Security: A Novel

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  “What?” Tessa said—twice—to Brian’s obscure confession that “It was Mitch.”

  Brian said, “I have to tell it all at once. I can’t—I can barely do it at all, but I know I can’t do it in pieces. The pool’s private, right? Nobody will interrupt us there?” Tessa managed one nod, and now they ride the last few floors down in silence. Brian appears ready to jump out of his own skin and run away. Tessa seems to wish she could dissolve into the elevator’s glass wall. She cleans her eyes and cheeks of tears, but more keep falling. When the elevator descends through the foyer’s ceiling, she jabs the intercom button, dialing the extension for the ballroom.

  “The lobby chandelier’s dusting up again. Del, do it the easy way, please. No ladders.”

  Jules’s voice rejoins tinnily, “Roger that, Captain.”

  Brian points at the speaker. “Those two seem happy.” He says it like it’s a test.

  Tessa doesn’t answer, except to look at Brian with a cocked eyebrow: Really?

  Brian nods. Tessa passed.

  The elevator settles on the first floor and dings open. Tessa walks. Brian follows. They pass the check-in counter, moving westward. They pass the information desk. They are bound for the large door opposite the hotel’s main entrance. They are walking away from a parking lot full of vehicles that could take them far from Manderley.

  Jules speaks to Delores, presumably informing her of the need to dust the foyer’s chandelier. Justin’s acquired a cart to hold the dishes no longer required in the more florid place settings.

  The Killer is eating his soup second. Philistine.

  CAMERA 7, 64, 7, 4, 12

  Tessa and Brian appear on the dunes. Her right boot heel gets stuck in the sand, and she lurches. Brian reaches out to help her, but she slaps his hand. He says something. He says something else. Tessa ignores him.

  The rear façade of the hotel is virtually identical to the front, though it seems flatter, duller. This is because no one who exits the hotel from the west would possibly bother looking at the hotel itself. The view is too fine. It’s the well-worn panorama on millions and millions of calendars, screensavers, and posters with inspiring quotes: sky meeting sea in a melted crayon box of colors and a sugary foreground stretching infinitely to either side. It might still strike some as boring, as any other beach. Except there is the pool.

  What most would guess to be part greenhouse and part rock formation—a mound of rough boulders and smooth glass, the limestone winking in the dregs of gone sunlight—stands short and stunted and lovely in the most natural of ways. Tessa is saying something, probably telling Brian about how she scouted locations for Manderley, about this cave and how shore accretion as a result of elsewhere’s erosion had exposed it, about how she took one look at it and knew.

  Only the sound of the ocean can be heard. It’s a beautiful sound. It’s the sound of life. The sun has set, and the waves are red. It is nine twenty-five p.m.

  Tessa holds the pool entrance open for Brian. He walks in.

  “My God,” Brian says.

  Outer Santa Barbara has suffered terribly from the accretion and erosion of its shore. This limestone cave may have once been the habitat of sharks, orcas, rays. It was dry when Tessa scouted it. It now glows green from moss that is nurtured by the hot humidity in the greenhouse. The mosses eat bacteria. Water tumbles down striations of rock through a pump system that pulls water straight from the Pacific. The pool is self-sustaining, self-cleaning, mostly self-lighting. Exactly one thousand round ten-watt bulbs are strung above the pool, woven into a net beneath the glass ceiling, like tiny moons. The pool is roughly fifty yards by ten, sparsely surrounded by comfortable chairs and a few granite tables with benches, but Tessa bends and unzips her boots, steps out of them, and sits at the edge of the deep end, dangling her feet in the water. The deep end is very deep. Twenty feet.

  Brian sits beside her. He leaves his boots on, his feet out of the water. “It’s kind of dangerous, isn’t it?” he says, looking at the daggers of rock.

  The answer is: Yes. Yes, it is dangerous.

  Tessa says, watching her bare feet glow green, “Talk, Brian.”

  The Killer is spooning ice cream onto the peaches. It’s dark in Room 1408. He doesn’t turn on any lights. He shuts off the oven instead and crosses the hall to Room 1409. The Thinker told him to, by text message. Room 1409 has a north-facing window. Looking up from, say, the pool, one would not see a light on the fourteenth floor if the light was in Room 1409.

