by Callie Hart
I spit, shrugging my shoulders. “Some people just don’t know when to leave well alone. This one’s on him.”
Raul sighs, scowling hard. He tosses a black zip-up bag at me, and I catch it out of the air. “Better get out of here before the boss sees,” he says. “He’s not in a very forgiving mood tonight. I’ll take care of this. Go on. Go.”
I leave on foot, ten grand richer, soaking from the rain.
FIVE
SELF-DESTRUCT
SASHA
There’s nothing more frustrating than having to buy a book twice. I was too embarrassed to go hunting through that huge pile of telephone directories for The Seven Secret Lives of James P. Albrecht after I left my meeting with Oscar four days ago, so now I’m having to stop in at a Barnes and Noble on the way home from the museum. Good job I’m a fast reader. There are only two days left between now and Friday when book club meets up, and I can’t just not read the book. Kayla would take it personally, guaranteed, and she’s not the type of person to forgive a slight like that easily. She would assume I hated her choice of book, that I was trying to personally insult her by not only not completing the read but subsequently misplacing my copy as well. All in all, it would not go down well. The thing is, I really hate buying romance novels in bookshops. There’s always some pimple-faced English lit student standing at the register, ready to silently judge you for your choice of reading material when they have such wonderful, awe-inspiring, Pulitzer prize winning tomes readily on hand instead. And don’t get me started on the creepers who lurk around the erotica section of the store, waiting to pounce the moment you pick up something that looks like it might be a little racy. Is a bookstore the best place to ask someone if they would like to come swinging with you and your wife? I think not, sir.
So I find the book, and I buy the book. I sidestep around the weird dude with the long white hair in a ponytail, wearing what looks like a set of white pajamas, and I ignore the judgmental twenty-year-old behind the counter who looks down on me with such pity. I decline the offer of a plastic bag, and I shove the novel into my purse along with the receipt, and the next thing I know I’m standing outside in the cool, calm night air, and I look up to see that the rain that’s been persisting for the past few days has now turned into snow.
A woman with a Santa hat perched jauntily on her head rings a bell, shaking her Salvation Army bucket, smiling at me warmly as she bounces around to Christmas music blaring out of a portable speaker. I give her the change from the book, three dollars and a penny, and I hurry off down the street in the direction of home.
When I get back, I grab some leftover salad from the fridge and I pick at it with a fork as I stand at the kitchen counter, staring at my purse. The book is in there, waiting for me to finish it. I’m about halfway through, but I just can’t seem to muster up the energy to crack it open right now. It’s not like I hate the story or anything. I just…I don’t know. I’m not focused when I try and read at the moment. My mind wanders. I find myself revisiting events in the past instead of seeing the words on the page, and the past is not a place I want to spend my free time. The past is dangerous, full of potholes and darkness. Losing myself there is damaging beyond belief.
Hours later, I’m in bed when I finally pick up the damn book. I can’t avoid it forever, and the couple of glasses of wine I drank as I watched television earlier seem to have comfortably numbed me.
She held the glass in her hand, and pieces of the shattered bottle dug into her skin. Small pearls of blood blossomed out of nowhere, swelling and swelling in size until they were too big, hanging like teardrops before falling to the earth. “Is this what you meant?” she asked me. “Is this the kind of pain that will remind me I’m alive?”
I nodded. The wind whipped and pulled at her coat and her hair, and the blood continued to fall to the concrete below. “I’m not cut out for this,” she whispered, her voice tremulous. I could easily see the tears welling in her eyes. Perhaps I should have given her an escape route at this point, it would have been the gentlemanly thing to do, but I was not a gentleman. And the sight of her emotions spilling out of her, the same way her blood was spilling out of her, for some reason made my dick hard in my pants. “I need you to take me home,” she whispered.
“No, Isobel. No, you’re not going home.” I stepped forward, and, like a mirror of my own movements, Isobel stepped back at the same time. She looked afraid.
