NOS4A2 A Novel

Out in the Cold


SHE WALKED.

The rain was a fine sleet that soaked through her army-navy jacket and made her hair crunchy with ice.

Her father and his girlfriend lived in Durham, New Hampshire, and there was some way to get to them by using the MBTA—take the T to the North Station, then switch to Amtrak—but it was all a lot of money Vic didn’t have.

She went to the T station anyway and hung around for a while, because it was out of the rain. She tried to think who she could call for train fare. Then she thought f*ck it, she would just call her father and ask him to drive down and get her. She was honestly not sure why she hadn’t thought of it before.

She had only been to see him once in the last year, and it had gone badly. Vic got into a fight with the girlfriend and threw the remote control at her, which by some wild chance had given her a black eye. Her father sent her back that evening, wasn’t even interested in her side of the story. Vic had not talked to him since.

Chris McQueen answered on the second ring and said he’d accept the charges. He didn’t sound happy about it, though. His voice rasped. The last time she’d seen him, there had been a lot of silver in his hair that hadn’t been there a year ago. She had heard that men took younger lovers to stay young themselves. It wasn’t working.

“Well,” Vic said, and was suddenly struggling not to cry again. “Mom threw me out, just like she threw you out.”

That wasn’t how it happened, of course, but it felt like the right way to begin the conversation.

“Hey, Brat,” he said. “Where are you? You okay? Your mom called and told me you left.”

“I’m at this train station. I don’t have any money. Can you come get me, Dad?”

“I can call you a cab. Mom will pay the fare when you get home.”

“I can’t go home.”

“Vic. It would take me an hour to get there, and it’s midnight. I have work tomorrow at five A.M. I’d be in bed already, but instead I’ve been sittin’ by the phone worrying about you.”

Vic heard a voice in the background, her father’s girlfriend, Tiffany: “She’s not coming here, Chrissy!”

“You need to work this out with your mother now,” he said. “I can’t go choosing sides, Vic. You know that.”

“She is not coming here,” Tiffany said again, her voice strident, angry.

“Will you tell that cunt to shut her f*cking mouth?” Vic cried, almost screamed.

When her father spoke again, his voice was harder. “I will not. And considering you beat her up the last time you were here—”

“The f*ck!”

“—and never apologized—”

“I never touched that brainless bitch.”

“—okay. I’m going. This conversation is finished. You’n spend the f*cking night in the rain as far as I’m concerned.”

“You chose her over me,” Vic said. “You chose her. F*ck you, Dad. Get your rest so you’re ready to blow things up tomorrow. It’s what you do best.”

She hung up.

Vic wondered if she could sleep on a bench in the train station but by two in the morning knew she couldn’t. It was too cold. She considered calling her mother collect, asking her to send a cab, but the thought of asking for her help was unbearable, so she walked





Home


SHE DID NOT EVEN TRY THE FRONT DOOR, BELIEVING THAT IT WOULD be bolted shut. Her own bedroom window was ten feet off the ground, not to mention locked. The windows out back were locked, too, as was the sliding glass door. But there was a basement window that wouldn’t lock, wouldn’t even close all the way. It had been open a quarter of an inch for six years.

Vic found a pair of rusting hedge shears and used them to slice away the screen, then pushed the window back and wiggled in through the long, wide slot.

The basement was a large, unfinished room with pipes running across the ceiling. The washer and dryer were at one end of the room, by the stairs, and the boiler was at the other end. The rest was a mess of boxes, garbage bags stuffed full of Vic’s old clothes, and a tartan easy chair with a crappy framed watercolor of a covered bridge propped up on the seat. Vic vaguely remembered painting it back in junior high. It was ugly as f*ck. No sense of perspective. She amused herself by using a Sharpie to draw a flock of flying pricks in the sky, then chucked it and pushed down the back of the easy chair so it almost made a bed. She found a change of clothes in the dryer. She wanted to dry her sneakers but knew that the clunk-te-clunk would bring her mother, so she just set them on the bottom step.

She found some puffy winter coats in a garbage bag, curled up in the chair, and pulled them over her. The chair wouldn’t flatten all the way, and she didn’t imagine she could sleep, kinked up like she was, but at some point she closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, the sky was a slice of brilliant blue outside the long slot of the window.

What woke her was the sound of feet thumping overhead and her mother’s agitated voice. She was on the phone in the kitchen. Vic could tell from the way she was pacing.

“I did call the police, Chris,” she said. “They told me she’ll come home when she’s ready.” And then she said, “No! No, they won’t, because she’s not a missing child. She’s seventeen f*cking years old, Chris. They won’t even call her a runaway at seventeen.”

