Chapter 2
Truthfully, I am a person who should not have married.
I am not the kind who ever had any chance of settling in happily to domestic life.
It wasn’t modeled for me, that type of existence where people fall in love, build something together, have children, grow old, die.
My parents modeled fear, violence, chaos.
So it’s not surprising that my ill-fated marriage ended quickly, uglily, both of us still bearing the scars.
That’s why I don’t answer the call from “The Asshole” when the notification pops up on the dashboard screen.
There’s a second and a third. His ringtone is set to Darth Vader’s theme, “The Imperial March,” by John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra.
Not especially creative but appropriate, given his role in my life.
Someone who could have been one thing but turned out to be quite another.
People tend to get maudlin around the holidays. He’s probably drunk somewhere, lamenting his life choices, fantasizing about how we “could have made it work” and “were good for each other in some ways.”
The garage door opens at my approach, and I pull inside, let it close behind me.
I wait a few seconds before I kill the engine.
I always toy with it. Just sitting there with the engine running and the door closed until—nothing.
They say that it’s a peaceful way to go, just like falling into a blissful sleep.
My shrink calls this suicidal ideation, and it concerns her that it’s something I think about quite often—how, when, if.
“Doesn’t everyone think about it?” I asked. I mean—we’re all going to die, right? It’s just a matter of time. So why not bow out on your own terms?
“Of course people think about it. But it seems to me more like you’re strategizing, considering options. Most people cling to the time they have on this planet. That’s the norm.”
“Well, that explains it. No one has ever accused me of being normal.”
“If you’re depressed—” She’s always offering up medication.
But I’m clean—no drugs, no alcohol, no nicotine.
I keep the machine in tip-top operating condition.
I can afford nothing less in my line of work.
Because while I’m happy to consider ending my own life, there’s no way some fucker is going to get the drop on me.
“I’m not depressed,” I assured her. “Let’s just call it death curious.”
Depressed implies that at some point you were happy, that there’s an alternate state of being to which you aspire.
I’m not sure I’ve experienced that—true, lasting happiness.
I don’t know what it looks like. From the outside it seems pretty delusional.
But I guess that’s just my skewed perspective on reality.
I kill the engine, sit a moment in the dim of the garage.
I can still smell her on me, a clean, light scent, feel the weight of her in my arms. Apple.
When I think of how close I came to ruining her life, how any of my colleagues would have ended her while she slept in her princess bed, I feel something almost like sadness.
I’ve been triggered. The image of my father kicking and kicking my mother, her gaze holding mine between the slats of the closet door until her eyes just went blank and a thin line of blood trailed from her mouth.
Something happened to my brain, like I browned out. Shock, I suppose.
Where are you, kid? my father said when she’d gone quiet. He was panting like a beast. I smelled blood. Come on out. I’m not going to hurt you.
There were sirens then. I still held the phone in my hand.
911, what’s your emergency?
My father found us. He’s going to kill us.
What’s your address? Stay on the line. I’m with you.
It took them twenty-two minutes. If they’d come faster, maybe they’d have saved her. But apparently it was a busy night in the East Village. Black Friday, actually. That tacky, gluttonous start to the holiday season. For me, the end of everything.
I try to breathe through the rise of emotion, the way my shrink taught me. Box breathing, she calls it. Inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four. Repeat until your nervous system reregulates. Sometimes it even works.
But not tonight.
I stare at my phone a moment, hoping for another text from Nora, something that softens her last communication. But no.
Finally, I climb out of the car and head inside.
The lights are on, and there’s music playing.
The aroma of something cooking makes me think just briefly of The Asshole with something other than loathing.
He was an amazing cook. We ate and fucked like rock stars.
We laughed a lot, too, shared the same dark sense of humor.
Buried deep in my bag, his ringtone again.
He must be really wasted. He’ll never leave a voicemail, just keep calling until I give in or he gives up.
Drake’s at the stove as I walk in, put my tote on the stool at the veined-quartz kitchen island. He turns, flashes me a smile.
“How’d it go?”
“Unforeseen complications.”
“Oh?” He walks over with a wooden spoon. “Try this. Careful. It’s hot.”
It’s good. Not great. There’s something he lacks in the kitchen.
Sophistication, I think. He’s young, ten years my junior.
He’s never been to France or Italy; only recently has he even been to Manhattan.
So there are layers to food, to art—to life—that elude him yet.