“I’m not your property,” she told me, her hand shaking, fingers still curled around the glass. “You can’t make me stay.”
“I don’t need to make you stay. You want to stay.”
She swallowed hard. “You’re wrong. I have to get back to—”
“To your husband? The man who beats you senseless every night of the week?”
Isobel flushed, her cheeks reddening against the cold and the sharp sting of my words. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You have no idea what kind of man—”
“I know exactly what kind of man raises his fist to his woman. A coward. A weak piece of shit who doesn’t deserve the right to walk the streets.”
Her hand tightened around the broken glass. “I don’t want to do this anymore, James. We’re done, okay? I just…I have to go home.”
“And I told you—”
“God, please. Just let me go. I can’t stand this anymore. I’m being torn apart. It’s too much to deal with right now. Maybe in time—”
“What? The past will suddenly no longer matter? You think there’ll come a time when you don’t wake up screaming in the middle of the night? When you’re not looking over your shoulder every time you walk down an unfamiliar street?” I laugh, shaking my head. “I’m disappointed. I thought you wanted to be brave. I thought you were ready to let go of everything that happened.”
She visibly shrinks before me. My words are harsh, I know, but she needs to hear them. She can’t go on living like this, jumping every time a car backfires.
I slam the book closed, slowly closing my eyes. It’s becoming apparent why Kayla picked this specific book. She’s not particularly known for her subtlety, but I really do have to give it to her this time. The female protagonist in the book hasn’t lost her child, she was kidnapped and held against her will by a demented man who escaped from prison, and yet there are startling similarities between myself and the fictional girl in the book: she’s haunted by her past; she can’t seem to get her life back in order after her ordeal; persistent nightmares plague her every time she closes her eyes; and she finds it hard to trust men. Especially the dark-haired rogue who refuses to cease and desist in his borderline stalker-esque pursuit of her.
Somehow, I think Kayla is trying to show me that a brooding, sarcastic asshole in my life is exactly what I need to break me out of my melancholia. I can’t seem to understand her logic. And who is she to speak, anyway? She’s been professionally single for the past three years, ever since she caught her ex-husband fucking his secretary in the basement of their house, and have I given her a hard time about her personal life choices? No, I have not. I don’t judge. I don’t comment on anyone else’s decisions, mistakes or general quirks. All I ask is that I’m afforded the same treatment in return. With Kayla, it never really matters what anyone else wants, though. She’ll do whatever she thinks is right, irrespective of who it might piss off.
I set down the book, thinking about the main guy in the story, James. He’s from a broken home. The thought of having a long-term, committed relationship with a woman has never occurred to him until he meets Isobel, the female lead, of course. He’s a reprobate, a criminal, a dangerous gun-toting kind of guy you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alleyway. He has very little going for him when you consider him as potential boyfriend material, and yet when I think about him I can almost feel the touch of his fingers against my mouth. I can almost imagine how it would feel to be locked inside his arms, half afraid and half melting with desire as he breathes heavily against the sensitive skin of my neck.
Why is it t
hat the idea of a reckless, frightening man like him is enough to get my heart racing, and yet the idea of a sensible investment banker from Hoboken makes me want to vomit?
Maybe it’s because Andrew was an investment banker from Hoboken. Maybe sensible, reliable men with no psychopathic tendencies are always going to remind me of him, and in turn what we lost. Or maybe it’s the fact that edgy, dark, moody men with hidden pasts are bad for women like me, and I hit my self-destruct button a long time ago.
SIX
PAYDAY
ROOKE
Another text message this morning. Another car. This time the boost is an easy one. “Fifteen grand. You’re not getting a cent more from me, Rooke. I don’t need to remind you how badly you ripped me off with the other night, do I?”
“I’m not exactly popping the hood on these things to check the engines, Jericho. If it runs when I cross the wires, I take the fucking thing. You can’t blame me if the vehicles I bring you aren’t in pristine working condition sometimes.”
