Providence

by Caroline Kepnes

  JON

  And just like that, everything is wrong again, everything is like it was back then, everything is off, askew. She was supposed to throw her arms around me and we were supposed to kiss and start this new chapter in our lives but instead she took one look at me and she passed out.

  The doctors say it’s normal. She went into shock, this sort of thing happens.

  But it didn’t feel normal. It made me hear Mr. Blair in my head again. We did good work down here, Jon. It made me want to read his letter.

  My mom knocks on my door. I bury the book under my pillow. “Yeah?”

  She comes in, beaming. I’ve never seen her this revved up, she’s like a brand-new car, full of pep, jerky, laughing one minute, crying the next. “We’re gonna need to get you a new bed, honey. Start thinking about what color sheets you might want, maybe we could paint? Maybe a nice bright blue?”

  “Maybe,” I say. I move closer to the pillow. I put my elbow on the pillow. She can’t see that book. Ever. I feel like Gollum with the ring, I feel like the goddamn book is making me weird, undoing all the good she sees, so handsome, so big!

  She doesn’t realize I’m a mess. She’s tearing the tags off shirts that someone brought over. All day our house has been a zoo with cops and doctors and reporters, friends bringing casseroles and clothes. The dog’s barking again—they got a dog, Kody Kardashian Bronson—and she winces. My mom said it saved her life, to get a dog. “Are you sure you don’t want him to come in here?”

  “Mom, I just kind of want some space.”

  She nods. She fiddles with the book I was reading when he took me, the book about Marshmallow Fluff. “I wish I had better things to say,” she says. “You know…wisdom.”

  “Mom, you say the right things.”

  She hugs the fluff book. “I just missed you so much. I’m sorry I’m such a basket case. I’m sorry that we took your Spider-Man wallpaper down. I’m sorry the bed’s not big enough and I’m sorry about Chloe, and I’m sorry I keep falling apart on you.”

  I take the book out of her hands and hug her. I feel bad that I’m not crying, and I feel scared of my body, like I’m not holding her right, like I don’t do anything right, the same way I felt when I was a kid. I think of Chloe falling onto the ground, the blood spilling out from her nose, her split knee, and suddenly my mom gasps.

  “Whoa,” she says. “Honey, I don’t think you realize your own strength.”

  When we pull apart, there are two little streams of blood dribbling from her nose. I held her so hard that she’s bleeding.

  I hear him again, Roger Blair. You’re welcome, Jon.

  * * *

  —

  It was the same thing with my mom as it was with Chloe. The doctors say it’s shock, perfectly normal to have a physical reaction in a situation like this.

  But nothing feels perfectly normal to me. I’ve been home a couple days now and Chloe hasn’t come back to see me. Her mother thinks she’s sick, she thinks she caught a bug, so she’s making her stay home. My dad passes out a lot. He drinks too much and he leaves his records on but it’s another thing that feels off somehow, the way we’ll be sitting there watching TV and one minute he’s awake and then one minute he’s not.

  I lock my door. I read The Dunwich Horror three times in a row.

  It’s a hard book to get through, and I skip around to the parts that Mr. Blair underlined. It takes place in a small town in New England, and of course I picture our town, our streets, even though this book takes place a long time ago. The main guy is Wilbur Whateley and he’s basically the town freak. He grows really fast. People are horrified by him. Dogs run away. He’s a giant.

  Wilbur is really smart and twisted and he’s missing a couple pages from his Necronomicon book. He needs those pages in order to summon the bad guys, the old ones. But the librarians are onto him. They’re afraid of what he’s gonna do if he gets his hands on those pages. So they ice him out. He won’t take no for an answer and he dies trying to get those pages. A dog eats him. There’s no blood, no guts. He’s only part human.

  I hear Roger’s voice again. You’re welcome, Jon.

