Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery (29 page)

“I’m sorry about that day,” I said. “I know you felt like I abandoned you, but I really didn’t have any choice.”

“It’s okay. I get it.”

“Are you going to look for her?”

“Yup.”

“I’ll help,” I said. “I can’t do it 24/7 anymore, but I’ll do what I can.”

“It’s okay. I think I’ve got your method down anyway.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“You just ask questions and hope no one tries to kill you.”

I laughed, though I wasn’t sure she was joking. “So how’ve you been? Did you move out of that house?”

“Yup. Out of my cousin’s, back into my dad’s. I should probably look for employment at some point.”

“Have you been seeing Rubina at all?”

“Yeah, I gave in and said I’d pump milk for her, so she picks it up and takes it to the hospital. She acts like it’s the least I can do, and she’s probably right. I’ve been by to see Alex, too.”

“How is he?”

“He’s still in the hospital, which is standard for preemies. He’s healthy, despite everything.”

“And how’s Rubina?”

“She’s neurotically watchful, can’t help herself, but mostly she’s just smitten to pieces in love. My great nightmare is pretty much over.” She went back to rifling through my clothes, dismissing almost everything with a flap of her hand. “Where’s your slutty stuff?”

I smiled. “I don’t know, in my early twenties?”

“You didn’t keep any of it?”

“Your dress isn’t slutty.”

“I still have preggo body. And anyway, sure it is. It’s not tight, but if you look close you can almost see where the baby came out.” She flicked her hem and gave me a flash of underwear.

I laughed. “Okay, I guess that’s convincing.”

She pulled out a tight black dress with a fake leather panel down the front. “Oh, hey, you did keep one.”

I got dressed and put on makeup while Lusig chugged beer and chanted “more eyeliner” over my shoulder. I called a cab and we got through another round of beer while we waited.

“Let’s fill your flask before we go.”

“How do you know I have a flask?”

She shrugged. “You’ve spent your life perfecting this old-school gumshoe shtick. I’m almost positive you have a flask. You were probably born with one glued to your naked baby hip.”

I found my flask in a kitchen drawer. “I don’t use it as much as I thought I would, though. It’s a pain in the ass to clean. Rye okay?”

“Whatever you feel like, you fucking alcoholic.”

The cab came after I topped off the flask, and we went down to meet it. The driver was a middle-aged Korean man, and Lusig made multiple attempts to engage him in conversation. He smiled and responded politely in hesitant English, and seemed relieved when we made it to the club downtown. We paid the fare and stumbled out of the cab, Lusig clutching on to my arm.

The Mayan was an old theater that served as a nightclub on weekends. Downtown had gentrified with enormous speed in the last several years, but The Mayan was at the outermost edge, still a little bit dicey after dark. Last I’d heard anyone talk of The Mayan, it was because someone had been stabbed right outside. There was a metal detector on the way in, and we had the privilege of walking through it after forking over a $20 cover.

The detector beeped angrily when I tried to pass, and I groaned as I remembered the flask.

“Please don’t take it from her,” Lusig pleaded. “It belonged to her dead grandmother.”

I pictured my maternal grandmother watching her Korean period dramas on VHS with a flask in her hand. I had to stifle a laugh. Miraculously, we were let through.

The club was loud and crowded, the dance floor crammed with bodies. Lusig dragged me to the bar, where she ordered two blue drinks that smelled like nail polish.

“I am too old for this shit,” I said, wrinkling my nose at my plastic glass. “I think it’s actually glittering.”

“Oh shut up, Song,” she said, slinging an arm around my neck. “You’re not above this.”

“Fine,” I said, taking a long, horrible gulp. I knew she was right.

We downed them quickly and ordered another round. She drank with determination, and I could see her loosening with every sip. Her tolerance must have taken a big hit during her months of patrolled abstinence.

“Rob didn’t mind you canceling?” she asked.

“No. It was fine. We’ve been seeing each other plenty.”

“So, things are going well?”

“Yeah, I like him.”

“He’s a cutie. Is he good in bed?”

I laughed and took a sip of my blue drink, which was tasting more tolerable by the minute.

She pointed at my chest with exaggerated force. “Answer my question! I command you!”

“I wouldn’t know.”

