—Does it do anything?
—Not yet. May never. Oh well.
Oh well. She smiled. She never saw the contraption again, but its presence signaled the very distracted quality that she realized, in retrospect, allowed their relationship to work. His toothbrush soon appeared in the mason jar on her sink side, his bags of celery and cartons of cottage cheese soon sidled up to her grape jelly and cherry yogurt, and all the while David appeared to have better things to do than obsess over Lydia’s hidden inner life.
In the kitchen, Lydia drank a glass of water, put the kettle on for tea, and began to put away the groceries.
Soon David came in, shirtless, barefooted, with that stupid tattoo of a pork chop just below his rib cage that he’d gotten on a high school trip to Mexico. Lydia had already pulled out the cutting board and unbagged an onion and was just piercing its skin when he pecked her from behind.
“You’re happy,” she said.
“I found a semicolon in the program where a colon should’ve been.”
“Is that good?”
“Really good,” he said. “Thousands of lines deep. Boss gave me a clumsy high five. It was awesome.”
She studied him for a clue that he was being sarcastic, but he wasn’t.
“I just saved our department about a week’s worth of headache,” he added, fumbling through a basket of fruit. “What about you? Any better at work today?”
It was a question David had asked her every day for the past week, ever since Joey. It still didn’t make sense, she thought, what the kid had done. A few days ago while emptying the front counter trash, she’d come across a crumpled wad of yellow crime-scene tape that someone had shoved into the dumpster like an unspooled cassette, and she’d stared at it for a long time, unable to peel herself away, as if its cursive loops might explain why Joey—young, bright, damaged Joey—had climbed the shelves and tightened a strap and stepped into his death. She thought about the books she’d seen him reading in the weeks before he’d died—fractal geometry and microbial art and Petrarchan sonnets—but as far as she could tell they reflected the same tastes, both broad and narrow at once, he’d always indulged. In her search for an answer, she’d even gone up to the third floor earlier today and stood in the center of the Western History section, wondering if his choice to kill himself there, around those titles, signaled some deeper meaning.
Just as she was about to give up and head downstairs to help at the counter, Lydia noticed that the floral chair in the corner where Joey had spent his last living hours had been shoved too far against the wall. When she leaned over to reposition it, lifting and tucking its cushion for good measure, she spotted something tiny and white, about the size of her pinkie nail, sitting in the seam behind the cushion. She reached past a penny and a few oyster crackers to dig it out. A tab of paper. A perfect little rectangle. At first, she wondered if Joey had been dealing panes of LSD that night or cutting chains of paper dolls, but when she placed it on her palm and saw that it had clearly been cut from a book, she thought that he might have left her a suicide note, after all. She held it under the light, anticipating a single word that might tease out Joey’s death—sorry; hopeless; murder—but discovered instead that the letters printed on it were fragmented, nearly indecipherable: an almost e, an almost j, an almost l, an almost m, some almost others. A biopsy of a page that added up to nothing.
Lydia’s hands were holding the onion and the knife, but they weren’t moving, and she was staring blankly at the silver toaster in the corner of the counter.
“Work was fine,” she said to David. “I guess I’m getting over it.”
He nodded, rolling an apple against his palm.
“Listen,” he finally said, “maybe this isn’t the best time, and I know it’s out of nowhere, but can I ask what’s up with you and your dad?”
Lydia felt her blood grow warm and her skin prickle cold. David took a bite of apple, then spat the apple’s sticker into the sink.
“You’re right,” she said, suddenly focused on chopping, dicing, swiping. “It’s really not the best time.”
“His name is Tomas, right?” David said.
Hearing her father’s name, Lydia felt like a child lifting the lid of a coffin. All it took was a peek.
“He called this morning,” he added. “Just after you left for work.”
She could feel her face flush and she quickly made a scene of washing her hands—pumping the soap dispenser, cranking the faucet to scalding.
“He needs to leave me be,” she said. “David, did you talk to him?”
“A little.”
She looked up from the sink and stared at David for a sign that her father had told, that David now knew who she really was: Little Lydia. The bloody-faced girl beneath the sink, the survivor from the evening news. Because no one from her present life knew. No one could know.
“If he calls here again,” she said, “please hang up.”
“All parents suck when you’re a teenager, Lydia,” he said, irritating in his calm. “Maybe he’s just trying to reconnect.”
“This is different,” she said, and she could feel a painful bubble expanding inside her throat. “He moved me to the middle of nowhere, then he just checked out. After the age of ten I basically raised myself.”
“Okay.”
“So hang up if he calls again. Please.”
“Okay.”
David started to reach for her but turned at the last moment and wiped some crumbs from the counter instead.
CHAPTER FOUR