  The main part of the book, the actual “horror,” comes at the end. This invisible beast ravages the town; he leaves giant prints on the ground. I picture a dinosaur but I don’t know if I’m right. I tell myself I will put it away and put it out of my head. I should focus on real things, figuring out about school, talking to reporters, police. But it’s almost as if the tentacles on the book are holding me, as if they’ve grown out of the cover and onto my hands, snaking up my arms, into my ears.

  * * *

  —

  Eating with my mom and dad always helps.

  I feel more like me every time I eat her overcooked broccoli and hear about Grey’s Anatomy. My dad and his red Solo cup of scotch, teasing her about the broccoli, about her shows. This is my life. This is my family.

  But I always blow it somehow. I eat too fast. I ask my mom for her phone. She puts her fork down. “Why do you need the phone?”

  “Cuz I was gonna text Chloe.”

  They say nothing.

  “I won’t be on it all night, I swear.”

  My mom sighs. “Jon,” she says. “I think you need to cool your jets.”

  My dad won’t look me in the eye. My mom scoops the dog up onto her lap.

  “What do you mean?” I ask. I am already turning red. “We’re just talking. She’s just telling me about stuff, you know, stuff I missed, she’s going to NYU, stuff about school, what’s the big deal?”

  My dad drinks his scotch. My mom kisses the dog. “Jon,” she says. “Does she mention anything about her boyfriend?”

  My heart starts to pound because I knew it. You always know it. You feel it and you push the hunch away, like the bad book, the bad letter. I knew she was too polite and I knew she was using too many exclamation points and I knew something was a little different about her. I told myself I was staying off Facebook and all the other social places because the shrink I saw the day I got back said it would be too overwhelming. But the truth is I didn’t want to see it with my own eyes. I didn’t want to know.

  “It’s Carrig, isn’t it?”

  My mom shakes her head no but the word comes out like a hiss. “Yes.”

  * * *

  —

  I can’t sleep.

  I did text Chloe again but I didn’t tell her I know. She asked me more questions. Do you even kind of remember anything? Were you dreaming? What did you do when you woke up? Do you remember that first moment? What’s the very last thing you remember? Why do you think he took you? I mean were you ever scared of him? It’s all anyone can talk about at school, how weird he was, how it’s so scary to think of him out there, how it’s such bad luck that it was you, it’s not fair, Jon. Do they think they’ll catch him? You remember when he wanted us to prick our fingers for some genetic test thing? When he wanted us to pull out our hair? It’s literally insane that he was in our school. I think about it, I get so mad. You must get so mad, do you?

  I can’t ask her my questions. Do you really like Carrig Birkus? How did it start? Why? Did he kiss you? Do you bring him into our shed? Did you ever want to kiss me the way you kiss him? Do you have sex with him? Do you talk like this with him? How can you be one way with me and another way with him? Did you miss me? Did you stop missing me? Do you really love him? Do you? How can you love him? How?

  When Kody Kardashian scratches at the door, I decide to let him in for once. I pat the bed, come on up. He wags his tongue. I want to tell him he’s wasting his time, that I’m a hamster person. But he’s hell-bent on being my friend. He rolls over and yelps and snuggles into me, burrowing. He loves me. Chloe doesn’t. I start crying again, and Kody doesn’t turn away the way a lot of people would. He moves closer to me. I scoop him up. Thanks, little guy. And then befo
re you know it, I’m sleeping. I’m dreaming of being with Chloe. We’re in my house, which is the shed, and then the curtain falls the way it does when you leave a good dream, when it hurts to wake up, to realize that nothing is that simple right now.

  As soon as I wake up I feel it. The hard form curled next to me, cold where there had been warmth. The silence where there had been panting breath.

  I feel it in my bones and I start to cry before I see Kody’s lifeless body. I know what happened. I know the smell of death. I think we all do.

  I can’t scream. I can’t wake my parents. I can’t believe what I see, this dead dog. He came into this room in perfect health. And now he’s gone. He saved your mother’s life. She can never know. I put on those new sneakers that I was excited about only a few hours ago. I pick up his little body. There’s no other way around it.