Vic was about to climb out of her seat and go upstairs—and then she thought, F*ck her. F*ck the both of them. And eased back into the chair.

In the moment of decision, she knew it was the wrong thing to do, a terrible thing to do, to hide down here while her mother went out of her head with panic upstairs. But then it was a terrible thing to search your daughter’s room, read her diary, take things she had paid for herself. And if Vic did a little Ecstasy now and then, that was her parents’ fault, too, for getting divorced. It was her father’s fault for hitting her mother. She knew now that he had done that. She had not forgotten seeing him rinsing his knuckles in the sink. Even if the mouthy, judgmental bitch did have it coming. Vic wished she had some X now. There was a tab of it in her backpack, zipped into her pencil case, but that was upstairs. She wondered if her mother would go out looking for her.

“But you’re not raising her, Chris! I am! I’m doing it all by myself!” Linda almost screamed, and Vic heard tears in her voice and did, for a moment, almost reconsider. And again held back. It was as if the sleet of the night before had been absorbed through her skin, into her blood, and made her somehow colder. She longed for that, for a coldness inside, a perfect, icy stillness—a chill that would numb all the bad feelings, flash-freeze all the bad thoughts.

You wanted me to get lost, and so I did, Vic thought.

Her mother slammed the phone down, picked it up, slammed it again.

Vic curled under the jackets and snuggled up.

In five minutes she was asleep again.





The Basement


NEXT SHE WOKE, IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON AND THE HOUSE WAS empty. She knew the moment she opened her eyes, knew by the quality of the stillness. Her mother could not bear a perfectly silent house. When Linda slept, she ran a fan. When Linda was awake, she ran the TV or her mouth.

Vic peeled herself from the chair, crossed the room, and stood on a box to look out the window that faced the front of the house. Her mother’s rusty shitbox Datsun wasn’t there. Vic felt a nasty pulse of excitement, hoped Linda was driving frantically around Haverhill, looking for her, at the mall, down side streets, at the houses of her friends.

I could be dead, she thought in a hollow, portentous voice. Raped and left for dead down by the river, and it would be all your fault, you domineering bitch. Vic had a headful of words like “domineering” and “portentous.” She might only be pulling C’s in school, but she read Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. H. Auden and was light-years smarter than both her parents, and she knew it.

Vic put her still-damp sneakers in the dryer to bang around and went upstairs to have a bowl of Lucky Charms in front of the TV. She dug her emergency tablet of Ecstasy out of her pencil case. In twenty minutes she was feeling smooth and easy. When she closed her eyes, she felt a luxuriant sensation of moving, of gliding, like a paper airplane on an updraft. She watched the Travel Channel, and every time she saw an airplane, she held her arms out like wings and pretended to soar. Ecstasy was motion in pill form, as good as flying through the dark in an open-top convertible, only you didn’t have to get off the couch to go for a ride.

She washed out her bowl and the spoon in the sink and dried them and put them back where they belonged. She turned off the TV. The hour was getting late, she could tell by the slant of the light through the trees.

Vic went back into the basement to check her shoes, but they were still wet. She didn’t know what to do with herself. Under the stairs she found her old tennis racket and a can of balls. She thought she might hit against the wall for a while, but she needed to clear a stretch first, so she started moving boxes—which was when she found it.

The Raleigh leaned against the concrete, hidden behind a stack of boxes marked for the Salvation Army. It baffled Vic, seeing her old Tuff Burner there. She had been in some kind of accident and lost it. Vic recalled her parents talking about it when they didn’t know she could hear.

Except. Except maybe she hadn’t heard what she thought she’d heard. She remembered her father saying she would be heartbroken when he told her the Tuff Burner was gone. For some reason she had thought it was lost, that he couldn’t find it. Her mother had said something about being glad the Tuff Burner was out of the picture, because Vic was so fixated on it.

And she had been fixated on it, that was true. Vic had a whole framework of fantasies that involved riding the Tuff Burner across an imaginary bridge to faraway places and fantastic lands. She had ridden it to a terrorist hideout and rescued her mother’s missing bracelet and had taken it on a ride to a book-filled crypt where she’d met an elf who made her tea and warned her about a vampire.

Vic moved a finger across the handlebars, collected a thick gray pad of dust on her fingertip. All this time it had been down here gathering dust because her parents hadn’t wanted her to have it. Vic had loved the bike, and it had given her a thousand stories, and so naturally her parents took it away.

She missed her stories about the bridge, missed the girl she had been then. She’d been a better person then and knew it.

Vic continued to stare at the bike as she put her sneakers on (they were now both toasty and stinky).

