Pieces of Her

by Karin Slaughter

  Dedication

  For my GPP peeps

  Epigraph

  I’m Nobody! Who are you?

  Are you—Nobody—Too?

  Then there’s a pair of us!

  Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!

  How dreary—to be—Somebody!

  How public—like a Frog—

  To tell one’s name—the livelong June—

  To an admiring Bog!

  —Emily Dickinson

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  August 20, 2018 Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  July 26, 1986 Chapter 7

  August 21, 2018 Chapter 8

  July 31, 1986 Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  August 23, 2018 Chapter 11

  July 31, 1986 Chapter 12

  August 26, 2018 Chapter 13

  August 2, 1986 Chapter 14

  August 26, 2018 Chapter 15

  One Month Later

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Karin Slaughter

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  For years, even while she’d loved him, part of her had hated him in that childish way that you hate something you can’t control. He was headstrong, and stupid, and handsome, which gave him cover for a hell of a lot of the mistakes he continually made—the same mistakes, over and over again, because why try new ones when the old ones worked so well in his favor?

  He was charming, too. That was the problem. He would charm her. He would make her furious. Then he would charm her back again so that she did not know if he was the snake or she was the snake and he was the handler.

  So he sailed along on his charm, and his fury, and he hurt people, and he found new things that interested him more, and the old things were left broken in his wake.

  Then, quite suddenly, his charm had stopped working. A trolley car off the tracks. A train without a conductor. The mistakes could not be forgiven, and eventually, the second same mistake would not be overlooked, and the third same mistake had dire consequences that had ended with a life being taken, a death sentence being passed, then—almost—resulted in the loss of another life, her life.

  How could she still love someone who had tried to destroy her?

  When she had been with him—and she was decidedly with him during his long fall from grace—they had raged against the system: The group homes. The emergency departments. The loony bin. The mental hospital. The squalor. The staff who neglected their patients. The orderlies who ratcheted tight the straightjackets. The nurses who looked the other way. The doctors who doled out the pills. The urine on the floor. The feces on the walls. The inmates, the fellow prisoners, taunting, wanting, beating, biting.

  The spark of rage, not the injustice, was what had excited him the most. The novelty of a new cause. The chance to annihilate. The dangerous game. The threat of violence. The promise of fame. Their names in lights. Their righteous deeds on the tongues of schoolchildren who were taught the lessons of change.

  A penny, a nickel, a dime, a quarter, a dollar bill . . .

  What she had kept hidden, the one sin that she could never confess to, was that she had ignited that first spark.

  She had always believed—vehemently, with great conviction—that the only way to change the world was to destroy it.

  August 20, 2018

  1

  “Andrea,” her mother said. Then, in concession to a request made roughly one thousand times before, “Andy.”

  “Mom—”

  “Let me speak, darling.” Laura paused. “Please.”

  Andy nodded, preparing for a long-awaited lecture. She was officially thirty-one years old today. Her life was stagnating. She had to start making decisions rather than having life make decisions for her.

  Laura said, “This is my fault.”

  Andy felt her chapped lips peel apart in surprise. “What’s your fault?”

  “Your being here. Trapped here.”

  Andy held out her arms, indicating the restaurant. “At the Rise-n-Dine?”

  Her mother’s eyes traveled the distance from the top of Andy’s head to her hands, which fluttered nervously back to the table. Dirty brown hair thrown into a careless ponytail. Dark circles under her tired eyes. Nails bitten down to the quick. The bones of her wrists like the promontory of a ship. Her skin, normally pale, had taken on the pallor of hot dog water.

  The catalog of flaws didn’t even include her work outfit. The navy-blue uniform hung off Andy like a paper sack. The stitched silver badge on her breast pocket was stiff, the Belle Isle palm tree logo surrounded by the words POLICE DISPATCH DIVISION. Like a police officer, but not actually. Like an adult, but not really. Five nights a week, Andy sat in a dark, dank room with four other women answering 911 calls, running license plate and driver’s license checks, and assigning case numbers. Then, around six in the morning, she slinked back to her mother’s house and spent the majority of what should’ve been her waking hours asleep.

  Laura said, “I never should have let you come back here.”

  Andy pressed together her lips. She stared down at the last bits of yellow eggs on her plate.

  “My sweet girl.” Laura reached across the table for her hand, waited for her to look up. “I pulled you away from your life. I was scared, and I was selfish.” Tears rimmed her mother’s eyes. “I shouldn’t have needed you so much. I shouldn’t have asked for so much.”

  Andy shook her head. She looked back down at her plate.

  “Darling.”

  Andy kept shaking her head because the alternative was to speak, and if she spoke, she would have to tell the truth.

  Her mother had not asked her to do anything.

  Three years ago, Andy had been walking to her shitty Lower East Side fourth-floor walk-up, dreading the thought of another night in the one-bedroom hovel she shared with three other girls, none of whom she particularly liked, all of whom were younger, prettier and more accomplished, when Laura had called.

