach and considers Whisper’s bared teeth. “Lebanon. You know he served with the marines there, right?”
I ignore this because I did not know that, but if it’s anyone’s business, it isn’t his. “Doesn’t explain why you’re following me.”
He swipes a hand over his face, the tips of his fingers pause at his scar. He notices my eyes flicker toward it. “From Lebanon. An explosion.” He considers his next words carefully before he speaks. “I said I’d check up on you if anything ever happened to him.”
I laugh. “You’re a few decades too late.”
“I’m not a very good friend. Look, I’m retired now and I had to make a trip to Canada. I thought I’d look you up. I had checked on you and your sister after I heard he died all those years ago, but you were with your aunt and everything seemed fine. A couple days ago I managed to track down your sister. She wasn’t exactly very forthcoming about you—”
“She wouldn’t be.” Lorelei and I had not parted on good terms. She had kept her maiden name, though, when she got married, and had a robust online profile. She wouldn’t be hard to find, if you had a mind to go looking.
“I told her we were old friends. Took some convincing, but she told me that I could find you through Sebastian Crow. And here I am.”
“But why?”
He becomes agitated, fishes out a lone cigarette from his jacket, and lights it. His eyes linger on the wisp of flame from the lighter. “You ever made a promise you didn’t keep? I’ve done a lot of wrong in my life, but how things turned out with your father, in the end . . . I never thought what happened to him was right. I knew he was struggling after the trouble in Lebanon, but goddamn. What a waste.”
He looks down at my hand, where my fingers are clenched so tight around Whisper’s leash that my nails dig into my palm, leaving crescent-shaped marks.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he says helplessly. He hasn’t taken a drag of the cigarette yet, seems to have no intention of smoking it.
I almost drowned last year. I don’t remember a lot about it, only that I must have blacked out at some point. Any free diver or scuba enthusiast will tell you that in the final stage of nitrogen narcosis, latent hypoxia hits the brain. It can cause neurological impairment. Reasoning and judgment are often affected, at least in the moment. But it can also feel pleasant, this lack of oxygen. Warm. Safe, even.
It can make you delusional.
I wonder if I’m experiencing a more long-term fallout from my near drowning. Because I used to be able to tell when people were lying, almost definitively. But now I’m not so sure. After the events of last year, when my daughter went missing—the girl I’d given away without a second thought—I have looked at people differently. Maybe it’s my sluggish maternal instincts kicking in, muddling my senses. Or maybe I’ve lost my mojo. Because when he said he doesn’t know what he’s doing here, I believed him. I believe that we do things that don’t make sense. Even to ourselves.
It’s also possible that I am falling into my own hallucinations.
I’m so confused that I say nothing at all in return. The veteran looks as unsettled as I feel. I stare at him hard until he walks away, toward the ocean, and disappears into the dense night. Then I rub some feeling back into my hands. My thoughts are a jumble, until one of them shakes loose.
It isn’t just the surprise of someone coming to find me after all these years. It isn’t even that he felt the need to follow me in the dark to ascertain whether I’m doing okay. It goes deeper than that, and has to do with the things about my father that I don’t know. That there was trouble in Lebanon. With my father.
My father had trouble in Lebanon, and then, some years later, he blew his brains out.
Chapter 3
Deep in space, a star named KIC 8462852 flickers for some unknown reason, while down on Earth an ex-cop, ex–security agent, ex-husband, and ex–amateur bowler grimaces as he downs a glass of spinach juice and hopes that his internal organs are paying attention to the effort he’s making on their behalf.
This particular star has confounded scientists the world over by its constant dimming and brightening, while Jon Brazuca confounds only himself with his new resolution to be kinder to his body. He inherited low self-esteem from his spineless mother and weak-chinned father, both of whom apologized through life and then on into their retirement.
But Brazuca is over it. This demeaning cycle of “I’m sorry” and “I beg your pardon” would end with him.
He is turning over a new leaf, and then blending it into a smoothie.
The evening sun is low on the horizon and he is filled with chlorophyll and contentment. Brazuca has always been more awake at night, more alive, and has now turned to astronomy to help fill in the gaps. He is not a man of science but wishes that he were. His mother had once taken him to Spain as a child, to the cliffs of Famara, and together they had looked out at the stars reflected in pools of water on the beachfront below.
Thinking of this, he longs for a simpler time, when women he generously pleasured didn’t drug him and tie him to a bed, leaving him to be found by astonished maids. Which is something that actually happened to him approximately a year ago. Nora Watts, the woman he’d attended AA meetings with, the woman who had gone and lost a daughter that she hadn’t even wanted, the woman whom he felt compelled to help for no rhyme or reason that made any goddamn sense to him—she had left him high, literally, but not at all dry. No, she’d fed him a booze-and-sedative cocktail that put him to sleep and gave his body the little bump it had been wanting for so very long.
