Chapter 6 Nicola
I’M HIDING IN the airport bathroom.
Almost a quarter hour after disembarkation, I’m still perched on a toilet in B Concourse, jeans bunched around my ankles, trying to come up with something to say to Greer Woods.
I loosen the strings on my sweatshirt and push the hood down.
Bracing myself, I click the front-facing camera on my phone.
Great. My cheeks are flush with that craggy alcohol glow, the bags under my eyes like newly formed blisters.
I wanted to come across as composed, attractive; instead, I bear a distinct resemblance to the homeless woman who shuffles barefoot around Dollar General every Sunday.
Los Angeles.
Not all that long ago, I’d been dumb enough to believe I might be destined for a flight out west.
I never intended to return home after college.
My admission to Cooper Union was supposed to be a one-way ticket to a career as a professional artist. But after I almost failed out during my junior and senior years, I resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t destined to break out on the New York art scene.
I moved back to my hometown, back into my childhood bedroom, and eventually started teaching at the same elementary school where I’d first picked up a paintbrush.
For a while, I maintained my subscription to Artforum, but there were too many articles about my former classmates.
Melanie Gardener, who graduated the year ahead of me, had a show at Gladstone reviewed; Justin Billings had an entire feature written about his asinine video collages of morning commutes.
But when Greer arrived in town, I started to believe things could change for me.
“When this is all over,” she’d said, “you should come out to California. We can spend a few weeks together, check out some of the galleries.” We assembled playlists during our stakeouts because Greer swore that, without them, the freeways would be unbearable.
I found myself looking forward to that trip—to putting my small town in the rearview mirror, dreaming bigger even if it was only temporary.
It wasn’t just the idea of being back in a big city that thrilled me; it was the idea of being there with her.
The last person who made me feel that way about my life, about the future, had been Claire.
The creak of the custodian’s cart drags me back to the airport. “Hello?” a woman calls, her chunky shoes shuffling to a halt in front of my stall. “We’re closing the bathroom for cleaning.”
“One sec.” I shove the phone back in my pocket, then slide on an oversized pair of sunglasses.
No more delaying the inevitable.
Zach’s waiting outside. “You good?”
“Yeah.”
“You know you don’t have anything to worry about, right? I promise all the club members are totally normal, or at least as normal as people like us can be. Besides, you’re already friends with me.” He tweaks one of my hoodie drawstrings. “Trust me, I’ll take care of you.”
Trust him. He makes it sound so easy. My phone buzzes. A message from the club administrator:
Downstairs in arrivals. Look for Legacy Consulting, LLC.
I show my screen to Zach, who shakes his head. “Connor’s fucking ridiculous.”
This is the second time he’s mentioned that name. “Who’s Connor?”
“The membership director. He loves all this cloak-and-dagger bullshit. ‘Meet me when the wind blows south by southwest, and the water runs uphill.’ Like, just tell us you’ll be at baggage claim, wearing a corduroy jacket, and we’ll find you.”
Caution doesn’t sound like the worst thing to me, but Zach clearly feels otherwise.
The escalator ferries us down to arrivals, and sure enough, standing next to the revolving doors is a man in a brown corduroy jacket holding a sign for Legacy Consulting, LLC.
He’s handsome—early forties maybe, with thick dark hair and a wiry frame that either speaks to admirable self-control or a lifetime diet of caffeine and cigarettes. Zach makes a beeline for him.
“Hey, I’d like to schedule a consultation on how to rebrand my restaurant after discovering my dad’s a serial killer. Any ideas? I was thinking a brand-new menu: the Münchausen by Panini, the Unsub Chicken Sub, the Macdonald Triad Triple Decker Sandwich.”
The man—Connor—glares at Zach. “You’re late. You were supposed to be on the twelve-forty-five out of Denver.”
“Missed connection. But it all worked out for the best because this one”—he steps aside and pulls me forward—“was traveling on the same flight.”
Connor’s annoyance seems to recede a little when he notices me, but there’s still something hard and impersonal in his stare.
“Connor,” he says, shaking my hand. “How was your flight?”
“Great, thanks.”
He checks the clock by the arrivals board.
