All the Broken People

by Leah Konen

  It was crucial that I see him slip—it was the one lie that didn’t contain even a shred of truth, one I’d have to deliver with conviction all the same: Just after I got to the clearing, I heard him scream. I saw him slip and fall.

  “We’ll try to call nine-one-one immediately,” Vera said. “Only we probably won’t have service until we get down to the bottom.”

  I nodded. “We should walk fast, maybe even run. It will help us when we call the police. Adrenaline, you know.”

  “Yes,” Vera said. “Good point.”

  John paused, twisting at the strap of his backpack. He looked pale, almost ill. “I hate this,” he said. “I don’t want to put you two in danger.” His voice was earnest, his eyes clouded with worry. “If I got you in trouble, I couldn’t live with that.”

  “Well, you won’t be alive, officially, so you don’t have to worry about that,” Vera said, only the joke didn’t land, for him or for me. She forced a smile. “Don’t worry. We won’t get in any trouble,” she said. Then she stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips.

  I couldn’t help but imagine standing on my tiptoes, doing the same.

  * * *

  • • •

  Vera took the train to the city as soon as we were done with our hike. She was going to do her best to procure a car from her friend, for John to drive off in, one that couldn’t be traced.

  With her gone and me on my own, I made a low-key dinner and ate it while I caught up on Netflix and indulged in wine—binge-watching and nervous drinking were better than silence, better than waiting for Davis to suddenly appear.

  The doorbell chimed as I was finishing my plate. Dusty barked wildly.

  My pulse ratcheted up. I knew it was probably a trick-or-treater, though I’d kept the porch lights off in the hopes of keeping them at bay—but what if it was Davis, already here?

  I sat stock-still, frozen, not wanting to make a sound. Praying whoever it was would just leave.

  It chimed again, and just after, my phone buzzed: a text from John.

  It’s just me

  My heartbeat slowed as I walked to the door and eased it open.

  “I come bearing gifts,” John said, holding a bottle of whiskey. On his breath, I could already smell a bit of it.

  “I’m glad it’s just you,” I said.

  He nodded, understanding the implication. “Want company?” he asked, leaning casually against the doorjamb. Even his mannerisms had a way of putting me at ease. He straightened up. “I mean, I can leave you alone if you’re in the middle of dinner. Or if this is weird. Vera just thought, you know, that it would be good for me to be with you, in case your friend told your ex—not that we think she would. But in case you wanted company.”

  “Not weird at all,” I said, the tightness in my chest loosening just the tiniest bit. “Come in.”

  I shut my laptop, then took my plate and wineglass to the kitchen, returning with two glasses for the whiskey and some ice. “Do you think Vera was able to get a car?” I asked.

  “I think so, probably. Her artist friend—I remember him—he was always kind of shady, knew how to sort out that kind of thing. She’s staying the night, in any case—she might need to look again in the morning if she wasn’t successful today.”

  Our eyes caught, briefly, the logistics making it suddenly real.

  “By the way,” John said, breaking the silence as he poured our glasses extra-tall, “this is the good stuff. Vera suggested I bring it over, use it up before . . .”

  “There will be whiskey in the Adirondacks, too.” For a moment, I let myself imagine it, us sitting in a cozy little cabin, quaint as John’s little studio. Tucked up together in front of a fire, nature’s bounty all around us, Vera there, too.

  He shrugged. “Will there?”

  I laughed. “Alcohol knows no borders.”

  John smiled, eyes crinkling at the corners, and scratched at the scruff of his beard. “I guess.” I had an awful intrusive thought, of running my fingers through his beard, pulling him toward me, waking up the next morning with scratches across my body.

  “And you can paint more,” I said impulsively. John and I had never truly been alone together, and I needed to protect us with words. “You can do nothing all day but draw and paint and make Ms. Fancy Gallery Owner bring in the money.”

  He cocked his head to the side. “Yes, to be truly removed from it all. Perhaps I’ll give up food and drink, too. Go all Marina Abramović on your ass.”

  I laughed, and he did, too, but his was slightly less convincing. He sank back against the cushions, his body sagging.

  “Are you nervous?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “No more than I should be.” His eyes turned down at the corners, his crow’s-feet catching the light. Dusty hopped into his lap, and John scratched at his back, just above his tail. He knew exactly where Dusty liked to be scratched, just as I did. “Maybe I’m just sad. I love it here,” he went on. “I feel like it’s home. I don’t want to leave, but part of me is happy that I won’t be looked at like this anymore, like I’m some sort of monster.”

  I knew in my heart that he wasn’t. He was only a man too naive to understand how certain things look. I didn’t for a second believe that anything had happened between him and a sixteen-year-old, but at the same time, staying here and proclaiming his innocence wasn’t possible, not after all the ways they’d been threatened. Maybe in some strange way, all of this was for the best, his death a relief, even, for the girl. After all, rumors were circling her, too.

  “You’re not a monster,” I said finally, letting myself look at him, really take him in. His worn sweater, jeans marred from wearing them while he worked. The way the skin roughened around his knuckles and the beds of his nails were never quite fully clean from paint. He was a man’s man, wearing every one of his forty years with pride. He was old enough to be a sixteen-year-old’s father—it wasn’t possible.