  * * *

  —

  My parents are still asleep when I get back home from burying Kody.

  I am on high alert, as if I’ve had ten cups of coffee. I’m awake, jittery. My body hums like a city that never sleeps, green lights as far as the eye can see, lights that never turn red, the chaos, the noise in me. The zzzz.

  My mother is up first, like always. She whistles, Kody Boy. Come find Mama. When she can’t find him, when she doesn’t hear him barking, she wakes up my dad. He startles and she snaps, I told you that doggy door was a bad idea. He groans and I learn the brief history of the doggy door. Kody goes out and he doesn’t come home. Like a criminal, I realize that I’m gonna get away with this, as if I did something.

  I didn’t. Did I?

  My dad opens the slider and I peer out of my window and watch him out there, clapping his hands, whistling. Kody Boy, come on! My mother’s downstairs, puttering around, looking for a lighter, finding a lighter, making her way up the stairs and closing her bedroom door. She squeezes the doorknob so that I can’t hear the button pop when she locks the door. She probably thinks I’m sleeping, has no idea that I’m pretending. She’s a good mom. She doesn’t want to wake me, doesn’t want me to hear her crying. She did this when I was a kid, when she wanted to be sad about something, when she didn’t want to be a mom for a minute or two. Soon, I can hear the familiar old sound of her choking on her tears as my dad screams, Kody!

  I open The Dunwich Horror. Roger’s words jump off the page: You’re welcome, Jon.

  I’m starting to get paranoid, starting to think something’s wrong with me. Chloe fainting. My mom’s bloody nose. My dad passing out. Kody is dead. And I spin out. I imagine myself the invisible monster, slaughtering them all.

  Cool your jets, Jon.

  That’s a made-up story and it’s possible it doesn’t even have anything to do with me. Roger Blair is a weirdo and weirdos read weird things. He probably just needed a place to write his letter but then I’m spinning again because that’s right. The letter. What did he mean, interesting to see how things play out? What did he mean about me being special, having power? What I would give to see him again, the painful irony of wanting it more than anything, more than a kiss from Chloe.

  I hear my mom on the phone. “Hello,” she says. “Is this the right number to report a missing dog?”

  When she’s downstairs, I go online and look at pictures of the new me, the articles about Basement Boy, Miracle in Nashua. I’m a feel-good story, standing between my parents. The before-me is puny and awkward and the now-me is strong, towering over my parents. I see the drawings Chloe made for the police. It all looks so good in here, like things worked out.

  It’s like the producer from Ellen told my mom, We love your son because he’s an inspiration.

  I Google Roger Blair and find every article I can about him. How he was a professor at Brown before he was fired. How he did experiments involving plants and bananas and the sun. None of it makes sense and soon my head is spinning. I turn off the lights and stare at the ceiling. I can’t see in the dark and I can almost pretend that I’m back in the basement and Roger Blair is gonna come in and tell me what he did to me, what he did to me for real.

  The next morning my mom is posting pictures of Kody on her Facebook page and my dad is scrubbing the front porch.

  “Someone egged our house last night,” she says. “What can I tell you, Jon? When it rains it pours.”

  CHLOE

  There’s no good place to break someone’s heart.

  I choose the patio in front of Starbucks. Maybe it will be easier to end things because I’m wearing my uniform, because my break has a beginning, a middle, an end. And we do need to end it. It started fizzling the day Jon got back, the moment I climbed out of that pool. Carrig hasn’t forgiven me for ditching him to go see Jon, he’s been cold to me ever since, he doesn’t trust me anymore. But he won’t let me slip away either. Boys like Carrig, boys who play lacrosse and take abuse from coaches, they want everything to be official, winners and losers, goals and misses, so here he is, crunching on the last chunks of ice, refusing to let me drift away.

