Chapter 6
I’m bad at this,” Joel says, arranging his fork at the side of his plate, “but it’s probably better to just put it out there.
” He looks down, seems to gather himself, his curls absorbing the warm light from the stained glass fixture—that old-fashioned Adirondacks-looking kind—hanging over the middle of the table.
I love the way the first hints of gray glint in his brown hair, past and future intermingling.
I’d love to watch him age, over the decades.
Dear Lord.
We are most of the way through dinner. He made chicken with parsley pesto. Ella is lying on the floor in the living room, playing with Mr. Button.
“Okay,” I say. I can’t read in his expression which way this is about to go, only that he’s nervous.
“I can’t be in a relationship,” he says.
I stare at him, my brain polyester—nonabsorbent.
“I’m not sure you were even thinking— ” He looks annoyed at himself, starts again: “I’m not trying to suggest— ” He laughs shortly. “This is going even worse than when I tried it in my head.”
“It’s okay,” I say quietly. “We’ve been hanging out. Some of us sang Adele really dramatically.”
We both laugh, half a laugh each.
“Right,” he says. “And I realized I should be up-front.” He looks at me directly, something painful in his expression. “You’re lovely; it’s not that.”
Lovely. Also my word for him. But now that he’s said it, it seems too mild, a throwaway.
I smile. “Isn’t that the breakup speech? ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’ ” I’m impressed by how even my voice comes out.
He smiles, not quite at me, sheepish. “Yeah. Wrong speech.” He takes off his glasses and sets them on the table, looks at them uncertainly, puts them back on. I observe, for the hundredth time, his short fingernails, the blunted tips of his fingers.
How am I feeling? I can’t tell. My veins have all closed; my blood can no longer move. Is this a strange new symptom of relief?
“Do you think there might be any dessert?” wonders Ella idly from the other room, just barely audible. The dining area is open to the living room with a single step down.
“Not this time,” I say automatically as Joel says with forced cheerfulness, “Yes!”
“Oh,” I say. “You don’t have to.”
“No, it’s okay, I got these cookies. . . .” He looks miserable.
“Hey,” I say. “I can’t be in a relationship, either.”
He glances up.
“Do they have gluten?” Ella has appeared at his side.
He clears his throat. “Nope.” They go into the kitchen together, and I take a moment to curl up in the fetal position inside my skull.
They come back, Ella eating contentedly over a green-glazed plate. I remember Dee’s new “low sugar” rule but it’s too late.
“They’re almond,” says Joel to basically no one.
I give Ella my phone, and she goes over to the couch to play chess with a robot named Eddy, and I know we should’ve just left instead, but I can’t do it. I succumb instantly to the panicked instinct to stall Joel, to keep him talking, possibly forever. If I leave, I may never see him again.
“Why can’t you?” I ask.
He takes a long moment. “It’s hard to explain.”
I wait.
“I told you I took care of my brother. He was . . . depressed.”
My throat goes thick and tight inside. Maybe it had nothing to do with me after all. Depression is different. I don’t cause that. I cause death.
“I was engaged,” Joel says, with the wincing look of someone who doesn’t mean to keep talking, “when he got sick.” My mind, still reeling from the revelation about Adam, swings sharply in a new direction. I instantly hate this woman of the past for having gotten the chance to touch Joel.
He says, “I moved out here to take care of him. I had to be in his apartment; he couldn’t learn another place at that point.” He glances up to explain, “He was blind,” and I force myself to nod. “I wanted to keep it consistent for him, keep things as safe as possible.”
“I’m so sorry.” My voice is a struggle. He’s making it sound like something more than depression was happening, but I can’t be sure, and I can’t bring myself to ask.
“She wasn’t going to move into my brother’s apartment.
Which makes sense. And I just stayed. It fell apart.
And here I am. Couldn’t leave this town after he died.
The Beth El people were really there for me.
One woman, Fran, she’s probably eighty-five, she kept bringing these quiches.
