Necessary People

by Anna Pitoniak

  Well, what if you finally did heed that feeling? And not just for one brief moment. For another, and another, and another, until the moments stacked into measurable time. What if that impulse could be stretched from a point into a line? A black slash of finality. The fin of a conductor’s baton. A heartbeat flattening into silence.

  The thrashing gradually slowed. The bubbles broke less frequently, and then not at all. The surface of the ocean continued to slosh against the boat.

  All you do is interfere, she said.

  This time, I did nothing.

  Part Three

  Chapter Fourteen

  “are you okay?” the woman at the motel said. “Do you want me to call someone?”

  “I just need a room,” I said.

  She squinted at my wet hair and red eyes and lumpy duffel bag. Then she stepped out from behind the front desk and peered through the window to the parking lot. “Are you sure he didn’t follow you, sweetheart?”

  “What?” I said. Her knowing look made it clear she took my confusion for denial. The implication finally clicked. “Oh, no, it’s nothing like that. It’s just…I had a fight with my best friend. She lives down the road. She kicked me out.”

  “Oh!” she said, visibly relieved. No shotgun vigil, no 9-1-1 on speed dial in case the abusive boyfriend showed up. “Well, you’ll make up with her. I’m sure of it.”

  “I hope so.” I attempted a smile.

  “Just one night?” she asked. “We’ll need a credit card for the deposit.”

  She studied my card. “Violet Trapp,” she said. “What a lovely name. I had a cousin named Violet. You rarely hear that name these days.” She handed back the credit card, and placed the room key on the desk, but kept her hand atop it. She had the distinctive curiosity of a postmenopausal, small-town gossip. “Honey, I have to ask, what were you doing around here at this time of year, anyways?”

  My initial plan was to keep the story as simple as possible, answers stripped of detail to prevent further questioning. But there was my credit card, logged in the computer. The careful way she had enunciated my name. The security camera aimed at the front desk. Sooner or later, someone would uncover this particular moment in time. I had to make it look real.

  “Her grandparents have a place here,” I said. “We’re from New York. We were just up for the weekend. She had a stressful week. Actually, her boyfriend just dumped her.”

  The woman frowned sympathetically. “And she took it out on you?”

  “I guess so. She was in a terrible mood, and told me she didn’t want me hanging around anymore. She wanted to be alone. So I decided to leave.”

  “Oh, honey, don’t take it personally. There’s nothing worse than a broken heart.”

  A lump formed in my throat. “I’m sure you’re right,” I said.

  “You’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep,” the woman said. “Your room is at the end, nice and quiet. Far from the road.”

  “Thanks,” I said. My stomach grumbled. “Is there anywhere to get something to eat?”

  “Best you can do is the gas station across the way.” She nodded toward the road. “They have a 7-Eleven that’s open all night.”

  I filled my arms with soda and chips and cellophaned pastries at the 7-Eleven, where the man behind the counter gave me the same appraising, sympathetic-but-skeptical look as the woman at the motel. “Don’t get many strangers at this time of night,” he said. But when I told him my story, it had a pleasing weight, a satisfying constancy. In the next twenty-four hours, I repeated it several times. To the taxi driver, who took me to the bus depot. The cashier selling the tickets. The person sitting across from me on the southbound bus. It was easy to remember, because it was so very close to the truth.

  I was staying with a friend.

  We had a fight, a bad one.

  She wanted me to leave.

  So here I am.

  That’s where the story always ended: with me, standing in front of whomever I happened to be speaking to. Unspoken was the coda, which—for the time being—only I knew to be true: and that was the last time I ever saw Stella Bradley.

  I’d never subscribed to the idea of prophecy, of instructions delivered with a psychic thunderbolt: Joan of Arc seeing visions in the garden, presidential candidates claiming that God told them to run. The idea of a higher voice—God, or call it whatever you like—cutting through the daily mental noise to show the way seemed implausible at best, and a ruthless lie at worst. Why does anyone decide to lead a military uprising, or run for president? Because they want power. But it’s unbecoming to state that so baldly. Anyone who said that God had spoken to them, I figured, was just looking for cover.

