I still don’t know who he is. Before she went private, her friends would say things like YOU GUYS ARE TOO CUTE and SO HAPPY TO SEE YOU SO HAPPY. Her friends met him. But they didn’t say his name. He lives somewhere high up, like a bad guy in a comic book. He has his own patio in the sky. Sometimes she took pictures of what you see when you’re up there, things you can only see from up in his #Penthouse. She’s different with him. There are more jokes, more hashtags. I don’t know where he lives exactly, but his home is the opposite of my basement dwelling. My walls are concrete and cold and dark orange. But in his apartment, the walls are white and there are wooden beams overhead.
She isn’t painting as much. There aren’t any new pieces for sale on her site and she hasn’t announced any more gallery appearances. Sometimes I think the guy she’s dating is a doctor, that she met him because of me, because I made her faint. I bet he told her to take a break from painting. So she did. Because he’s a doctor and doctors know what’s best. In my nightmares I sense him on my tail. He shadows me, resuscitating all the innocent people I murdered. He is hunched over them, counting, pumping his hands on their chests. And then I wake up.
Alone.
Aware that he presses his mouth into hers, his dick, that he sits with her on the subway train. I’ve never even been on the subway. I went all the way to New York City and I never got on. Days on Coney Island, nights under the stars, on bridges lit up from above. If he’s not a doctor, he might be a famous actor. I look at the screenshots I saved from when her Facebook was open. I look until I can’t take it anymore. I read about how Facebook makes people want to kill themselves and then before you know it I’m hungry or it’s time to go to work. Your body gets in the way of your plans, your life. Like that thing Lovecraft said about how you can always kill yourself next year.
I take another break from my route, from the Kiwis, from Florie’s emails. I think about Roger’s letter. You have power. You’re welcome. I am powerful, in a way. But it’s a misleading word. The power isn’t mine. I’m full of it, but I may as well be dead. I’m not in control of anything. I’m a host for an evil force. Powerless. I could only kiss Crane Comma Florie because I could never love her. She doesn’t get under my skin. Everyone I’ve ever hurt, they’ve gotten to me in one way or another. I could drive my car into the ocean like in the Pixies song. A couple of times I go to Bristol, over the bridges, the dramatic arches. I think of driving off, but I can’t do that to the rescue workers, to the fish, to my parents. And of course I can’t give up. Not fully. Can’t imagine dying without ever having gotten to take a picture of Chloe in the rain.
My phone buzzes, a text from my boss: Theo kid ya break is ova I need you tonight.
I write back: Sure.
* * *
—
It’s a bad day on the road.
I wasn’t off for that long, but there are new subscribers, hard houses to find, there are bushes in the way of the street numbers. I finally get to Crane Comma Florie’s street and I roll down the window to read a hot pink sign on a utility pole: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CAT? HIS NAME IS MUSE FRONTMAN. HE IS MY HEART.
I roll up the window.
There’s a note for me in Florie’s box: It would be so much cooler if you men had the courage to say goodbye. Goodbye.
While I’m reading her note, her screen door opens. She sees me, she’s coming for me. Her robe is open and underneath she wears little shorts and a little shirt. She’s coming closer and her boobs are there, as close to me as the raindrops are to Chloe when she bends over, when she makes them her own.
She gives me the finger. I deserve it. She goes inside, slams the door. I could park the car and apologize, try and kiss her again. But I love Chloe. I push the gas but then something hits my car. Klasch. A mug. A plastic mug that rolls onto the ground. BROWN UNIVERSITY. She threw her mug at me. She is starting to cry, holding on to her cat’s leash.
I stop the car. My heart is calm, steady.
I get out and walk toward her and she toughens up, says I had no right to ghost her. I apologize.
She looks around. “Not here,” she says, leading me into her place.
