Her mother hadn’t cried at all.
Cat had been so angry, but Anais had insisted that leaving him to suffer for another moment in pain would be the only thing that could really hurt him, that Cat’s anger was misplaced. Putting him to sleep is a gift we can and must give, Anais had insisted, but Cat had been only eight years old. She hadn’t understood.
She remembered the heavy strands of his forelock, each one thick as dental floss, and holding the hank of it in her hands. The milky whites of his huge eyes, wild and glassy, and pained, until they were blank, and, finally, the size of the needle they’d used to inject morphine into his haunches. Cat remembered it as the size of a drinking straw.
She suddenly felt very, very tired.
After a while—when it became clear that she wasn’t going to speak—someone walked her out of the apartment, into the elevator, through the lobby, and helped her get in a cab. She settled in and blankly gave the driver her address. As they pulled away, she caught a glimpse of Callie’s body, zipped into a thick plastic bag, being loaded into the ambulance.
Two days later Hutton sat on the floor of Callie’s apartment looking through a shoebox of photographs she’d left on the floor. With a flash of his badge and a copy of the death certificate, he’d had no trouble getting the super to let him right in.
The photograph in his hands showed a lighter-blonde Callie wearing a tattered black Hank Williams T-shirt while she smoked a cigarette in front of Dakin House. An equally youthful version of himself stood behind her, a rolled cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. He remembered when she bought the T-shirt in a thrift store out in Williamsburg, on an afternoon they’d spent drinking and shopping after waking up on somebody’s sofa. Whose party had that been? He tried to remember. It must have been something in Bushwick, he thought, maybe McKibbin, back when it was still deemed habitable, before the rat infestation had forced the city to permanently evacuate the building.
There were so many photos of him, of the two of them together. Every photo forced the same set of recollections: what day of the week it had been, where they had been going. He spent an hour going through the box. She’d loved him. They’d loved each other. He knew that. But it wasn’t enough. They’d never worked out.
When they’d met she was a naive girl from Ann Arbor who’d never had anything stronger than the so-called 3-2 beer they sold at midwestern gas stations. First it had been mushrooms and pot, then a short spell with cocaine, and then five years ago: heroin. Dope, she always called it, like she was a character in a Tom Robbins novel.
He didn’t know when she started using, but he remembered the first time he’d seen it. He’d stopped by Callie’s apartment just to see if she’d wanted to fool around, and found her listening to Depeche Mode and painting her fingernails with two of her spacey girlfriends from some bar.
“Want some dope?” she’d asked—her eyes huge, her voice so cheery, like it was anything else, like she was offering him a cocktail or a cigarette or a frozen mini-quiche. Too shocked to express his own horror, he’d just said no thank you, and hung out for a while until it was clear that everyone was so fucked up they wouldn’t notice if he left. He stopped calling her for a while after that, but he could never cut her out completely.
After a year or two of using she’d gone to rehab. Hutton had asked her to. She’d given in way more easily than he’d expected, happily grabbing her ID and getting in a cab to the airport, docile as a puppy. Later he realized how high she’d been. It took her two tries to get clean, and a long stay at home with her parents, but she eventually did it, a period during which he also left CBS and joined the NYPD. Hutton had paid for the whole thing without ever telling her. She thought her meager insurance, a long-expired hundred-dollar policy from her first modeling agency, had covered it.
By the time she came back Callie’s problems had—frankly—been too much for him to bear.
“I want you to be clean for yourself,” he’d said at the time. “I’ll always be here for you.”
“I am clean for myself,” she’d insisted. But she hadn’t made the changes she needed to make, he realized now. She’d kept the same group of friends, kept partying.
It was never my job to keep her sober, he reminded himself. It was never my job to tell her how to be. It was never my job to be her only lifeline; he knew all of that, and yet the guilt washed over him in a tidal wave, replacing all the blood in his veins.
He kept looking through the photographs. They’d been so young, and so beautiful, and so stupid, once upon a time. He could barely believe they’d survived. She didn’t, he suddenly remembered, in that way that you have to forget and remember and forget and remember and forget and remember—when people are very newly dead—that you’ll never ever see them again.
He’d been the one to call her parents, from the morgue on the Upper West Side the day after she died; a detective there who knew him had recognized Hutton’s name in Callie’s contacts. He’d tried to explain that yes, she’d been at a party, but he didn’t think it was that kind of party. No, he’d had no idea she was using again.
She’d choked on a piece of gum in the penthouse apartment of 150 Central Park West, at a party for RAGE Fashion Book. The drugs had relaxed her muscles, delaying her gag reflex when the gum she’d been chewing had slid down into her useless, weakened throat. And Catherine Ono—Cat!—had tried to save her, but the coroner found that the girdle Callie had worn to fit into her dress was so tight that Cat’s attempts at the Heimlich maneuver had failed. They’d found one of Cat’s fake fingernails stuck to the gum. But ultimately there was no explanation that could satisfy the exceptional grief of two people who had lost their only child, a person they had made and raised and loved.
Hutton checked his watch. The movers he’d hired to pack and ship Callie’s things to her family, to spare them the pain of it, would be here in twenty minutes. He wiped his tears, stood up, then looked through every drawer and cabinet trying to find anything she might not have wanted her mother to see; notebooks, videos, photographs, anything. He found a hard drive, another box of photographs—most of them nude—and her laptop, which was password-protected. He put everything in a duffel bag and told himself he’d have the electronics wiped the following week. He searched for the little black notebook she’d carried everywhere, but he couldn’t find it. The notebook must have been in her purse, he thought. The police would have released her belongings with the body. It was probably in a coffin on a plane right now. Her mother might read it, but he’d done his best, he told himself, even if it was too late.