  But on the boat that night, I understood how it might happen. After the thrashing stopped, my mind went perfectly quiet. Blank and still. And in that quiet, it was easy to listen to the one small voice that persisted. It was like driving through a desert with only static on the radio, and suddenly coming over a rise where the static gave way to a signal.

  When people claimed to hear God speaking, this was what they really meant. The infinite branching possibilities of life had—for that moment, at least—been pruned away, leaving only one option. The path forward was clear and definite. At a pivotal moment, you knew exactly what to do. As I stood on the boat, the ocean slapping and sloshing against the hull, I experienced that feeling of profound relief. One might even call it ecstasy.

  I waited for a long time to be sure she was really gone. But the night, despite the wind and waves, was ordinary and peaceful. The world looked no different than it had before.

  After I was certain, I began to move quickly. The keys, which Stella had dangled above my head not thirty minutes earlier, had fallen near my feet when she was thrown overboard. It took a few minutes to get used to the boat’s steering wheel and throttle. From the compass on the dashboard, I knew that I was pointed in the right direction—west, back toward the Bradley property—but I had to steer in a southwesterly direction to account for the strength of the current. Stella had taken us far offshore, and it was a long time before the lights of the house finally came into view.

  When I approached the dock, there was a small pinging noise. There, on the bench seat behind me, was Stella’s phone glowing in the darkness. It had just resumed contact with the cell towers. There were several texts on Stella’s phone, from her parents and friends and Jamie. I unlocked the phone—her password was her birth year, backwards—and typed replies to each of the messages. Her texts were easy to mimic: lazy and short, affectless except for occasional strings of exclamation marks. The only thing I added was a hint of mystery at the end. Jamie had written to her: You should know that I still care about you and respect you. I don’t want things to be weird for us at work. Violet-as-Stella replied: fine, but I don’t, and you’re still an asshole. we won’t be seeing each other again, so save the crap for someone else.

  Just as I was about to get rid of her phone, I paused. Even with my adrenaline surging and heart pounding, my mind was calm and rational. I opened her e-mail and spent a few minutes composing a message. Then I scrolled through her recent calls. There was a number, a local area code, that she had called several times in the last twenty-four hours. The man on the other end answered with a gruff “Yeah?”

  “Hello?” I said. “Hello? Can you hear me?”

  “Who is this?” the voice said.

  “Hello?” I said. “You’re breaking up.”

  I kept him on the line for almost a minute before he hung up. I did that a few more times, for good measure, until he eventually stopped answering.

  The screen cracked easily under the heel of my boot. I stomped on the phone several more times. Then I picked it up and threw it into the water. My own phone had remained back at the house, which meant it wouldn’t betray my movements.

  There was a small towel tucked under the bench seat, and before climbing out of the boat, I used it to wipe down the steering wheel, the throttle, the edges
I’d clung to in the tossing waves, and the pool of Stella’s blood on the bow. After scanning the interior one last time and throwing the towel into the water, I stepped onto the dock and shoved the boat clear. The current was strong, and it quickly carried the boat away from the dock, the white speck diminishing until it vanished entirely.

  The story was beginning to formulate in my head. What would Stella need, if she were running away? In the master bedroom, I cataloged her possessions. She had a few hundred dollars in her wallet. Surely she would go to the bank and withdraw as much as she could. But this didn’t fit into my plan. Every ATM was equipped with a camera these days. And if Stella wanted to run away, if she really wanted not to be found, she would ditch her credit cards. But the cash in her wallet wouldn’t get her very far.

  I felt something like tenderness. As if I were truly gaming this out for her benefit. Poor Stella. Beneath her confidence, she was a girl who became easily overwhelmed. How many times had the world told her she was gorgeous and charming and dazzling? Enough times to hollow her out entirely. This was the ending she should have had—an escape from the manufactured pressures of her life. A chance to start over. If people were going to believe that she’d really made a break for it, she needed as much runway as possible.

