by Karen Ellis
“When we lost her,” David says, “it was…unbelievable.” He looks at Elsa with such genuine caring, it startles her. “Would it be better if we don’t talk about this now?”
“No.” She lifts her third drink, nearly depleted but still with a tempting inch of numbness sitting at the bottom. “It’s okay. I know what’s coming. I’m ready.”
The brothers look at her in silence, politely ignoring what is clearly either a delusion or a lie on her part. Her father is dying. It has to hurt. And here she is, adrift in her corn maze again.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asks Lex.
He shrugs deeply, drunkenly, neck sinking between lifted shoulders, one eyebrow arching. “You didn’t want to talk about it, and I understood that, I really did. Losing a parent is one of the hardest things you ever go through.”
“I was twenty-nine when I lost Mama,” David says, “but you know something? There’s still this feeling of abandonment, and you’re helpless against it.”
“How old were you?” she asks Lex.
“Fourteen.” He shakes his head at the memory of himself back then. “I reacted badly.”
Elsa smiles. “Tell me.”
“Let’s just say”—David shares the smile—“that Lex sealed the deal on my specializing in criminal defense.”
Not, she assumes, in the public sector, given his freewheeling spending on these overpriced drinks. “You must be good,” she tells David, knowing that the NYPD would never have hired Lex if he had anything serious, or recent, on his record.
David deflects. “Well, in the end, he turned out okay.”
“What about your father?” She looks back and forth between them.
“Bastard was dead one year after he put me on that plane,” Lex says. “He was zapoi.”
“Casualty of the vodka wars,” David clarifies. “Drank himself to death.”
“And your real mother?”
Lex answers quickly, “My real mother was Yelena. My biological mother was the woman I never heard from after the day she walked out.”
“I’m sorry I asked.”
“No, it’s okay.” Lex uncrosses his legs and recrosses them in the opposite direction. “As soon as Mama Yelena was gone, David, he was stuck raising me.”
David laughs. “Fourteen going on ten.”
“And now look!” Lex grins.
David slaps his brother’s back and says, “Twenty-eight going on twenty-one. We’re finally getting somewhere.”
Lex flushes, as if it’s just occurred to him that Elsa is the senior investigator on their team and the affectionate ridicule might not be good for his budding reputation. But she’s pretty sure she won’t recall much of what they’ve said other than its friendly substance and the fact that she’s grateful to have joined the Cole brothers instead of going home by herself to wait and worry.
“What about your mother?” Lex asks. “You haven’t mentioned her.”
“She died when I was in high school. She was killed in a home invasion.” A pulse of silence, shock drifting across both brothers’ faces. And then Elsa bangs down her finished cocktail, what’s left of the oversize ice cube dinking the inside of the empty glass. “But here’s the thing: She wasn’t exactly a saint—she used to beat the shit out of me. Why can’t I just say it? It’s the truth.” She has never before come right out and said it so plainly, and she is instantly overcome with shame.
They stare at her, speechless.
“I’m sorry.” She pushes back her chair and stands, wobbly. “I’ve had too much to drink. I’ve got to get home.” Remembering, suddenly, that Mel will probably be back by now.
David stands with her. “Never apologize for telling the truth.”
“The truth is a fucking bitch,” Lex mutters.
When they emerge from the bar, Lex heads toward the subway, hands jammed in pockets, eyes down—presumably thinking thoughts she wishes she hadn’t made him think. Alone with David on the quiet street, the chilly late-night air infiltrating her long sleeves, Elsa folds her arms in an attempt to warm herself up.
“Come on,” he says matter-of-factly, “I’ll walk you home.”
Normally she’d refuse the offer, but the copious alcohol has relaxed her. And so, instead of responding with her usual line—I’m a big girl, I can get home on my own—she says nothing. They walk in silence to Butler Street and stop at the foot of her stoop.
He says, “Well.”
“Well.”
“I’m drunk.”
“Me too.”
“I really want to kiss you—is that crazy?”
