I didn’t ask him what smuggling people across the border had to do with tribal self-determination; this person shut up and ate, pausing only to nod in agreement.
Afterward Linnie showed us to a guest bedroom, gave us towels, and pointed out the bathroom. Finally we were alone. But still Ollie looked grim.
“What’s going on?” I asked her.
“We shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“In this bedroom?”
“In this house. These people are criminals, and they’re being kind to us for no reason whatsoever. They’ve been paid. We should be driving the hell out of here, now.”
I didn’t need to remind her that we had no car, and our ride wouldn’t be here until the morning. “If they were going to axe-murder us they would have done it by now,” I said. Then: “No, you’re right. Axe murderers always try to kill you after you’ve gone to bed, when you’re having sex.”
Ollie was not amused. She pulled off the pile of decorative pillows covering the queen-size bed and crawled in, still wearing the fleece suit. I stripped off to my underwear and got in beside her … where we lay, wide awake, listening to each other breathe.
“He knew about Rovil,” I said. “How the hell does he know?”
“He could have tapped Bobby’s phone before I made you stop using it. He could have followed you when you mailed the FedEx package. Were you followed?” She sounded angry.
“No, I wasn’t—fuck, I don’t know,” I said. “How would I know?”
“And we don’t know if Rovil’s still coming.”
“He’ll come if he can,” I said.
Ollie didn’t answer.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Dr. Gloria looked up from her notepad. “You have to consider what she’s gone through.”
What she went through? I thought we’d both had it pretty rough.
“Think, Lyda,” the angel said. “What happened back there? Tonight.”
Well, a shit-load happened back there. The fake drug exchange, the man in the black hat, Hootan getting shot. Then the run to the boat, and Aaqila …
Oh.
Ollie was facing away from me, her head tucked into her chest. I could picture Ollie, the rock raised above her head. The way she looked down at Aaqila’s body. She’d killed someone for me. I put an arm over her stomach and pressed my forehead into her back. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
Ollie didn’t move. Then she said, “For what?”
“For Aaqila. The Afghan girl.”
“She was shooting at you. I hit her in the head.” She said this calmly.
“I know, I know. But I put you in a position where you had to do that.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I sat up so I could see her face. “Ollie, I never wanted you to kill for me.”
Ollie blinked up at me. “She’s not dead. At least not when I left her. She was still breathing; I checked.”
“Oh. Thank God.” Maybe, I thought, Fayza wouldn’t hunt us down now.
“But I would have if I needed to,” she said.
Not for the first time I wondered what Ollie had done before she’d been an analyst. She said she’d been in the army, but she refused to talk about where she’d been deployed, or what she had done. I’d never pressed her. It wasn’t that kind of relationship.
“Keep telling yourself that,” Dr. Gloria said under her breath.
“I never should have put you in that position,” I said.
“You didn’t put me in that position,” Ollie said. “I put me in that position. It was my plan.”
“Because I forced you to break out of Guelph Western. I made you go off your meds, then—”
Ollie sat up. “Are you that egotistical?”
That stopped me. Ollie got out of bed looking like a child wearing her mom’s clothes. “You didn’t force me to do anything,” she said. She dropped her voice. “You didn’t make me go off my meds, or trick me into helping you. I chose to help you. So did Bobby. You think you’re so damn smart that you can manipulate everybody into doing what you want?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“Of course she does,” Dr. Gloria said.
“I’m the one who fucked up,” Ollie said. She started pacing. “I should have known that the cowboy would still be tracking you.”
“How could you possibly—”
“Not the cowboy exactly, though I should have realized back at the marina that he was watching us too carefully. But somebody. Someone went to the church after you did, then killed those people and took the printer.” She was trying to keep her voice down, but she was talking fast, growing more agitated. “He had to have followed you. But who is he working for? We know now that he’s not working for the Millies.”
“Not after he shot them,” I said.