  The gun, glinting on the nightstand, reminded me. In the closet, the safe was still open. The real Bradley treasures were kept closer to home, in their Beacon Hill mansion or in the vault at their bank. But Grandma Bradley’s one indulgence was fine jewelry, even up here in Maine. There, in a black velvet bag in the back of the safe: there was Stella’s ticket out.

  They glittered in my palm. A pair of diamond earrings, a few carats each. A tennis bracelet with a neat row of cushion-cut gems. And a ring, which I recognized from when the Bradleys entertained on a grand scale, hiring caterers and a string quartet while the guests dined at long tables on the lawn, overlooking the ocean. This was the ring that Grandma Bradley would wear on those occasions. A sapphire, hefty like a walnut and blue like the summer sky, ringed by a band of diamonds.

  The jewelry was cool and solid in my hand as I closed the safe, pressed the lock button, and wiped it clean. When would anyone bother to check the safe—would it be days from now, weeks from now? I would have to remember to act surprised. The diamonds were gone, the Bradleys would say, worrying and speculating. And so was the gun.

  My hair was tangled and my skin salty from the ocean air, so I took a scalding hot shower. I started to turn off the lights and thermostats, but then I thought, what would Stella do? That had to be my guiding mantra. Stella wouldn’t bother to check every little thing. She would just leave. So the heat remained on. The occasional lamp stayed burning.

  The walk to the motel took almost an hour. From a distance, warm squares of light shone through the lobby windows, and the neon sign blinked vacancy. It turned out it wasn’t so hard to cry on command. The water table was high, ready to reveal itself with just a little bit of digging. I cried so much that my eyes puffed and swelled. But it wasn’t guilt or distress that I felt, so much as an overwhelming recognition.

  You’re a heartless snob, my mother once said. You can’t wait to get rid of us, can you?

  That dark impulse, which I’d suppressed for so long. Stella Bradley was dead, and I saw who I really was. Who I had always been. It was the first time in my life that I recognized what I was capable of. Death forces you toward honesty. There is always a perfect understanding between the killer and the killed.

  Port Authority after midnight: the stores are closed, awaiting the morning rush. The alcoves and nooks near the heating vents are occupied by the sleeping bodies of homeless men. The fluorescent lights are set to a low hum, and the air smells cloyingly of fast food, with a tinge of sweat and garbage. The only motion came from those like me, passengers emerging from the end of long bus rides, moving like ghostly fish toward the exits of this strange aquarium.

  But I didn’t mind it. I didn’t mind any of it. I had slept most of the way, and I was glad to be back in New York. When the cab drove south down Seventh Avenue in the earliest hours of Monday morning, all I could think was I made it. I meant this in a very simple sense. Two of us had left the city for Maine on Friday morning. One of us had come back. One of us had what it took to persist, and the other one didn’t.

  Pete, the doorman, was on duty that night.

  “You have a good weekend, Miss Trapp?” he said, as he opened the door of my cab.

  “I was in Maine with Stella. She’s still up there.”

  “Nice to get away from the city,” Pete said. “Have a good night, Miss Trapp.”

  I debated how to tell the Bradley family. It had to look real. If Stella had kicked me out and hinted at disappearing for a while, would I be surprised? Alarmed? Or would I think, this is just Stella being Stella? Nonetheless, I called Anne on my walk to work that Monday morning. It was mid-November, and the weather was persistently perfect. The trees held the last of their crimson leaves, crisp temperatures just right for sweaters and football. While waiting for Anne to pick up, I decided that I couldn’t remember a more beautiful autumn.

  “Violet?” Anne said, sounding out of breath. “I just got out of spin class.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry to bother you. I just wanted to tell you about the weekend.”

  “Are you back from Maine? Stella made it sound like you were staying for a while.”

