by Julie Kriss
I sighed. I was in my bedroom, still wet from the shower and wearing a bathrobe. I fiddled with the thermostat, trying to make it go colder. It was hot in here. “What was I supposed to do?” I said. “My grandmother died and left me a house. A free house. What would you do if you were given a free house?”
“Me?” Nancy said. “Probably sell it and use the money to buy Fendi bags. Anything other than moving to Michigan.”
“I thought it would be nice to live in a house for once,” I said, poking the thermostat again. “I have more than one room to myself here instead of living with roommates in a shitty L.A. apartment. There are lawns here. Sprinklers. Kids on bikes, if you can believe it. There’s almost no smog and nothing’s on fire.”
“Jesus, it sounds fucking awful.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the most popular place to eat in my neighborhood was the Cheesecake Factory, and that literally nothing was gluten-free. “It’s been five days, and I’m climbing the walls,” I said, getting down to business. “I need work.”
“Honey,” Nancy said, “the lingerie business isn’t exactly centered in Butt-Fuck Michigan. You knew that when you left.”
I gave up on the thermostat. It was ten o’clock in the morning, it was already hot outside, and it wasn’t much cooler in here. Every room in this house was hot. I’d barely slept for days. “There are catalogs east of Colorado. I know there are. Someone, somewhere, must want a bra modeled. That person needs me.”
“I know, babe. You can sell bras all day every day and twice on Sunday. But work isn’t thick on the ground. You might have to get a day job.”
This had already crossed my mind. Like just about everyone else in L.A., I had done plenty of bartending and waiting tables while I waited for my big modeling break. I was a walking cliché. “I know. And I will. But I need you to find me real work.”
“The fact is, I don’t really do long distance,” Nancy said. “I told you that at our goodbye dinner before you left.”
Had she? We’d both been drunk. Or at least I had. Nancy was only a few years older than me, and she was slim and gorgeous. Why she wasn’t a model herself, I had no idea. But she was a killer agent, and I’d been happy to land her. “I don’t remember you saying anything like that.”
“I did. After the margaritas and before the gin. I love you, gorgeous, but business is business. You know how it goes.”
I stood paused in the middle of my grandma’s suburban bedroom, sweating in the heat, surrounded by dated furniture and flowery window treatments. “Are you… Are you dumping me?” I asked her.
“Not dumping,” she corrected me. “I’m staying in alignment with my goals. My goals being to have working clients who make me money. You don’t fit those goals anymore, honey, so I have to realign.”
She didn’t even sound sorry. We’d worked together for three years. I scrubbed a hand through my damp hair. “What about my goals?”
“Well, what are they?” Nancy asked me reasonably. “If your goal was a modeling career, then leaving L.A. was not in alignment. Perhaps you should re-center and reconnect with your inner self.”
“And in the meantime, don’t call you.”
“You know it isn’t personal.” As if on cue, there was a beep on the line. “That’s my new girl. She says she’s Giselle’s second cousin, but I think she’s lying. I have to go.”
I hung up and tossed the phone on the bed. Looked around.
I hadn’t known my grandmother. My mother called herself a “free spirit”—basically, she was a hippie. She’d met my father and gotten pregnant at nineteen. The two of them had packed a van and driven away from Michigan forever, on a quest to find themselves. They’d left my grandmother behind and never brought me back.
Now it was twenty-seven years later. My parents hadn’t worked out, of course. Mom was in Colorado, and Dad was in Texas of all places, where he ran an incense shop and lived with a different hippie woman—one much younger than he was. And I’d drifted to L.A., where I was hoping to make it as a model.
I wasn’t the best-looking woman in L.A. I wasn’t the sexiest, or the skinniest, or—this one hurt—the most talented. In high school in Colorado, I’d been pretty. In the sea of gorgeous people in Los Angeles, I was nothing much. I’d lived in a series of apartments not much bigger than this bedroom, with roommates who sometimes creeped me out, working occasional bar jobs and going on auditions. I’d gone to L.A. out of desperation, thinking I could be free of my shitty life in Colorado, where I had nearly crashed and burned. I’d resurrected myself and run. And it had been fun, for a while.