I could leave. I should leave. I’m not kissed. I’m not fixed. I can’t stop thinking about how instantaneous it was with Chloe. It’s the opposite with Florie, she isn’t fainting, bleeding. She is wrapping her leash around her wrist, telling me about how she can’t find her cat. She doesn’t know how to get under my skin and she never will. I put my arms around her and she doesn’t fight. She says she missed me, as fucked up as that is, I really did, I really thought we had a connection.
“Me too,” I lie.
She pulls away and leads me away from the fish, toward the kitchen. It smells so bad and I try to hide it. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I have to clean the litter box but I read you shouldn’t do that because the scent is home and if I throw it out he might not find his way.”
I hold her hand. “He’ll come home,” I say. “He has you.”
She laughs. I can tell she’s been crying a lot. “It’s gross, you know? What you can get used to when you live alone.”
She turns off lights and checks the cat door. Feeds her fish. She says she went back on Zoloft when I ghosted her, when Muse ran off. “You guys,” she says. “You have no idea what you do to us.”
“You girls are the same way.”
She tilts her head. “Do you mean that? Because you can’t use me right now. I don’t want you here unless you mean that.”
I get a flash of Chloe and Doctor Actor. I push them away. I’m here.
Crane Comma Florie shakes her head. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t think about someone else when you’re in my home.”
“I’m not.”
“Don’t lie. Just don’t do it. I mean when you start to do it, just stop.”
She tears her top off and her tits are there for the world to see, the world as in me, just me. “This is me,” she says. “I’m comfortable with who I am. Don’t ghost me. Don’t zone out on me. I don’t need you, but I like you.”
“Okay,” I say, moving toward her, still she doesn’t bleed, doesn’t weaken.
She pats my chest. “Follow me,” she says.
I follow her into the bedroom and she asks me to close the door. The walls are white and the bed is messy and it’s almost like a hospital room. No fish. No art. I realize that was all for strangers, for visitors. This is where she lives, where she worries. Where she takes her pants off and comes toward me, opening herself up to me, kissing me.
I kiss her like we did before. She doesn’t stop me when I feel her boobs. Her skin goes all over me, her mouth moving into mine. She is so slow and velvety, syrup and turtles and old men in rocking chairs, all the slow things in the world, the roots, all of them in her, moving toward me. I want her, I feel her, I let the want take over. And then.
And then.
She stops kissing me. She stops breathing.
Drip. Drip. That bony smell, that stiffening, sinking. No. No. She seizes up, as her eyes bulge, no, no, as her hands crunch, bone to muscle. This is what it looks like when you die, the ugliest thing there is, the way the neck extends, she is a turtle, and then she’s jelly, wobbling, all that energy exiting, swoosh, vroom, gone, and the horror of the quiet, the thud when her body falls onto her bed.
I killed her. Because that’s what I do.
* * *
—
I open the bedroom door. And it hits me all at once.
The fish.
I run from tank to tank and some are living and some are dead but the dead aren’t dead because fish die like she said. Not today. The dead are dead because of me.
The smell.
I open the closet in her kitchen, the one you can’t get to without moving the trash, the recycling. I push my wa
y in there and move the old coats, the magazines, the umbrellas, and there he is, dead, Muse.
I killed him too, when I kissed her. I wasn’t kissed, fixed. Florie wasn’t immune to me and this has nothing to do with passion. I was deluding myself and now more life is lost because of me, Florie, her sweet little cat in the window, dead. Florie never knew what I put her through, that I risked her life, that I did what I told myself I wouldn’t do, I experimented on a human, what Roger did to me. You are what you eat and I caved. She didn’t sign a form, she didn’t sign up for this and she never will know and she was right about all of it. You guys, you have no idea what you do to us.
I go back into the bedroom and cry with her because she should know, her body should get my tears. I tell her how sorry I am.
On her nightstand, there are pills. Poor Florie. There are bags from CVS with instructions stapled on them. Sleeping Beauty is on TV, muted. Pills didn’t kill her. I did.
Because I should know by now, once and for all, and end all the daydreams about tomorrow, about getting cured, I should get it already. I am a monster. I am evil. I am Providence and she was Keeping Providence Weird and I killed her.
