17. The Risk is Drowning So I’ll Dive Right In
THE RISK IS DROWNING SO I’LL DIVE RIGHT IN
“TERESA’S JUST RANDOMLY GONE missing,” Teddy was ranting to me over the phone, “because apparently it’s perfectly fine to take multiple sick days without warning—she’s definitely fired, but that doesn’t help me, seeing as I’ve got double the workload.
” He was in the process of canceling the drink I’d suggested, which I took as divine favor. “What about tomorrow?”
“I’m at work tomorrow. But I’m sure we’ll find the time.
” I was barely paying attention. I was thinking about who Teresa was and whether Jude knew her.
Whether her body might show up somewhere contorted in the news.
I watched the local news religiously now, something I’d never done before, but nothing gruesome had come up yet.
Maybe she really was just an irresponsible employee.
(The image of Jude scrubbing beneath his fingernails filled my head, enveloping me like the bright smell of lemon disinfectant, something my subconscious seemed to have added into my memory for purposes of scene.)
A few days later, our plans were canceled again.
These things happened! I assured Teddy that work was just crazy, my mom had lots of demands, she never liked it when I was out of the house inconsistently—I even worked in something about filial piety, leaning hard on my generational immigrant trauma just to get one persistent boy off my back.
In the meantime, my checking account began to collect routine deposits.
I went to work at the shop and I went on auditions and I did one particularly stupid stock photo shoot and I took circuitous routes home, gradually piling an apology stronghold of coffee beans into my mother’s pantry.
She’d turned enough of a profit at the shop to invest it in an improvement to the apartment complex: air conditioning.
In our unit. I was so happy I think I might have blacked out and cried.
And then, of course, there was the villa.
The first night back, after the storm, I found myself singing as I drove, excitement churning low in my belly, the appearance of the house below the crest of the driveway greeting me like the smile of someone I longed to fuck.
Which, I told myself, wasn’t the case. I certainly didn’t want to succumb to it this easily, to let go of the fantasy, which I felt sure was the only thing that kept luring me back.
It was true, Jude had gotten me exactly right: I loved the danger of it, the way reality seemed to tip slightly off-center, balanced serenely on the courtyard parties where time suspended, where blood was wiped clean and the flowers smelled of uncooked meat and there was a coexistence at all times of life and death, past and present, the sterile renovation of a celebrity mansion against the backdrop of Gatsby gilded rot.
I didn’t know what to feel when I got to the house and he was missing from his room.
I’d been preparing myself to engage him very coolly, with an air of not particularly wanting to be there, planning ahead for a game I already knew how to play.
Of course, if he’d let me do things like that, reaching into the playbook that William de Witt himself had said was too obvious to mistake for real, then I wouldn’t have thought of him as interesting.
You’d think I would have understood that by then—that just because something breaks a pattern doesn’t mean it’s inherently good.
Jude’s room was dark, abandoned, lit dimly by the hallway light. I ran my fingers along the orange bottles of his medication, trying to determine whether they’d increased in number. For the first time, something about them caught my eye—it wasn’t Jude’s name on the bottles.
The patient’s name, for whatever reason, was Killian de Witt.
I looked up for the camera then and found it. I stared for a moment into its one lifeless eye and set the bottles back down. Raised both hands up as if to say I get it, we were never here.
Then I continued my search for Jude, conveniently within my job description. Emmanuelle was downstairs in the courtyard as usual, swaying drunkenly, her body loose and fluid when she spotted me and gripped me by the shoulders.
“Emmanuelle, have you seen Jude?”
“Anya darling.” Her eyes were glazed, unfocused, only partially open.
I thought she’d gotten some filler removed, or maybe something else, like the reshaping of her cheek.
“You’ve got to save me from this boys’ club.
Do you know who they want to direct?” She said the name of a director so famous I almost don’t want to write it down in case it counts as libel.
“We are living in a clown world, my dear.”
I caught his eyes then, the flicker of marine layer that lingered on the edge of the courtyard, like he could only physically materialize in my periphery, too strange for me to look at head-on.
He brought a glass to his lips, surreptitiously cocking his head with an invitation, and I knew it was the monster, because Jude always seemed too out of place in a crowd.
It was impossible to imagine him existing in real life—but this, his seemingly invisible presence, seemed particularly uncanny.
