When Lydia stepped into her empty apartment, the first thing she saw was Joey’s black suit hanging like a headless man from a hook on her bedroom door. She startled and nearly dropped her keys, but once she recovered, she found herself staring at the suit with fresh eyes, thinking differently about its presence.
Lyle had mentioned buying this suit for Joey, but as far as he knew, Joey had never even worn the thing. Lydia realized that she was equally in the dark, and that she’d dragged it out of Joey’s apartment and brought it here without ever even inspecting it. Feeling queasy and invasive, she turned her head to the side and reached under the dry-cleaning plastic as if it were a hospital gown, then began to grope through the suit’s pockets. She was hoping for Bright Ideas labels or little cutout tabs, or maybe even a final note, but found only a single blue foil wrapper that had once held a small sphere of chocolate, probably the same kind she’d smelled melted in his jeans as he’d hanged. Nothing else. Even after throwing it out, she felt sick to her stomach.
After stuffing the suit into her closet, she scrubbed her hands and climbed into a pair of David’s Broncos sweats and his ripped Thrasher hoodie. Before she’d even finished heating her rice and beans in the microwave, and before she’d even set out the bottle of Tabasco and glass of water on the table in the kitchen, and before she’d even picked out whatever novel would accompany her dinner—eating and reading in solitude being a pleasure she ranked just below sex with David, and just above deliveries of hot Chinese food on cold winter nights—before any such evening rituals took hold, Lydia settled herself at the kitchen table, unbuckled her satchel, and laid out the new pair of books that she’d borrowed earlier from work. If Joey’s misplaced labels were correct, these titles would allow her to hear a few more fragments of his disembodied voice.
While Lydia was here dancing with the dead, David was down in Colorado Springs for a few days, manning a booth at a homeschooling convention. After more than a year working on the lowest rungs of the IT basement, he had recently been asked to represent the company on a trial basis at a few education conferences around the state. No one gets out of that basement alive, David sometimes said, so it was a big deal among his programming peers that a coding grunt had been recruited to meet with potential customers. Lydia had been reassuring him for days that he was just the person for the job, but she couldn’t help but feel a guilty pleasure tonight in knowing she’d have the apartment to herself.
Lydia pulled her dinner from the microwave and began picking through Joey’s milk crate, looking for the cut-up books that she could pair with those she’d brought home from work. Finding the titles on the bookstore shelves earlier had been more difficult than she’d expected. In her sunflower notebook she’d created a list of all the titles printed on the labels on the back of Joey’s books, but during her search she learned that many were no longer on the shelves at all; they’d been sold or placed on hold, were missing or on order or lost in some inventory dead zone. Without those complementary titles there could be no messages, but she had enough to stay occupied. At least for the evening.
Lydia picked one of the cut-up books from the crate—a trade paperback of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love that she’d personally sold to Joey—and double-checked the label he’d stuck to the back to make sure she was pairing the titles correctly: it belonged to Walker Percy’s novel The Last Gentleman, one of the books she’d borrowed earlier from the store. When she stacked them atop each other, the two were the exact same size, as expected. In the heart of Joey’s copy of Geek Love, she found little windows cut into four or so pages—34, 89, 144, 233—and one at a time, she began to slide them over the corresponding pages in The Last Gentleman until his words emerged:
My D
add
Y
wast
, he???st
. At
emy
mo
mm????the
Fo
ood!” B????an
ks
and the
“Me?”
talc
ots??and the
L.A.
under
O’Ma
at
sand
then
came
my
on
ly,
. He
r.
Lydia flipped through the books to see if she’d missed any holes, and when she was sure she hadn’t, she looked at the fragments again—my daddy was the state . . . my momm the foood banks and the metal cots and the Laundromaats . . . and then came my only Her—and the last word hooked her sight: Her.
She scooched her chair back on the linoleum and the scrape it made felt like fingers strumming her spine. Outside of his early years with the Molina family, Joey had been a ward of the state, she knew that already, and she knew that this was probably a big part of the reason he felt so totally alone in the world. But those last words, and then came my only Her, suggested a life after the state.
A life with Her. This was new: Joey feeling rescued from that life, feeling saved, by a woman.
Lydia allowed herself to conjure an image of Joey standing behind a twentysomething cutie-pie—flower barrettes and hair cropped short—and bobbing his head to a band at some dim venue, Lion’s Lair or 7-South; or both of them rubbing their hands over the bronze claws of the grizzly in front of the Denver Museum of Natural History; or even Joey standing at a courthouse counter in his cryptic black suit, mumbling his wedding vows with chocolate in his pocket. Maybe later, after this relationship had shattered and sent him into a spin, Joey had burned his marriage certificate and his divorce papers—
But then wait, she thought: Her.
Now Lydia found herself conjuring an image of the girl Joey had almost killed. Lydia pictured her sitting in her car seat with a mouthful of Cheerios as a cinder block emerged before her eyes and exploded on her knee. Joey’s victim was only one year old then, which meant she would be—what? In kindergarten? First grade? Was it possible that Joey had tracked her down after prison, sought her forgiveness, become something like an uncle or a big brother, leading her through the zoo?
But then wait: Her.
A sudden, unsettling thought sloshed through Lydia. What if she—Lydia—was Her? What if Joey had been secretly in love with her, and these messages, that photo (just how had he acquired that photo?), this whole hanging, was some sort of misbegotten attempt to declare his love? Joey’s version of a severed ear.
“Oh, screw you, Joey,” she said out loud in the empty apartment. She shook her head and held her hands palm out. “Don’t let it be that, Joey, please don’t let it be—”
A sudden knock caused Lydia to hop out of her seat. A second knock shifted her sight toward the door. Instinctively she tossed the books into the milk crate and slid it under the kitchen table. She suddenly longed to have David beside her.
Another knock, harder this time.
When she peeked through the peephole, holding a paring knife behind her back, she was startled to see Raj. He leaned against the hallway wall with a swoop of hair over one eye and a box of glazed doughnuts in his arms. With more than a little hesitation she opened the door but kept the chain clasped. She thought she smelled vodka.