She gasped. “You’re lying.”

I laughed, and the bubbly sound of it told me I was well on my way to drunk. “Yeah, I’m lying. He’s good. A
+
, would bang again.”

“Do trumpets play? Does the earth move?”

“No,” I said. “You’re thinking of the apocalypse.”

She led me to the dance floor, where lights strobed blue and gold across hundreds of sweat-dampened faces. We finished our drinks and held the glasses loose in our hands.

“Van’s kind of hot, isn’t he?” she shouted.

“I know what you mean. He’s not movie-star hot, but he has a look. Strong arms, dark eyes, a little stern.”

“Yeah, like he’s a
man
, you know?” She flexed her forearms and crunched hard on the word. “He has that lantern jaw. And, actually, it’s not even the arms, it’s the hands. He has these compelling hands.”

“Sure,” I said, turning my head at her. “Compelling.”

“You’d fuck him, wouldn’t you?”

I laughed. “Jesus, we’re having this conversation?”

“Fuck, marry, or kill?”

“That’s not how that game works.”

“Fuck! Marry! Or kill!” She flung her fists up and down as she danced.

“Okay, given those options? Fuck.”

“I knew it!” She squealed triumphantly, throwing her head back. Then she stopped dancing, standing still in the writhing crowd, and looked at me with sudden purpose. Her lips moved. She’d said something at normal volume.

“What?” I asked.

She shouted in my ear, vying against the music: “He’s mine.”

I felt her words fly at me with the velocity and danger of a penny free-falling off a skyscraper. They landed with a vicious ping in the middle of my head.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, but I already knew.

She bit her lip and watched my eyes, and when I returned her gaze with the intensity of understanding, she nodded back at me slowly, like a teacher encouraging a child on the right path.

I wasn’t dancing anymore, and neither was she. Without a word, we left The Mayan and stood on the sidewalk outside. It was still busy with people coming in and out of the club, but I could tell right away that my ears had been plugged from the music and noise inside. The newer quiet rang between them.

I lit a cigarette and offered one to Lusig. She took it with gratitude.

“Lusig,” I said, after a long drag. “Are you telling me Alex is your child?”

She covered her face in both hands and swayed, the tip of her cigarette sending a ribbon of smoke tracing above her head. “God, I must be drunk.”

“No shit, you’re drunk. What did you think would happen if you mixed every alcohol after nine months off?”

She groaned.

“Lusig, did you invite me out tonight so you could get this off your chest?”

She opened her fingers like blinds and peeked at me with a caught expression in her eyes. “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“You’re not still sleeping with him,” I said, exploring.

“No, God no.”

“Why did you sleep with him in the first place?”

She took a greedy drag on her cigarette. “To get pregnant. To let Van and Ruby have their baby.”

“Isn’t that what the IVF was for?”

She nodded then shook her head, nodded then shook her head. The motion set her off balance. I grabbed her arm so she wouldn’t tip over. “It was insurance,” she said.

“What do you mean, insurance?”

“IVF has an iffy success rate. Less than fifty percent.”

“So, what, you guys decided to open another avenue of attack?”

She nodded.

I held my head, trying to get a grasp on that logic. It was too much for me in my present state. “Why?”

“Ruby would’ve been devastated if it didn’t take.”

“But she knew, right? She knew it might not work?”

“Yeah, she knew.”

“So failure was always a possible outcome, even a likely one, for the first try at least, right? And I’m guessing money wasn’t really an object?”

She kept nodding. “It’s expensive, but you’re right. They were prepared to do it more than once.”

“So, what happened? I assume Rubina wasn’t in on this back-up strategy.”

She shook her head. “Van and I decided on our own.”

“What do you mean ‘decided’? Was this a strategic e-mail chain?”

She looked at me with a trace of misery, and I wondered if she regretted telling me.

I softened. Lusig was my friend and she was trying to confide in me. “Just tell me how it happened.”

“Van and I were never close before this whole surrogacy arrangement. To be honest, when Ruby got engaged to him, I didn’t like him at all. I thought he was stodgy and stern. Too smart, kind of arrogant, not weird enough, just this somberly handsome doctor, you know?”

I reviewed my initial reaction to Van and decided it had lined up with this image. “And then?”

