“Are you sure you don’t need anything else?” He has to lean three times on the hatchback door to click it closed. “Because I think we might have a couple of rusty screws left in the back somewhere.”
“Old overachiever habits are hard to break, I guess.” I grin.
He grins back, the skin of his right cheek leaning into the hint of a dimple. “It was a pretty fierce list. Very thorough. One might even say overly so.”
“I told you I was—”
“Excellent at research,” he interrupts, still grinning. “I remember. But preparation is only half the battle.”
His tone and expression are teasing, and I imitate both. “Are you doubting my competence?”
“Hell, no. Anyone who can make a list like yours is fully capable of looking up instructions on the internet. All I’m saying is, if you happen to run into any problems with the execution and need an experienced handyman...” He cocks a brow and gestures with a thumb to his apron, Handyman embroidered in big white letters across the front.
I laugh. “I’ll remember that.”
This is when he smiles again, big and wide, and it completely transforms his face. It’s a smile that’s just as fierce, just as sexy and magnetic as his look-alike brother’s, yet somehow, Gabe makes it his own. Maybe it’s the way his left cheek takes a second or two longer to catch up with his right, or the way his eyeteeth are swiveled just a tad inward. Maybe it’s the way his eyes crinkle into slits, and that dimple grows into a deep split. Whatever it is, Gabe’s smile is extraordinary in that it’s so ordinary, lopsided and uneven and unpracticed for red carpets and film cameras, and in that moment, I forget all about his famous brother. In that moment, I see only Gabe.
But now we’ve milked the moment for all it’s worth, and it’s time to go.
“Thanks for everything,” I say, reaching for my door. “Really. You’ve been a huge help.”
Gabe waves off my thanks, but he doesn’t turn to go. He stands there while I get settled, watching as I start the engine and fiddle with the gearshift, and then he stops me with a knuckle to the glass.
I hit the button for the window. “Don’t tell me I forgot something.”
“Yes,” he says, that extraordinarily ordinary smile nudging at the edges of his expression. “You forgot to tell me your name.”
“Abigail.” I extend my hand through the window, and his face blooms into a smile I can’t help but return. “Abigail Wolff.”
“Nice to meet you, Abigail Wolff. Gabe Armstrong.”
He shakes my hand, and a surge of solidarity for this stranger-who’s-not-quite-a-stranger spreads over my skin. I want to tell him I get it. I understand how one person’s death can tilt your entire world into a tailspin, how it can make you reevaluate your life and send you scurrying for a dead-end job in a dusty hardware store, how that one choice, that one event, that one split second can change everything.
Instead, I tell him goodbye, shove the gear stick into Reverse and point my car toward home.
3
The good thing about renovating a master bathroom yourself is that it takes loads of time. Six to eight weeks, including demolition and drying, so says the internet, and if there’s one thing I’ve had since Maria, it’s oceans and oceans of time.
It’s not that I’m overqualified for my current position as content curator for the nation’s leading health care website, though I most definitely am. My job is a forty-hour-per-week slog that, on my worst weeks, I can wrap up in less than half that time. Yes, I’m capable of so much more, but I can’t seem to muster up the energy to care. Content curation pays the bills and, as far as I know, has never killed a single soul.
It’s funny. Back when I was working—really working—as a journalist, there was no such thing as free time. When I wasn’t writing or researching or following leads, I was thinking about my next story. In the shower, on the water, during one of my mad sprints through the grocery store. Even my vacations, by definition a break from the daily grind, were not idle, and they were never long. Stolen snippets here and there, half days and federally mandated holidays, spent rowing or climbing or hiking through some forest somewhere, my mind tripping over ideas for my next piece. The harder I pushed myself, the faster my creative juices flowed. I didn’t have time to stop moving. Time is money. Time waits for no one. There’s never enough time in the day.
Now, though, I have more than enough to cart in all the bathroom supplies from Handyman, organize them by the order in which the internet tells me I will need them, line everything along the wall of the upstairs hallway and still be a good fifteen minutes early for my mid-afternoon skim latte date in Georgetown—even though I know it’s just not in Mandy’s DNA to arrive anywhere when she says she will. She pulls up at thirteen minutes past three, just as I’m settling onto a sidewalk terrace chair with two fresh drinks, my second and her first.
“Sorry I’m late,” she calls from across the street. “Client meeting ran way over, but the good news is, I knocked their sixty-dollar argyle socks off.”
“Come on. Socks don’t cost sixty dollars.”
“Not exactly the point here. The point here is—” an SUV whizzes by, stirring up the early-September air with the first of the fallen leaves, and Mandy disappears behind it, reappearing a second or two later with a wide grin “—they loved me. They gave me the job.”
She steps off the curb without checking traffic, without making sure the drivers have slammed their brakes and their tires have screeched to a complete halt. Which they do, of course. Mandy is the human version of Jessica Rabbit, a rowdy redhead with Bambi eyes and bee-stung lips who favors skintight jeans, high heels and flowy, flowery blouses. Stopping traffic is her superpower. There’s not a man on the planet who gets annoyed at the sight of her jaywalking across four lanes of city traffic as she’s doing now.