  I cleared my throat. “Do you think you’ll miss anything—or have any regrets—being dead, I mean?”

  A smile crept up the side of his mouth. “I’m sure I’ll have some,” he said, and with the wildness of the whiskey already pumping through my veins, I let myself pretend he was talking about me, that he regretted not having a chance with me.

  Another intrusive thought, crazy and wrong—of reaching for him, his roughened hands, his broad shoulders, instead of my whiskey.

  The first glass drained easily, almost as if it were leaking, water through a sieve.

  The second glass went quickly, too, both of us drinking too fast, painfully aware that this might be the last night of semi-normalcy for a very long time. For him—perhaps forever.

  “What do you miss most about the city?” John asked, leaning forward to pour us a third glass.

  Or was it technically a fourth?

  I gazed into my drink, remembering. “The way you passed so many people in a day, but you could still stay completely anonymous. You?”

  “The smell of bread on our old block. I used to go out to get coffee and cigarettes, and all you could smell was yeast.”

  “You smoked?” I asked. “Even, you know, with your parents’ cancer and all?”

  “I know, it was reckless,” John said. “But in the East Village in the early aughts, we all did.”

  “Aughts.” I laughed, taking another sip. “Such a stupid name for a decade.”

  “Well, it was a hell of a decade anyway. And unlike you, I was old enough to truly appreciate it.”

  “Practically an old man, really,” I said.

  John raised an eyebrow. “Well, I am quickly crawling toward death.”

  I grinned. The air in the cottage, which had felt oppressive since I’d seen Ellie, was more pleasant with him in it. Our arms were only inches apart, and—another intrusive thought—if I let myself sink in a tiny bit closer, the
y would touch.

  He set his glass down and turned to me. “Do you want kids, you think?”

  My eyes narrowed. “That came out of nowhere.”

  “Death, birth.” He shrugged, fooling with one of the cuffs of his sweater. “Two sides of the same coin.”

  I bought time with another sip. Truth was, I had wanted children, very badly. I’d once thought they were a possibility, even a certainty. “I don’t know,” I said, blinking back a sudden weight in my eyes. “Do you?”

  A change in our energy—his eyes looked awfully, unbearably sad. There was the slightest sheen to them, almost as if he was about to cry.

  I forced a laugh. “You started it!” The joke came out all wrong, poisoning the air like an acrid smell. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I did start it, didn’t I? We wanted kids, yes. Then again, we didn’t,” he said, studying the wall as if it would offer some sort of answer. “It’s complicated.”

  He leaned forward again, pouring more into his glass, even though it wasn’t empty.

  “Should I put on some music?” I asked.

  John shook his head, and I noticed dots of sweat on his upper lip. “It’s funny, when we first moved up here, I couldn’t stand the quiet,” he said. “Now I can’t stand even a bit of noise. The crickets. A car passing by.” He leaned back, resting his head on the cushion, blinked a few times, glass still in hand.

  Outside, the grumble of a car slowly passing by. Its lights splashed the room with shadows.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, scooting a bit closer to him on the sofa.

  He straightened, then blinked again, as if trying to focus. “Yeah, it just got to me all at once,” he said.

  I nodded. “Me too.”

  “I guess the good stuff is strong.” This didn’t stop him from taking another sip. He stared at me. “We had a miscarriage.”

  “Oh.” I scooted back instinctively.

  He gazed into his whiskey. “Yeah.”

  My brain felt like Swiss cheese, but I tried to focus on saying the right thing. “Had you—er—had you been trying a long time?”

  “We hadn’t been trying at all. Our timing was never right. Vera wanted to have an abortion.” He took another sip. “I couldn’t do it,” he said, his voice cracking. “I didn’t want to do it, since it was ours.”

  “But you guys didn’t . . .”

  “No, but she really wanted to. Maybe that’s what I couldn’t get over. I am a monster,” he said, scratching at his beard again. “I should never have pressured her. I should have driven Vera to the clinic, held her hand, respected what she wanted. But then we lost the baby anyway.” He blinked once, twice, as if holding back tears. “She’s never gotten past it. It happened when she was eighteen weeks. She was only showing a little, but we knew. I think it was the first time I’d ever seen her gain weight. And she looked different. She was breaking out like a teenager, her hair was so damn thick. It was—he was—a boy. The internet said the size of an avocado. I came home right away and took her to the hospital—we were there for hours. And then the recovery. The procedure they make you have, to get all the tissue.” He clung tightly to his glass. “I put her through all that. All for nothing. Sometimes, it feels like it only just happened.”

  “Christ,” I said, forcing myself to speak, realizing that our faces couldn’t be more than a foot apart. “That’s awful.”

  “I wanted to try again, but she said no.”

  “Like never no?” I asked.

  “How can we now?” He looked down at his hands, then back up at me. “It’s so hard,” he said.