Apparently the Merc was a dud. He fucking wanted it, though. He was the one who told me specifically where it was. Jericho uses the nail on his little finger to scratch at the corner of his mouth, frowning deeply. He curses under his breath, using language that would make a sailor blush. “How about a wager? Double or nothing, my friend. Spice things up a little.”
“No, thanks. I’ll stick with the twenty you promised.” I’ve learned my lesson with Jericho. He never places a bet he knows he can’t win. His coins are double-sided. His decks are stacked. If I chose to go head-to-head with him every time he proposed a bet, I’d be the poorest car thief in the tri-state area.
“All right, man. Twenty,” he says. “But I’m telling you now, if I lose money on this thing I’m coming after you for the balance. And I don’t want to have to get on a bus to Brooklyn, asshole. That would be some bullshit right there.” Despite his role as mechanic and “used car salesman,” Jericho hates driving cars. He prefers to sit on the back seat of a bus whenever he has to get around, generally falling asleep with his mouth hanging open and missing his stop at least twice. There’s no reasoning with the man, though. No matter how many times I try to persuade him it would be more efficient to use one of the many cars he has on hand in his garage, he refuses to budge on the matter.
“How do I get pulled over by the cops if I’m riding a goddamn bus? How do I get caught for some stupid small shit like speeding, only to get dragged down to the station on an outstanding warrant, if I’m minding my own damn business at the back of the Q54, huh, Cuervo?”
He calls me Cuervo because he thinks I’m ignorant to the fact that it means crow in Spanish. He has no idea how I spent my time in juvenile detention, though, my adult-sized legs concertinaed beneath a child-sized desk as I pored over high school AP Spanish textbooks, mouthing the translations to phrases, verbs, adjectives and nouns silently as my eyes hungrily skipped over the pages. I’m pretty much fucking fluent these days.
“You won’t have to come looking for me,” I assure him. “It’s perfect. It’s last year’s model. No problems with the head gasket on this one, I promise. And even if there was a problem, you could always take it into a service center. It’s less than a year old. I’m sure it’s still under warranty.”
The broad, mildly overweight Mexican man now leaning against the driver’s side door shoots me a withering look that’s made lesser men turn tail and run in the past. He doesn’t say it: how am I supposed to take a car into a manufacturer’s service center if it’s been stolen and I don’t have any of the paperwork? He just lets the look hang between us for a moment, searing into me, doing the talking for him. I’m probably getting sunburn from the intensity of his glare.
“Funny man,” he says eventually. “I always forget how funny you are. And then you show up here and remind me, and I find myself wanting to forget all over again.”
“That’s a little harsh.”
He shrugs. “You’re funny. I’m harsh. We all have our crosses to bear.” I follow him as he leaves the metallic blue Land Rover I’ve boosted for him and heads into the back of the garage, where his office is located. I’ve spent half my life in places like this—mechanic’s shops, choked with car parts, everything covered in grease, stinking like sweat and cigarette smoke. Jericho’s place is unique, though. There are no pictures of naked women on the walls. Not one single poster. According to Raul, Jericho has seven older sisters who raised him after his mother died, and as such he won’t hear a bad word spoken against a woman. He beat a guy with a tire iron once because the guy in question called a hooker standing outside on the street corner puta.
Inside Jericho’s office, he gestures for me to have a seat. He turns his back to me while he opens up his small wall safe, entering digits into a keypad hidden behind an old photograph of a stern looking Mexican dude with a moustache in full military dress. Porfirio Diaz. I know the guy’s name because I made the mistake of asking Jericho about him once. Forty minutes later, I’d been well educated in the history of Diaz, including the fact that he served seven full terms as president of Mexico. He died in 1915. Jericho doesn’t appear to have gotten over the tragedy of it just yet.
I can hear him counting to himself as he retrieves my payment for the Land Rover. My phone goes off in my pocket but I leave it where it is. Jericho and I are on good, if a little spiky, terms. He’s a guy that demands your full attention, though. Texting in his office would no doubt be considered disrespectful on my part.