The way he blended in so easily. I almost believed he was a figment of my imagination, because he should have been unmissable.
Tall and strange and covered in grime and violence, a gleam of fluorescence haloing his buzzed head.
I suddenly remembered the fight I’d seen from the roof, the two men silhouetted from a distance. The distaste William de Witt had shown for my curiosity about his black eye.
Jude held my gaze for a moment as if he could see my thoughts.
Then he turned to leave.
“Anya.” Emmanuelle circled my wrist tightly with both hands, her lips tinged slightly black with something, probably a smoothie.
“You can’t imagine the prison I’m in. Do you have any idea how difficult it is, jumping when he says jump, as if the very thought of him doesn’t repulse me, body and soul?
I’m sick of the lies, and I’m so fucking alone—”
I disentangled myself carefully. “You’re not alone, Emmanuelle. Look, there’s Atticus!” I called to him, waving him over. “I’ve got to go check on Jude, all right? I’ll be back soon.”
“Jude, Jude, Jude!” Emmanuelle burst into tears. “He’s all anyone cares about. It’s Julian this, Julian that, all day long—”
Atticus took to consoling her, or seemed to, so I slipped off in the direction Jude had gone, unsurprised to find myself on the narrow path I still thought of as the servants’ entrance. I heard the garage door opening and quickly ran to block the driveway.
He was sitting in the driver’s seat of the red convertible I’d chased him down in once before.
“Don’t you dare,” I said, breathing hard. A patchwork of dreamscapes met me then: my hair blowing in the wind, Jude’s hands on my waist, fumbling with the catch of my seatbelt.
He looked at me, and I knew with the certainty of my grandmother’s gift how I’d gotten home the night Valerie Nguyen was murdered.
I didn’t know yet that Teresa Guzman was already dead. I wouldn’t really know until everything was already over, when I understood just how guilty I’d been.
“Get in,” he said.
I stepped around from the front of the car and climbed into the passenger seat.
I didn’t ask questions like do you even have a license because after a while, you just succumb to the aftermath of what you’ve done.
That’s what I mean by my guilt, because all of this would get much worse before I finally admitted the truth: that I saw suffering and closed my eyes, and not because I couldn’t bear to see it.
It’s because I was looking somewhere else.
At the ocean eyes fixed on the road before us, on everything I couldn’t yet see.
While he drove, I lifted my hands high like nothing could touch me.
Like no harm could befall me. I didn’t look where I should have because I wanted to taste the limits of what I could survive.
And because I didn’t have to. He was already looking at me.
By the time Jude pulled the car over on Mulholland, I had silenced Teddy’s third call.
“Is it even safe for you to be driving? You know, with the … seizures?” I asked evasively, and shivered. I hadn’t grabbed the jacket from my car because I hadn’t expected to be driving along the hills in the dark.
Jude looked at me, then pulled over near the crest of a peak and wordlessly got out of the car.
He walked toward the edge of the road, overlooking the hills.
I calculated briefly how I’d stop him if he tried to jump, then gave up.
I planned for the rest of the night the way I planned for my own success: I’d already said yes to this.
What good did it do to prepare for any less acceptable alternatives?
So I followed him to the edge of the cliff.
“What did you find?” he asked without looking at me. “When you were poking around the house the other night.”
“Not much,” I admitted. I waited another moment, then added, “I heard more than I saw.”
“Mm. Ova,” he said.
“Ova?” I echoed. “Like egg? You actually call someone that?”
He glanced at me sideways. “So murder you’re okay with, but you draw the line at misogyny?”
“I mean, kind of,” I muttered under my breath.
His smile quirked.
Then, “It’s not what it sounds like.”
“It sounds like you consider a sentient woman to be nothing more than her uterus.”
“If it helps, I also think very little of men,” he said.
“Do you think she’s beneath you?” I pressed him.
“Anya.” He pointed up. “Are you seeing this?”
“What? Stars?” Obligingly, I looked up. “They’re wonderful. But I’m not done.”
“Okay.” He turned to me. “Continue.”
“I just don’t think I can get behind that kind of fundamental disrespect. I mean, I’m a woman. I’m a lot more than my fucking eggs.”
“But the demon thing is fine.” His face was expressionless.
“I didn’t say the demon thing was fine—”
“You got in a car being driven by an epileptic demon.”