  The Killer props pillows against the headboard and loses patience with using a spoon to slice the peaches. He retrieves his knife from the end of the bed and slices his dessert with it instead. He looks like a child trying to transcribe an addition problem with an enormous novelty crayon.

  Jules and Justin are still changing place settings; only now they’re on opposite sides of the ballroom.

  Delores is—where is Delores?

  Brian has been staring at the water. At Tessa’s feet, like soft green animals in the water. One of Brian’s knees is flat to the limestone floor. His other knee is bent, a notch for his elbow. He’s angled toward Tessa. He is, it looks like, sitting comfortably. But his demeanor makes one wonder if there has ever been a man more acutely uncomfortable in the history of time.

  “You remember—,” Brian says. It comes out craggy, and he clears his throat. “You remember when Mitch broke his leg?”

  “Which time?” says Tessa.

  “Oh yeah.” Brian laughs, airily. “No, the second time. While we were on the road.”

  Tessa nods.

  Brian puts his head to his upright knee. “Tess, look. Tess, it’s something I really can’t explain. I can explain part of it. I can explain what happened. But—I’ve never tried telling somebody what it’s like, being twins. It’s not like you’re a twin. It’s like you’re both. You’re never alone. It’s impossible to really be alone. And that’s so great, but sometimes, you just want to be you. You want to want what you want.” He laughs again. “I knew I’d cock this up.”

  Tessa says, “I do get it.” She’s looking at him like he’s certifiable. “As close as anybody can, I get it. When Mitch broke his leg the second time . . .”

  Brian’s mouth assumes the shape of an awful taste. “The doc prescribed him painkillers. It was a bad break. He was in pain, and he ran out of painkillers. He refilled the scrip.” Brian peeks at Tessa out of the corner of his eye. “How many blanks are you filling in?”

  Tessa’s pale.

  Brian takes her hand, and she lets him. “Mitch wanted to stay on the circuit, even injured. He was riding injured. It was aggravating the leg, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He wasn’t feeling the pain, see. He figured he was fine.”

  “He seemed fine. Whenever I saw him—”

  “Whenever you saw him, he’d cut his doses. He got good at it really fast. I’ve learned since that it’s pretty easy with pills—to figure out how much you need to be normal, how much you need to fly, how much isn’t near enough anymore.” Brian lets go of Tessa’s hand. His teeth are bared, as if he’s under the ministrations of an invisible torturer.

  Tessa takes her feet out of the water, making a woosh-patter sound. She moves closer to Brian and cups his jaw. “Say the rest.”

  Brian’s voice is steady, but it’s too hard, brittle. It wants to break. “It’s pretty easy with pills. It’s a lot tougher with heroin.”

  Tessa’s hand drops from Brian’s face.

  “There’s every kind of drug you can think of on the circuit. Plus about fifty you can’t. You know—you knew Mitch, how he was. He found something he loved, and he wouldn’t give it up. He couldn’t. I’d talk to him about rehab, and he’d laugh at me—not in a dickish way, in a sad way. He’d say he had it under control, but he knew he was lying. He knew what he really meant was more like, ‘There’s no point, Bri.’ ” Brian’s throat squeaks on his own name. His head falls forward to Tessa’s shoulder. Before Tessa can reach out, he’s sitting straight again
, straighter. Speaking more quickly. “When he announced he was doing the triple, I tried to talk him out of it, Tess. I tried. You have to believe me. I even went over his head, I went to Troy. I told Troy about the drugs, but he brushed it off. Said Mitch was gonna make history. The promoters said the same thing.” Brian looks nauseated.

  “Slow down,” Tessa says.

  “I can’t. I’ve gotta get this all out, or—I didn’t understand why, what this bug up his butt was about the triple. I asked him, I said, ‘Mitch, do a fucking double,’ because that was high-risk enough. A single is high risk. But Mitch told me he’d been offered fifty grand, so he had to do it. And that made no sense. I knew his finances were a mess, but I was covering him.” Brian’s mouth opens to say more, but his voice stalls. It croaks. His words won’t come out.

  Tessa says, “What can I do?”