“She’s happily married,” I say loudly enough so that the one closest to me, a Paul Bunyan type in a minivan, hears me through his open window. He responds by leaning into the dash to get a better look at her ass.
She collapses onto the seat next to me, snatches up her cup from the table. “Did you hear me? Honeymoon Channel wants me to redesign their app. It’s a big deal, Abby. You should be thrilled.”
“I am thrilled for you.”
“Be thrilled for us.” She lifts her drink in a toast, then pauses for a long pull. “I sold your services, too.”
“I already have a job, remember?”
If she rolls her eyes, she’s considerate enough to do it behind her mirrored sunglasses. After Chelsea died, Mandy made no secret of her disgust with my decision to shove my press pass to the back of a drawer, and she’s spent the past three years encouraging me, rather loudly and relentlessly, to get back in there. To write something good, something meaningful, do something more exciting than my current drudgery.
But what Mandy can’t seem to understand is, there’s no shelf life on guilt. Someone died because of me, because of words I wrote. Just because I wasn’t the one to pull the proverbial trigger doesn’t mean I wasn’t to blame. Words, even when they’re carefully crafted, can be just as deadly as a bullet.
“Come on, Abigail.” Mandy shoves her glasses to the top of her head and leans into the table. “I’ve seen your day planner. You row until mid-morning, you take weekly martini lunches—”
“I take them with you.”
She waves off my rebuttal with a manicured hand. “Not the point. My point is, you can do your job in your sleep. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’ve done your job in your sleep, and more than once. You have plenty of time for the one I’m offering.”
I shake my head, confused. Mandy is a technological genius who peppers her sentences with terms like HTML and search engine optimization and JavaScript. Half the time, I have no idea what she’s talking about. Why would she hire me for anyt
hing?
“I know nothing about apps,” I tell her, “except how to order pizza off them.”
“No, but you know about writing.” When I don’t respond, she cranks up her pitch a notch or two. “Have I mentioned it’s for the Honeymoon Channel? We’re talking beaches and cruises and European getaways. How is that going to harm anyone, except maybe with jet lag or a sunburn?”
“That’s not the point, and you know it.”
She sighs. “I know, I know. Your muse has vanished, your well’s run dry. But surely you have enough talent still lurking in there somewhere to spit up a few thousand words of catchy advertising copy.”
I turn and stare down the street, not eager to rehash this stale argument—yet again—with my well-meaning best friend. No matter how many times I’ve told her, she refuses to believe my not writing is so much more than just me missing my muse. It’s that I can’t. What happened with Chelsea didn’t just mess me up mentally but also physically. I know this because for the past three years, every time I sit down at a blank computer screen or pick up a pen and paper, my fingers freeze up. My brain shorts out. The words are piled up somewhere deep inside of me, but they refuse to come out to play.
If anything, I’d always thought it would have been Maria. After all those pictures hit the internet, I’d obsessed about her welfare. Did she find another job? Had she made friends, come out of the closet, settled into a normal life? Was she living on the streets? But Maria had gone dark. Her phone was disconnected, her apartment empty, her email address unrecognized.
And then Chelsea surprised everyone by tying a noose around her neck and dangling herself from the showerhead—not an easy task, considering she had to rig the rope just right to support her weight and keep her knees bent as the oxygen stopped flowing to her brain. But she succeeded, and while the rest of the world shook their heads in compassion or tsked their tongues in holier-than-thou judgment, a chain of two words repeated in an endless loop through my brain. My fault—my fault—my fault.
And because Mandy knows me better than just about anyone, she heard them, too.
“Abigail, repeat after me,” Mandy said when I called to tell her the news, now coming up on three years ago. “I am not responsible for Chelsea Vogel’s death.”
“My phone and email are blowing up with people, my freaking colleagues, asking me how her death makes me feel.”
“Tell them it makes you feel unbelievably sad. For Chelsea, for her family, for everyone who ever knew her. Tell them her death is a tragedy, but do not, do not accept responsibility for that woman’s suicide.”
My fault—my fault—my fault.
A loud, exasperated sigh came down the line. “How many times have I listened to you preach about public enlightenment, how it is the foundation of democracy? That, as a journalist, it is not only your job but your duty to seek truth and report it to the world?”
“Yes, but I was also supposed to be sensitive and cautious and judicious in order to minimize harm, which clearly I didn’t, because I’m pretty sure suicide is the mack-fucking-daddy of harm.”
“If Chelsea Vogel didn’t want her dirty laundry aired, then she shouldn’t have had any in the first place. You reported the facts, Abby. Fairly and honestly and comprehensively. Just like you were trained to do.”
“Yes, but—”
And just then, a terrible, awful, horrible thought entered my mind unbidden. It was like an invasive weed that couldn’t be killed, climbing and coiling through my consciousness like kudzu, suffocating every other thought in its path.
And the thought was this: yes, I had been sensitive and cautious and judicious with Maria, perhaps even overly so, but I could have done better by Chelsea. I could have shown more compassion for how she was about to be involuntarily outed not just as a predator but as a lesbian. I could have thought a little longer about her husband’s and son’s response to the news, what would happen when they opened up their morning paper or switched on their morning talk shows. I could have been more sensitive to her right to respond to the allegations, could have been more diligent in seeking her out. I should have done all those things, but I didn’t.
