Apollo felt as if his head had been dunked underwater. “What in the fuck are you talking about?”
“The tribute page,” Patrice said softly. “To Brian.” He tapped his phone, then handed it to Apollo.
“?‘Tribute to Baby Brian,’?” Apollo read.
There was a Facebook page dedicated to Brian Kagwa.
It had sixteen thousand fans.
The page used the same photo of Brian that had been in all the news reports. The one Apollo had taken down in the basement of the home in Riverdale. Who’d snatched that picture from his personal page first? Which news outlet? And now it was here, too. Apollo’s fingertips felt hotter, as if the phone were burning him.
Patrice spoke softly. “I’m a fan,” he said. Then heard himself and put up his hands. “Not a fan. You know what I mean. I’m going to shut up now.”
Apollo scrolled down, reading through many, many posts. He had a lot of nicknames on the “Tribute to Baby Brian” Facebook page.
The Hanging Husband.
The Prisoner of Apt. 43.
Strangled Dad.
Failed Father.
Mr. My-Son-Is-Dead.
There were kinder ones, of course, but some were even worse. Quite a few blamed him for what had happened. Men and women, members from every race and region of the United States, international contributors, too—all of them had opinions. A segment of every population you could imagine hated him. Many more loathed Emma. Almost all of them spent at least a line condemning her to some kind of hell. The only innocent in all this was the child. And though it hurt, Apollo couldn’t argue with that.
Apollo scrolled back up the page. It had been started while he’d been in the hospital. When he and Emma and Brian had been breaking news. In all likelihood, someone had started the page with good intentions, but then his or her own life got busy, and this person stopped keeping track. Soon no one was driving the train, and everyone was driving the train. Some folks posted messages of love addressing Brian directly, prayers from more holy books than Apollo recognized. There were images of angels holding a baby that looked vaguely like Brian, and others of angels with Brian’s little face scanned directly onto the body. Pictures of Emma, and sometimes Apollo, scanned onto monsters from movies or myth, Medea a mainstay. The image of a tombstone with Emma’s name and the phrase “Rest in Piss.”
For a while, early on, there were people having ongoing arguments about the case, about Emma’s disappearance, about the inability of law enforcement to find her; various conspiracy theories about how Apollo had killed them both and got away with the crime. Posts condemning the misogyny and misandry surfaced throughout. Some threads turned into parenting forums, of a sort, where people discussed the ways Apollo and Emma had parented badly from the beginning. What evidence any of them had about Apollo and Emma’s parenting style was unclear and obviously didn’t matter. They’d been helicopter parents, and that was what went wrong. They’d been a household with two working parents, and that had started the whole mess. A few wrote of their empathy for Emma, saying she’d clearly suffered from severe postpartum depression. Some suggested, one might say gloated, that this kind of thing was incredibly common in black households. They live in hell, these people. So they act like devils.
“I can’t believe this,” Apollo whispered, but he couldn’t stop reading.
All this time—while he’d been in the hospital, in Rikers, and even now, struggling through some sort of recovery—he’d been discussed, dissected, and denounced. He felt as if he’d just been told he’d been walking around with his ass hanging out, so utterly exposed. Was it better that he hadn’t known this page existed, or was that worse?
And then there was the person who’d started the page. The administrator. He went by the name Green Hair Harry. His own page was clearly just a placeholder. The profile photo showed the Grinch grinning. Only one piece of personal information provided (Hometown: Mount Crumpit).
“Why would this guy do this?” Apollo asked, looking up from the phone.
Patrice stared back, his mouth hanging open. “I thought you knew about the page, my man. I never would have…I got a note there was activity on the page. When I went there, I saw that you’d checked in with the Survivors. I figured if you were posting on the Baby Brian page, that meant you knew.”
“I didn’t do that,” Apollo said. “Not on purpose at least. I was just trying to cover my ass with my parole officer.”
Apollo had to stop talking. Going over the technical details about posts and alert notifications made him want to crack Patrice’s phone against the side of Patrice’s head. Speaking of Patrice, why would he even join such a page?
Patrice slipped his phone from Apollo’s hand and placed it facedown on his thigh.
Apollo leaned away from Patrice until his shoulder touched the window. Outside, they’d left Queens and reached Long Island. The yards of the homes were slightly larger, the commercial buildings no more than two stories tall.
Sixteen thousand people had joined that page? For what? As the train sped past these residential homes, Apollo wondered if he might be seeing places where many of them lived. Maybe Green Hair Harry lived in that brick Tudor home right there. Or the next one. Apollo felt his breath leaving him, dizziness so severe he might black out. What had he been worrying about twenty minutes earlier? Fucking witches? Why worry over witches when the Internet could conjure so much worse?
THE LONG BEACH station’s depot had a red-clay-tiled roof and white walls with brown accents at the corners, making it look more like a Mediterranean bungalow than the last stop on the Long Island Rail Road. It was even more incongruous in midwinter when cold winds from Reynolds Channel to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the south made the building shiver.
“That’s our guy?” Patrice asked.
In the parking lot, William Wheeler stood in front of a green 2003 Subaru Outback. His arms were crossed, and he watched the asphalt as if reading tea leaves. For a moment, Patrice and Apollo stood inside the station and watched him. Wheeler uncrossed his arms and walked around the Subaru. He opened the driver’s side door and pulled out a plastic supermarket bag. It was tied at the top, and William untied it with urgency.
The waiting area of the Long Beach station was soundtracked by a low fuzzy buzz; the ticket agent left his microphone on while he stepped away from his chair at the booth. The room practically throbbed as Wheeler reached into the plastic bag. He pulled out a sixty-four-ounce bottle of soda.
Tab.
“It’s 2015,” Patrice said quietly. “Who the fuck still drinks Tab?”
A forty-ounce of beer would’ve been problematic, a liter of gin downright troubling, but a sixty-four-ounce bottle of Tab? Ridiculous. The bottle’s pink wrapper had faded to the color of fiberglass insulation. Wheeler walked back to the front of the Subaru and rested against the hood. He lifted the jug to his mouth and chugged.