  “Breast cancer,” Laura had said, not whispering or hedging but coming straight out with it in her usual calm way. “Stage three. The surgeon will remove the tumor, then while I’m under, he’ll biopsy the lymph nodes to evaluate—”

  Laura had said more, detailing what was to come with a degree of detached, scientific specificity that was lost on Andy, whose language-processing skills had momentarily evaporated. She had heard the word “breast” more than “cancer,” and thought instantly of her mother’s generous bosom. Tucked beneath her modest one-piece swimsuit at the beach. Peeking over the neckline of her Regency dress for Andy’s Netherfieldthemed sixteenth birthday party. Strapped under the padded cups and gouging underwires of her LadyComfort Bras as she sat on the couch in her office and worked with her speech therapy patients.

  Laura Oliver was not a bombshell, but she had always been what men called very well put together. Or maybe it was women who called it that, probably back in the last century. Laura wasn’t the type for heavy make-up and pearls, but she never left the house without her short gray hair neatly styled, her linen pants crisply starched, her underwear clean and still elasticized.

  Andy barely made it out of the apartment most days. She was constantly having to double back for something she had forgotten like her phone or her ID badge for work or, one time, her sneakers because she’d walked out of the building wearing her bedroom slippers.

  Whenever people in New York asked Andy what her mother was like, she always thought of something Laura had said about her own mother: She always knew where all t
he tops were to her Tupperware.

  Andy couldn’t be bothered to close a Ziploc bag.

  On the phone, eight hundred miles away, Laura’s stuttered intake of breath was the only sign that this was difficult for her. “Andrea?”

  Andy’s ears, buzzing with New York sounds, had zeroed back in on her mother’s voice.

  Cancer.

  Andy tried to grunt. She could not make the noise. This was shock. This was fear. This was unfettered terror because the world had suddenly stopped spinning and everything—the failures, the disappointments, the horror of Andy’s New York existence for the last six years—receded like the drawback wave of a tsunami. Things that should’ve never been uncovered were suddenly out in the open.

  Her mother had cancer.

  She could be dying.

  She could die.

  Laura had said, “So, there’s chemo, which will by all accounts be very difficult.” She was used to filling Andy’s protracted silences, had learned long ago that confronting her on them was more likely to end up in a fight than a resumption of civil conversation. “Then I’ll take a pill every day, and that’s that. The five-year survival rate is over seventy percent, so there’s not a lot to worry about except for getting through it.” A pause for breath, or maybe in hopes that Andy was ready to speak. “It’s very treatable, darling. I don’t want you to worry. Just stay where you are. There’s nothing you can do.”

  A car horn had blared. Andy had looked up. She was standing statue-like in the middle of a crosswalk. She struggled to move. The phone was hot against her ear. It was past midnight. Sweat rolled down her back and leached from her armpits like melted butter. She could hear the canned laughter of a sitcom, bottles clinking, and an anonymous piercing scream for help, the likes of which she had learned to tune out her first month living in the city.

  Too much silence on her end of the phone. Finally, her mother had prompted, “Andrea?”

  Andy had opened her mouth without considering what words should come out.

  “Darling?” her mother had said, still patient, still generously nice in the way that her mother was to everyone she met. “I can hear the street noises, otherwise I’d think we’d lost the connection.” She paused again. “Andrea, I really need you to acknowledge what I’m telling you. It’s important.”

  Her mouth was still hanging open. The sewer smell that was endemic to her neighborhood had stuck to the back of her nasal passages like a piece of overcooked spaghetti slapped onto a kitchen cabinet. Another car horn blared. Another woman screamed for help. Another ball of sweat rolled down Andy’s back and pooled in the waistband of her underwear. The elastic was torn where her thumb went when she pulled them down.

  Andy still could not recall how she’d managed to force herself out of her stupor, but she remembered the words she had finally said to her mother: “I’m coming home.”

  There had not been much to show for her six years in the city. Andy’s three part-time jobs had all been resigned from by text. Her subway card was given to a homeless woman who had thanked her, then screeched that she was a fucking whore. Only the absolutely necessary things went into Andy’s suitcase: favorite T-shirts, broken-in jeans, several books that had survived not just the trip from Belle Isle, but five different moves into progressively shittier apartments. Andy wouldn’t need her gloves or her puffy winter coat or her earmuffs back home. She didn’t bother to wash her sheets or even take them off the old Chesterfield sofa that was her bed. She had left for LaGuardia at the crack of dawn, less than six hours after her mother’s phone call. In the blink of an eye, Andy’s life in New York was over. The only thing the three younger, more accomplished roommates had to remember her by was the half-eaten Filet-O-Fish sandwich Andy had left in the fridge and her part of the next month’s rent.

