Dwellers (12 page)

Ivy sees this and begins to cry, the fight gone out of her.

She blows hair away from her face. “I knew Louis would be here, but you? What the hell are you doing here, Ivy?” She chuckles. She pulls up her bag by the straps and takes out a roll
of duct tape. “Take this and tape Louis to that chair over there.”

“I don’t have scissors.”

“You’re too cute,” Leslie says, revealing a pair of scissors, snipping twice, taunting her. “You think I’ll hand this to you? Get a move on.”

I can try to ram her, but the damn coffee table is in the way.
Early weight-bearing is encouraged.
I grit my teeth, dig my elbows into the armrests, and try to pull myself up, one painful
fraction of an inch after another.

“Try that and Louis will get it in the chest,” Leslie says.

I sit back down, breathing hard. Leslie gives me a look before making Ivy sit on the couch. With one hand—her other hand holding the gun trained on Ivy’s face—she duct-tapes
her wrists and ankles.

“Interesting,” she says, as Ivy whimpers. “When did you start caring about your brother?”

This gives me pause, and that’s when I realize that Leslie and Jonah are partners-in-crime. She trusts him. At least, she did, once upon a time. And I have a character to play.

“It hurts too much to stand,” I say, cautioning myself not to overdo it.

Leslie sits cross-legged on the coffee table. “You look like hell.”

I look at her hair, her smeared eyeshadow. “Well, you don’t look too hot yourself.”

“That’s not what you told me the last time I came here looking like this.” She laughs, and my stomach churns.

“So,” she says, “Louis. Nice to see you again. I was surprised when I heard that you actually brought your brother here. Ivy, you know why Louis kicked him out? Jonah killed
his
dog.”

“Will you shut the fuck up?” I say. Is that what Jonah would say? I hope so.

“Buried him in the damn garden,” Leslie continues. “You like that Louis? Flowers growing from your beloved dog? Jonah here got a kick out of that. I’m surprised you
didn’t throw him down the basement stairs.”

Leslie turns to me, winks. “What did you tell these two? That you are innocent? How the hell did they buy that?”

“I told them enough to keep them quiet for a day or two,” I say. “Then you barge in here with a gun.”

Leslie scoffs. “You’re telling me they haven’t seen the video yet?” She takes the box containing the disc from the floor. “Bet you just charmed Ivy here. Which is
something, even for you, Jonah, considering she doesn’t even like dick.”

Ivy cries. Louis strains against the duct tape.

“No one’s screaming,” Leslie says. “Despite your un-duct-taped mouths. I am impressed. But then who can hear you in this rain, right?”

“What are you doing here, Leslie?” I say.

“Tying loose ends,” she says. “I thought today’s as good a time as any to bury a body.”

Ivy cries harder, but I don’t think she completely understands. I stay quiet.

Leslie glances at Ivy. “Oh!” She laughs, amused. “You don’t know, do you?”

Ivy looks confused.

“Ivy,” Leslie says, “Meryl is in a chest freezer in the basement.”

26

IVY IS DUMBFOUNDED. Leslie looks at her the way a mother would at a child that entertains her.
You dropped your toy again? You are so adorable.

“No,” Ivy says and Leslie begins to laugh. “You’re lying.”

But she need only look at us. Louis is grief-stricken but he can’t react quickly enough to wipe the look of guilt from his face.

“What?” Ivy says. “I don’t understand.”

To my horror, Leslie takes out a tablet computer, slides her finger on the screen a few times, and turns the screen toward us.

I see Meryl’s body for the first time. It is not the decomposing body that haunts my dreams. It is a photo of a person who has just died, eyes half-open, lips cracked and bleeding from
dehydration and starvation.

Do not cry, I think. Do not look away.

“See?” Leslie says, as Ivy looks on with mounting revulsion. “Meryl finally got the perfect figure she wanted.”

“This is a joke,” Ivy says.

Leslie shrugs. “All right, then. It’s not so much perfect as—”

“This is a joke! There was a body in the FA building! They found her bag and her necklace!”

