Chapter 21
I bare my teeth at the phone.
Why would I be? I write back. I never have any sex.
Actually, I have an IUD to regulate my aggressive period, but I’m not about to reassure him.
So funny, he writes. I can practically feel him there, only blocks away, holding his phone in those wide, warm hands. I can practically feel him thinking, typing.
Does he really believe I’ve been killing men right and left?
Yes.
And also left and right.
I’m pregnant with your monster baby, I write. I’m going to raise it to be just like me. I send that. Then I tack on a vindictive purple devil’s face for good measure.
Last night I was crying, sick to my stomach, but today I woke up stronger.
I know this feeling. I meet it with a squeeze of poisonous guilt, a slash of fiery fear.
I feel it as I did the first time, at fourteen, on the day I learned that Benny had died.
I feel it as I felt it after Arlo, still not knowing, and then Sam, with that dawning suspicion.
And then the horror of Omar. Knowing—knowing for sure at last. And then, of course, Adam, when I heard he’d died.
My joints are easy and supple, my muscles calm and ready.
My skin seems stronger, the tone slightly warmer.
It’s just a little bit harder to be upset.
And I have so much to be upset about. My mind sidles away from it.
From the picture of Grub’s face that his school put on their social media with a little caption about how he’ll be missed.
In the picture, he is squinting suspiciously and ducking away from the camera; he looks like himself, black hair falling greasily into his face.
I couldn’t look at it for more than a few seconds.
I take Ella to art class. They are always making something large with papier-maché. Ella always catches me when I try to move it into the basement later, even if a month has gone by.
There is still no sign of my father’s demon. Unbelievable. He probably just made the whole thing up. Or maybe it ate him.
Life seems to be settling automatically back into itself, reverting to the norm out of habit, as the ground beneath it hitches and buckles and a few chunks of foundation sheer off and vanish into a silent, private kind of abyss.
Dee is at work. Mom is behind the desk at the yoga studio, probably talking on the phone.
I am sitting in the little lounge room upstairs at the Arts Council, emailing the lovely Tamar and another client who signed up with me almost the moment she learned she was pregnant and isn’t due for ages.
I don’t technically need to check on either of them, but I’ve almost forgotten that I’m a doula, and I want to remind myself.
I ask if Tamar wants any recommendations for acupuncture, prenatal yoga, massage.
I remember she said her lower back was hurting.
For a moment, I’m tempted to change the notification on my website to “Available: taking new clients.”
But no. First I have to kill Joel. Obviously.
Want me to come back? I text him that night, when I can be reasonably sure that Ella is asleep and Dee’s and Mom’s lights are out, too.
No.
I make a triumphant sound at the sight of his message. Yes you do.
I should have touched you right away, he writes, and my obnoxious stomach clenches at the thought of him touching me then, when I wanted him so simply and wholly. When I knew only good things about him and he was perfect to me.
I write, You didn’t think my dp would work on you? Got cocky?
Of course it works on me. I’m human.
And I’m not.
Maybe partly, he allows.
Partly abomination.
A disease.
Good thing you’re a doctor.
Walked right into that one.
He doesn’t respond.
I add, So important to thoroughly examine the patient before diagnosing. I am now a person who writes these things. A vigilante.
I’m a daughter of a demigod. Or whatever impossible, absurdly old thing he is.
I’m a person who has sex.
I’m typing aggressively, not thinking at all. Maybe you’ll find some part of me that’s worth saving next time. If you go a little deeper.
I’m grinning and I feel like it might look maniacal. I reread what I just sent. It doesn’t make perfect sense. I don’t care.
How about now? How much do you want to be inside me right now?
I squirm, clench at the thought as I send it.
Not at all. It doesn’t work over text.
I scowl. He must be right. It doesn’t work unless I’m touching him, making eye contact.
But you can remember . . . I’m embarrassing myself. I am also embarrassed at being embarrassed. I don’t want to care what he thinks of me.
I can. And it disgusts me.
Oh.
I hesitated to kill you because of Ella. I know the harm it will cause her. She doesn’t deserve that. But I regret my hesitation. Evil has to be rooted out.
I think of the way he looked away from my face, tried to hold his body off my body.
You sound like a video game, I write, typing angrily. Evil has to be rooted out? Who even says that??
Don’t come over, he writes.
I jump up, glance in the mirror, barely seeing myself, yank my hair out of its bun and shake it loose.
I am wearing the same pants as last night: the black sweats that I bought two pairs of from Target because they’re so comfortable.
I wrap my loose Navajo-pattern jacket around myself and creep out of the house.
I don’t trip over the new fairy. I walk briskly down the sidewalk and cut through the park, dipping through the shadows under the big trees, leaves sliding and breaking underfoot.
It smells like Halloween. I walk through strands of spider silk and brush them away without pausing. My socks are wet at the backs of my slippers.
I knock on his door, louder tonight.
“I told you not to come over!” he yells.
“Open the door!” I call back.
“I’m not going to open the door.” He’s right on the other side of it now. The rough grain of his voice sounds like something I can run my fingertips over.
I put my hands on the dark surface of the door and it feels warm, somehow still steeped in the sun. I lean forward.
“Open it.”
“No.”
“Open it.” I hit the door’s face with my palm.
“You’re acting like a child,” he says.
Which is funny and ridiculous, considering what I’m here for. I almost laugh.
I pound on the door with both fists. My heart pounds, too.
I feel deliciously unhinged: a fairy-tale villain, a pirate king swaggering on the deck of a tossing ship, capable of anything.
Is this what Dick Face feels, all the time?
Spewing his power on whoever is in front of him, just letting it spill unfettered into the world.
What is he even like when he’s not—what’s his word, the one that always sounds like it’s someone else’s? —fallow.
