Mr. North

by Callie Hart

  “Well, it’s too late,” David crows triumphantly. “She doesn’t have a choice in the matter. The wheels are already in motion. I called the bank earlier this morning and paid the debt in full. Now she can always live in the old house.”

  “She doesn’t want to fucking stay in the house, David! She wants to fucking go!”

  “Bullshit. That’s where we grew up. That’s where she had built a life with Dad.”

  “Just because you’re sentimental about it, doesn’t mean she has to be as well. And you’re forgetting one thing, too. Dad died in that house.” I don’t mention Mom’s attack. Maybe David would understand a little better why Mom wouldn’t care about the place very much if he knew what happened, but I can’t voice the words. Mom made me promise all those years ago never to tell Dad or David. She made me swear I wouldn’t breathe a word. Even now, I can’t break that promise to her. “Our father dropped down onto his knees in that house,” I continue. “She watched his eyes roll back into his head, and that was that. He never opened them again. What do you think she sees when she closes her eyes, asshole? She sees the man she loved most in the world, dying in front of her. The man that you just implied sexually abused me. The man that raised both of us, gave everything for us, always. He was such a—“

  “He was just a man, Beth!” my brother roars. “People are always going on about him like they know him better than anyone else. They talk about him like he was some kind of fucking saint. Like he rescued starving orphans from the roadside on a daily basis. He was just a fucking guy, though. He cursed, and he dropped shit, and he would stare out of a window with a stupid smile on his face for three hours at a time and never get anything done. And he did slap Mom once. I saw it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “He slapped her right across the face, Beth. You wouldn’t even fucking know! You were just a baby.”

  I can’t take this anymore, this weird grasping at straws. He’s just trying to justify what he’s done, to make it okay that he’s betrayed not just me, but Mom and Dad, too. “How much did they give you, David?” I ask tiredly.

  The line is static and nothing more.

  “David. Tell me how much they gave you!”

  “It doesn’t matter how much exactly. I got enough to save the farm. That’s all that matters.” His voice is flat. Almost lifeless. He’s not going to tell me what my dignity was worth to him.

  “Don’t call me again, David,” I say. “Lose my number. Don’t come knocking on my door anymore, okay? You’ve just gone and lost yourself a sister.”

  He laughs gently, chewing something on the other end of the phone. “Whatever you say, Spooch.”

  Eleven

  Beth

  I miss an hour of my first class because of David. If it weren’t so close to the bar exam, I would probably have bailed altogether today, but there are only a few short months standing between me and the biggest exam of my life; I can’t afford to drop the ball now, even though the entire world is expecting me to. Praying for me to drop the ball, no doubt. If there’s anything the general masses love to stand around and gawk at, it’s someone crashing and burning in epic style. The worst part is that I used to be guilty of it, too. I used to greedily tear through the society pages of newspapers and websites, reading about the nipple slips and unfortunate pantie shots of Raphael North’s previous supermodel girlfriends, back when he used to have them. It was fascinating to me. Weird. Intriguing. I always wanted to know more, especially when the seemingly perfect woman he was dating did something stupid or was publically embarrassed in some way. That would make me feel justified in my dislike or distrust of them. And now, here I am, with the shoe well and truly glued onto the other foot, and it feels absolutely terrible. I guess this is karmic retribution on the grandest scale imaginable.

  Instead of interrupting the lecture that’s already started, I make my way to the campus library and I find a secluded, quiet spot to sit and study until my next class. I gather a stockpile of books, and I build a wall out of them in front of me, essentially blocking out the rest of the library, creating a barricade between myself and the rest of the world. I’ve been studying in in my own peaceful little bubble for about an hour when there’s the soft sound of someone clearing their throat behind me. I’m surprised to find Nate standing there when I twist my body to look back over my shoulder.

  “This is becoming a bad habit,” I observe a little frostily.

  “Ouch. Harsh.” Nate points to the seat opposite mine. “Mind if I sit down?”

