Chapter 3 #2
On our way out, I see a photo of Adam and Joel on the top of a bookshelf.
They’re in sunglasses, grinning. Adam is smaller, with darker hair, wavy instead of curly—there’s something fine-tuned about him that Joel doesn’t have.
He’s probably the more conventionally attractive one.
My stomach wrings itself out. Have I somehow actually managed to forget their connection over the course of this nonsensical visit?
The mental image of Adam comes back to me, as visceral as a slap: boyish smile, fashionable in his brown sweater, a humble confidence in his narrow shoulders.
My hands tremble on the steering wheel as I pull away from the curb, Ella telling me in a small voice from the back that Mr. Button will probably be very sad at first.
I think I left this out before: Adam did get sick.
After the fifth time I slept with him, he fell into a coma.
I assumed he had died, and my old self-hatred opened under me like a trapdoor.
Dee was scared for me, and I was scared for myself.
But there was Ella, this tender storm of a child with an Eeyore bent.
Ella, who often cried as a toddler for barnyard animals in baby stories if they were alone on the page, because what if they were afraid and missing their mama.
There she was after a long afternoon at the park, her sweaty head on my chest, her knee pinning my thigh, as though even her sleeping body wanted to keep me with her.
So I stayed.
I didn’t do my due diligence. I didn’t know that Adam was alive another year after the coma and apparently upright enough to walk in front of a truck.
After I learned about his death, I liked to imagine a timeline like this for him:
1. sex with succubus (me)
2. brief coma
3. completely fine again, living full life
4. died in accident totally unrelated to original sex with succubus
When I finally told Grub the basics of my DP, and he nicknamed me Lorelei, he was annoyed that I hadn’t been more “systematic” in investigating Adam.
I wouldn’t tell him much—I didn’t want him investigating Adam, either.
I couldn’t face it. Now I have the strange, paranoid sense that I’m being punished. Or about to be.
When we get home from Joel’s, I’m unsettled, tense.
“Hi, Piggie,” Ella is saying to her favorite front garden sculpture. “You look comfortable.” The stone pig, rolling on her back in a patch of bright green sedum, does.
It’s sunny and safe feeling, but for some reason, I think of the demon hunter. The pretend serial killer Grub imagines is lurking nearby.
A demon hunter?
Come on.
Then again, how far-fetched am I?
A dirty white car glides to a near stop fifteen feet away, its windows tinted. I’m suddenly sure that it has followed us here. What will I do if the door erupts open, if someone leaps out? I grab Ella’s arm.
The car passes us.
“What’s wrong, Titi?” She looks scared.
“Nothing. It’s okay.” I release her. “Sorry, Els.”
Now that it’s gone, it seems like the car wasn’t particularly suspicious after all. But I can’t shake the feeling that something has been nudged askew. The delicate equilibrium of my life has unbalanced, and I am tipping toward a darkness I can’t quite see.
* * *
I stretch out in bed, my body a Jenga tower collapsing into a pile of aching blocks, and open my reading app.
I can hear Dee doing the bedtime routine, counting aloud while Ella brushes her teeth because Ella gets stressed if she doesn’t brush the right amount.
I flick past the award-winning novel I keep meaning to read— “A surgical evisceration of the rapacity of modernity”—and click into Mountain Rose, the story of a woman who moves home to a small town in the (you guessed it) mountains, secretly pregnant after a wild night with the powerful CEO she is pretending not to be madly in love with.
He’s mysterious and aloof, and she’s going to be shocked when he follows her to Montana. . . .
Fine. I give in and google Joel Tav (again), and my phone buzzes in my hand like a warning. I jump, guilty.
It’s Grub. He’s done some digging, and he thinks the angel doctor is Joel Tav, who is a member of the local synagogue. He wants me to go there and stalk him. When I don’t immediately respond, he calls.
“We should probably forget about this angel thing,” I snap. “You can’t believe every random thing you read on the internet!”
“That’s why you have to investigate,” he insists. “Because otherwise how could anyone even believe in us?”
“No one does believe in us.”
“Okay, fair. Except the demon hunter. Who may actually be one of us. . . . Do you think it’s Dorothy?” An actively rude fiftysomething woman from freaksofnature whose DP is that everything anyone eats around her tastes rotten. And sometimes like feces. Whatever that tastes like!
“Hang on.” Ella is coming in to hug me good night.
“The kid?” Grub asks when she’s gone. He doesn’t like how much of my attention Ella gets. “Did you tell her yet to switch to electric bass? Violin’s a weak-ass instrument.”
“She’s seven.”
“When I was seven I started cutting myself.”
“Exactly. That’s what we’re trying to avoid.”
He considers. “No, wait. I think I was eight. My brain’s being slow.” He sounds mournful. “I’m getting that urge a little.”
When we don’t give in to our powers, we get punished for it. I get weaker, Grub gets slower. Cruelly, when Grub causes the people he loves to feel miserable, he gets smarter. He skipped a grade the last time he lost control of his DP. And I get stronger when—well, you know when.
“You’re smart no matter what,” I promise him. “Trust me.”
“Eh, maybe.” He needs a pep talk, so I do one. The theme is inner strength, which I thought I had a lot of until just recently.
“Sometimes I think we’re the only nice Dows out there,” he mutters.
After I hang up, I look at the results of my internet search.
I click a link I’ve already clicked and reread that Joel did a joint program at Juilliard and Columbia, music and premed.
Oh, and here’s an obituary for Adam, rising star in the math department at Princeton when he died.
He is survived by his brother, Dr. Joel Tav.
Just one name. Just the two of them, and then just one.
The coma was your fault, my brain whispers to itself. I try to argue, But maybe I’m not responsible for his death? For the truck?
You just want to touch his brother, my brain parries. His brother! You’re horrifying! You’ll kill him, too.
I can never let myself see him again. It’s too dangerous.
Except that Grub told me to investigate. And I should probably do that.
Right?
Yeah.
I should.