Fractured

by Catherine McKenzie

  “He’ll do fine in there, you know,” Alicia says. “He’s a bright kid, and he knows what he needs to do.”

  Hanna gives a deep shudder. Her bottom lip’s quivering. She and Alicia sit in adjoining waiting chairs in a coordinated movement.

  “It was awful,” Hanna says. “I didn’t expect . . . I really didn’t expect it to be like that. Do I make people feel like that?” She looks at me.

  “It’s not the same, honey,” I say. “What you do is about money.”

  She shakes her head. Is Hanna’s career going to be another casualty of the day of the accident? That horrible day.

  “But they asked everything we thought they would?” Alicia persists. “Everything we talked about?”

  A look passes between them. One that excludes me. Have they had meetings I didn’t know about? Or am I so full of secrets myself I assume everyone else must be similarly situated?

  Hanna looks at me. Looks through me. I turn to see if there’s someone behind me, but there’s only the dingy oatmeal wallpaper, and strangers looking uncomfortable.

  “What, Hanna?” I say.

  “I can’t tell you. You know that. I can’t repeat my testimony.”

  My anger boils over. I speak through my teeth.

  “This is ridiculous,” I say to Alicia. “I can’t talk to my own wife about—this is my family. Our family. How can they make us testify against each other?”

  “Do you really think I’d testify against you?” Hanna says. “How can you think that?”

  “I feel like there are all these things you’re keeping from me. Like you and Alicia have some secret strategy I’m not allowed in on.”

  “Ha! That’s rich.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Hanna looks as if all of the energy has drained from her body. And I’m the one who pulled the plug.

  “If you’d done what I’d asked, if you’d stayed away from her, none of this would have happened.”

  “I did. I did stay away. And what happened that morning . . . that’s only what anyone would’ve done.”

  “That’s always been the problem, hasn’t it?” she says. “It wasn’t anyone. It was you. And now look where we are.” She points to the doors Chris disappeared behind. “Look where your son is right now.”

  I Love New York in June

  Julie

  Four months ago

  “And then,” I said as I huffed up to the top of another hill, wishing I’d worn my sleeveless running shirt, “my lawyer said that if she actually goes through with this, it could cost me $50,000 in his fees alone.”

  Susan and I were on one of our night walks. I’d been speaking to my lawyer, Lee, that afternoon. He’d finally gotten around to giving me a full report on what he thought my options were. He’d been in trial, but still, given all the dollars I’d already sent his way, I would’ve thought I’d be more of a priority. Which I told him, and which I was certain he didn’t appreciate.

  “That’s a lot of money,” Susan said.

  There was something in her tone I didn’t quite like, or understand.

  “It is.”

  She pulled her shirt away from her skin. “I can’t believe it’s still this hot at nine thirty at night.”

  “$50,000 is a lot of money for me.”

  “Is it?”

  “Of course it is.”

  She pulled her shirt over her head and tied it around her waist. She was wearing a large black sports bra underneath, something that provided more cover than most swimsuits. I copied her maneuver, though my own sports bra was more revealing. The air felt momentarily cool against my slick skin. Still, I looked around to see if anyone was watching. If we were on Pine Street, you could be certain Cindy would be finding/inventing a new bylaw about proper workout attire. I’d had enough interventions in what I did and said in the last few months to last a lifetime.

  Susan had lost some weight in the last couple of months. All of the trudging up hills and down dales had helped bring some definition back to her body. I, on the other hand, felt lumpy and unfit. Two months ago, I could’ve taken this hill without a second thought. Now I was huffing right along with Susan.

  Damn John and that stupid kiss.

  “Didn’t you sell, like, three million copies of your book?”

  “It’s . . . something like that.”

  “And you get, what? Two, three dollars a book?”

  God, how I hated that question. I’d never ask Susan, or anyone else, what she made for a living, working as a bookkeeper for several local businesses, or what she received in support payments from Brad. But every Tom, Dick, and Susan thought they had a right to know what an author’s income was, how many books we’ve sold and whether we’re successful. Even though my book had done well, I felt as put off by the questions as I would have if I’d sold the five hundred copies I expected to when The Book came out.

  “It’s not that linear. There are a lot of e-books in there, and price drops, and my agent gets fifteen percent, and there are taxes . . .”

  I trailed off, because what was the use? She was right. On paper, $50,000 shouldn’t mean anything to me. The fact that it did was a form of denial. The money was still coming in like it was being sprayed out of a fire hose, but I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t even talk about it with Daniel, who tended not to read the stories that came out every six months or so when I crossed another significant sales threshold. I’d hung the framed copy of my book they’d sent me when it reached a million copies, but had put the other two in a drawer.

  “It’s not only the money,” I said. “It’s the whole principle of the thing.”

  “I’m sure Hanna feels that way, too.”

  “Have you talked to her?”

  “Not in detail, but I’ve known them for a long time.”

  “I know that, and I appreciate you taking my side, I really do.”

  “I’m not taking sides,” Susan said. “I’m just not going to stop being your friend because of this.”