“We should get going.” The LEGACY CONSULTING, LLC sign is affixed to a clipboard, and as we approach the parking garage, he flips through the other papers underneath.
He reminds me a little of Mrs. Walsh from Oliante Elementary.
“The clipboard fascist,” Jenny Landry whispered to me, back when we were still friends, as Mrs. Walsh scrutinized her seating chart to make sure not a single student was out of their assigned place.
The temperature outside feels sweltering after being blasted with air-conditioning in the airport.
I want to strip off my hoodie, but as families rush by us, en route to their minivans, I know it would be too much of a risk.
Instead, I follow Connor as he strides toward the back of the lot.
“We charter a shuttle every year,” he says.
“To maintain our anonymity, we ask you to be mindful of what you say during the drive. No full names, nothing about our parents.”
Zach’s tapping away on his phone. “No one cares,” he says, not bothering to lift his gaze. “The bus driver doesn’t care, the airline passengers didn’t care. Literally, the only one who gives a fuck is you.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You have nothing to lose.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
Zach stuffs his phone into his pocket. “He means the press already knows who I am.”
“Most of our members have changed their names,” Connor explains. “Moved away from their hometowns. Left the past behind them.”
“Sure, Bernecke.”
Connor stops dead in his tracks, then slowly turns around.
His expression hasn’t changed, but the steeliness in his eyes has sharpened into a shiv.
Bernecke. I know that name; Michael Bernecke was a cult leader back in the nineties.
His followers ransacked a chain of houses, leaving a trail of arson and butchery behind them. Is Connor the child of a cult leader?
“Patchet,” he corrects.
None of us moves. Finally, Zach mumbles, “Sure, whatever.”
As we press forward through the garage, I find myself wondering what it would be like to change my name, construct a new past. Claire managed something like that back in college.
She and I met during our freshman year, and by the end of the first semester, we’d swapped roommates so that we could live together.
Back then, she carted around used textbooks and scavenged food from campus events, same as me.
It wasn’t until her parents came to visit, and invited us to join them for dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant, that I discovered we weren’t cut from the same cloth.
As the servers shuttled out each course, I scrutinized her gestures and copied them methodically: this glass, that knife, don’t start eating yet, keep the napkin off the table.
I thought it was all very impressive—that she was very impressive—but while I marveled at how effortlessly she glided between Claire of the Turpentine-Soaked Paint Rags and Claire of the Oyster Fork, her father nitpicked every little thing she did.
Her haircut looked shabby; her clothes weren’t pressed right.
Her brother was pursuing his MBA and what was she doing?
Wasting his hard-earned money on art school.
(Never mind that Cooper Union was free back then.) It seemed like the harder she tried to please him, the more hopeless it became.
As soon as we returned to the residence hall, I disappeared into the back stairwell, called my dad, and told him how much I loved him. I could never be Claire—but I don’t think I’d want to be, either.
We stop next to a minibus, large enough for eight or maybe ten passengers.
As the door folds open, a burst of chatter erupts from inside, punctuated by laughs.
Zach doesn’t hesitate; he bounds up the stairs.
The windows are tinted, so there’s no telling who’s inside.
I listen for the sound of Greer’s voice.
“Well?” Connor waits behind me. I brace myself, then scale the steps to the bus. It’s one of those luxury models with leather recliners and a kitchenette in the back. About half the seats are already occupied. I tuck my sunglasses into my pocket and visually sweep the bus’s interior.
Greer’s not here.
Maybe her flight hasn’t arrived yet. She’ll be coming in from Los Angeles—a shorter distance, sure, but maybe that means her ticket was booked for later in the day.
I’ll be able to introduce myself to the other club members without her having already muddied the waters.
What should come as a relief instead makes me feel agitated, a single question flooding my mind: What if she’s not coming at all?
I follow Zach down the aisle. “Nic, this is Kemy,” he says, indicating a Black woman to our left, probably in her mid-forties, with a ponytail so tight, just looking at it gives me a headache.
A laptop’s propped open in front of her.
She murmurs “Hello,” but doesn’t bother looking up from her screen; her fingers chase one another across the keyboard.
“She’s a university professor, which means that whatever she’s working on is far more important than either of us. ”