“Actually, it—” Is, she’s about to say. It’s very crazy, kissing isn’t in my wheelhouse anymore, because, because… Their lips touch, tender, soft, before she flinches away.
“Sorry,” he says.
“No, it’s okay, it was just…habit.”
Humor, acceptance, appears in the corners of his eyes. It feels easy to be with him, and she likes him, and she wants him, but she can’t allow herself.
“I’ll bet you’re married,” she says, as if that explains her reluctance.
“Divorced. You?”
“Just plain single.”
He smiles.
“My niece is staying with me,” she says, glomming onto the first excuse that comes to mind. She cannot let this man into her life just so he can see her ruined skin and leave her. She glances at the apartment window, lit up yellow. “Looks like she’s home.”
He presses the side of his nose into her neck, and she feels the warmth of his exhalation, and something inside her badly wants to melt. But she can’t. “It’s okay, but tonight was nice,” he whispers, amazingly, given what she just dumped on him in the bar.
She has to agree, despite all that. “It was.”
“Here.” He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a business card.
She holds the card, looks at him. “In the morning, you’ll wake up and wish you hadn’t given me this.”
“No, I won’t.”
“I’m damaged.”
“Who isn’t?”
“You.” She smiles. “Unless I’m missing something.”
“See this face?” He presses a hand to his cheek, slackening and puckering his skin in a way that ages him comically. “I’ve earned every one of these wrinkles.”
“Wrinkles are nothing.” She hesitates, and then: “You know how some people are covered in tattoos?”
A slanted smile. “My ex-wife has a little bird tattooed on her shoulder.”
“Sounds tasteful. But mine? Let’s just say they’re doozies.”
“Trust me”—his voice a soothing whisper—“nothing would surprise me.”
He has no idea.
“Call me,” he says.
“This case is taking up all my time.”
“You’ll find the kid. From what I understand, you always do.”
In her mind, she searches through the thick fog of alcohol, trying and failing to recall any mention of that at the bar. She cringes at how much she drank, how vulnerable it made her, how stupid.
“Good night, David.” She steals another whiff of him, sweet, milky. “It was really nice to meet you.” She stumbles up her stoop, aware of him watching her until the door closes between them.
14
Loud music seeps out of Elsa’s apartment into the common hallway. She cringes to think of her neighbor’s young children being kept awake. Inside, it’s vastly louder—something she doesn’t recognize, a metallic genderless auto-tuned voice. Mel is sprawled on the couch, her long legs hoisted and ankle-crossed, hands drumming her stomach. Her jackknifed laptop sits open on the floor, pumping out a heavy beat.
Elsa crouches down and mutes it, issuing a quiet “Shh. Neighbors.”
“Oh, shit!” Mel slaps a hand over her mouth. Whispering: “Sorry.” She swings her feet to the floor and they tap-tap-tap in place.
“How was class?”
“Oh, class, great. The teacher, Mr. Bernard, gav
e us an assessment test to find out where we’re at and we graded them together in class and, strangely, I totally aced it.”
Elsa says, “Well, that’s good.”
“I mean, it’s Algebra Two, it’s not like I don’t know anything, but the point is I just failed it in school and now I got like the best grade in class and the teacher was wondering why I was even there.”
“I guess you know more than you think you know, if that makes sense. You ate something, I assume?”
“Actually, no. I wasn’t hungry but now I kind of am. Hey—want to go out? What’s good around here? Coming back from the subway I noticed tons of restaurants along Smith Street. I mean, it’s never this hopping on the Upper East Side, which is so boring. I wish we lived here.”
Elsa stands back and looks at Mel. “How much coffee did you drink today?” Mel seems, somehow, high—but Elsa herself isn’t exactly sober at the moment and the thought of asking her niece if she’s impaired feels hypocritical.
“Not much. I mean, a lot.” She laughs. “Is four cups too much?”
“Depends.” On if you’ve slept or haven’t slept. On what time of day it is. On if you’ve eaten anything. But four cups shouldn’t be enough to produce this much hyperactivity.
