It All Falls Down

by Sheena Kamal

  Dedication

  For my mother

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Three Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part Four Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Part Five Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Sheena Kamal

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  1

  When they erected their first pop-up tents to treat the addicts who wandered in and out like living corpses, I thought: Sure.

  When the newspapers ran article after article about the opioid addiction taking the city by storm, it was more along the lines of: No kidding. Nothing slips past you guys.

  But when the mental health infrastructure became obsessed with the zombies, I had to put my foot down.

  Nobody cared about my griping.

  With all these people addicted to addicts now, where are the humble murderers of the city supposed to turn for our mental health support? I ask you. We have been reduced to complaining about it in our weekly meetings. Not that there are murder support groups in Vancouver. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Alternative outlets for the murderous of the city are sadly lacking. Private therapists can cost an arm and a leg—so to speak—and it’s not like you can find community discussion groups on the topic, either. The closest I’ve found is one for people with eating disorders, but I don’t expect people who have done terrible things to their appetites to understand that I killed a person or two last year. In self-defense, but still.

  During my share, I settle for telling my fellow nutjobs that I feel like I’m being shadowed by my demons, and they nod in understanding. We are strangers who all know one another’s deepest secrets, bonded in the sacred circle of a urine-stained meeting room in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. They lift their anemic arms in polite applause afterward and we disperse from the collapsed circle. We are blessedly strangers again.

  The feeling of being watched follows me from the low-income Eastside Vancouver neighborhood I frequent back to the swanky town house in Kitsilano that I now occupy some space in. I drive with the windows up because the air is thick with forest fire smoke from Vancouver’s north shore, smoke that has drifted here in pungent wafts and settled over the city. It doesn’t help that we are experiencing one of these new Octobers that doesn’t remember that there’s supposed to be a fall season and is almost unbearably hot for this time of year.

  As I drive, I obsess over still another death. One that hasn’t occurred yet. But it will.

  Soon.

  2

  When I get back to the town house, Sebastian Crow, my old boss and new roomie, is asleep on the couch.

  I reach out a hand to touch him, but pull back before my fingers brush his temple. I don’t want to wake him. I want him to sleep like this forever. Peaceful. At ease. In a place where the C-word can’t reach him. Every day he seems to shrink a bit more and his spirit grows bigger to compensate for the reduction of physical space he occupies. He’s ill and there is nothing I can do about it because it’s terminal. My dog, Whisper, and I have moved in to keep him company and make sure he doesn’t fall down the stairs on our watch, but beyond that it is hopeless. There is a great fire that he seems to burn with now. His body has turned against him, but his mind refuses to let go just yet.

  Not until the book is done.

  When he asked me to help organize and fact-check it for him, I couldn’t say no. Not to Sebastian Crow, the career journalist who is writing his memoirs as he nears the end of his life. Writing it as a love letter to his dead mother and an apology to his estranged son. Also as an explanation to the lover he has abandoned. What I have read of it is beautiful, but it means that he is spending his last days living in the past. Because there is no future, not for him.

  Whisper nudges my hand. She is restless. On edge. She feels it, too.

  I put her on a leash, because I don’t trust her mood, and we walk to the park across the street. There’s a man there who has been trying to pet her, so we steer clear of him in a spirit of generosity toward his limbs. On the other side of the park is a pathway that hugs the coastline. Smoke from unseen fires lingers, even here. Not even the sea breeze can dispel it. We walk, both of us feeling uneasy, until we circle back around to the park. I sit on a bench with Whisper pulled close.

  The man who has been watching me walks right past us.

  “Nice night for a bit of light stalking,” I say. “Don’t you think?”

  The man stops. Faces me. He opens his mouth, perhaps considering a lie, but shuts it again. My back is to the dim streetlight that overlooks this section of the park. Whisper and I are just dark shapes to him, but he is fully illuminated. His coat is open and at his neck there is a long swath of mottled skin running from the hinge of his jaw to his collarbone. It looks like new skin tried to grow there once but gave up halfway, leaving behind an unfinished impression. He’s an older man, but I find his age hard to place. Whatever it is, he has used his years to learn how to dress well. Sleek jacket. Nice shoes. It doesn’t add up. A man, careful with his appearance, who spends his evenings sitting in a park and following women as they walk their dogs.

  We wait in a kind of charged silence, all three of us. Whisper yawns and runs her tongue over her sharp canines to speed things along. He takes this as the threat it’s no doubt meant to be.

  “Your sister told me where to find you,” he says finally.

  If he thinks that’s supposed to put me at ease, he’s off his meds. Lorelei hasn’t spoken to me since last year, since I stole her husband’s car and ran it off the road and into a ravine.

  But I decide to play the game anyway. “What do you want?”

  “Damned if I know,” he says, with a rueful smile. “Taking a trip down memory lane in my winter years, I suppose.”

  “And what’s that got to do with me?”

  “I knew your father once.” It’s a good thing his voice is soft because said even a decibel louder, that statement could have knocked me on my ass, if I wasn’t already on it. “May I sit down?” He gestures to the bench. There’s something odd about his tone. His enunciation is too measured for someone confronted by an unpredictable animal. I wonder if the scar at his neck has anything to do with his casual demeanor. If he is one of those men who is so accustomed to danger that it do
esn’t faze him anymore.

  “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 or not I’m doing okay. It goes deeper than that, and has to do with the things about my father that I didn’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.

  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?”

  “You’re still working with that small PI outfit? They give you any time off?”

  “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?”