  I want to tell him to go away, that my patience is barely a millimeter thick today and he’ll probably end up losing his head if he joins me at the table right now. I don’t, though. I’m too tired to argue with anyone anymore. It feels like all I’ve done for days. I gesture to the seat opposite me, and Nate sinks into it, huffing heavily.

  “Should I even ask how you found me?” I ask.

  He scratches the back of his hand, taking a look around the library. “Probably not.”

  “Raphael’s had you following me, hasn’t he?”

  Nate shakes his head slowly. “He hasn’t.”

  “Then…?”

  “Raph likes to do things by the book. I don’t mind bending a few rules here and there. Bribing the necessary people. Hacking into a surveillance camera or two when the need arises.” He says it so flippantly that it takes me a moment to realize that he’s being serious.

  I close my eyes for a second, taking a deep breath. “You’re here to try and make me go and see him, aren’t you?”

  “No. I’m not here to try and make you do anything. I’m here to tell you something. And then, if you’ll let me, I’ll show you something, too.”

  I pinch the bridge of my nose between my fingers, trying to find an ounce of calm somewhere deep within me. My reserves are tapped out, though. “Okay. Let’s do this. I have studies I need to catch up on.”

  Nate doesn’t say anything. When his silence continues, I look up at him. He’s obviously waiting for my full attention, his hands folded one on top of the other on his chest. As soon as I meet his gaze, he begins to speak. “Five years ago, Raphael and his friends were out one night. They were celebrating some bullshit award Raphael had won. Best-dressed bachelor of the year or something. They went out and had dinner. The week before I’d broken my wrist heli-skiing in Aspen, so I couldn’t drive. I told Paxton to shoot me a text when they were ready to leave the restaurant and I’d order a town car for them. He said sure. Fine. Whatever. A couple of hours go by. Three. Then four. Then five. I call Raph at one in the morning to see if they’re okay and they need picking up, but he sounds fine. He says they’re having a good time, that I need to stop worrying, I should go to bed. They’re grown-ups, they’ll be able to find a cab themselves when they’re ready to come home. So that’s what I do. I go to bed.

  “At six in the morning, I wake up to complete and utter fucking chaos. Every single phone in my apartment is ringing off the hook. I have fifteen messages from the CEO of North Industries. I turn on the TV, and Raphael’s face is everywhere. You think this whole drone thing is bad?” he says, giving a hard laugh. “This was fifteen times worse. The internet almost fucking broke.” Nate holds up his hands, framing them in between us. “Raphael North crashes Maserati into side of Waldorf Hotel. Raphael North shaken but uninjured in horrific car crash .”

  I remember all of these headlines. I remember you couldn’t turn around without seeing Raph’s face absolutely everywhere. It was the biggest scandal of the year. Nate continues. “Three people walk away from North’s totaled sports car. All passengers reported to be fine. Only, the information the news crews were pumping back out into the world wasn’t strictly true. Three people did walk away from the crash, but they weren’t fine. Raph had serious neck problems. Some broken ribs. Paxton had a concussion and a really bad laceration to his forehead. Thalia looked okay in the beginning, but once she was in hospital they discovered she had some pretty serious internal bleeding. She could
have bled out if they hadn’t been diligent and caught it in time. And…”

  “And?”

  “And not everyone walked away from it, Beth. There weren’t just three of them in the car. There were four .”

  A weight, impossibly heavy, sinks through me like a stone. Four. Everything’s finally beginning to snap into place. “Chloe ,” I say.