“That was just some homeless girl I always saw roaming around campus,” Leslie says. She tucks away the tablet computer. “I needed to stop the police from poking around, so I
had this idea. The body size was correct. I offered her a beer. She was grateful and surprised someone even noticed her. It’s sweet, really. She told me her name, but I forgot. Junkie.”
She shrugs. “Jonah lent me a gun to shoot Meryl but I ended up not needing it. I didn’t want to shoot this girl, though. Too messy, and there’s the issue of the bullet lodging in
her brain. So I laced her beer with Valium. Police didn’t even look twice, did they? Typical. Just what I needed. They saw the jewelry and the bag and thought, ‘Open-and-shut case. Time
to go home.’”

“No,” Ivy says as Leslie speaks, punctuating every sentence. “No.”

“Yes,” Leslie says. “You want to go to the basement, take a peek?”

“Shut up,” Louis says and Ivy’s face crumbles.

“You took a photo?” I say, because I must remain in character. “How stupid can you be?”

Leslie huffs. “Not so stupid as to keep a body as long as you did.”

I hear Ivy’s breath hitch. “All those times I came here— All those times I— ” She cannot finish her sentence.

Leslie shakes her head in sorrow. “Monsters, aren’t they?”

“What did you do to her?”

Leslie sighs, as though the question has been posed to her so many times before, and she is sick of explaining herself. “Short version? Jonah threw her down the basement stairs and she
broke her leg. We did it before he left for Cebu with Louis. I babysat the house while they were gone. Traipsing through Visayas, giving talks like God’s gift to humanity. I had
no
idea what Meryl did down there the whole time. For a day or two, I sat on top of the staircase to talk to her, you know, have an actual
conversation,
for goodness’ sake
.
I even
threw her a bottle of water. We found and destroyed one CD in her bag, so I said if she told me where the other copies of the clips were I’d give her food and painkillers. But she just kept
screaming,
so I stopped visiting. Thank you for soundproofed walls.

“When I checked up on her two weeks later, the floor looked disgusting. Feces and blood and urine everywhere. I hosed the basement down and placed her in the freezer. She was
way
lighter then. I bleached the basement floor. Burned her clothes. Pushed the cabinet so it would block the staircase. It was hard work! I nearly asked Louis for a bonus.”

“You should have buried her,” I say.

Leslie rolls her eyes. “Do I have to do everything around here?”

“You locked her up,” Ivy says, “like an animal.”

“Careful, now,” Leslie says, raising the gun. Ivy shakes like a curtain caught in the wind.

“Tell her the long version, then,” I say. “Once upon a time, Leslie and Meryl were classmates in Fundamental Accounting.”

“Classmates in Fundamental Accounting taught by this new instructor named Jonah,” Leslie continues. She smirks. “Jonah hit on Leslie at the start of the semester, thinking she
would be scared and coy and demure. He was dismayed when she practically tore her clothes off for him. How am I doing with the storytelling, Professor?”

“I sense unfair subjectivity,” I say. There comes a point when you feel like a figment of someone else’s reality. Illusory and suspended in time. That point is now. Leslie
laughs.

“So Jonah and Leslie have sex but most of the time they hire prostitutes, male and female, to spice things up,” she continues. “Then Leslie meets Mona.
Moan
-na, ha-ha.
If there is a photo that accompanies the antonym of the word
coy
, you’ll find a photo of Mona there, so Jonah was once again disappointed. However, he enjoyed filming the two girls, so
the arrangement was satisfactory for all involved. And Mona
was
fun. At first. Then she wasn’t. But the moment she stopped being fun for Leslie, she started being fun for Jonah, who
liked his girls struggling and crying and practically throwing up their insides in fear. Different strokes for different folks.

“Jonah’s greatest mistake was getting high and falling asleep with his laptop unlocked. Stupid piece of shit.” Leslie’s sudden shift to anger is unnerving, as though a
black cloud has appeared in front of the sun. “Mona made a copy of the video clips and erased the copies from his hard drive. Threatened to show selected clips to the school board. It would
expel me from school and land Jonah in jail.”

“You threatened her with the same thing,” I say.

“She learned from the best,” Leslie says. “But Mona can’t handle the pressure. So she swan dives from the top of the Engineering building. We don’t know where the
disc ends up until Meryl talks to me about it. She called me first, wording her message carefully. She could have gone straight to the police but she probably thought I was a victim. So
that’s how I played it. I asked her to meet me at Trudy’s. I shed some tears. Had a nice cinnamon roll. I told her Jonah had actually roped me into house-sitting his brother’s
house while they were out of town, and could we go there now? I said Jonah had more CDs of naked co-eds kept in his room, and I wanted to help my fellow victims.