When he first came into my life, he thought Olive Garden was fine dining.
But he has other skills. And he’s learning fast.
“Hmm,” I say. “Bolognese. It’s fantastic.” It’s not. But it is rich, meaty. I never eat before a job, so I’m starving now. Something he knows, so he always has dinner waiting. Like I said, he has other skills.
“So . . . what happened?”
“Can we not talk about it?”
He shrugs his well-developed shoulders. “Sure. When you’re ready.”
Drake is another of Nora’s prodigies, like I was once.
A rescue. The story goes that she found him as he was about to enlist in the army after aging out of the foster care system.
She found me at community college, also just aged out of foster care, working at a boxing gym called KO Punch and sleeping in the pool house of its owner, Maxine Marsh.
Maxine taught me how to fight, how to take out my rage on the heavy bag.
She taught me how to defend myself. I came to her a fourteen-year-old scared of my own shadow, brought in by a local cop who caught me shoplifting.
Instead of arresting me, he took me to Maxine, and she took me under her wing.
When I aged out of foster care, Maxine took me in and gave me a job.
By the time Nora discovered me, I was a locally competitive junior female featherweight, strong, fast, willing to take on any opponent.
You’re special, kid. You have a spark. Don’t let them snuff it out.
That’s what Maxine would say when I’d take refuge at the gym after whatever drama had unfolded at school or at the group home where I finally wound up.
She saved me from what I was about to become—on the pole, or addicted, or dead, like so many lost girls.
“You’re a million miles away,” says Drake now. I sit at the table. He pours me a glass of cabernet. “Tell me.”
I tell him about how the job went bad, about Apple. He listens, watching me over his glass.
“You did the right thing,” he says when I’m done.
“Nora won’t see it that way.”
Faintly, I hear my phone ringing, still buried in the bottom of my bag. What does he want?
“Make her understand.”
Drake is naive, still thinks we have something to say about how things go.
Nora chose Drake because he was a deadeye.
His foster father apparently thought a good bonding activity was taking him to the gun range.
When his talent was discovered by the range owner, Nora got the call.
Her network, eyes in unusual places, looking for unusual talent possessed by a certain type of young person.
Lost girls and boys with nowhere to go and no one who looks when they disappear—or even cares.
It goes without saying that I shouldn’t be sleeping with Drake. I’m his mentor, and he’s far too young. Unfortunately, we have a sexual chemistry that can’t be denied.
We don’t even bother with the dishes, tearing at each other’s clothes as we move down the hallway to my bedroom.
He’s as attentive and eager as a labradoodle.
His youth, his beauty, is a salve. I love to watch his toned, muscular body writhe with pleasure beneath me, feel his lips on my skin.
There’s so little comfort in this life; I’m a proponent of taking it where you can get it.
Afterward, he drifts off, and I get up to clean the kitchen. This is an activity I find soothing. I take my time, making sure everything is spotless.
When I’m done, a glance at my phone reveals two more calls from The Asshole.
He has a name. Julian. But it’s better for me if I cast him as the villain in everything that transpired between us.
Otherwise, I have to contend with my own regrets and wonder if things could have been different.
There’s no time for that. What’s done is done.
I ignore the calls, turn off the lights, secure the perimeter.
As I’m checking the front door lock, I spy a pair of headlights going dark across the street. A black SUV sits. No one gets out. The windows are tinted black, so from where I stand, I can’t see anyone inside. But I know there’s someone there. Watching.
I move swiftly to the floor safe in the pantry, retrieve my Glock, and make sure it’s loaded—though I know it is.
Back at the keypad by the front door, I set the alarm, activate the motion-sensor cameras.
This house is a fortress—bulletproof-glass windows, dead bolted security doors, every entry point monitored.
No one will get in without my knowing about it.
When I get back to the front door and peer out the side window, the SUV is gone.
Heart thumping, I sweep the house, just to make sure there isn’t anyone already inside, waiting for us to sleep—every room, the basement, the attic. But it’s clean.
I sit on the stairs, looking out the window at the street. It’s quiet, my neighbors’ homes decorated tastefully for Christmas, twinkling lights in pines, red-ribboned wreaths on doors, animatronic reindeer grazing in yards. The pretty, easy lives of the innocent.
In my pocket, my phone pings again.
He’s given up calling. This time it’s a text.
It’s just two emojis, a knife and a Santa.
I puzzle over it for a time. Has he lost his mind?