And it has taken him months to kick the habit again.
Brazuca stands on the balcony of his apartment in East Vancouver and winks up at the sky, in the general direction of the flickering star he has read about in a magazine. He feels for a brief moment a sort of affinity for the universe. He chugs the rest of the juice and belches in contentment.
His friend Bernard Lam has asked him to come over and, for the first time ever, he feels like hanging out with a billionaire.
“Brazuca,” says Lam, at the door of his sprawling Point Grey mansion. If there’s a housing crisis in Vancouver, it might be because so much space has been taken up by this single estate. There’s an east wing and a west wing, and about twenty rooms in between them. There are outdoor courts for every sport, and a miniature golf course for variety. If you get bored of the saltwater pool, there’s a freshwater one on the other side of the property.
Bernard Lam, the playboy son of a wealthy businessman and philanthropist, gestures for Brazuca to follow him inside. His famous charm is nowhere to be seen. His manner is grave and uncertain as he leads Brazuca down a long hallway filled with family photographs mounted on the wall, newer photos of Lam and his recent bride, and then into a study. “What’s wrong?” Brazuca asks as soon as the door is closed behind them.
“One moment.” Lam goes to his laptop on the desk. There’s a bottle of scotch next to him and no photos to speak of here. It is a family-free zone. Lam turns the screen toward Brazuca.
“She’s beautiful,” he says, glancing at the woman on Lam’s computer. In the picture, she’s in a sundress on a yacht, laughing up at the camera. She’s tall and voluptuous, with a sheet of glossy dark hair and bright eyes.
“Her name was Clementine. She was the love of my life.”
No amount of spinach juice can stop the headache that begins at Brazuca’s temples at Lam’s use of past tense. The woman in the photo wasn’t the woman on the walls of the family home. So the love of his life was not Lam’s new bride. “When?”
“They found her last week in her apartment. They say it was an overdose. She’s . . . she was four months pregnant.”
“Yours?” Brazuca asks, careful to keep his voice even. Lam raises a brow, as if the possibility of anything else doesn’t even exist.
Brazuca decides not to push. “So what do you need?”
“I take contracts as needed. They’re flexible.” His new employers weren’t picky about what work he chose, as long as he took some of it off their hands. They’d even offered to make him a partner in a more formal sort of arrangement, but he’d said no to that. He didn’t want formal.
“Good,” says Lam. “That’s very good. I need you to find out who her dealer is.”
“Bernard . . .”
“You will, of course, be generously compensated.”
“It’s not about the money.”
“Then do it for a friend. Do it for me. My girl and my child are dead. I want to know who’s responsible.”
Brazuca wonders if Lam knows that, with the use of the word girl, he has painted both of them with the same brush of idealized innocence. “You’re not going to like what comes out of this,” he says quietly. “It will bring you no peace of mind.” Death by overdose is a nasty thing to deal with. Blame is hard to pin down.
“Who says I want peace of mind?” Lam pours a shot of scotch into his glass and knocks it back. “I’ll give you the paperwork and her contacts. They didn’t find anything on her phone. The drug she took . . .” He looks away, gathers his thoughts. “It was cocaine laced with a new synthetic opiate now hitting the streets. A fentanyl derivative more potent than what’s been seen before, and actually stronger than fentanyl. Called YLD Ten.”
“Wild Ten? I’ve heard of it. Not much. But I know it’s out there.” It was the stupid name that got to him. Easy to remember when you place an order from your friendly neighborhood drug dealer.
“Then you know how dangerous it is. She was only twenty-five. She had her whole life ahead of her, Jon, and it was with me. I need to know. Please.”
“Okay,” Brazuca says, after a minute. Because he’s not the kind of man who can say no to a cry for help. Turns out, his leaf isn’t so fresh after all. “I’ll look into it. Do you have a key to her apartment?”
Lam nods. “Of course. I own the place.”
“Of course,” Brazuca murmurs. “I’ll get started right away.” He doesn’t have to say the “sir” because it’s implied. Bernard Lam, whose life he saved several years earlier, is oblivious to this dig.
About the Author
SHEENA KAMAL holds an HBA in Political Science from the University of Toronto. She was awarded a TD Canada Trust scholarship for community leadership and activism around the issue of homelessness, and has worked as a researcher into crime and investigative journalism for the film and television industry. Her debut novel, The Lost Ones, was inspired by her experience. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Facebook: /SheenaKamalAuthor
Instagram: @ sheenakamalwrites
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Also By Sheena Kamal
The Lost Ones
In the Grip of It (a novella)
It All Falls Down
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from It All Falls Down copyright © 2018 by Sheena Kamal.
in the grip of it. Copyright © 2018 by Sheena Kamal. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.
Digital Edition MAY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-287932-5
Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-06-287933-2
Cover design by Amy Halperin
Cover photograph © rusm/ iStock/ Getty Images
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