“You see, Jonah, I could be coy and demure if I wanted to.

“Louis was out doing some dumb paperwork so we had the house to ourselves. Jonah grabbed Meryl—but you know about this already.”

In my head, I work out what might have happened after the brothers got back. Louis discovers the body first, confronts Jonah about it. Jonah feigns innocence. They drive out and an SUV drives
them into a tree—

“For some moronic reason, Jonah didn’t get rid of the body as soon as he got back,
as he was supposed to
, and now he’s in a wheelchair and you’re in this mess. The
end.” Leslie beamed at them. “Questions?”

“You’re crazy,” Ivy says.

“Look at this rain,” says Leslie, and even I am thrown by the unexpected comment. “It is unnatural to get so much rain.”

We fall silent.

“The logical thing to do during our short lives is to save this world we find ourselves in,” Leslie says. “Make it at least livable. Spend our finite energy pressuring
governments to focus on the environment. But the world is large. Imagine, you do your duty here, separate your fucking paper from plastic, but in another part of the planet, a company does
hydraulic fracking to access natural gas under the earth, contaminating drinking water in the process and giving residents brain lesions. Chemicals are dumped in the oceans and everyone gets
cancer. The logical thing to do is to fight but who has the energy to do that? How many protesters have seen change within their lifetimes? They fight, get separated from their spouses, lose
custody of their children, and die poor, with the mission still unfulfilled. They move on from this world, and you wonder, what was the point of that life?

“Most people, they’d rather be rich.
Rich.
Because money is power and having power will insulate you from the world’s troubles. So you study, you work, you save, and
save, and save even though a huge chunk of your salary goes to corruption. But you shrug it off, you turn a blind eye to it because the goal is to be
rich.
Once you’re rich,
you’ll have money to protect yourself against crime and natural disasters. You’ll be able to afford insurance and body guards and a nice house.

“Eventually, you’ll move to a better country, a richer country, a country where things actually
work.

“Then another nation detonates a nuclear bomb.

“You see? We are doomed because we are all connected. But alone, we won’t survive. So we are all doomed. Even if you follow all the rules, someone, somewhere, won’t, and it
will be the end of you.

“If a life is defined by how it ends, then no life has meaning, Ivy, because every life ends with nothing. So the goal, Ivy, is not to be rich or to save the planet or to help other
people, but to live
now.
To find joy
now.
We are infinitesimal, Ivy. We are too small and our lives are too brief to make a difference. There’s no use making ourselves believe
otherwise. Look at you: all you ever wanted was to tell Meryl how you really feel. But you decided not to tell her that because, what? It will break your Catholic mother’s heart? You are
afraid? Twenty years or twenty minutes from now you will be dead, and what do you get out of denying yourself what you want? Nothing. Meryl decided to take matters into her own hands because, what?
A girl was wronged and justice must prevail? If she didn’t get involved, she’d be alive and counting calories. And what did her involvement yield? Nothing.

“You’re still living in a dream world, believing people help each other out because it’s the right thing to do. You know what the true appeal of altruism is? Of
kindness?
It makes people feel good about
themselves
. Everything goes back to the self and what the self wants. Knowing this—that’s not insanity, Ivy. That’s being
aware. That’s being
awake.”

“Are you done now?” I say, even though I feel like I am falling into a pit. I recall the 3 x 5 index card I found in Jonah’s room. How strange it was. “No one wants to
hear your ‘big business is a sociopath’ speech again.”

“Ah,” Leslie says. “So a spark of Jonah remains. I’m glad. You’ve been weird. Why didn’t you get rid of the body?”

I point at my legs. “Accident.”

I can’t glean anything from her expression. “Louis clearly knew about the basement. And as far as I know he has not told the police. Why didn’t
he
bury her?”

“He didn’t want to touch her.” At least this is the truth.

“Goddamn pussies,” Leslie says.

“I’m bored now,” I say, wiping my palms over my face. The perfect picture of impatience? I don’t know but Leslie doesn’t say anything. “Listen, my brother
won’t tell anyone about this because this is his house. Louis won’t be able to wiggle out of this so easily. Ivy, though—Ivy needs to go.”