Her son died young, brain cancer, and— Sorry. You don’t want to hear all this.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say again, imagining the fiancée unzipping his fly, her delicate ears, which look natural with diamond studs in them. Why am I picturing her ears?
He shakes his head, like Not your fault.
I shake my head back. My fault.
But of course he doesn’t understand.
Adam ended his own life. Joel implied it, didn’t he?
He’d been so positive, energetic, when I’d known him.
“That probably doesn’t sound like a real explanation,” Joel says.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“I’m stuck there, I guess. I’m not past it. I can’t get past it.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“You, either,” he says. “But what’s yours?”
I push at the sauce on my plate with my fork, cutting aimless channels in it. Time to lie. I take a breath. “I’m just really focused on being there for Ella. Trying to fit in my job.”
We glance at Ella, engrossed in her chess game, the bluish phone light illuminating her face. He nods. “Right. Of course.”
We are silent.
“Cool,” I say lightly, but with finality. “Such grown-ups.”
His eyebrows shoot up at the unexpected humor and he laughs, and I want to run my tongue over his neat, square teeth. “That’s what I’m always going for. You know, that driving-a-Honda vibe.”
“Do you drive a Honda?” I’ve seen his car in the driveway, but I can’t remember.
“I do,” he admits. “They perform well in crash tests.” He’s making fun of himself.
“That’s very practical.”
His gaze bumps into mine, stays.
I can’t look away. I am stuck there, a small spacecraft in a large tractor beam. Utterly exposed, lit up in the dark.
I need to play this right, but I can’t. I put my hands over my face, holding myself in. I take them away, and he’s looking right at me with such serious eyes. He’s looking at me like I’m beautiful.
“Sorry,” he says, admitting to the meaning of the look. He closes his eyes for a moment. “That’s not helpful.”
“Not really. But— ” But I love it. I love you.
You don’t love him! I yell at myself internally, furious. What the fuck. You met him a month ago.
But, my God, it doesn’t matter.
“Tempest,” he says, grit in his voice.
I stand up firmly. “Thank you for dinner.” My left knee gives and I fight not to wobble. Stupid weak body. I am choosing this. I am choosing it to save him.
But if I didn’t kill Adam. If it truly isn’t my fault. Then what if I just tried . . .
I rush my plate into the kitchen, calling over my shoulder. “Two-minute warning, Els! Gotta get home for story time with Mommy.” Dee is working late; we’ll beat her back.
Even if somehow Adam survived me, Joel may not. The others still died. That was real. It happened.
It’s a blessing that he doesn’t want a relationship.
Joel stands up, too, and he’s just waiting there, holding on to the back of his chair, when I come in again and collect more things from the table.
“I’ll clean up,” he says slowly.
“Okay,” I say. “Ella!”
“But I’m going to get Eddy’s queen! I think. Maybe. I might not.”
“Pause the game. You can play it at home. Thank Joel for dinner, please.”
She looks up reluctantly. “Thanks, Joel. That was a really good cookie.”
This is fine, I tell myself as we walk home. This is the best I can ever hope for. I’m still vibrating, like his voice is strumming the thick strings of my ribs, and I can feel him say it over and over. Tempest.
I didn’t let him say whatever he was about to tell me next.
My phone lights up in my bag, and when I look, it erupts in a cascade of frantic notifications.
Leaving my phone on silent is a luxury I can only afford when my clients are nowhere near their due dates.
Grub apparently tried to video call me about twenty times while Ella was playing chess.
She must’ve hit the red button repeatedly and, with some mysterious seven-year-old logic, not felt the need to mention it to me.
He’s texted: HE STRIKES AGAIN, with a link to a news report. An MMA fighter has been found dead. Seems like he stabbed himself with a historic $32,000 samurai sword.
This is really close to you Lorelei im telling you the demon hunter is in nyc. Everything is in a radius around that. I have a really bad feeling that ur in danger.