“Yes, but what?” Mandy said.
“I have to go.”
“Not until you answer me, Abigail. Yes, but what?”
I hung up on her then, and she never badgered me about it again—a decided lack of interest that’s very un-Mandy-like. I suspect she heard those words, too. The loud and insistent ones I didn’t know how to smother, the ones telling me that while I might have done everything right with Maria, with Chelsea I did everything wrong.
“Earth to Abby,” she says now, waving a hand in front of my face.
I shake off the memory with a full-body shudder. “Sorry. What?”
“I said just think about it, okay? This job’s a great way to ease back into writing, and I really could use the help. The last copywriter I hired was a total dud. He missed every single deadline.”
“Great. So now I’m your last resort?”
She gives me a teasing half smile over her Starbucks cup. “You know what I mean.”
I nod because I do know what she means, even though my answer is still no. “No offense, but if I ever write again, it will not be for an app. It will be because I can’t keep the words inside. Because the story demands to be told. As awesome as tropical beaches are, I don’t think they qualify.”
But instead of being disappointed as I figured she’d be, she looks as if she wants to stand up and applaud. “Look at you, having a breakthrough.”
I snort. “Hardly. I didn’t say I was going to write. Only that I’m self-aware enough to know it has to be for the right topic. And honestly? I can’t imagine what that topic would be.”
“Maybe BenBird21225 can help you.”
For a moment, I’m confused. How does Mandy know about BenBird21225, the faceless handle who’s been badgering me by email and text for weeks now, his messages increasing in frequency and urgency. I have no idea who he is, why he’s contacting me, how he got my phone number, because the only thing he ever actually says in any of them is that he wants to talk to me.
She points to my phone. “He’s texted you ten times in as many minutes. Who is he?”
I pick up my phone and scroll through at least a dozen shouty texts. Ben wants a MEETING. He has something VERY IMPORTANT to say that must be said IN PERSON. Once upon a time, I would have followed this lead. I would have written back to Ben—asking for more details, setting up a time to talk, feeling him out as a potential source—instead of writing him off as I do now.
I delete them all, every single one, and toss my phone back onto the table.
“He’s nobody.”
4
When the doorbell rings in the middle of the day, nine times out of ten it heralds the arrival of the UPS man or a band of Jehovah’s Witnesses on a mission to save my soul. Today, like pretty much any other day, I ignore it. I’m not exactly in a position to go to the door anyway, my body wedged uncomfortably under the bathroom sink, both hands prying loose a particularly stubborn drain nut. This happens to be a crucial moment, one the internet tells me is best handled equipped with a bucket, a mop and an endless supply of rags.
But when the doorbell rings again, and then again and again and again, I retighten the nut, wriggle myself out, dust myself off and head down the stairs.
The person on the other side of the door is a kid, twelve or thirteen maybe, with long shaggy hair that falls in a honey-colored veil over eyes I can’t quite see. He’s prepubescent skinny, his beanpole limbs sticking out of baggy shorts and a faded Angry Birds T-shirt, his bony ankles tapering off into orange Nike sneakers. White earbuds dangle from his shoulders, the long cord trailing down his torso and disappearing into his pants pocket. He shifts from foot to foot in what I read as either a bout of sudd
en impatience or the sullen annoyance typical of kids his age, almost-teens with a laundry list of things to prove to the world.
“Can I help you?” I say, glancing beyond him to the street for an idling car. No bike or skateboard, either, and I wonder if he’s one of the neighborhood kids. Once they hit middle school, they shoot up so quickly I stop recognizing them.
“I’m Ben,” he says, and when my brow doesn’t clear in recognition, he adds, “The dude who sent all those emails?”
“Ben. As in BenBird21225?”
“Yeah. How come you never emailed me back?”
There are a million reasons I haven’t emailed him back, none of which I’m willing to go into with a twelve-year-old kid. I settle on the one I think would be easiest for him to comprehend. “Because I didn’t feel like it.”
He makes a face as if I just offered him raw broccoli. “I thought you were a journalist. Aren’t you supposed to, like, follow every lead or something?”
“I’m not a journalist. I’m a content curator.”
“Huh?”
“I mine the internet for content relevant for today’s active seniors.” It’s my elevator pitch, and I typically pull it out only when I want the person across from me to stop talking. It almost always works or, at the very least, results in slack jaws and glazed eyes and a very swift change of subject.
But Ben here doesn’t take the bait. “Like, Viagra and adult diapers?”
“No,” I say a bit defensively, even though Ben’s right. Viagra and adult diapers are relevant to pretty much every senior, even if it’s only just to brag about how their still youthful, virile body doesn’t yet need them. “Do you need a ride? Or for me to call your mom to come get you?”
“I’d love for you to be able to do that, but my mom is dead.” He runs his fingers through his messy bangs, pulling them off his face, and recognition surges. I know those gray-blue eyes. I’ve seen them before. I know the gist of his next words before they come out of his mouth. “She hung herself in the shower.”
The Ones We Trust Page 2
