Mister Tender's Girl

by Carter Wilson

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  Copyright © 2018 by Carter Wilson

  Cover and internal design © 2018 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Adrienne Krogh/Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover image © Mira/Ims/Plainpicture, STILLFX/Shutterstock

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  “Sound” by James © 1991, written by Tim Booth. Used with permission.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wilson, Carter (Novelist), author.

  Title: Mister Tender's girl / Carter Wilson.

  Description: Naperville, Il : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017014795 | (trade pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Psychological fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.I57787 M57 2018 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014795

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part I: Alice

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Part II: The Glassin Twins

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Part III: Mr. Interested

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Ed Bryant

  We all miss you here

  Come, dip on in

  Leave your bones, leave your skin

  Leave your past, leave your craft

  Leave your suffering heart.

  —JAMES, “SOUND”

  Part I

  Alice

  One

  Thursday, October 15

  Manchester, New Hampshire

  Deep, deep in the morning, sirens.

  I peer out the window of my coffee shop, waiting to see the flashing lights, the blur of brilliant, pulsing red, the rush of an ambulance blistering toward the horrors of others. I see nothing, and the sound fades, as all eventually do. Perhaps it was never there at all.

  “Miss?”

  I snap my attention back to the man at the counter. Older man, salt-and-pepper beard, deep-green eyes, the color of jade. Charcoal suit, no tie.

  “I’m sorry. What would you like?”

  “Cappuccino. Small. To drink here, please.”

  His voice is deep. Enchanting.

  “Of course.”

  When he hands me the crisp five-dollar bill, I catch his stare, and his gaze is locked on me. There’s an endless longing to it, as if I’m the ghost of someone he once loved. This has happened before.

  “Can I get a name?” I ask, holding eye contact for only a moment.

  He thinks on this for a moment, as if I’ve asked a deeply personal question.

  “John.”

  I write this on a sticker and place it on the lip of a ceramic cup.

  When I give him his change, he looks only at my hands. John takes his money and leaves my space as quickly as he entered it.

  Sometimes I meet a person and my paranoia insists they already know me. Know everything. Where I live. How many scars I have. My real last name. It’s a game my mind likes to play when it thinks I’m getting complacent, or cured. Happy, even. I meet people every day at the Stone Rose, the coffee shop I own. Customers rarely give me this feeling.

  But John does. I dismiss it, knowing my past has chiseled and shaped my mind into something that favors fear over sense. Paranoia over logic. I take a deep breath, hold it to the count of four, then release. Repeat.

  Sometimes this helps.

  Two

  Paranoia is also the reason I keep no knives in my house, which makes for practical concerns. My diet at home consists of things I can eat with a fork and spoon, and even when I want a slice of butter on my bread, I reach for an individually wrapped packet, the kind you find in restaurants. Spread it with a fork.

  It sounds mad, I know. If someone wanted to hurt me, they wouldn’t need to use a knife. On my dining room table alone are things that could maim or kill. Fork in the eye. Ceramic plate smashed over the skull. Wineglass, broken to a fractured stem, sliced across the carotid artery. Cloth napkin shoved down the throat, fingers used to pinch the nose shut. You might even argue that if someone wanted to stab me, why would they bother relying on my knife? Surely they would bring their own.

  I’d tell you those are all reasonable points. But I don’t have to rationalize my horrors to you.

  I pour another glass of merlot. The chicken on my plate is tender, and the tines of my fork slide easily into the spongy flesh. I’ve developed a friendship with the Hannaford Mar
ket butcher, and he always cuts my meat and poultry at the counter for me. His name is Jesus, and he’s never asked me why I make this request. I plan on giving Jesus a nice tip at Christmastime.

  I drop the fork, my appetite not reaching critical mass. The wall clock reads just past eight, and my stomach tightens at the thought of the coming night. Music from the little Bose player fills the room, but I hear the silence behind it, the vacuum that grows like a cancer as it draws closer to bedtime. In bed, the weight of the night will sit on my chest until it threatens to crush me altogether.

  Sometimes I wish it would. Sometimes I fall asleep with that thought in my head, a wish for death, and there’s a kind of dark peace to it all, like a shipwreck victim floating gently to the bottom of the ocean floor.