  “Sorry I haven’t been around much,” I say. “I picked up some extra shifts. New York is just gonna be so expensive, you know? And I’m so behind in everything, I even had to get an extension for my art class.”

  He smiles at the concrete. A shitty smile. “Right,” he says. “You’re busy.”

  “Carrig, I don’t know what you mean by that. I’m telling you the truth.”

  “I’m not stupid, Chloe.”

  “Who said you’re stupid?”

  He bites his lower lip. I’ve never seen him cry. I don’t want to see him cry. I reach for his hand but he pulls it away. “Stop saying you’re busy with work,” he says. “Just fucking say it.”

  “Say what?”

  It’s easy to imagine his eyes exploding right here on the patio. “It’s fucking Jon,” he croaks. “Just say it.”

  “Nothing is happening between me and Jon.”

  He squeezes his empty cup. “Just say it, say you’re fucking done with me.”

  I don’t want to say it. I want Carrig to give up on me, to stomp off into the parking lot, delete my number, tell me to go fuck myself. His left leg shakes. His cheeks turn red. He will suffer and simmer but he won’t be the one to go.

  “Is this cuz I egged his fucking house?”

  “You did what?”

  He clenches his jaw. He thought I knew. Now he knows I didn’t know. And now I have this image of him throwing raw eggs at Jon’s house. I can see the yolks dripping on the windows. I rub my eyes.

  “It was just a joke,” he says.

  “Care, egg whites are corrosive. You can really do damage.”

  “It’s just egging a house.”

  “No,” I say. “It’s not.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Well you can do some pretty sick shit too, Chloe. Just saying.”

  There is no swearing or stomping. He just walks away.

  I watch him charge into the parking lot, he doesn’t look both ways and he almost gets run over by a truck. He flips off the driver and yanks his door open and I’ve never felt so mean in my life. So powerful and responsible, so bad. I did that, me. I try to write to Jon but I can’t find the words. How can I tell him it’s over when I hate having to admit it happened in the first place?

  * * *

  —

  A few weeks later I show up at Noelle’s with cake pops and Frappuccinos and she looks me up and down. “Who are you?” she asks.

  “Noelle, come on. People get jobs.”

  She takes the Frappuccino. “So,” she says. “How are things in Jon Land?”

  That’s what she calls it. She won’t just say How’s Jon?

  “He’s great,” I say. “Same as ever. I sit down to talk to him and we never run out of things to talk about and sometimes we’re texting and chatting and then we find a movie to watch and before you know it it’s four
A.M.”

  She stares at me. “So let me get this straight,” she says. “You broke it off with Carrig and still it’s just talking? Christ, I assumed by now there would be something going on.”

  “Noelle, come on. You know it’s complicated.”

  “Do you even go to a movie ever?”

  “He has PTSD.”

  “Wait,” she says. “When is the last time you just plain even hung out with the kid?”

  I don’t answer the question because she knows the answer. She knows Jon won’t hang out with me. She says she’s not mad at me, she’s mad for me. She rolls her eyes. “You’re like a human security blanket. You even look different, Chloe. Are you painting at all? Or do you just like text 24/7?”

  “Yes,” I say, I snap. “I’m painting.”

  She shakes her head. She knows I’m lying. “Dude,” she says. “He survived. I don’t feel sorry for the kid. He didn’t get molested by aliens.”

  “Noelle.”

  Her eyes bulge. “Did he?”

  She does this every time. Her tone shifts and everything is a question, a doubt. She wants to know what we talk about. I tell her the truth. Last night we spent several hours comparing live versions of the Hippo Campus song “Way It Goes.”

  “No,” she says. “What do you talk about?”

  I know what she wants because I would want it too. She wants the goods, the things you tell your best friend, his nightmares, the things they don’t put in the paper. But I don’t know anything. It hurts to feel the words come out of my mouth, “We still don’t talk about that stuff.”