26
The New Year’s Eve trash still filled the streets, but the New York storefronts were already moving on to Valentine’s Day.
The pharmacy had heart-shaped cardboard boxes of chocolates in the windows along with paper towels and micellar water. The
coffee shops put up pictures of fluffy pink lattes. The wine shops displayed champagne and every corner deli had roses in
buckets out front, under plastic. She had not been as conscious of this on their walk to Monument Movement. Now romance was
everywhere.
As was the pain in her body. In her head. It was sitting behind her eyes, strumming her optic nerves like a banjo. Stevie
felt too bad to walk but was far too stirred up not to.
She kept her chin and gaze up and tried to hold focus, like they both hadn’t been cornered by Dean, like David hadn’t just
said girlfriend.
“He’s in the middle of this,” she said. “He and Helen were in a group together and pretty much everyone in that group is dead. Now Helen is dead, and Benny is dead. I just don’t know why. If I knew why, I could work backward, I could figure it out.”
“Wait,” David said. “Stop. Just . . . stop running for a second.”
Had she been running? She was a little out of breath. She ground to a halt in front of a FedEx place that said that you could
send your love with guaranteed overnight delivery, because everything was romance. She’d been drowning in it. Maybe there
were hearts up her nose and that’s why she couldn’t breathe.
“Don’t you think,” he said, “that we should maybe work out what’s happening? We haven’t talked about it yet,” he said.
“We talked about it. . . .”
“Not about what you wanted to do. Not about whether . . .”
The evening was falling silver and cold and David was hovering on the razor edge of the statement.
“. . . you want to get back together.”
Part of Stevie was going to jump out of her own skin and perhaps into his. Or something less gross than that. She wanted to
retreat to some softly lit pocket of the city and make out until she fainted. But another part of her was shivering. And yet
another part sat silently in the corner of the room, waiting to speak. It was lingering, like Benoit Blanc in Knives Out, never asking a question but hitting a single piano key each time someone said something of note. That part of the brain
was about to step forward to make its questions known.
“Will you say something?” he asked.
“Is this really the time for that?” Stevie shot back.
“Yes. It is. Because I know you. You’ll avoid talking most times, and you’ll always avoid talking when you have a thing to
solve. Nothing is going to change in your case in the next half hour, but a lot of my sanity is riding on what’s in your head,
because I kind of put it all out there . . .”
What was he doing? He was forcing her to go back into the Seven Bishops, right up to the back of that faceless person and tap them on the shoulder.
Janelle was right: She was always going to ask this question. Maybe he knew it too.
“Okay,” she snapped. “Fine. I want to know what happened that night, with, the person . . .”
Stevie couldn’t bring herself to say “the person you were kissing.” That made it too clear, too bright a line. If he agreed,
it meant that had really happened.
David rubbed his hands together and inhaled deeply.
“Do you really want to know this?” he said. “Will it help? Really?”
“I’m asking.”
David blew out a long sigh.
“Her name is Katrina.”
Pow. Right in the solar plexus. The person had a name. It had not been a hallucination.
“She was in one of my tutorials,” he went on, although Stevie wished he wouldn’t. Still, she had a morbid curiosity. Sure.
Might as well find out more. Salt that wound. Poke the bruise as hard as you can, just to see how much you can take. She had
asked, after all.
“That night, after your cab left, I went to the pub and drank eight pints and a shot called the Minging Stinger, which is whisky, pickle juice, and a small piece of a cheese called Stinking Bishop on the rim, which you are supposed to eat after you do the shot, I guess to make sure you will throw up. Which I did. Later. She was there. I was over halfway into the drinks, and . . .”
“Was it you?” Stevie said, clenching her jaw.
“Was it me what?”
“Was it you who hit on her or her on you?”
“I don’t remember. It might have been . . . I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. It just kind of happened.”
“What just happened?” Stevie asked. “Did you just kiss, or . . .”
“Stevie . . .”
“Answer me,” Stevie said.
His lack of answer, his helpless shrug, and the way he looked into the distance at the Empire State Building told her everything.
She had the sensation of falling.
“You had sex,” Stevie said. “With her.”
David turned. The hollows of his cheeks had fallen into shadow, and she didn’t feel like she quite knew his face anymore.
“She wasn’t the first,” he said. “You know that. It didn’t .
. . It sounds horrible to say it didn’t matter.
The next afternoon, I kept drinking. I stayed drunk until the next night, and eventually I went to Izzy’s room and she made me drink about seventeen cups of tea and then made me walk up and down along the river so she could tell me how stupid I was, how you came back, how you figured out everything that happened at Merryweather with the ax and the shed, how you saw me, how I had the best girlfriend in the world and that you’d just left and I was an idiot, so I . . .”
“So you what?” Stevie said. “Wait, did you see her again?”
“For maybe a week. I think she was interested, but I wasn’t.”
This was a horror she had not considered. The question had been a throwaway. A given. No, he had never seen Katrina again
because Katrina was not Katrina but the concept of betrayal taking human form just to make things spicy.
“Does that answer your question?” he asked.
“Yup,” she said sharply.
“I told you it didn’t matter.”
“It does.”
“I mean, to me,” he said.
“But it does to me.”
“I know.”
“Because it hurts,” she said. “It really fucking hurts.”
“Yeah,” he said defeatedly.
“You did this,” she said.
“I know.”
“Stop saying I know.”
“Look,” he said. “I did that. I can’t change that I did it. I can’t make it not bother you. But do you want it to?”
“Want it to?”
“Not bother you. I’m asking you to forgive me. You can either do that, or not. It’s up to you.”
He sounded annoyed now. That enraged her. How could he be annoyed? How could he simply break up with her and hook up hours later in a drunken stupor like it was nothing? You can’t
unring a bell, and that bell was tolling loud, all the time, clanging in the bell tower of her mind.
“We should get back together,” she heard herself say, her voice edged with sarcasm. “My parents would love it.”
“Are you seriously going to stay away from me because your parents like me?”
“I have other reasons,” she said.
She didn’t mean that. She barely knew what it meant. It came from something inside her that she didn’t know was there.
“Well, I’m glad I could at least be useful today. I definitely haven’t gotten enough of that in my life.”
He was trying to maintain eye contact but kept jerking his head to the right. His arm swung up, flicked against his face.
David was crying, outside, on a New York City street. She had seen David cry once before, when Ellie died, and it had filled her with panic.
It was too much emotion. But this—this was too much emotion and it was his fault. All their pain was in full view of the two
people at the bus shelter and people passing by in cars. Stevie didn’t want people perceiving her right now, not like this, in the wet wind in front of a FedEx.
“You should whine more,” Stevie replied. “I don’t think you get enough practice.”
The words had the desired effect—they were as hard as a slap and it startled him out of the moment. He let out a savagely sharp laugh. The thread between them, which felt so visceral, so real—like a blood vessel that linked them chest to chest—was ruptured.
“So I guess I have my answer,” David replied. His face twisted into a humorless smirk, and for a horrible second, Stevie saw
his father in his face. He walked off. Stevie watched him go for a moment, before turning down a different street that hopefully
led back the way she needed to go. Walking alone on a New York City January night is cold, with the city bright and diamond
hard and the moon white and blank, a big zero in the sky—and she was freezing to the marrow and shaking and might never be
warm again.