  Dinner over, dishes done. My one-hundred-and-twelve-year-old compact colonial house is now as clean as it was one hour ago, things back where they should be, not a fiber or dust mote in sight. I straighten a picture on my wall that probably isn’t even crooked. A photo I took of London a decade and a half ago. Street scene, at night, a couple on the sidewalk holding hands and looking into a dimly lit storefront. I was with my father that evening, just after he’d given me that camera for my birthday. It was the first photo I’d taken with it. I was thirteen.

  I miss England sometimes—the smell of London, the aroma of time, moisture, and car exhaust swirled together in a blend only big cities can produce. But mostly I try not to think of the place I grew up. I almost died there when I was fourteen.

  Beams from car lights sweep along my windows, temporarily highlighting my living room wall like prison searchlights. Richard must not be working the overnight shift at the hospital tonight. He rents the room on the third floor, above my bedroom. I call it the Perch. It has its own small kitchen, bath, and separate entrance, for which Richard pays me five hundred dollars a month. I rarely see him, and I won’t deny he’s somewhat odd, but he causes me no trouble, and his rent pays nearly a third of my mortgage.

  There’s a comforting energy to Richard, one I don’t feel with many people, where having him living here makes me feel safe. Well, perhaps not safe, but in some way less panicked. Knowing he’s up there makes me feel less alone, I suppose.

  The car door opens and closes, footsteps on the exterior stairs, upstairs door hinge squeaking, then silence. He’s quiet as a cat. Never even a dribble of music, a foot stomp, or a squeaking bed. Sometimes I imagine that, as Richard passes the threshold into the Perch, he turns into vapor until sunrise.

  In my room. Teeth brushed, flossed, gleaming to perfection. Pajamas of the flannel variety, which hang loosely around my thin frame. I haven’t eaten enough, I know, and the hunger may wake me if I’m lucky enough to fall asleep. My hour at the gym this morning was intense, as it always is, and I haven’t taken in enough calories to account for those I’ve burned. I’ll eat more tomorrow.

  I look down at my left arm, which is lean and toned, both bicep and tricep visible if I flex just right. I like what I’ve become on the outside. But as strong as I am and with all my training, the things with neither form nor mass scare me the most. Like silence. And memories. Nighttime.

  If I had been stabbed during the day, would I dread the sunrise every morning, like a vampire? Maybe. But I wasn’t stabbed during the day. I was stabbed late on a half-moon night, a few days before Halloween. So I suppose all this wondering doesn’t really matter for anything.

  In bed. Grab my phone, which someone who has trouble sleeping shouldn’t do. But my sleep issues go beyond my brain’s reaction to a little glowing screen.

  Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram.

  Two-second glances at unrestrained propaganda. The triumphant struggles of supermoms. The political rants. The photos of the perfect kids, the great vacations, the most exhaustive meals. It all makes me so sad, mostly because I don’t believe any of it. But I also realize a lot of this is me, my cynicism. I rarely post but often lurk.

  An email from my brother, Thomas. It’s good to see his name in my inbox, the last name I used to have. I changed my last name from Hill to Gray when I turned eighteen, but just seeing his last name makes me think of the best parts of my childhood. Thomas is bitching about Mom. This doesn’t surprise me.

  I almost put the phone down and turn off the lights, but I decide to check my BlindDate account. I signed up for the dating site a year ago on the advice of a friend who worried I would die from loneliness. She doesn’t know about my past. She doesn’t know the name Alice Hill, only Alice Gray. But I did sign up, checked it for about a week, then lost most of my interest. I’ve never been on a date through it but still stray back to check the activity every now and then. I don’t know what I’m hoping for.

  Now I scroll through a month’s worth of matches, swiping them away like mosquitoes. But the last one freezes my fingertip in mid-rejection. I stare at the screen name, the man some algorithm has determined me to be compatible with. This match, this man, doesn’t know my real name, just the random screen name I created a year ago. Perhaps he would recognize me from my profile photo, though I don’t know how. I’ve changed so much since I was fourteen.

  Still, his screen name glows at me, seeming to pulse like a heartbeat on the screen. I whisper it aloud just to convince myself it’s real.

  “Mister Tender.”

