THIRTY
I woke at seven in a room thick with darkness. My limbs felt like I had spent the night folded into a metal suitcase. I ran a hand over my face and winced when I touched my cheekbone. I wasn’t sure where I was. I heard kitchen noises coming from far away and quietly got out of the bed. I didn’t feel hungover so much as fragmented, like half of my thoughts had been forcibly removed from my head. My throat was raw. I looked at my phone but the battery was dead again. My jeans were inside out on the floor, shed like a skin. I was still wearing my shirt. I looked through the open doorway and saw another bedroom with the door closed, an alarm clock bleating, ignored, inside. Over the metal railing, the lower level of the loft looked like the scene of a disaster movie, so many plastic cups and paper napkins and a smear of something on the wall by the vagina painting that was either hummus or vomit. A woman with long black hair was passed out on the ottoman, snoring faintly. Catherine was in the kitchen drinking coffee and her dress was unzipped. I pulled on my jeans and boots and went down the spiral staircase.
“Good morning,” I said.
She smiled but it didn’t touch her eyes. She had always been like this, all over me one minute, then struck down by the blackest of moods the next. “You were totally out up there,” she said. “I was surprised you stayed.”
I thought that was a strange thing to say. “She stayed,” I said, pointing to the snoring girl. “You stayed.”
“Um, yeah, I did,” she said like I was stupid.
“So what, ah, happened?”
Catherine looked at me. “Funny,” she said.
I shook my head, grabbing on to the counter for stability as I did so. “Seriously,” I said.
“Seriously, I think you drink too much if you don’t even fucking remember. Thanks for coming. We had a good time.”
I felt my face getting hot. I looked at her in the thin morning light. Her eyeliner was smudged and her hair was tangled and standing there in this big, modern kitchen, she could have been anyone.
We.
That we wasn’t Catherine and me. It was Catherine and Thao.
It made sense, all of a sudden.
I fumbled with the zipper of my jacket. I needed to not be in this apartment anymore. I should have known better than to think that Catherine could fix anything. I gave up on the zipper. My hands were shaking too much. “You couldn’t have said something?” I said.
Catherine set down her coffee mug and it clattered against the granite countertop. “What does that mean?”
I stared at her in disbelief. “It means the other night, I asked you where your husband was, if you’d stoop to having dinner with me,” I said. “I guess the more relevant question is where Thao was.”
“Don’t get mad,” Catherine said. “The other night was great. Last night was great. Either way, I’m attached. So what’s the difference?”
She knew exactly what I meant. I could see it in her eyes. “The difference,” I said, even though I knew I shouldn’t bother, “is last year you said you wanted to work on things with him.”
“Yeah.”
“And I said when you were done with all that, come find me.”
“Yeah.”
“And you said you would,” I said. “But instead you found her? You’re choosing her? How long has this been going on?”
“It’s been a few months.” She folded her arms over her chest. “And I don’t know what you’re talking about, choosing. Come on, Roxane, you know how things are. It’s not like you and I owe each other anything.”
It sounded a little like what I’d told Tom last week, except I liked it less when it was directed my way, and especially when I realized in both cases it was about sleeping with someone other than me. I blinked hard. “This is perfect,” I said. I felt every second of the last forty-eight hours pressing down on my heart. “Why would you invite me here?”
She picked up her coffee cup again. “I wanted to see you.” Her tone was infuriatingly innocent.
“You don’t get to want that,” I snapped at her. “Not when you don’t give me all the information.”
She laughed, like anything could possibly be funny. “Oh, you,” she said. “Trying to tell me what I’m allowed to want.”
I turned around and walked out.
No one chased after me this time.
*
After a forty-minute shower and two cups of tea, I still wasn’t ready to face things. I lay in bed with the blinds drawn. I wanted to sleep for a year and wake up sober and entirely happy. But I couldn’t even sleep for five minutes. Finally I looked at my phone and considered the damage from the past day.
Calls from: Danielle (confused), Marisa (concerned, having heard from Kenny about what happened to me), Danielle again (annoyed), Tom (concerned/apologetic), Matt (inviting me to an AA meeting with him), my mother (with the phone number of her dermatologist), Joshua (no update), Shelby (no message). The unknown number remained silent.
Even it had determined that I had no next move, that I proved no threat to anyone.
I stared at the stars on my ceiling, willing them to tell me what to do. Either they didn’t know, or they weren’t saying. Finally I got up and took my tea into the office and called Danielle.
“I’m sorry for the delay in getting back to you,” I told her. “I have no excuse. But it won’t happen again.”
“Listen, Roxane,” she said. “I don’t think this is working out.”
I pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead. “Danielle—”
“It’s nothing personal, really,” she said, “and I don’t mean to be judgmental about whatever, um, problems you might have. But my brother is running out of time. Literally. He doesn’t have any time to waste. I hired you to help him, and instead you spent the last week trying to pin some other shit on him?”
So she’d finally talked to her brother. I felt my face get hot again, even though I was alone. “I wasn’t trying to pin anything on Brad,” I told her. I stood up and paced the length of the hallway. “I was trying to figure out how these events were connected. In my line of work, you have to explore everything. Even when it looks ugly. Even when it’s the opposite of what you set out to do. I know—”
“No, I don’t think you do.” Danielle cleared her throat. “Brad had Columbus police detectives in to visit him the other day, about that Mallory Evans girl you asked me about. They didn’t just spontaneously decide to revisit that.”
Fuck you, Tom, I thought unfairly.
“So I can’t work with you anymore,” she finished. “That’s all I wanted to say.”
I couldn’t even argue with her. I walked back to the office, once again refusing to look at the square of cardboard on the front door. “Okay.”