“So he’s working parallel to us, trying to shut the church down. His accent was American. Does that mean anything?”
“It sounded fake to me,” I said. “A little too John Wayne. He could be anyone who watched a lot of movies.”
“But American beneath that,” she said. “Midwestern.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t going to argue with a woman who used to monitor phone calls for a living. “So a drug agent then. DEA.”
She fanned the idea away. “No, not a cop—he wouldn’t be working alone. Maybe an ex-officer.” She spun suddenly, looking at nothing. “What if he’s working for the church? Plugging leaks? He follows you, sees you talk to Luke and Pastor Rudy, then kills them. He gets to Rovil somehow. Then he follows you to the beauty salon, then to Cornwall—I should have spotted him!”
“Easy, easy,” I said. “Edo’s a billionaire; he can afford to hire good people.”
“You’re sure it’s Edo, then.”
“Pretty fucking sure.”
She said nothing for a moment, then: “If you find him, will you kill him?”
I laughed nervously. “Jesus, Ollie!”
She crouched down in front of me. “You can trust me. If there’s something you’re going to do, or something you’ve done…”
“I haven’t—”
“You can know that whatever it is, I’ve done worse.”
“You want me to confess my sins?” I tried to make it into a joke, but my heart was beating fast.
When I was a girl, before my mother’s disease made it impossible, we went to church three times a week, and every night during revival week. It was at a revival service when I was twelve years old that I first felt God working on my heart. As I sat there in the pew during the altar call, I suddenly understood that if I didn’t surrender to Him I would go to Hell when I died. It wasn’t Hell itself that scared me—or not just Hell. It was the idea that my mother was going to Heaven without me.
I began to shake in the pew. I wanted to go up and be saved, but I was afraid to move. In my church we called that “being under conviction.” And then my mother touched me on the shoulder, and it was like a boulder tipping off the edge of a cliff. I plummeted, into the arms of a loving God.
“What is it?” Ollie asked.
My eyes had filled with tears. When—how—did that happen?
“You can tell her,” Dr. Gloria said.
“I’ve never told anyone,” I said to both of them.
Ollie put a hand on the back of my arm.
“I remember a knife,” I said.
* * *
I told her everything I could remember, which was hardly anything at all. I’d woken up on the floor of Edo’s apartment suite, blinded by a white light. In my hands I felt the wooden handle of a knife—and then someone took it from my hands.
“But Gilbert confessed to killing her,” Ollie said.
“Yes, he did.”
“So it couldn’t have been you.”
“Unless he was lying.”
“Why would he do that?” she asked. “Do you remember stabbing Mikala? Striking her at all?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know,” Oll
ie said. “What does your angel say?”
“My angel tells me what I want to hear,” I said.
“I will ignore that,” the doctor said. “Aren’t you glad you told her?”
‘Glad’ was the wrong word. I felt like I’d stripped naked in the middle of the street. The fact that Ollie had not shut down, that she’d opened her arms to me—I just couldn’t fathom that.
Ollie and I talked for another hour. I was aching to fall asleep, but she was growing more excited by the moment, churning through all this new information.
I took a breath and said to Ollie, “Do you have that bottle of Alisprazole?” The antianxiety meds she’d stolen before leaving the hospital.
“They’re in my clothes,” Ollie said warily. She’d draped her wet things on doorknobs and across the room’s furniture. “But I’m not taking them.”
She was going for maximum cognitive sharpness, even if that meant flirting with paranoia. Off meds, her Clarity-wired brain was in charge. On them, she was that slave to agnosia she’d been back in the NAT, unable to connect the dots. No doctor had been able to find a chemical balance between the two extremes. My job was to decide when the paranoia was becoming too dangerous and force her back on the Alisprazole.
“Not for you,” I said. “I figure a couple for me.”
“You told me you were staying clean.”
“But we also need to sleep tonight. I’m keyed up, you’re keyed up…”
“I’m not taking those pills, and neither are you.”