  That had been three years ago, almost half as many years as she had lived in the city. Andy didn’t want to, but in low moments she checked in with her former cohabitants on Facebook. They were her yardstick. Her truncheon. One had reached middle management at a fashion blog. The other had started her own bespoke sneaker design company. The third had died after a cocaine binge on a rich man’s yacht and still, some nights when Andy was answering calls and the person on the end of the line was a twelve-year-old who thought it was funny to call 911 and pretend he was being molested, she could not help but think that she remained the least accomplished of them all.

  A yacht, for chrissakes.

  A yacht.

  “Darling?” her mother rapped the table for attention. The lunch crowd had thinned out. A man seated at the front gave her an angry look over his newspaper. “Where are you?”

  Andy held out her arms again, indicating the restaurant, but the gesture felt forced. They knew exactly where she was: less than five miles from where she had started.

  Andy had gone to New York City thinking she would find a way to shine and ended up emitting the equivalent amount of light you’d find in an old emergency flashlight left in a kitchen drawer. She hadn’t wanted to be an actor or a model or any of the usual clichés. Stardom was never her dream. She had yearned to be star-adjacent: the personal assistant, the coffee fetcher, the prop wrangler, the scenery painter, the social media manager, the support staff that made the star’s life possible. She wanted to bask in the glow. To be in the middle of things. To know people. To have connections.

  Her professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design had seemed like a good connection. She had dazzled him with her passion for the arts, or at least that’s what he’d claimed. That they were in bed when he’d said this only mattered to Andy after the fact. When she’d broken off the affair, the man had taken as a threat her idle chatter about wanting to focus on her career. Before Andy knew what was happening, before she could explain to her professor that she wasn’t trying to leverage his gross inappropriateness into career advancement, he had pulled some strings to get her a job as an assistant to the assistant scenery designer in an off-Broadway show.

  Off-Broadway!

  Just down the street from on Broadway!

  Andy was two semesters away from earning her degree in technical theater arts. She had packed her suitcase and barely did more than toss a wave over her shoulder as she headed to the airport.

  Two months later, the show had closed under crushingly bad reviews.

  Everyone on the crew had quickly found other jobs, joined other shows, except for Andy, who had settled into a real New York life. She was a waitress, a dog walker, a sign painter, a telephone debt collector, a delivery person, a fax machine monitor, a sandwich maker, a non-unionized copier paper feeder, and finally, the loser bitch who had left a half-eaten Filet-O-Fish in the fridge and one month’s rent on the counter and run off to Buttfuck, Georgia, or wherever the hell it was that she was from.

  Really, all Andy had brought home with her was one tiny shred of dignity, and now she was going to waste it on her mother.

  She looked up from the eggs.

  “Mom.” She had to clear her throat before she could get out the confession. “I love you for saying that, but it’s not your fault. You’re right that I wanted to come home to see you. But I stayed for other reasons.”

  Laura frowned. “What other reasons? You loved New York.”

  She had hated New York.

  “You were doing so well up there.”

  She had been drowning.

  “That boy you were seeing was so into you.”

  And every other vagina in his building.

  “You had so many friends.”

  She had not heard from one of them since she’d left.

  “Well.” Laura sighed. The list of encouragements had been short if not probing. As usual, she had read Andy like a book. “Baby, you’ve always wanted to be somebody different. Someone special. I mean in the sense of someone with a gift, an unusual talent. Of course you’re special to me and Dad.”

  Andy’s eyes strained to roll up in her head. “Thanks.”

  “You are ta
lented. You’re smart. You’re better than smart. You’re clever.”

  Andy ran her hands up and down her face as if she could erase herself from this conversation. She knew she was talented and smart. The problem was that in New York, everyone else had been talented and smart, too. Even the guy working the counter at the bodega was funnier, quicker, more clever than she was.

  Laura insisted, “There’s nothing wrong with being normal. Normal people have very meaningful lives. Look at me. It’s not selling out to enjoy yourself.”

  Andy said, “I’m thirty-one years old, I haven’t gone on a real date in three years, I have sixty-three thousand dollars in student debt for a degree I never finished and I live in a one-room apartment over my mother’s garage.” Air strained through Andy’s nose as she tried to breathe. Verbalizing the long list had put a tight band around her chest. “The question isn’t what else can I do. It’s what else am I going to fuck up?”

  “You’re not fucking up.”

  “Mom—”

  “You’ve fallen into the habit of feeling low. You can get used to anything, especially bad things. But the only direction now is up. You can’t fall off the floor.”

  “Have you ever heard of basements?”

  “Basements have floors, too.”

  “That’s the ground.”

  “But ground is just another word for floor.”

  “Ground is like, six feet under.”

  “Why do you always have to be so morbid?”

  Andy felt a sudden irritation honing her tongue into a razor. She swallowed it back down. They couldn’t argue about curfew or make-up or tight jeans anymore, so these were the fights that she now had with her mother: That basements had floors. The proper direction from which toilet paper should come off the roll. Whether forks should be placed in the dishwasher tines up or tines down. If a grocery cart was called a cart or a buggy. That Laura was pronouncing it wrong when she called the cat “Mr. Perkins” because his name was actually Mr. Purrkins.