  For a second, I lost the thread of conversation, found it difficult to remember what had been hard, the baby or losing it or not having one again? Or having to disappear, fake his own death? It was all jumbling, jigsaw pieces. Like the puzzles I used to do with my dad, back in Seattle.

  “Before I met her, it was something I always imagined.”

  It. I couldn’t place what it was. God, I was drunk.

  “A baby,” John reminded me. “A family.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “A family.” It was like meeting people at a dinner party, their names floating away and bursting like bubbles. I blinked, trying to focus, my eyelids even heavier than before.

  “I love Vera,” John said. I could hear a but in there, lodged in his whiskey-soaked words.

  “But sometimes I think all we do is try to make each other people we’re not. It’s pathetic.”

  I was suddenly so tired, but I had to stay awake. I had to tell him that I got it, tell him something so true, it could only come out when I was out of my mind like I was.

  I would do anything for a family, too.

  “Sometimes the smallest, tiniest part of me wants Davis to find me, just so I can see him again. He was the first person who really felt like family since I lost my parents in college. And as much as I hate him, I miss him, too.”

  “That’s so wrong,” John said. He stared, waiting for a reaction, but my body wanted only to shut down. Then he smiled, a grin that grew slowly, a grin that spelled broken rules.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “we want what we know is wrong.”

  Breath caught in my throat. Something had changed. Something big.

  John leaned forward, his breath warm, tickling my lips.

  SEVENTEEN

  When I woke, I sensed it immediately, the difference.

  The bed was warm. It smelled woodsy and aromatic, stale and salty, the distinct tang of male sweat. My eyes landed on Dusty, curled between us, and my first thought was of Davis. It was so natural, something I’d woken up to so many times. Then my mind woke up, too.

  John lay, slack-jawed and fast asleep, in my bed.

  I was in a bra and underwear and on top of the covers. He was fully clothed.

  It hit me, a punch to the stomach, images running through my head like a sick, twisted film.

  He’d leaned in, and I hadn’t leaned away. Our lips had found each other’s, hungry, and for a moment it was ecstatic, it was all I’d been wishing for, it was guilt, and I didn’t pull away and he didn’t, either, and then . . . nothing.

  My head pounded and my stomach twisted. It was a kiss. It was only a kiss. Wasn’t it?

  I had that awful feeling, the one I’d had that morning in college, when I couldn’t remember exactly what had happened but I knew I’d fucked up.

  I’d fucked up bad.

  There was no video this time, nothing to splash across every network, nothing to give everyone a reason to either judge me or pity me, but did it even matter? It had happened. I had betrayed her.

  Jumping out of bed, I darted to the dresser and tugged at a drawer. I snatched a tank top and shorts. I let myself take him in for a moment, the way his mouth hung open as he slept, how his hair splayed out over my extra pillow . . . it was something I’d imagined so many times but hadn’t ever wanted to really happen.

  “John,” I said. “John, wake up.”

  His eyes cracked open, and it was only then that it sank in. The drapes in the bedroom were wide-open, as if waiting for Vera, or anyone, to come by and see him in my bed.

  I ran to the window, wincing at the light streaming in, and pulled them shut, a brutal headache already raging behind my forehead.

  “God. What am I . . .” He looked down at his clothes, then back at me, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he tried to make sense of it. “Nothing happened, besides . . .” he said, leaving a blank, hanging there, taunting. “Nothing really happened. It was a stupid mistake, just an impulsive . . . Shit. I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have ever let it happen.”

  He’d wanted it, he’d fantasized about it, too. The realization would have made me schoolgirl happy, only it was sharp, double-edged. I loved Vera. He supposedly did, too.

  “Did you black out?” I asked.

 
His face was pale, his forehead covered in sweat, but he shook his head. “I don’t know, I don’t think so? I just had a lot. Nothing happened. We kissed, and then somehow we got in here, and I—uh—well, we—must have taken your dress off, but I remember you snapping out of it and pushing me away, and then at some point, we both passed out.”

  “So you did black out,” I said. “You don’t remember everything.”

  “Maybe just a little,” he said, his face going red.

  I looked at him. His sweater—even his shoes—were still on.

  It was coming back in flashes—me, helping him lift my dress over my head and then seeing myself in the mirror over the dresser, remembering Vera, pushing him away. Then blackness again.

  He was right. He had to be right.

  Blood rushed in my ears, acid rose in my stomach—I ran to the bathroom and sank to my knees so hard it hurt, whipping the lid of the toilet up so it clanked against the tank. My vomit was brown and bitter. It came in three lurches, and I spit, trying to get it all out.

  “Are you okay?”

  I stood, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye, my face burning with shame.

  A crush, even a flirtation, was one thing. Betraying her was another.

  “You should go,” I said softly. “Vera will probably be back soon.”

  “Of course,” John said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  I looked up, finding his eyes then, and he didn’t look away. For a second, in the haze of morning and the ripe smell of sweat, everything passed between us. Words unsaid. Feelings that couldn’t—shouldn’t—be expressed.

  “It will never happen again,” John said solemnly. “Never.”

  He turned, walked out of my cottage, pulling the door shut softly behind him, Dusty chasing him, not wanting him to go.