At least, I thought it had. But the years had ground by one after another, and my career had gone nowhere. Neither had my love life, because L.A. was full of narcissistic jerks. In a way, I was just existing, and I didn’t know what to do about it. Most of the time it didn’t feel like anything much was wrong, but that was because I was intentionally numb.
Then my grandmother died and I found out she’d left her house to me. She was still mad at Mom, so she’d cut her out of the will—everything she had skipped a generation and went to me.
And I hadn’t thought twice. I’d taken it. I’d packed my bags and left without a backward glance.
If your goal was a modeling career, then leaving L.A. was not in alignment. Perhaps you should re-center and reconnect with your inner self.
Nancy was heartless, and she was full of L.A. bullshit-speak, but part of me wondered if she had a point.
I sighed and dropped my robe. It was time to see if the Cheesecake Factory was hiring.
Four
Tessa
* * *
“Millwood isn’t so bad,” the woman from down the street said. “I mean, we’re not rich, so we’re not assholes.”
We were standing in my driveway. I’d been about to get into my car and drive to the nearest batch of big box stores and chain restaurants to apply for jobs when these two women had walked by. They were in their mid-thirties, both wearing capri-length yoga pants and tank tops, their hair tied up in ponytails. In L.A., these women would be wearing $500 yoga outfits and weigh around ninety-five pounds. In Michigan the outfits were Walmart and the number on the scale was higher, but it turned out they were both pretty cool.
“This neighborhood is nice,” the woman named Amy said. “There are a lot of older people that have been here for years. And then some of them have started to pass away, like your grandmother. So then you have the younger people, like us.”
“I’m around the corner that way,” the other woman, Jan, said. “Amy is four doors down from me. We like to take our walk after we drop the kids at day care.”
“I organize the community barbecues,” Amy said. She was mixed race, with big brown eyes and a nice Meghan Markle look. “You missed the Fourth of July one, but there’s another one in a few weeks. You can meet everyone there.”
I pushed my sunglasses higher on my nose. I was sweating under my tank top. “Community barbecue, huh? I’m not sure I’m into those.”
Jan looked me up and down, not unkindly. “I guess they don’t have those in L.A. You should try it, though.”
“What about that house?” I said, nodding to the house across the street. I’d noticed it before—a place with a ramp on the front porch to accommodate a wheelchair. “Who lives there? One of the old people?”
Amy and Jan traded a look, and then they both laughed.
“What?” I said.
“Andrew Mason lives there,” Jan said. “He isn’t old. He’s maybe thirty.”
“Oh, shit. And he’s in a wheelchair?”
“A drunk driving accident a few years ago,” Amy said, more seriously. “Left his legs paralyzed. It split the family apart, too. It created some kind of falling-out with the parents. He moved into that house alone, and he’s been there ever since. He almost never leaves.”
I looked at the house again. It was tidy, well-kept. The blinds were closed. There was no car in the driveway. But stil
l, I got the feeling that someone was watching. I was probably just being paranoid.
“That’s sad,” I said. “A young guy getting paralyzed like that. I feel bad for him.”
“We all do,” Jan said, “and then he always goes and wrecks it.”
I looked at her, feeling my eyebrows go up.
“Andrew Mason isn’t much of a neighbor,” Amy explained. “When he moved in, we tried dropping off welcome gifts. Flowers and whatnot. He never answered the door, and we’d find the gifts jammed into the garbage can at the foot of the driveway.”
“He never comes to the community barbecues,” Jan said.
“Halloween is the worst,” Amy said. “We have a lot of kids in this neighborhood, and Halloween is a big thing. Everyone gets into it, but not him. He actually puts a sign up in his window that says KIDS FUCK OFF.”
I couldn’t help it—I laughed.