  “The press never really paid attention to her,” Nate says. “Her family had money, but nothing like the others. She was well off by most people’s standards, but in these rich New York socialite scenes, if you’re not a multimillionaire, you’re a nobody. Raphael and Chloe had dated back in high school. They were so close, all four of those guys. Raph broke up with Chloe when they graduated, and they drifted for a couple of years. After a while, though, Raph’s lifestyle choices began to take a toll on him. He missed Chloe. He loved her. Three months before the accident, Raph went and apologized to Chloe for leaving her, and they got back together. The four friends were reunited again, and everything was great. That night, Chloe was in the passenger seat of the Maserati when Raphael crashed it. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.” His expression is grave as he runs through the rest of the story. Raphael’s lawyers intervened the moment the CEO of North Industries discovered what had happened. They buried Chloe’s death so effectively and efficiently that all record of Raphael ever even spending time with the woman was wiped from the internet. People were bribed. The New York City chief of police received a brand new vacation home in the Hamptons. Nate’s voice dips lower and lower as he unveils the measures that were taken to make sure Raphael didn’t get sent to prison for manslaughter.

  “I can’t believe it,” I whisper. “I can’t believe he would ever allow so many laws to be broken to save his own ass. I can’t believe he would crash a car into a building, drunk, killing his own girlfriend, and he would want to avoid the consequences.”

  Nate leans across the table, staring me dead in the eye. “That’s the thing. Raph was sober as a judge. The police did eight different tests on him, tried to pin a DUI on him, but they couldn’t. He hadn’t drunk a thing . And believe me…” Nate’s eyes are shining brightly now, filled with pain. “Raph did everything he could to make sure he did go to jail. He admitted fault. He demanded he pay a penance for the accident. A judge settled the matter out of court and sentenced him to twenty-four months house arrest. Raph walked into that penthouse of his, and he did not step foot outside once for two years. Not even onto the goddamn roof.”

  This is completely unbelievable. Completely. I just stare back at Nate, trying to figure out what I’m feeling. What I’m even thinking. None of it computes. Should I hate him for killing Chloe? Should I feel sorry for him? The worst part is that I keep experiencing a sharp stab of jealousy at the knowledge that Raph was in love with another girl from a lifetime ago. God, I’m reeling. “So…what happened?” I whisper. “If he wasn’t drunk, if he hadn’t been drinking at all, why did he crash the car?”

  Nate clenches his jaw, sinking back into his seat once more. “The accident investigators claimed he fell asleep at the wheel. They pinned him with driving without due care and attention in the end, but I knew at the time it was a fucking lie. I’ve worked for Raph for ten years. I’ve sat in cars with him all over the world, too. He’s a good driver. He would never have even gotten into the car if he thought he was compromised in any way. He told me not to, he told me to leave it, but as soon as that car was released back to us, I had a full work up done on it.”

  “And?”

  Nate studies me intently, like he’s trying to figure out if he should even continue speaking. He cracks his thumb, and then taps it against the side of his leg nervously.

  “Goddamn it, Nate. Come on! You can’t just show up here and tell me all of this, then not give me the entire picture. What am I supposed to do with that?”

  He nods, just once, then looks down at his sneakers. “The brake lines were cut. The vehicle report said it happened during the crash, but it didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because. When something is torn apart, ripped due to a violent collision, the line break is jagged. Uneven. The lines on the Maserati were clean. Like they’d been cut with a knife.”

  I allow this to sink in for a minute. A loud buzzing has started up in my ears, drowning out the muted sounds of the library around us. I hear Nate perfectly well when he speaks next, though. “I think he was run off the road. I think someone forced him into the side of that building, and when he tried to stop, he couldn’t.”

  “If that were true, wouldn’t Raph have explained that to the police?”

  “Come on, Beth. You know the guy by now,” Nate says. “It doesn’t matter if it was an accident or if the car was tampered with to him. All he cares about is that he was behind the wheel…and someone he cared about died.”

  Twelve

  Beth

  O n the subway , half asleep and drowsy from the heat of so many packed bodies all crushed into such a tight space, I look up at the ads on the other side of the train carriage and I see it. The first of Raphael North’s marketing campaign to win my heart. I know the black and white image is a message from him. It has to be. The image is a chess piece, a pawn, toppled on one side, and above it the words, ‘Checkmate. You’ve got me.’ It can only be a message from Raphael. What could it possibly mean to anyone else?