* * *
Grub’s face appears on my screen within seconds of me calling, a black knit hat pulled down low over his disgusting hair. He’s wearing the disturbing clown hoodie again, plus the hat is embroidered with an eyeball that has a knife stuck in it.
“Where were you?” he demands. “You’re always around at night. You freaked me out.”
“Ella’s friend’s house.” I hate myself.
“From the group?” He knows something isn’t right.
I nod, pulse jumping in silent confession. Ella is only tentatively in her bed after eating her nightly bowl of oatmeal and letting me count to the full one hundred while she brushed her teeth. Dee should be back any minute now, though, and she will take over.
“What are you eating?”
He’s chewing something, effortfully.
“Focus, Lorelei, a man is dead. The demon hunter is on the rampage. It’s a bloodbath.”
“Is this the first one that’s actually had any blood?”
He thinks. “I mean, technically, maybe. Yeah, I guess.”
“It looks like su— ” I start, and Grub cuts me off.
“I read everything about him; he wouldn’t have killed himself. He was all about hurting other people. There was something about him, I’m picking up on it, that made people want to fight him. He got in fights everywhere he went.”
“Because he was a jerk.”
“Because he made other people violent.” He widens his eyes significantly at me. No eyeliner tonight.
“He was an MMA fighter, Grub. Not everyone is using dark magic.”
Grub starts ticking off other “victims” on his ever-growing list. The woman in upstate New York who was running an “organic” makeup pyramid scheme with exceptionally carcinogenic products, the guy in Pennsylvania who was straight up just stealing jewelry and, once, a red Tesla.
No one can remember anything about him, Grub tells me.
Even his family members. The Brooklyn film student who left behind a string of broken hearts, many of them belonging to his professors.
“Kinda like you, Lorelei, just a little?” Grub teases. And quickly adds, “I’m kidding! Just if you sucked.” And then, cracking himself up: “Sucked! Sucked like a succ— ”
“That’s enough. You’re not funny.”
He crams something into his mouth.
I sigh. “Is that candy corn?”
He holds up what seems to be a sack of it.
“Since you’re literally always eating, you could maybe rotate in something other than processed sugar.”
“Insatiable appetite was a curse. Demeter cursed Erysichthon, poor dude, and he ended up eating his own skin off or something. Maybe I have that, too.” He pivots instantly back: “But seriously, this Brooklyn guy was workin’ it.
Some big-deal producer was giving him gigs; someone filed a complaint because they were ‘romantically involved.’ Like, everyone was in love with him even if they weren’t gay before. ”
“Maybe they were, though?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s a spectrum. But Lorelei, for real, this is sus. And he was, like, so full of himself. There’s no way it was suicide.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions. Did it look like suicide?”
He scrunches his nose.
“Grub.” I’m stern.
“Fine! He jumped off the Williamsburg Bridge. Doesn’t mean anything.”
I raise my eyebrows, resting my case. “Kid, you can’t research every single untimely death in the tristate area. You’ll find ways to connect them all. It’s not good for you. Can you get outside into nature a little bit?”
“You sound like Bill. He got me a bike. Like I’m gonna put on that spandex stuff that has, like, a boner pill logo on it and one of those dickhead helmets— ”
“That was nice of him,” I say of his stepdad. Bill was institutionalized for a while when Grub began to like him. That was half a year after his mother got remarried. Grub was seven. No wonder eight was rough.
Grub has learned to keep everyone at a distance, for their own protection. It’s a delicate balance. His mother, he says, doesn’t try as much anymore. But Bill hasn’t given up.
I hear Dee getting home. “I should go.” She’s always a little weirded out by my relationship with Grub.
“The kid?”
“Dee.”
“Say hi for me.” They’ve met on video chat, and he instantly developed a crush on her.
But I don’t say hi for him or even for me.
I stay in my room, repicturing the helpless way Joel looked at me.
Like a door blown open by a strong wind.
I am almost certainly a reckless criminal of an idiot for letting it go this far.
But for an ephemeral midair moment, I let myself think of nothing except the sound of his voice on my name.