“You can laugh, but people get mad when their kids see that kind of language,” Amy said primly. “The Masons are some of the richest people in Millwood, so he has plenty of money. But does he give to the annual neighborhood charity drive? No, he doesn’t.”
“And we can’t hate him, because we feel sorry for him,” Jan said. “Also, because he’s good-looking.”
Now my eyebrows rose even higher. “Good-looking?”
The women exchanged another look. “Google him, you’ll see,” Jan said. “My sixteen-year-old daughter saw him in person once, sitting on his porch. Her exact words were—and I quote—‘The legs don’t matter, Mom, because he’s total swoon.’”
I looked back and forth between the two women. “You’re saying that my neighbor across the street is rich, single, good-looking, in a wheelchair, and an asshole?” He sounded like he was very messed up. Messed-up people were the only kind of people who interested me, the only kind of people I understood. “Maybe I’ll pay him a visit.”
“Yeah, good luck with that.” Amy shook her head. “He won’t answer the door. He hasn’t answered it in the seven years he’s lived here.”
She was probably right. But the idea stayed in my head as I drove to the nearest bars and restaurants, filling out applications. It stayed with me as every male manager I met let his eyes crawl up and down me like he had a right to it. It stayed with me as I sat in front of my laptop in my pajamas that evening, unable to sleep in the heat, looking up local modeling agencies who might find me some catalog work.
I got myself a bowl of fat-free ice cream from the freezer, peeking out the window on my way back to my grandmother’s sofa. The house across the street was dark except for a single light behind one of the blinds. Nothing moved.
Picking up my laptop again, I downed a bite of ice cream and opened my browser. I Googled Andrew Mason Millwood Michigan.
The results came up right away. There were articles about the accident from local papers, because as Amy had said, Andrew Mason’s parents were well known in town. There was a photo of a handsome, smooth-cheeked teenager with dark hair, smiling at the camera with the caption Andrew Mason was known as a talented young man with a lifetime of success ahead of him.
Was. As if he was dead.
There was a photo of the accident site—a car smashed and twisted around a guardrail, so damaged I was amazed anyone had survived. I felt a little sick. The article said that the driver, Andrew’s friend, had died on impact.
My heart heavy, I scrolled to the next photo. It was one of those local-interest anniversary pieces: Five years on, accident still haunts the Mason family. The photo showed a man wheeling his chair out of the front doors of a hospital, his face angled away as if he wasn’t aware he was being photographed. He was dark-haired with a scruff of beard on his jaw—the same face from the teenaged photo, but this was a man’s face, one that knew hardship and sadness. His eyes were set under slashes of brows, his cheekbones sharp as blades. He was wearing a plaid button-down shirt over a muscled set of shoulders and a broad chest. He was deeply, darkly handsome and mysterious, tragic and giving off a vital energy at the same time.
The article said that Mason’s parents were divorcing, citing “irreconcilable differences.”
I stared at the picture for a long time, alone in my grandmother’s living room, eating my fat-free ice cream. I memorized his features, the line of his shoulders. And I decided for myself: This guy was fucking badass.
He was obviously very, very screwed up. Who wouldn’t be? Maybe he was almost as screwed up as me.
I wanted to meet him.
It wouldn’t be easy.
I started to form a plan.
Five
Andrew
* * *
I lived alone, but there was always someone in my house. Grocery delivery; cleaning service; pharmacy delivery; medical visits; landscaping. Even my therapist made house calls. The only good thing about my shitty life was that I had lots and lots of money, so I could make people come to me.
If I didn’t have to shop and clean, then what did I do all day? Here’s something they don’t tell you: when your legs don’t work, everything takes longer to do. Getting out of bed, taking a shower, dressing—that shit can take an hour and a half, easy. I had fitted one of the spare bedrooms into a workout room with weights, pulleys, and bars—that took an hour again, and I couldn’t skip it because my upper body strength was all I had.