  Three

  Mister Tender made my father famous, at least among fans of graphic novels. My father wrote and inked them. Not comic books—never call them that. Graphic novels. My father created Mister Tender, and Mister Tender nearly killed me.

  My father was the sole owner of Mister Tender. He wrote the stories, he drew the panels, inked the artwork, colored all the bold and beautiful violence. No one else helped bring that monster to life.

  The Mister Tender series ended its run fourteen years ago, shortly after I was released from the hospital. There was no final volume, no end to the story. My father simply refused to ever draw that character again. He also refused all future royalties, assigning them to a local women’s shelter, and shunned all interview requests. We never again said the name of that demonic bartender in our household, which we didn’t occupy together all that much longer. Two years after the final image was drawn, my parents’ marriage fractured, and my mother swooped up Thomas and me and moved us to the States. My father was left a shell of a man, riddled with depression, his hands bloodied in his own ink.

  I visited him as often as I could, which wasn’t enough. If it had been up to me, I would have chosen to live with my father, but a child has no recourse when the law proclaims a parent’s right to custody as “untenable.”

  My father was stabbed to death three years ago in London by an Islamic extremist; this is, at least, the common belief, for the single eyewitness (an elderly pedestrian over two hundred feet away) described the assailant as having worn a black, robe-like outfit, which he referred to as “Muslim garb.” The murderer was never caught.

  Dad had very stupidly drawn a political cartoon showing Mohammed, and despite Mohammed having been made into a rather appealing figure, the cartoon was a death warrant. The murderer’s blade pierced my father four times: twice in the chest, once in the stomach, and the fatal blow to the neck. So now, because God apparently finds such things amusing, two members of the Hill family have been brutally attacked with knives, and I stand as the lone survivor.

  Mister Tender was a bartender—part human, part demon—and he was excellent at lending an ear to stories of woe. Then he’d convince his customers to do very bad things. The thumbnail image of him on my dating app is not a photograph of a real man but the character himself. Just the sight of him roils my stomach, even though, in truth, he’s a beautiful creature. Thick, dark hair, swept back 1920s style; preternaturally smooth, white skin; strong, high cheekbones; dark, jade-green eyes, a gaze that pierces into your deepest, most hidden places. He’d fix that gaze on you as you slid up to the bar. T
hen he’d slide over a new cocktail of his own devising, a mixture of some unknown liquid, bubbling and smoking, a kaleidoscope of colors. As you considered the logic of actually drinking it, he’d lean over and, with just a touch of Cockney, say, So, then, what’s your fight against the world today, love?

  That’s Mister Tender.

  And Mister Tender always pours heavy.

  My thumb twitches to delete the match suggestion, but I don’t. I’m drawn to it, the way a person might reach out to open a closet door, checking for a hiding intruder.

  I press on the link.

  He has the same traits as my father ascribed to the character in his debut. Unknown age. Occupation: bartender. Likes: making wagers, watching people lose. Dislikes: teetotalers. Yet there’s one bit about this Mister Tender’s profile that is markedly different from his deceased namesake. The Mister Tender of my father’s creation resided in the West End of London.

  Here, on this little screen, Mister Tender lists his hometown as Manchester, New Hampshire.

  Mister Tender has come to America to find me.

  Four

  Friday, October 16

  The man in the gym keeps staring. He’s in my direct line of sight as I do my lunges, but I look straight ahead. I’m a regular at Steeplegate Fitness—hell, I should have my name on the wall—and I don’t get approached often. But I won’t say it’s never happened.

  Real gym rats keep to themselves, and you can always tell them apart from the trolls. Rats have their routine, their headphones, their focus. They’ll leave you alone, because they want to be left alone. Trolls, meanwhile, always have bad form and are prone to spending most of their time doing bicep curls and checking themselves in the mirror, secretly hoping you’re paying attention to them. They’ll slowly begin encroaching into your space, eventually finding some reason to say something to you. Usually something like “Are you a fitness coach? I could use some advice.” Or “I haven’t seen you here before. Is this your regular gym?” Once, someone walked up and asked me about my scars, which I don’t always bother to conceal at the gym. I’m neither proud of nor ashamed of my scars; they are just a part of me.