  Brian closes his eyes, takes her hands, and places them on either side of his throat. He holds them there. “Our bank accounts were separate. But I forgot we set up your college money in a joint fund.”

  Tessa transforms, slowly, into a close imitation of Munch’s The Scream.

  Brian doesn’t see the transformation. He doesn’t want to. “I forgot until Mitch under-rotated on the second turn going into the third, and I could see, and everybody could see, how he was going to land, and it occurred to me right then—Oh yeah. Tess’s college money.” Brian opens his eyes and takes in Tessa’s profound and boundless horror. Brian takes it in like he deserves it, because, “I should have thought of that earlier. I could have told him we’d make it up. I’d make it up. But he didn’t want me to know, cuz that was the worst thing either of us could have ever imagined doing. We promised you. We told you you’d go to college on us. We swore it, and Mitch was so proud we could do that for you. The day we showed you the paperwork—remember? Your seventeenth? You and me and Mitch at the Lone Spur Grill. You cried, and you never cry.” Brian takes a handkerchief—a handkerchief?—from his jeans pocket and dries Tessa’s face. “Mitch told me that night—before he fell asleep, he told me he was going to marry you someday. And then about a year later, he’s dying on a dirt ramp because he drained your college money down to nothing. He drained it to nothing, and then he borrowed to put it back and he drained it again. And he’s dying, and he’s looking up at me, his big brother—by eight minutes, but still his big brother—and he’s telling me, ‘Make it up, Bri. You gotta make it up, okay?’ And he keeps saying that and saying that, and I’m telling him I will but he needs to hold on, we’ll make it up together. But then his breathing gets short, and before it gets so bad he can’t talk anymore, the last thing he says to me, the very last thing is—‘Don’t tell Tess.’ ”

  Tessa makes an appalling noise. A child in a sadist’s strong grip might make this noise. She covers her mouth with both palms. Tears fill and flood. Her complexion is hectic with color.

  Brian is nodding at her, but he keeps talking, like his words are rocks and speech is their momentum down a hillside. “The promoters didn’t even wait till after the funeral. They quoted me a hundred grand to do the stunt. The day before the wake, remember? Remember that call I got when you were helping me pick out what he should wear?” Tessa looks down at the glowing green stone. “I wanted to tell you. Tess, you can’t know how badly I wanted to tell you.” He takes her shoulders. She stares at the stone. “You were the only person who felt him being gone like I did. You were the only other one who knew how good he was, how he wasn’t just some fun-time jerk. He was more than a party; he was good. I knew—Mitch didn’t know, but I knew—you could handle hearing it, the whole truth, and you’d come out the other side still loving him, exactly the same as before, better. Tess, you’ve gotta look at me for this last part. I swear on Mitch’s grave, it’s the last time I’ll make you look at me ever again, but please, please do it.”

  Tessa does. It’s the whole world’s misery. Asking why, why it has to be this way.

  Brian reels. He holds the angle of her neck. He says, “When you got down on your knees, grabbed the sleeves of my best shirt, and begged me—right after the funeral—to stay with you, and help you, and take care of you, keep you safe . . . there aren’t words in any human language for what was going on in my mind. It was like Mitch was on a loop in my head—‘Don’t tell Tess. Don’t tell her.’ So I said I was leaving but I’d be back. I had to do some stunts, I had to do the one that killed Mitch, but I’d visit.” Brian finally breaks. “And you looked just like this, and I almost told you, I came so close, you can’t even—so when I landed the triple and paid off Mitch’s debt and had enough for your first semester, I decided I’d keep going, go a little longer without seeing you, make enough for your sophomore year. Then I went a little longer and a little longer after that, but you have to understand, it never got easy. It should have, but it didn’t. It got harder and harder. The longer I went, the more sure I got that the next time I saw you, I’d tell you everything. I’d tell you Mitch loved you, and so did I, and we had about a dozen drunk conversations where we fought about who should be with you when you were grown up, and Mitch always won by telling me I could keep it together without having you to keep it together for, but he couldn’t.” Brian’s and Tessa’s commingled sobs fill the pool with ghostly echoes. Brian talks through his and says, “So I stayed away half because I thought of you as his, and half because he used the last breath in his broken body to tell me not to tell you he was weak.” Brian wills himself calm again, brushing Tessa’s hair back from her moist cheeks and staring at her with the focused heat that they’ve both been trying to throw ice water on all evening. “But he was weak,” Brian says. “And so am I. So I’m here. If I’m too late, then that’s okay. That’s what I deserve. But you have to tell me I’m too late.”