  There isn’t just one of the ads behind the sheet plastic on the wall of the train, either. No, that would have been too easy for me to miss. I stand up, peering through the window at the end of the carriage, into the one ahead of mine, and then in the opposite direction, to the one behind, and every single ad spot in all of the carriages has been taken up the image of the toppled chess piece.

  I sit back down, feeling numb. How much did it cost him to do this? How many trains did he buy up all the advertising space on? Was it just this one, on this line, because he knows I use it? Something tells me he bought up the advertising space on every single damn train in New York. Something tells me he did so to ensure I’d see this message and have to respond to it. He couldn’t just message me like a normal human being. A text message would have been too easy. I could have easily ignored a text message. How the hell can I possibly ignore this, though? I sit back down, and the elderly woman in the seat next to me shakes her head, tutting under her breath. “Probably for some new weirdo play,” she says. “None of them make sense no more. Give me Phantom Of The Opera any day.”

  I laugh nervously, twisting the fringe on my purse over and over again. There is no other text on the black and white image of the pawn. Just the strapline along the top. What does he expect now? What did Raphael want me to do when I saw this? Call him? Get off the train and head straight back to the Osiris Building? Fall at his feet and thank him for being so romantic and making such a grand, expensive gesture?

  I take out my cell phone, bringing up his contact information. Slowly, I type out a response to his message, holding my breath as I do so.

  M e : I never said I wanted to win you. I said I wanted honesty.

  I hit send , then immediately regret it. Thankfully there’s no reception underground, so the message won’t—

  Shit .

  Of all the days to get one bar of reception on the damn subway, it would be today. The message makes a shoop ing noise, and a small word pops up underneath the text: delivered. Shit. Shit, fuck, shit.

  I’m about to toss my phone back into my bag, when I see the speech bubble pop up below; he’s replying. Call me a glutton for punishment, but I can’t seem to look away.

  R aph : Come and see me. I’ll explain everything.

  M e : It’s a little late for that. I already got the run down from Nate.

  I don’t want to get Nate into trouble, but I can’t stand this anymore. I need clarity. I need more than half-truths and uncomfortable silences. I need him to be real with me.

  R aph : He told me. I was going to explain, Beth. I just needed more time. I
needed to figure out how.

  M e : It would have been easy. All you needed to do was speak to me.

  R aph : Harder than it sounds

  M e : No, it’s not. It’s the easiest thing in the world.

  R aph : You think it would be easy to tell someone you care about that you killed someone?

  F air enough . He has me there. It’s not as simple as that, though.

  M e : It wasn’t your fault, Raph. And we’ve wasted all of this time because you feel guilty for something that had nothing to do with you.

  H e doesn’t reply for a long time. I get off the train and start walking, taking the long way in order to avoid any persistent news reporters that might be hovering down the side streets on my normal route from school to home. I let myself into my apartment, and I toss my keys into the bowl beside the door. My phone chimes as I’m taking off my jacket.

  R aph : I was driving. I fell asleep. Chloe died. If it’s not my fault, who’s fault is it?

  I reply immediately .

  M e : Nate said the brake lines on your car were cut.

  R aph : He wants to believe that. Please come here. Let me talk to you face-to-face.

  M e : Why don’t you come here, Raph? If you want to talk to me that badly, you can make the trip across town. Or are you worried about slumming it over here in Brooklyn?

  R aph : I can’t. I can’t leave the penthouse.

  M e : Bullshit. Nate said you got 2 years house arrest. That means you were allowed to leave 3 years ago.

  R aph : The house arrest ended, yes. But I haven’t left.

  E verything around me seems to just…stop . The gentle hum coming from the fridge. The ticking of the small clock on the wall in the hallway. My own heartbeat. I stare at the words, trying to figure out what the hell he means by that.