When I die, if there is a place called hell, I will go there.
EGGS
Some girls make you think about that Bruce Springsteen line, You ain’t a beauty but hey you’re alright. That’s my kind of woman, grainy skin, a ready smile, eyes that could stand to be a little bigger, same goes for the mouth, as opposed to her feet, those could stand to be a little smaller. But a woman like that sets her eyes on you, the world opens up and sucks you in, it’s a sex thing, a life thing, a thing you only get from that woman at that moment. That’s what I thought about Lo when we got together. That’s what I think about this poor girl, this dead girl, Florie Susan Crane. Some people, you take one look at them and you just like them.
I like her parents for giving her the middle name of Susan. I feel for the girl. I know what happened. She couldn’t find her cat—Muse Frontman, according to the neighbors, the signs. She was missing him bad, and then she found him in the closet. There are pills here. Bottles open.
But this girl, in a great big T-shirt, the bottoms of her feet are brown with mud, gravel.
Why was she outside with her bare feet? She was looking for her cat.
My gut flip-flops. I radio Stacey. Be right there, dropped my phone under the bed.
Something tells me this girl didn’t put on this shirt. There’s a drawer in her chest open, as if someone didn’t close it all the way. This is crazy, Eggie, this is suicide, don’t make it yours.
I get a closer look at her face. Her skin is bare, her pores pronounced. But there are fake singular eyelashes in there, pressed in recently, you can tell—I know from my sleeping wife—and you don’t put those in for nobody. She painted her eyelids, nude, as Lo says, You work hard to look like you didn’t work hard. The skin around her lips is the slightest bit raw. She’s been kissed. And my gut twists. She wasn’t just kissed; whoever kissed her, he has a beard.
I catch my breath. What was he doing here?
Now isn’t the time to question myself for asking the question, for attempting to be logical, to prove that there aren’t thousands of men out there with beards. Now I am here, on the scene, now is the time for my mind to make leaps.
The chewing gum ground into the tiles in her kitchen.
The fish that weren’t fed, the water that wasn’t changed.
The pills, the dates on the bag, filled this week, recently.
He was here until he wasn’t. That’s why her skin wasn’t used to him, the way Lo’s got used to mine when I had a beard.
That’s crazy, Eggie. No. It’s makeup. Makeup.
When Chuckie was two, when he wasn’t looking at us, wasn’t smiling, was just banging his head against the wall, Lo threw all her makeup in the trash. “It’s nothing but poison,” she said. “Nothing but chemicals.” Back then she was on my side, we were trying to beat this thing together, the thing they call autism. I remember how astounded I was by what that makeup did. Without it, Lo had no eyelashes at all, and without those eyelashes, her eyes were even smaller. I didn’t say anything but sometimes she’d catch me staring at her. I wanted her to go back to wearing the mascara, and really, wasn’t it too late? Chuckie was no longer inside of her. But here’s the thing about love. When you want to make someone better, when you love someone, you do everything. Anything. Even if it’s crazy. And then one day Lo came downstairs and her eyes were lined again, her lashes were back.
In the living room, I hear the medics calling this a coronary/possible self-inflicted, pending autopsy. This girl died of a heart attack and nobody wonders about a dead cat. Florie Susan Crane was only twenty-three. The odds of a young female of average weight dropping dead at that age: less than one percent. Odds of my Chuckie being so violent that they have to keep him in a room with padded walls: less than one percent. But odds don’t matter. Not when it’s your daughter, your son.
She wrote to her boss a few hours before she passed. She’s a paralegal and she was calling in sick. Florie sure did like her email. There are thousands of unread messages, most of them from men. You can tell that none of these guys loved her, not in the right way. There’s a tone of Thanks for writing again, but I still don’t love you. Try again next week! The most recent guy she was talking to is named Theo Ward. It was a one-way-street situation, she was writing to him:
It was so much fun hanging out with you even if I shouldn’t say that.
Because of you I am watching Grown Ups 2.