“Exactly.” Mel stands and quickly collects the things she’s strewn around—laptop, socks, phone, magazine, used tissue—as if they’re about to go somewhere.
“I can make us some eggs,” Elsa offers. “How does that sound?”
“Oh—sure.”
“Fried okay?”
“What can I do? I know—I’ll make toast!”
Mel zips around the small kitchen while Elsa checks her phone. A few junk e-mails but no messages from the lab and nothing about the APB on Ishmael Locke. She sets about making the eggs, the blur of alcohol and the surprise of the unexpected kiss giving way to domestic routine. She will never call David, and he’ll never call her, but she’s grateful for tonight.
“So,” Elsa says, “tell me about your day.”
“I put up, like, a million signs again this afternoon. I mean, I’ve been looking for stuff about her on the Internet but it’s all the same thing, nothing new, but you must know something.”
“You went back?” Elsa, incredulous.
“Are you mad?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Sorry.”
“I hate apologies that could have been avoided.” Elsa’s thoughts swirling as it sinks in that her beloved niece, whom she trusts, trusted, defied her. She pictures it—Mel leaving the apartment building after Elsa drives away; taking the subway back to Queens, to the Haverstocks’; that man, Teddy, handing her another stack of flyers, maybe adding a button; heading back into the woods—and feels a loss of…what? Control. What on earth was the kid thinking, going back after Elsa (thought she’d) made it clear that the Haverstock house was off-limits? “You knew I didn’t want you there, and you went back anyway?”
Mel, slack-jawed, looks surprised at her aunt’s reaction, disappointment having never before played out between them. “It’s just that she’s missing. And I thought I could help. And I had nothing to do.”
“You could have read a book. Called a friend. Gone to the movies.”
“I met some more of Ruby’s friends,” Mel tries, as if she could possibly think that by investigating in her own way, she was helping Elsa, not creating unnecessary distractions. “They’re pretty cool.”
Cool. Elsa does her best to ignore the ineptitude of that observation. Cool. Nice. A regular person. When in fact, no one, examined closely, is ever any of those things. She gathers herself, and asks, “How long were you there this afternoon, at the Haverstocks’?”
“Two hours, maybe, hanging more signs. And then Allie and me and Charlie—”
Allie and Charlie and I, Elsa thinks but doesn’t say. “Please tell me you’re not talking about Ruby’s ex-boyfriend Charlie.”
Mel’s eyes lower; she’s realizing (Elsa hopes) the error she’s made in socializing with someone who is, at the very least, a person of interest in a missing-child investigation. Her voice softens. “We walked over to his house—well, Allie went home, I don’t think she likes him very much, but I stayed for a while. I’m sorry, I really am. He was just…there.”
They stare at each other a moment, two, three. Mel shrinking, ashamed; Elsa sobering quickly. And then Mel says, “Auntie Elsa? The eggs are going to burn.”
Elsa’s attention jumps to the stovetop, where the edges of their sunburst eggs have curled into blackened crisps. She pulls the pan off the burner, shuts off the gas, and switches on the exhaust fan. After catching her breath, she says, “They’re still good to eat. Let’s just calm down and have some dinner.”
Mel nods, more submissive than Elsa likes to see her. She feels bad for yelling at the girl, but what was she supposed to say?
Mel barely eats and Elsa, ravenous, finishes off both their meals. She tries not to stare when Mel sets to biting what she can of her cuticles, as if they’ve suddenly grown long and bothersome.
“What else is going on with you, Mel?”
“Nothing.” Her gaze lands on Elsa and just as quickly flits away.
“I realize,” says Elsa, leaning forward, “that we haven’t spent a lot of time together lately, and I’m sorry about that, because I love being with you. So maybe I missed out on something, but tell me what’s going on and I promise I won’t tell your mother.”
“I feel like I want to rip my head off!”
“I can see that.”
“You won’t say anything?”