After another minute of silence I turned toward her. “I suppose we could try more natural remedies.”
“Natural remedies,” Ollie said skeptically. I touched her chin. She said, “Like what?”
I slid my thumb across her jaw, then down her neck to the valley of her clavicle. Her skin was no longer cold; she felt hot, almost feverish.
I said, “I think we need a little dose of sexytocin.”
She laughed. “What about the axe-murderers?”
“Fuck ’em.” I ran my palm along her shoulder, pushing aside the neck of the fleece shirt until it dropped over her shoulder. Then I bent and kissed the side of her neck. In the hospital I’d fallen in love with the taste of her skin.
She said, “I feel like we’re making out in my parents’ bedroom.”
“That’s so hot,” I said, and she laughed again.
I pushed the fleece from her other shoulder, then let my hand glide down, hovering a hair’s breadth above her breast, not touching except for tiny incidental touches, moth wing touches that raised goose flesh across her skin. Her nipple hardened and brushed my palm. I circled there, the point of contact between us so tiny, so intermittent, like neurons firing to each other.
“Hmm,” Dr. Gloria said. She jotted something on her notepad.
“You can get the hell out of here,” I said.
“Don’t mind me,” she said.
“Out!”
She put away her notepad, rather sulkily I thought, then with two beats of her wings vanished through the ceiling.
Ollie touched my neck. “Hey. Where’d you go?”
“I’m right here,” I said. I moved my hand down, firmer now, one facet of my ring tracing a path along her ribs, across the ridge of her hip, then under the waistband of the absurd fuzzy pants, then down, my ring finger dragging across her cleft. She arched her back, and her hands gripped the carpet. “Right … here,” I said.
* * *
Love at first sight is a myth.
I was twenty-five, two years into my PhD program and already tired of my fellow grad students, when I got roped into going to a party in an apartment on Door Street. The place was packed, doors and windows open to the humid night air, the typical low-rent shoutfest fueled by cheap beer, grocery store cheese, and Ke$ha pounding on the speakers. I was drinking my first and last beer of the party and plotting my exit when I noticed the tall black woman with the plaited hair.
She stood in front of a pair of windows, towering over a white boy, explaining how he was wrong—about the Greenland ice sheet, or fracking, or the Supreme Court, or Radiohead, or any one of the hot topics on her agenda in those days—simply wrong, and we’d better all get our heads out of the fucking sand now. She was over six feet tall in flats, slender and muscular as an Olympic volleyball player, and wore a purple maxi-dress with a slit that ran the length of her thigh.
My body reacted on its own. Dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin—the whole damn monoamine family—kicked in like a band of mustangs.
Love at first sight is a myth, but thundering sexual attraction at first sight is hard science. The limbic system knows what it wants and does everything possible to keep the prefrontal cortex, that yammering, censorious maiden aunt, from shutting down the party. My genes clanged their tin cups across the bars of their jail cells and shouted to fulfill their evolutionary mandate: Rep-li-cate! Rep-li-cate! Not all of them had gotten the news about my sexual orientation. Genes are notoriously indifferent to details.
So with their chemical commandments pounding in my bloodstream, I pushed through the crowd toward her and the white boy. He might have been my age or older, but his mall-issue cargo shorts and American Eagle T-shirt placed him fully in Boy Territory. I eased up between them until my right shoulder was just in front of the boy’s left, setting the pick. He still hadn’t noticed this; his attention, predictably enough, was on the black woman’s braless tits and their friendly, attentive nipples. Perhaps I noticed them myself.
She reached for her wineglass, and I saw the small tattoo on the inside of her arm, a circle nested in a hexagon. I was no chemist but I’d taken enough hours to recognize what it stood for: six linked carbon atoms, each one attached to a hydrogen atom.
I stepped in front of the boy and said to the woman, “So, you’re toxic?”
