I’m already dead, she assured herself. She turned the key in the lock and threw the door open, the gun pointing straight into the apartment, completely useless if either Lars or Ned was to her right or her left.
They weren’t. Caleb still sat at the table, his flesh the white of soap, the blood crusted and black in the center of his face. She closed the door behind her and moved to her right, inching down the wall until she reached the open doorway of the half bath. It appeared empty. She looked in the crack between the open door and the jamb and saw that no one was hiding on the other side.
She moved toward the bedroom. The door was closed. She put her palm on the handle but her flesh was so slick with sweat it slid off. She wiped it on her pants, used her sleeve to wipe the door handle. Grasped it with her left hand, held the gun in her right. Swung the door inward. As she did, she imagined Lars sitting on her bed, waiting for her. A soft pop and she’d be on her back, leaking.
He wasn’t there. The room appeared empty. But it reinforced what she’d felt entering the apartment—they were better at this than she was. If they were in here with her, she was already dead. She entered the master bathroom and then checked the his and her walk-in closets with a sudden fatalism. She felt closer to death than at any time since Leógane. She felt it emerge through the floorboards and penetrate her body, conjoin with her blood and pull her back down through the floor into the cellar of the next world.
That’s what was waiting, what had always been waiting, the next world. Whether it was above or below, white or black, cold or warm, it was not this world with its comforts and distractions and knowable ills. Maybe it was nothing at all. Maybe it was just absence. Absence of self, absence of sense, absence of soul or memory.
She realized now that in Haiti, even before the camp, as far back as Port-au-Prince and the corpses smoldering in the streets and stacked in the parking lot of the hospital, stacked like old cars in junkyards, beginning to swell and balloon in the heat, as far back as then, the truth of their deaths became the truth of her own: We are not special. We are lit from within by a single candle flame, and when that flame is blown out and all light leaves our eyes, it is the same as if we never existed at all. We don’t own our life, we rent it.
She searched the rest of the apartment, but it was clear they weren’t there. Her initial instinct had been right—if they’d been waiting to kill her, they would have done so the moment she came through the door. She returned to the bedroom and packed a backpack with hiking boots, several pairs of warm socks, a heavy wool coat. She took a gym bag with her into the kitchen and added one carving knife, one paring knife, a flashlight and batteries, half a dozen power bars, several bottles of water, and the contents of the fruit bowl on the counter. She left the bag and the backpack by the door and returned to the bedroom. She changed into cargo pants, a thermal long-sleeved T-shirt, a black hoodie. She tied her hair back into a ponytail and covered it with a Newbury Comics ball cap. She opened the floor safe in his closet and removed the cash there and took it and the gun into the bathroom and placed them on the counter and looked in the mirror for a long time, and the woman who stared back at her was exhausted and angry. She was also afraid, but not paralyzed with it. She said to herself, with the compassionate authority of an older sister speaking to a younger, “It is not your fault.”
What’s “it”?
It was Widdy and Esther and the ex-nun, Veronique, and all the dead in Port-au-Prince. It was her mother’s toxicity and her father’s absence and Jeremy James’s abandonment. It was Sebastian’s disappointment in just about everything she did. It was the feeling she’d had as long back as she could remember that she was unforgivably inadequate and worth abandoning.
And the voice in her head was primarily correct—most of it was not her fault.
Except for Widdy. Widdy was her insurmountable sin. Widdy was four years dead. And Rachel, who’d gotten her killed, was four years older.
She lifted a picture of her and Brian off the dresser. Their unofficial wedding photo. She looked in his lying eyes and his lying smile and she knew she was just as much a liar as he was. From grade school through high school, college, grad school, and out into the working world, she had assembled herself into a character she played every day for most of her life. Once that character failed to connect with the audience any longer, she disassembled it and assembled a new one. And on and on. Until, after Haiti, after Widdy, she couldn’t reassemble. All that was left of her was the nub of her hollow, manufactured self and the whole of her sin.
We are liars, Brian. We.
She left the bedroom. In the living room, she realized her laptop wasn’t on the bar where she’d left it. She looked around for a few minutes but surmised pretty quickly that Lars and Ned had taken it with them when they left.
Fine. She had a smartphone.
What she didn’t have was a car. Even if Kessler hadn’t frozen her credit cards, she couldn’t rent a car or use Zipcar because then she’d be a cinch to find. She looked around the apartment again, as if it could tell her something, looked everywhere except at the corpse at her dining room table. And then she realized that’s exactly where she should be looking.
The key fob was in the right front pocket of Caleb’s jeans. She could see the bulge of it when she came around the table to him. She didn’t look at his face. She couldn’t.
What about Haya? she wondered. What about AB? At the party just four days ago, Caleb had lifted his daughter in front of his face and she’d gripped his upper lip and pulled it toward her like a drawer. He’d let her do it. He’d laughed, even as it was clearly painful, and when Annabelle released his lip, he held her to his chest and pressed his nose to the crown of her head and breathed her in.
Caleb had been an actor. Just like Brian. Just like her. But the acting was just one aspect of the whole. He wasn’t acting the father. He wasn’t acting his loves. Wasn’t pretending what his dreams and desires and hopes for the future were.
He had been, she realized, her friend. She’d always thought of him as Brian’s friend, as Brian’s partner because those roles (there was that word again) had been firmly entrenched when he’d entered into his association with her. But time and attrition had created a familiarity and comfort with each other that one could only call friendship.
She reached into his pocket. The denim was stiff and his body was stiffer. Rigor mortis had set in, and it took her a solid minute to work the key fob up his thigh and out of the pocket. In that time it occurred to her that if they’d never returned here so she could e-mail her book to herself, he might still be alive.