“Someone’s going to call the police,” Joel says.
“Unless you let me in.” I’m actually laughing now.
How am I laughing?
I’m high on my own vitality. I feel like singing.
I can tell my voice will be at its fullest, limber even though I haven’t warmed it up.
“But there’s a side to you, that I never knew, never knew.
. . .” I sing softly. Adele was trying to warn me the whole time!
It was right there! I sing louder, leaning into it, closing my eyes.
I sound amazing—better than Adele. “Right, Joel?” I say musingly.
“You did turn out to have another side.”
“Why won’t you just die,” he says from a few inches away, and the door abruptly seems thin as cardboard between us.
“I’m going to start yelling,” I tell him. “I’m going to yell that I’m your dealer—that I’m your ex-wife and I just got out of prison! That I’m your— ”
He yanks the door open, furious and disheveled—a rumpled, stressed-out lion, his hair a mane.
I smile.
We have sex against the door.
I come again, later, remembering the urgent, rhythmic sound of it, his gasping, guttural breath in my ear.
The next night we end up on the living room floor, and the following one, too, his eyes closed tight in a grimace of denial, hands shoving my thighs open.
“Beg me,” I say, sliding down him.
“Bitch,” he says right back, fingers coiled in my hair, his voice on the edge of breaking.
He has clearly admitted to himself that this is happening, because he got condoms. The night after that, we make it all the way to the couch, where he visibly hates himself for giving in—his head between my legs.
He devours me starvingly, in a rage that burns briefly close to something sweeter.
Mr. Button hides. We come at the same time, like in one of my books, except in those stories it’s because they love each other.
On this couch, it’s only hate and dark magic and Joel getting really quiet while I get really loud, and he is looking accidentally into my face at the last moment and whispering, “Tempest.” And then, “Fuck.”
I wake up early, my mind washed clean by sleep, my muscles excited. I have so much time to myself before Ella wakes up. I can do yoga or meditate again or relaunch my poem-of-the-day project.
Miss me? I text.
Don’t flatter yourself. Ooh, he’s talkative today.
I write: Don’t pretend you aren’t thinking about it all the time.
There’s a pause. Then he sends: Don’t imagine I have any interest in you outside my unfortunate reaction to your dark power. I’m sorry for bringing shame on my brother’s memory. I’ll carry that to my grave.
I recoil.
That warmth in his eyes, when he looked at me, before the truth came out, before he knew what I’d done.
I know I’ll never see that again. For a moment, I forget everything—I want desperately to see that look.
I want to claw backward through time, ripping apart the other pieces of the story, flinging aside everything else, until it’s only the two of us, standing in his kitchen.
And then I remember Grub.
I wake up even earlier the next day, at 5:35, before the sun has even leaked a hint of morning. I go for a run in the dim, clinging mist. Maybe the third time in my life I’ve ever tried to run. (The first two were—well, what do you think? If they’d been good maybe I would’ve done it more.)
This time is revelatory; it’s almost spiritual.
My ligaments sing operatically. I suddenly understand runners.
I understand athletes. I understand people who go to the gym.
They are my people! Running is the second-best thing to flying— the road feels taut, it gives ever so slightly under the soles of my sneakers, it springboards me. I’m hardly out of breath.
How are you feeling? A little weaker? I text Joel after our sixth night. I’m grateful for Dee’s sleeping pills—she hasn’t noticed me sneaking around. It’s the furthest away from her I’ve felt since I moved in with her and told her everything, and I’m hardly thinking about it. I’m too occupied.
I feel fine, he writes back. Is he lying? I’m riveted.
Too bad, I say.
Sorry to disappoint you.
I’m going for a run every morning. I watch the sunrise from Goose Poop Hill (Ella named it a while back).
I watch the sunrise from the old slate steps of a castle-like courtyard at the heart of the university campus while all the students sleep.
Magic sizzles in the corners where Virginia creeper climbs bloodred over the stone; a single ancient ginkgo tree rises like a gout of yellow fire.
Grub would like it. Back home, I almost google his real name again, almost look at that photo from his school, to see his face again.
I don’t, though. My hands shake so hard on my phone when I try that I have to stop.
I carve pumpkins with Ella in easy strokes of the butcher knife; I can remember it being hard, other years, hacking through the tough hide. I hoist Ella up into my arms when she stubs her toe at the park. I give her a piggyback ride.
“You never give me rides!” she cries, delighted.
After dinner, we turn pop music up loud in the living room and push back the coffee table and dance. Ella and me, then Mom when she gets home, beads clacking wildly, then Dee, still in her work clothes.
“Play it again!” Ella yells, high on adrenaline and togetherness, eyes fervent.
We blast the same song over and over, working on our moves. I’m jumping, Dee is shimmying like she’s in the club, Mom has her arms over her head in a blissed-out trance. Ella is clapping her hands and doing jumping jacks and kicks. She tries a little butt wiggle that alarms me, but only distantly.
“I love you, you pack of crazy coyotes,” Mom says as we calm down. We grin at each other. Dee pulls her button-down off, sweating in a black tank top.
It’s been a while since we had one of these dance parties.
It’s the first time I haven’t been exhausted after.
I want to keep dancing, I’m just getting started, but I make myself sit down on the old green chair.
Ella flops instantly across my lap, her chest heaving, her arms splayed, belly-up.
For a minute, I’m happy. But then I’m fidgety, itching to move again, needing to go somewhere.
Ella’s sticky skin is an irritant against mine; she is a hot little anchor, trying to hold me down.
I nudge her off me, stand up. Something isn’t right.
Something in me is unsatisfied and bored, is outgrowing the confines of my regular life.
I look around the bright living room with its messy scatter of books and colorful throw blankets, and it feels for a moment as restrictive as a cage.