Elsa shakes her head. “No. I promise.” And poses a question she’s hoped never to be in a position to ask her own niece: “What are you on?”
Mel buries her face in her trembling hands with their raw half-moon cuticles.
Elsa breathes deeply, trying to keep calm. She knows what drugs can do to teenagers, to anyone, how they have the power to bring whole families down, but she never expected it to happen to Mel. To them. Tara hasn’t mentioned anything, but it’s possible that she doesn’t know. That Mel has saved it for Elsa, her trusted aunt who’s never judged her and has always said, all through her sixteen years of life, that she could tell her anything.
“Talk to me,” Elsa says as neutrally as she can.
Mel squirms in her seat. Wipes a distracted finger across her empty plate. “I never did it before.”
“Okay.” Elsa, calm on the outside. “Never did what?”
“It was just one.”
“One what?”
“Adderall. Charlie said he takes one every morning for his ADHD and it wears off after eight hours and he’s done so much better in school since he started taking it but it’s been like ten hours now and it hasn’t worn off at all!”
“Charlie gave you one of his Adderalls?” Relieved to learn that it’s a prescription drug, as if somehow that makes it safer.
Mel nods, staring down at her plate.
“Does he know who you are—that you’re my niece?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t mention it.”
“Did Allie? Mention it?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Of course she didn’t, otherwise he wouldn’t have dared to do this.”
Mel seems to shrink with embarrassment. Her eyes slam closed. “You’re right. I never should have gone there.”
Elsa asks, “What was the dosage?”
“Dosage? I don’t know—one pill.”
“But Mel, one pill can mean anything.”
“It’ll wear off. Everyone takes it. It was just one pill and it’s really no big deal.”
“Is that what Charlie told you?”
Mel nods.
“What about Allie—is she into it too?”
“Into it, Auntie Elsa? Seriously? One, she was gone by then? Two, it’s medicine? To help you concentrate? Because school is too boring and too hard?”
“But Mel, you took someone else’s medicine. You don’t have ADHD
that I know of.”
“But sometimes I wonder if I do.”
Elsa bites her tongue, on the verge of saying, Yeah, you and everyone else—why don’t you just put down your phone?
“Don’t worry”—Mel gets up and paces the room—“because I’m never taking it again. I hate it. I’d rather fail school than feel this way.”
Mel sits back down, now facing her aunt, the two of them knee to knee. Elsa strokes the girl’s soft cheek, unsure what to say.
“You won’t tell Mom?”
“I probably should—”
“You promised.”
“I know I did.” Elsa hesitates. “Don’t worry. It’s between us.”
“Thanks.” Mel’s smile is a little sweet and a little conspiratorial, reminding Elsa of how things have changed over the years, how friendship with a small child and friendship with a teenager are not the same thing. She’s on shifting ground with Mel now.
“Listen,” Elsa says, “I’m wondering—did Charlie offer you the Adderall? Or did you ask for it?”
“I didn’t know he had any, so why would I ask for it?”
“Why did he offer it? He hardly knows you.”
Mel shrugs. “Well, I guess maybe because he’s kind of nerdy and that’s one way he can get girls to like him? I told him I had to go to summer school and he just was kind of, like, Here, this will help. He said I could have it at no charge.”
“He sells his meds?”
“I guess so. But he said he liked me and he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.”
“What does that mean?”
Mel shrugs. “I’m not interested in him or his shit, so as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter. And anyway, I’m not going down that road. I’m not.”
Something about the change in Mel’s tone triggers a new concern. “Is Adderall the only thing Charlie sells?”
Mel nods, then shrugs her shoulders—and then she shakes her head.
Elsa pitches forward. “Talk to me, Mellie.”
Mel hesitates before stooping to the floor to unzip the front of her backpack. She pulls out a yellow globe-shaped lip balm and snaps it open. She removes a tiny plastic bag she’s jammed in the globe and hands it to Elsa. The clear bag, smeared with the greasy lip balm, holds about a tablespoon of white power inside.