Once I made a cup of coffee and fried an egg, it was halfway to noon. I powered up my monitors, my computer, my server, and got to work.
I could have opened my camera feeds and looked at the house across the street, but I didn’t. Tessa Hartigan and her lacy underwear were none of my business, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to start creeping on her like the desperate asshole I was. There was no point to it. She’d never come over here, and I sure as hell would never go over there. End of story.
Today was physiotherapy day, and an hour later the doorbell buzzed. I turned on the security feed. Jon Chu was at my front door camera, wearing his scrubs and waving. I let him in.
“Hot out there!” he said as he walked in. “Supposed to be a heat wave coming.”
“Sure,” I said, still typing.
He tapped my shoulder. “Let’s get moving, Bubble Boy. I get paid by the hour.”
I pulled away from my computers, but I took my phone with me. I wheeled after Jon into my exercise room, where he unfolded the table he kept there and helped me on.
“Lower back today,” he said.
“Thank fucking God,” I replied, pulling off my shirt.
Together we arranged me on my stomach on the table. Jon took a towel and wrapped the waist of my sweatpants with it, jerking them halfway down my ass. Then he took his oil out of his bag.
Anyone who thinks this is awkward has never been in the kind of pain I have. Jon had been my regular physio guy for over a year, and he was magic. I didn’t give a shit about having a man’s hands on me as long as he took the pain away. I’d been through much, much worse humiliation in my life.
“So Nick is gone on his honeymoon?” Jon asked as he got started.
I grunted as he hit a knot of pain in my lower back. Sitting in a wheelchair is hell on the back muscles, from the neck all the way down. “Two weeks.”
“Sucks, man.”
“It’s fine.” It wasn’t fine.
He talked like he always did—about a date he’d been on, about his trip to his mother’s house for her great cooking. Jon liked to talk without requiring me to say much in return. It made me feel less lonely and at the same time he never pried.
“You working your back muscles lately?” he asked.
I pulled out my phone and tapped it on, swiping through my apps. I called up my security feed, my fingers moving of their own accord. “Trying to.”
“Nice job.” He whistled. “Wow. Who’s that?”
Shit. I hadn’t been able to resist it: I’d called up the view of the house across the street. Tessa Hartigan had come out her front door and was unwinding a hose to water her lawn.
/> “She just moved in,” I said, trying to sound casual. Trying to sound like I wasn’t spying on her.
“Holy shit.” Jon leaned forward, looking more closely at her over my shoulder. “That girl is hot. What’s her name?”
“I don’t know,” I lied.
“But you’re one of those computer hacker guys. You could find out, easy.”
I already had. “Maybe.”
He paused in his work and we both watched her turn on the hose, then stand in the front yard, spraying the grass. Her neck was smooth and white below the ends of her hair. She had her big sunglasses on again, only her perfect nose and pouty lips visible. She was wearing a spaghetti-strap tank top and short shorts. Even her flip-flops were sexy. Jesus Christ.
“You should talk to her,” Jon said.
“No I shouldn’t.” I was mad that he’d caught me creeping on Tessa Hartigan like I couldn’t help it. I bit back my anger.
“Sure you should. I keep telling you, women would go crazy for you if you left the house.”
“Did you forget the part about my legs?”
“Aw, man, that doesn’t matter. As long as the plumbing works.”
I glanced over my shoulder at him. “This finally got weird, considering I’m partly naked.”
Jon shrugged. “I don’t play for your team, man.” He pointed to my phone, where my neighbor was spraying water like a cheesy music video. “I play for that team.”
“Thanks for the insight. My lower back, okay?”
He got back to work, taking his heated towel out of his bag and putting it on me while he worked. It was my lower back—my lumbar spine—that was damaged in the accident, the nerve damage shorting the signal from my brain to my legs. One stupid decision, and my legs weren’t getting the message anymore. They probably never would again. I couldn’t see the scars from the emergency surgery on my spine, but I knew they were there.
I closed the security app. I didn’t want to look at my neighbor anymore.