  “That’s the thing. I’m back, but she’s—well, we got into an argument on Saturday night. A pretty bad one. I got a motel room and came back on the bus yesterday. She’s still up there. I mean, as far as I know.”

  “Oh, dear. Oh, Violet, I’m sorry.”

  “To be honest, Mrs. Bradley, she was seriously upset. Jamie breaking up with her…I think it came as a shock. She wasn’t taking it well.”

  “I wish she had let me come up. The poor girl. She really can’t handle this kind of thing by herself.”

  “I think she just wanted some space from it all, you know?”

  “So she didn’t say when she’d be coming home?”

  “Not to me.”

  Anne sighed. “And she won’t be in trouble at work?”

  “Given the ratings on the Danner story”—this, this was the one moment I felt an unsettling flare of heat in my cheeks—“I’m guessing they’ll be in the mood to forgive her.”

  “You’ll let me know when you hear from her?”

  “Of course. And I’m sorry, Mrs. Bradley, I don’t mean to worry you. I just wanted—”

  “No, no, I’m glad you called. Thank you, Violet.”

  Jamie’s desk was empty when I arrived around 8:30 a.m. He, like most people in the newsroom, tended to arrive closer to 10. But the habits of my ambitious intern days had stuck. I drank my coffee and caught up on what I’d missed over the weekend. The major newspapers had all covered the Danner story. Danner’s spin machine was in high gear, spokespeople reinforcing the message that the CEO had delivered in his interview. They were conducting an internal investigation; they would implement rigorous sexual harassment training; they would make sure this never happened again.

  An e-mail pinged in my in-box. My chest tightened when I saw the sender—Willow, the woman in Florida. She had watched the story. It wasn’t what she’d been led to believe. What had happened to her was just a footnote. Why, she wanted to know, why had I spent so long chasing her down and convincing her that she was the hinge to the whole thing?

  I don’t expect you to respond to this, she wrote in her e-mail. I could see her, leaning against the doorjamb in her white living room, digging her fingernail into the orange peel, looking at us with skepticism that was, in the end, completely justified. I assume you’ve moved on and you’re already preying on some other helpless victim.

  I jumped at the hand on my shoulder.

  “Whoa,” Jamie said, taking a step back. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said, breathing hard. “You scared me.”

  “You’re really
pale.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”

  “Let me guess. She said you’re not allowed to talk to me anymore, is that it?”

  “What?”

  Jamie gave me a quizzical look as he dropped into his chair. “Stella.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh, yeah. No. I mean, it’s fine, we can talk, it’s just—”

  “Never mind.” He shook his head. “Sorry, you’re in an awkward position. I don’t mean to put you in the middle of it.”

  I sighed. “I think it’s too late for that.”

  We went to the cafeteria on the third floor to get coffee, and a modicum of privacy. Everyone in the newsroom knew about Stella and Jamie’s relationship; it was ideal office gossip, self-contained and slightly illicit. We sat by the windows overlooking Sixth Avenue, people occasionally waving at us as they carried bagels and oatmeal back to their desks. As I told Jamie about the weekend, from Stella’s return to the apartment in the early hours of Friday morning to her ultimate accusation on Saturday night, it struck me: had it really happened so fast? Less than forty-eight hours from when Jamie broke up with her to when she climbed atop the bow of the boat. The triangular dynamic of the past year had proved shatteringly fragile.

  “And that’s when she kicked you out?” Jamie said.

  “She said I had sabotaged your relationship. That I was…jealous of you two.”

  Jamie’s expression softened, briefly.

  “I told her that was ridiculous, but she wouldn’t believe me. She wanted me gone.” It didn’t feel like a lie. The night in Maine had gone one way, but it so easily could have gone another. “She couldn’t stand being around me. That’s what she said.”

  “Jesus.” His face had closed off again. “She is a horrible person.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  Jamie wrapped his hands around his coffee cup. He had removed the lid so the coffee would cool down faster. As he squeezed the sides of the cup, the liquid crept toward the brim. A taut meniscus stretched across the top. He was on the verge of spilling.