The spring was in almost perfect balance, felt like July in the direct sunshine and like January in the shade. Vic didn’t want to walk along the road and risk having her mother spot her on the way back, so she steered the Raleigh around to the rear of the house and the path into the woods. It was the most natural thing in the world to put her leg over it and start riding.

Vic laughed when she climbed onto it. It was too small for her, almost comically so. She imagined a clown squeezed into a tiny, tiny clown car. Her knees rapped the handlebars, and her butt hung over the seat. But when she stood on the pedals, it still felt right.

She took it downhill, into shade that was ten degrees colder than out in the sun, winter breathing her in the face. She struck a root, grabbed air. She didn’t actually expect to come off the ground, and she screamed, a thin, happy scream of surprise, and for a moment there was no difference between who she was and who she had been. It still felt good, two wheels spinning below and the wind grabbing her hair.

She did not take it straight to the river but instead followed a narrow trail that cut sidelong across the face of the hill. Vic burst through some brush and came out among a pack of boys standing around a fire in a trash can. They were passing a joint.

“Gimme a toke!” she shouted as she rode by and mock-snatched at the little reefer.

The kid with the joint, a scrawny doof in an Ozzy Osbourne T-shirt, was so startled he choked on the lungful of smoke he was holding. Vic was grinning as she rode away, until the kid with the joint cleared his throat and yelled, “Maybe if you come suck us, you f*ckin’ hoor!”

She continued on and away through the chill. A parliament of crows, roosting in the branches of a thick-trunked birch tree, discussed her in the gravest of terms as she rode beneath them.

Maybe if you come suck us, she thought, and for one cold moment the seventeen-year-old girl on the child’s bike imagined turning around and going back to them and getting off and saying, All right. Who’s first? Her mother already thought she was a whore. Vic hated to disappoint her.

She had felt good for a few moments, racing across the face of the hill on her old bike, but the happy feeling had burned itself out and left behind a thin, cold rage. She was no longer entirely sure who she was angry with, though. Her anger didn’t have a fixed point. It was a soft whir of emotion to match the soft whir of the spokes.

She thought about riding to the mall, but the idea of having to put on a grin for the other girls at the food court irritated her. Vic wasn’t in the mood to see people she knew, and she didn’t want anyone giving her good advice. She didn’t know where to go, just that she was in the mood to find some trouble. She was sure that if she rode around long enough, she would come across some.

For all her mother knew, Vic had already found trouble, was lying naked and dead somewhere. Vic was glad to have put such an idea in her head. She was sorry that by this evening the fun would be over and her mother would know she was still alive. She half wished there were a way to keep Linda from ever finding out what had happened to her, for Vic to vanish from her own life, to go and never come back, and how fine that would be, to leave both of her parents wondering if their daughter was alive or dead.

She relished the thought of all the days and weeks they would spend missing her, tormented by dreadful fantasies about what had happened to her. They would picture her out in the sleet, shivering and miserable, gratefully climbing into the back of the first car that pulled over for her. She might still be alive somewhere in the trunk of this old car (Vic was not aware that it had, in her mind, become an old car of some indeterminate make and model). And they would never know how long the old man kept her (Vic had just decided he must be old, because his car was), or what he did with her, or where he put the body. It would be worse than dying themselves, never knowing what dreadful person Vic had come across, what lonely place he had taken her to, what ending she had found for herself.

By then Vic was on the wide dirt road that led to the Merrimack. Acorns popped beneath her tires. She heard the rush of the river ahead, pouring through its trough of rocks. It was one of the best sounds in the world, and she lifted her head to enjoy the view, but the Shorter Way Bridge blocked her line of sight.

Vic squeezed the brake, let the Raleigh gently roll to a stop.

It was even more dilapidated than she remembered, the whole structure canting to the right so it looked as if a strong wind could topple it into the Merrimack. The lopsided entrance was framed in tangles of ivy. She smelled bats. At the far end, she saw a faint smudge of light.

She shivered in the cold—and also with something like pleasure. She knew, with quiet certainty, that something was wrong in her head. In all the times she’d popped Ecstasy, she had never hallucinated. She supposed there was a first time for everything.

The bridge waited for her to ride out across it. When she did, she knew she would drop into nothing. She would forever be remembered as the stoned chick who rode her bike right off a cliff and broke her neck. The prospect didn’t frighten her. It would be the next-best thing to being kidnapped by some awful old man (the Wraith) and never heard from again.

At the same time, even though she knew that the bridge wasn’t there, a part of her wanted to know what was on the other side of it now. Vic stood on the pedals and rode closer, right to the edge, where the wooden frame rested upon the dirt.

Two words were written on the inside wall, to her left, in green spray paint.