  “Thank you. That means a lot to me.”

  We walked to the next street and started down the hill.

  “Any word from Brad lately?”

  “I think he’s trying to win me back.”

  I glanced at her. Her cheeks were red, and her hair was puffed up from the humidity. She looked puzzled and vulnerable.

  “Why didn’t you say anything before?”

  “I’m not sure what to think about it.”

  “What’s he been doing?”

  “I told you he’s going to AA? Well, he seems to be taking it seriously. He says he’s been sober for three months now, and he’s doing that whole making-amends thing.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe for him, but what does it mean for me? Am I supposed to forgive him for all the times he chose alcohol over his family?”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “But I feel as if I do, you see? Alcoholics are so selfish. It’s always about them, even in recovery. This is what I need. Blah, blah, blah. I’m sick of it, you know?”

  “I get it. How are the kids handling it?”

  “The kids,” she said, a sob escaping her. “That’s what makes this all so impossible.”

  “Because you’re worried what he might do?”

  “Because he’s got them in on his act. Suddenly I’m the bad guy if I don’t back down and take him back.”

  “That doesn’t seem right.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Can you talk to Brad? Tell him how you’re feeling?”

  “That’s the thing. If I talk to him, I might give him hope, but I can’t totally destroy his hope, either, because then he might start drinking again. It’s a no-win situation, either way.”

  “I’m so sorry, Susan.”

  “Fucking Brad.”

  We walked for a few minutes in silence, reaching the bottom of one hill and starting up another toward one of the lookouts over the Ohio River. Despite everything
that had happened, I still loved the neighborhood. The colorful houses hugging the sidewalks, the views of the river and its different moods. A runner passed us, breathing heavily, doing what we were doing but at running speed. Hill work. I used to do that. It was unpleasant, but it made me feel so strong when I could get all the way to the top of the “awful hill,” as Leah and I called it, without feeling like I needed to puke at the end.

  “How long,” I said eventually, “do you have to keep walking on eggshells around him?”

  “I went to one of those Al-Anon websites. I think he needs to be sober for a year.”

  “What does that mean for you?”

  “I’m keeping my contact to a minimum, but I can’t tell him that there’s no hope for us. I can’t tell him the truth.”

  “Is it the truth?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine. I’ve kind of accepted it.”

  “Maybe the website is wrong? There’s all kinds of misleading stuff on the Internet.”

  “You’re right . . . anything going on there, for you?”

  With everything else happening, Heather had receded into the background, where I wished she could stay forever. “I’m almost scared to say it, but all seems quiet on the Heather front.”

  “That’s good. Did you see Ashley won an award for that picture she took? When you ran out after her at the Bow Tie?”

  “Where did you see it?”

  “Facebook, I think.”

  “Are we . . . are we in it?”

  “Not recognizably. It’s all blurred and foggy . . . I was pretty impressed, actually.”

  “You must have thought I was insane, running out like that.”

  “It was a normal reaction after everything that’s happened.”

  I agreed, but then went silent. I scrolled through everything that had happened since I’d arrived in Ohio. The lack of video evidence on my camera feed. The way the police had dismissed me. The fact that none of the events, in and of themselves, actually proved anything.

  Was it possible that it was all innocent?

  Was it possible it was all in my head?

  The first time I really knew there was something wrong with Heather was the summer we spent working in New York.

  As far as I’m concerned, the summer associates program is the main reason to attend law school. At these well-paid jobs, your only responsibility is going for expensive lunches with the senior associates and making sure you don’t nod off at your desk in the afternoon as the pasta dish you ate spreads its carbohydrates through your bloodstream.

  I got one of those jobs at Kerr, Byrne & Grant after my second year at McGill. I knew it was a Faustian pact: one well-paid and lazy summer in return for seven brutal associate years that would start after I passed the bar. But I had the grades, and I needed the money, and: New York!

  It was Kathryn’s idea, and Booth and Kevin came along because they went along with whatever Kathryn decided. Kathryn and I shared an apartment a few blocks from them in the Village. The guys worked at a different firm, but we had enough hours to ourselves to become familiar to the bouncers at Fiddlesticks, our local Irish bar.

  Heather was there that summer, too. Not in our apartment, but nearby, and working at the same firm as Kathryn and me. She seemed to be the only student who hadn’t gotten the take-it-easy memo, getting stuck on some deposition document prep that took up every waking minute. She lost weight and developed deep circles under her eyes, and when I’d occasionally try to pry her from her cubicle, she’d give me this weary look and tell me what she was doing was too important to step away from.

  I felt different that summer. I ran along the East River every morning. I was going to parties and wearing clothes I couldn’t afford because Kathryn insisted what was hers was mine. I felt like time was winding backward, the years peeling away. How did I already feel old at twenty-four? I couldn’t even say. Only I’d been so focused on getting somewhere, anywhere but where I came from, I’d never sat in one place long enough to just be.

  I did manage to “just be” that summer with Kathryn and the others. Though I was with Booth and she was with Kevin, we were a seamless unit.