  Tessa does not excel at playing dumb. “Too late for what?” She sniffs. Pillows her lips together.

  Brian spares a hand to plumb his jacket pocket. He produces a glossy sheet of paper folded in quarters. It is doubtful this one contains a knitting pattern. He unfolds it and shows her.

  Tessa is no longer playing dumb when she says, “I don’t understand.”

  It’s the cover of this month’s Travel magazine. Charles Destin and Tessa posed for the photo together in the center of the maze. Destin is giving her a rose. Tessa’s smiling down at it. Destin looks like a great big phony clowning creep, and Tessa looks bottomlessly sad, because she looks almost happy. She felt accomplished that day, having impressed the reporter, who later rated Manderley at five stars.

  “This Destin guy.” Brian says. “I didn’t snoop or anything. I just did some careful Googling, but he’s got a reputation I’m not crazy about.” Brian folds the photo again. He watches his hands fold it. “I trust your judgment, though. You talked about that security guard to spare my feelings, maybe—to not let me know you fell for someone. But I can handle it if you have. You just have to tell me. Or, you don’t even have to tell me. You can tell me to get out of here if you want me to go.”

  Tessa has evidently reached a point where so many emotions are occurring at once that selecting a reaction is impossible. It’s easy to identify with such a state. She stands and walks a short distance from Brian. Brian is putting the photo back in his pocket, but he changes his mind. He crumples it and pitches it toward a trash can ten feet away. He misses. The balled-up paper bounces off the can’s rim. Tessa picks it up and drops it in, as though gratified that her standing and walking served a purpose. She looks around the pool like she’ll never see it again, taking in details: the jasmine vining up and through the latticework on the greenhouse’s glass, rolled and stacked towels so white, they throb in their seashell-shaped basket. She pats them. She smells a jasmine blossom.

  Tessa turns, crosses her arms, and says, “The photographer who did that cover said a romantic shot would sell the hotel to a wider client base.”

  Brian’s brow crinks.

  “I’m not with Charles,” Tessa says. “I’m not with anyone. The head of sec
urity’s a convenience. He wants more, but I don’t, and I made that clear to him from the beginning.” She gestures at Camera 64. “You can wave at him if you like.”

  Brian stands, hastily, wiping his tears on his sleeve while shouting, “Jesus fucking!—Tess, you let me say all that when he can—”

  She yells over him, “There’s no audio surveillance anywhere but the lobby—”

  The most thorough safety is safety one’s object of protection doesn’t know about.

  “And his team’s watching sixty-four screens at a time. They’re half-staffed because we’re not open yet, and you and I were facing mostly away from the camera while we were talking. If you’re saying what I think you’re saying, then you need to get in the habit of giving me at least a little goddamn credit.”

  Brian’s mouth works. He laughs, helpless. He takes a step toward her.

  “Stay right there,” says Tessa, quiet and deadly, pointing at him.

  Brian freezes.

  “I get it,” she says, her pointer finger accenting “I” and then the pair “get it.” “I do. But it’s still eleven years. It’s eleven”—she points—“goddamn”—she points, and points again—“years.”

  “I know,” Brian says. He tries to inject huge, incontrovertible sentiment into these two words, but—

  “Do you?” Tessa’s eyes are round and shining. “Because this isn’t fucking automatic. Okay? This isn’t an auto-forgive.”

  “Tess?” He takes one step. “I know.”

  Tessa looks ready to run, but she’s not sure which direction. “Great, then you’re going to be really specific, right now—what you’re saying, exactly, about what you want and what you feel and all that girly stuff, or I am out. I’m done. I can’t do it again. If all you’re doing is wondering what I’m like in bed—”

  “You’re not with anybody?”

  “Did you hear anything else I said, Bri? I can repeat it.”