“There,” he says, turning around. “Twenty thousand. I don’t have any small bills I am afraid.”
Great. Hundred dollar bills are a nightmare to get rid of. Try to pay with a Benjamin in most of the establishments Jake and I frequent and you’ll get a suspicious look in the very least. At worst, the bill will be returned to you and you’ll be told to go break it somewhere else or they’ll call the cops. Still, money is money. It’s not like I’m planning on spending it anyway.
I take the small black carrier bag he’s holding out to me. “Any idea what you might like next? And don’t say a fucking Tesla.” I don’t normally grumble, but fuck. That’s all he seems to ask for, and those cars are virtually impossible to misappropriate.
Jericho half closes his eyes, thinking deeply by the looks of things. “Ferrari. Bugatti,” he says slowly. “Sports cars. I have people asking me for sports cars.”
“No one drives a Bugatti in the city. What would be the point? The average speed a car travels here is fifteen miles an hour and that’s if you’re lucky.”
Jericho shakes his head sadly, skirting around his desk, which is overflowing with paperwork and empty takeaway coffee cups. He descends the two steps from his office and meanders in between the sleek fleet of expensive cars that are parked on his garage floor. “You asked me what I would like and I told you. Do I expect you to bring me a Bugatti? No, I do not expect you to bring me a Bugatti. I expect you to bring me a Prius or some other bullshit.”
Cheeky motherfucker. “I have never brought you a Prius.”
“And so what? Perhaps it would be easy to sell a Prius.” He looks indifferent as he points me in the direction of the exit. “You’ll bring me something I can sell, I’m sure. Thank you for stopping by, Cuervo.”
When he smiles at me, I notice for the first time that he’s had some dental work done: a gold-plated grill over his top row of teeth. On his grill, the word: Arrepiente.
Repent.
******
Twenty grand in a black plastic shopping bag. Twenty grand, banging against my shinbone as I walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. The long struts of the support wires look like long, skinny fingers stretching up towards the sky. The sun’s been down for hours already, and the thick layer of clouds overhead break occasionally, revealing the brief, sharp pin prick point of some unknowable star. It’s so cold, the air hurts as I draw it into my lungs. I think about a lot of things as I cross the bridge.
I start by thinking about what I’m going to do with the
money swinging from my hand as I walk towards home. It would be really easy to flag a taxi down and pay to be taken to my front doorstep once I’m off the walkway, but I know I’m not going to. The cold feels like it’s restarting my heart, and walking always helps to clear my head.
Jacob. I could give the money to him. He has student debt up to his eyeballs just like everyone else, and struggling to make it as a musician in New York is pretty much the same as struggling to make it as an actor in Los Angeles. Nine times out of ten it just ain’t gonna happen. If I give the money to Jake, though, he’s going to want to know where I got it from. He’s too curious. He’d never be satisfied with the knowledge that it’s his to do with as he pleases, no matter where it came from. There would be questions, questions I obviously won’t be able to answer. We’d end up arguing or falling out, and neither of us need the drama in our lives right now. If I had a sibling, a brother or a sister, I could give them some of the money. I wallow in the strangely comforting idea of having an older brother to look up to. A younger sister to protect. Only those who are born as only children can know and understand the longing most of us have for a brother or a sister. I’m an adult, and even now I wish things were different.
I think about Lola, the last girl I fucked. Would I spend any of this money on Lola if we were still fucking? Probably. I’d take her for dinner. Maybe buy her some flowers. I’d do clichéd, pointless things like take her to see a movie, and afterwards we’d get steaming hot salted pretzels from a bodega near my place. Would we disappear off on a plane to South America together, to adventure through Argentina and Patagonia? Abso-fucking-lutely not. She wasn’t that kind of girl.
Bicycles zip past me in blurs of blinking red bike lights and puffy black down jackets. I don’t hear their bells ringing. I listen to a heavy rap playlist on my phone, earphones blocking out the world, and I have one of those bizarre, out-of-body, how-is-this-my-life? moments.