She glanced at her arm, then turned her attention to me. The boy said something like “Excuse me?” but I cut him off.
“Get the lady a drink,” I said. Her wineglass was half-full, but being an optimist for my own chances I decided it was half-empty. Mikala seemed amused by my cheek, which was what I was going for. She looked me up and down, barely moving her eyes.
“So,” I said. “Benzene.”
“The mother of all hydrocarbons,” she said. “It’s crucial in everything from plastics to … opiates.”
“And it’s also really flammable,” I said.
She smiled. “The best things are, honey.”
Maybe she didn’t say “honey.” But that’s how I remembered it.
When after three years of living together we decided to marry, we of course—Mikala being who she was, and me being who I was—set about defining, redefining, contextualizing, and negotiating everything about what our marriage would mean, and what the ceremony would communicate about that meaning, down to venue, flowers, wardrobe, and the most important props of all: the rings. What to do about the rings? We were not chattel. Traditional symbols held no weight for us, but the hex and circle was something we could get behind. The benzene ring, we decided, would represent stability and creativity, but also danger: the rings would remind us to be careful with each other.
When we told the Sprouts what we were looking for, Rovil nodded as if this made perfect sense, Edo laughed his Santa Claus laugh (a back-of-the-throat chortle he deployed at every opportunity—as greeting, as filler, as disarmament tactic in business negotiations), and Gil shook his head at us. “Nerds,” he said. This from a man who spent $2,000 for a Joss Whedon T-shirt. Not a shirt with a picture of Joss Whedon, mind you, but a shirt that had been worn by him. (It was blue.) Gil was five-two, over two hundred pounds, and flew into rages when Stupid Humans fucked up his equipment. Not even Mikala would cross him when he was in a mood. So we were shocked when a few days later he presented us with two petri dishes, and in each rested a hand-forged brass ring. It was the most touching thing anyone had done for us.
Years later, at the trial, Gil would tell the jury that he was j
ealous of our relationship. He was in love with Mikala, but Mikala wouldn’t leave me. That’s why, he said, when the dosage took hold in that suite at the top of the Lake Point Tower, he stabbed my wife to death.
* * *
Dr. Gloria was not in the bedroom when I awoke the next morning. But Ollie was. She woke as soon as I slipped off the bed.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Yeah, that was pretty good,” I said.
“No,” she said. “For trusting me.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Part of me wanted to take it all back, untell the story of my crime. Go back to where we were before. “I smell breakfast,” I said.
It was seven in the morning and the house was jumping: Linnie and two women who might have been her daughters packed lunch bags in the kitchen; older kids helped younger kids pull on shoes; teenagers appeared, ate cereal standing up, then left without saying good-bye. At least three TVs yammered away. The dining room table had been turned into a buffet, loaded with loaves of white bread, Pop-Tarts burning in the toaster, a Crock-Pot of steaming oatmeal, and jugs of juice and milk. Roy sat at the end of the table reading from a real newspaper, undisturbed by the noise and chaos.
A girl who was perhaps three years old ran toward us and happily slammed into Ollie. Ollie looked at me in alarm. The toddler glanced up, realized that these legs did not belong to the mother/cousin/grandmother she thought they did, and ran into the kitchen.
“I’ll be outside,” Ollie said. She shouldered her backpack, grabbed a Pop-Tart, and headed for the front door. We had finally been able to fall asleep last night—thank you, oxytocin and prolactin, you were great—but the anxiousness had returned. Her mind was back to writing worst-case scenarios, and she wanted to be out of there.
I took the seat beside Roy and made small talk about children, a topic I knew nothing about. The oatmeal was too salty for my taste, but I was happy for more hot food.
Linnie gave me a pair of plastic travel mugs filled with coffee, and I took them out to Ollie. It was there I noticed a shimmer of pure white hovering above the trees.
“Hark,” she said. “Your ride approacheth.”
Afterparty Page 17