“We were thrown together by this baby madness. You get it. You lived in that disaster zone, too. It was crazy, and it was uncomfortable, but it was also intensely intimate. We were talking about cycles, eggs, the nitty-gritty of human reproduction, at a real TMI level. But it wasn’t just that, either. Ruby already knew me, but Van and I had to fall into each other. Ruby encouraged this, obviously, because we were going to be in each other’s lives now. I was going to play this huge role in their marriage, in their child’s life. Van had to know me. He had to study me. And the whole time, I could feel it. The way he was learning me, like no one else had really bothered before.”

“You fell in love with him.”

“Not exactly, no. But I did fantasize about him. I felt so close to him, and we’d never so much as hugged in a nonfamilial way. I started to wonder about his body, what he kissed like, how he moved in the dark.”

It had been a while since I’d nursed a fixation. I’d spent most of my adult life getting laid when I felt like it, whenever convenience and desire aligned. I hadn’t suffered an infatuation since high school, not the kind that smoldered with no way to quench or snuff it out. But I sympathized with Lusig, I recognized the truth and aching in what she’d said. It was a curiosity that demanded satisfaction, that could only be addressed with knowledge.

“I swear I wasn’t planning anything. I didn’t try to seduce him,” she said. “One day, Van got off work before Ruby, and he asked what I was doing. My dad was out, so I told him I was bored at home, and he said he’d stop by.”

“Had that ever happened before?”

“Him coming over alone?”

“Yeah.”

“No, it hadn’t.”

“Then did you know right away what was going to happen?”

She shook her head vehemently and I reached out a hand to stop her from tipping into the street. “I swear on my life, I didn’t.”

“Really?”

“It felt so natural. We were close, you know? And we had Rubina in common, and the baby soon, so why would it be weird for us to be in a room together?”

“Oh, I don’t know, because you wanted to sleep with him?”

“Okay, I may have overstated that.”

“You didn’t fantasize about fucking him?”

“I did, but that was just part of the big picture. Also, I’m telling you I was attracted to him
now
, in retrospect. But before anything happened it all felt very unreal and far away.”

“So, when did it turn into a romantic encounter?”

She bit her lip, thinking. I could see muddled thoughts crossing slowly, haphazardly across her forehead and eyes. “Not right away, but quickly. He came in, and we hung out in the living room. I remember he was wearing a jacket, and he took it off and hung it on the back of a chair. Like this.” She mimed placing a wide-shouldered jacket on the back of a chair with great care. “That’s when my heartbeat picked up on the possibilities.”

“Why? Because he was peeling his clothes off?”

She laughed. “No. This is stupid, okay?”

“Sure. I mean you’re telling me about the time you fucked your cousin’s husband.”

“Fair enough.” She squeezed her eyes shut and winced. “But the jacket. It was this nice jacket. Like, nice wool, not a wrinkle in it, neat lapels, whatever. And look, I’ve had some guys over at my house, okay? It’s not like I’d never seen a man in a jacket before. But the way he hung it was so precious, like he wouldn’t want to dirty my floor with his shit. Like he cared enough, or respected me enough, and I thought, What would it be like to live with a man like that?”

“Did you consider that maybe he’s just fastidious?”

“That’s not the point. It was visceral, okay?”

“Sure. So what happened? He took off his jacket and you jumped on him?”

“No, we sat on the couch and chatted for a while. We had a beer, nothing crazy. And then he told me how stressed he was about the IVF, and how Ruby had been just a crazy neurotic mess.”

“Ah, the crazy neurotic wife. Maybe who didn’t understand him?”

She looked at me with a touch of misery. “No, it wasn’t like that. Obviously, Van knows I love Ruby. He wasn’t trying to seduce me by pitting me against her.”

“Oh,” I said. “Jesus, that’s brilliant. He convinced you that a brief, functional affair might help Rubina.”

“Don’t you see how that might have been true?”

I tilted my head and gave her a gentle, skeptical look. “I don’t think that argument passes muster, and I’m a more lenient judge of these things when drunk.”

“Maybe sober, you’d see the logic more clearly.”

“No, Lusig. Come on.”

She sighed. “I know, I know. But at the time, we convinced each other. We crossed a line, but at least part of my motive was pure.”