  I believed that almost all of the time.

  But every once in a while, when Kathryn would come by my cubicle, laughing at some inside joke from the night before, I’d catch Heather watching us out of the corner of her eye, a small smile playing on her lips. Something about the way she looked at me made me feel small, like she was in on a joke that was on me, and was waiting for me to figure it out. Then I’d tell myself I was imagining things and go back to pretending to work.

  Then one day, deep in August, Heather brushed past me on the way to the bathroom, and I watched a piece a paper flutter behind her to the ground. I was about to call after her when I saw my name scrawled across it.

  I picked it up and turned it over.

  You’ll never be one of them, it read, and I felt its truth in every fiber of my being.

  It was the first of many notes I’d receive.

  On a Saturday in mid-June, I was standing in the entrance of Joseph-Beth, feeling awkward. There were two massive posters made up of my book cover and my face hanging in the front windows, which always made me feel like an impostor. Were people really going to show up—and okay, there was kind of a line, I could see, inside the store—just for me?

  How had that happened?

  I hadn’t wanted to do this public appearance, but my publicist insisted. The movie was coming out in a couple of months, and it would be good to spur more sales, she said. I wondered if she’d ever been to a bookstore signing. Even if it went well, I’d sell maybe a hundred books; no way that would move the movie dial. But she’d pressed, and my editor got into the act, and in the end it was easier to agree. Besides, I was starting to believe that Heather really had forgotten about me. Even the creepy phone calls had died down and then stopped.

  I used to love bookstores. On the rare afternoon when I’d have a sitter and could escape the twins for a few hours, that’s where I’d go. Not to run the errands that were supposed to justify the expense, but to the big leather chair in the fiction section where I could browse the newest releases and read in peace for an hour or two. Now I’m ashamed of myself, reading whole books without paying for them. But then, it never occurred to me that I was getting something for free. I was escaping; that was the important thing.

  Those stolen afternoons are the whole reason I started writing. I’d stumbled across a book written by another one of our McGill classmates, a woman named Moira, whom I hadn’t known very well. Her book was sitting in the bargain bin, ALL BOOKS ON SALE FOR $1.99! It had a lurid cover, its title written in a script that seemed to be dripping blood. Mens rea, it was called—the guilty mind.

  I knew it was about Kathryn as soon as I saw Moira’s name, my pulse quickening as I plucked it out of the bin and took it to my hiding place. It had been published during the foggy first year of the twins’ birth, when it would’ve taken police at my door to arrest me to register anything outside of my own personal bubble.

  There was nothing new in the book, I found as I raced through it. All the same theories and speculation about how Kathryn died, and who might’ve done it, were there. The “suspects”—me and the twenty other people who’d been at the party who knew her—picked up and examined, then discarded. She even considered herself, because she and Kathryn had a fight once when Moira kissed Kevin at a party and claimed she didn’t know he and Kathryn were dating, and she’d been there that night, too. Her verdict: it was a tragic drinking accident. No one could know that she’d never wake up from the nap she went to take while the party raged on around her. The idea that someone pressed her face into the pillow was too unreasonable to believe. She might have died a rock-star death, but that wasn’t any reason to create conspiracies.

  The book was badly written and vaguely libelous, and the title didn’t even make sense. If there was no me
ns rea that still might mean there was an actus reus—a guilty act. Both were missing from her book.

  And yet, that’s what stuck in my head. Mens rea, the guilty mind. It was an old debate Kathryn and Booth and Kevin and I had dozens of times over beers at McKibbin’s and cheap bottles of wine at one another’s apartments. At what point did thinking about something, even planning for something, become criminal? Where does the switch occur? At what precise moment? At the beginning of the plan? The End?

  And how?

  Those discussions were the genesis of The Murder Game—our name for the drunken conversations that became long planning sessions of how to pull off the perfect murder.

  “Ms. Apple?”

  A store clerk wearing a green apron with a Joseph-Beth logo on it stood in front of me with an inquiring expression. I didn’t look much like my publicity shot, I knew, mostly on purpose, but also because I couldn’t be bothered most days with the effort that would take.

  “That’s me.”

  “Oh, I thought so! This is so exciting.” She took my elbow and nudged me into the store. “Look, there are already a huge number of people here.”

  She pointed to the line I’d seen earlier. There were rows of empty seats scattered around a lectern. I wasn’t sure why they were making them line up to sit down, and I said so.

  “It’s all psychological! You know? Like if they see a line, then it’s something important.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Should I go over there now?”

  “That would be fantastic! So, you’ll read first? And then you’ll take questions? And then sign books?”

  I already felt exhausted.

  “That sounds great.”

  “They had to buy the book first! Look, they’re all holding their copies!”

  They were. Perhaps a hundred women—and only a few men—were clutching their books to their chests. I was happy to see so few men because, despite Heather, the men were usually the weirder fans. I had a wistful moment thinking back to the beginning. How I’d snap a picture of the meager crowds who’d come out to hear me speak holding their books in the air, and post it online. I’m in Seattle! Ottawa! Frankfurt!