Okay it just hit me I am watching the second movie before the first BLASPHEMY.
Here’s another podcast I meant to tell you about…Lenny Feder would approve.
Theo, sometime we have to watch Grown Ups 2 TOGETHER.
But Theo Ward wasn’t responding to her. I look through her account and this is true of most of these shitheads she was talking to. They drop off the planet. She gives and they go. Lo’s kids call it ghosting, but really it’s just being a shithead.
The last thing she printed was an article about sex drive and Zoloft. The last thing she did in the world: she went outside and got her paper. I saw it in the living room. But she didn’t bring it back to bed. Why go out and get it? Why get your feet dirty? The last purchase, insofar as I can tell: books. A bag on the floor, a receipt from yesterday.
My heart stops when I look in the bag. Lovecraft. Yes, her shelves are stuffed, Vonnegut and Jane Austen, DeLillo, she’s got a lot of Italo Calvino, a few by Colleen Hoover. But what did she buy yesterday? The last day of her life? Lovecraft.
The Beard. The hat. I am Providence.
What do you do when someone lets you down? You investigate. What makes them tick? What do they love and why? I’ll get Lovecraft, she thought. Maybe then I can figure him out. I feel it in my gut and it’s the great cockeyed injustice of the system. You can know something beneath your bones, in your intestines, and you can’t do anything about it.
I’m out of time and I amble into the kitchen where I play along, Yep, this is a sad one, poor girl. No mystery. In a corner by the overflowing trash can there are crumbs swept together, as if she couldn’t work out how to get them off the floor and into the can. Single people don’t have to be neat for anyone. In my gut: she was scrambling to make things nice for the Beard.
I open her cabinets but I feel Stacey’s eyes bore into the back of my head. The girl’s mother will be here, a mother who doesn’t need to see some plainclothes cop sniffing around for no reason, when there’s no malfeasance, no forced entry, no nothing. The mother has already sobbed on the phone, already said she was worried to death about her daughter who just couldn’t seem to find her way and never saw a drug she didn’t want to take.
My gut won’t quit. It burns. I fake a yawn, I riffle through her mail. Stacey coughs.
I apologize. “Sorry, b
oss.”
But then she leaves. I keep going, digging through her magazines, her old newspapers, sometimes she didn’t even take ’em out of the bag. I wonder why she subscribes, but then I think of that poster in her living room: KEEP PROVIDENCE WEIRD. I like this girl, I do. We’re clearing the kitchen and I hear the clack-clack of the gurney. Stacey’s whistling at me, Let’s go, Eggie.
Outside it’s a madhouse, the whole neighborhood is up, alarmed. The conclusion is that Mother Nature is a capricious beast, this girl wasn’t a junkie. Florie was independent and this is just tragic.
Stacey keeps her distance, says people need to blame someone.
“Sure,” I say, agreeable. But I gotta honor my gut.
“Gonna get an aspirin in my car,” I say.
She nods, she believes me and I am free to go, free as a kid whose mother left him alone. I watch the neighbors stand around. Most of the houses on this street are old Vics with chipped paint, split into duplexes, occupied by smart people, well-to-do people, people we used to call yuppies. And most of these people subscribe to the Pro Jo. More than half the houses have the white plastic box at the end of the driveway.
I pretend that my phone is ringing. I pretend that I have to take it. I start walking east, pretending to be into it with Lo—Well tell them we can’t pay up front—and what I’m really doing is checking the boxes, the people. Everyone east of here who has a box appears to have a paper. I heave and stop. I do my best bewildered—Lo, you have to calm down, you can’t get worked up, you know that doesn’t solve anything. I catch Stacey’s eye and wave my hands, helpless, and she nods.
I walk in the other direction. West. The next house after Florie’s, there’s an old biddy out front, shaking her head, lashing out in a whisper, That girl ran around in a bra, I always thought she was a little off.
I say goodbye to imaginary Lo and I put my phone in my pocket. “Ma’am, can I ask you, did you get your paper today?”
Providence Page 17
