Found You (12 page)

It looked down at the doll. With stiff and jerking movements, the little dead-shell rose to its feet and looked up at the Primary, who gave it a little nod.

The doll looked at Cheryl. She began screaming and crying, bending down to tug at her feet frozen fast in the ice, clawing at her own skin with fingers raw from the frosty surface.

“No no no no no no,” she kept whining over and over. The doll tottered closer. Each awkward step brought a fresh wave of screaming in higher pitch and more frantic pounding and scratching at the ice. The skin around her ankles bruised. Her nose bled. Her hair tangled itself over one eye as she shook her head against the approach of the doll.

When it reached her, it picked up its head. It had no face, no eyes, no ceramic smile. Cheryl wilted where she stood, the tears slowing to crystal on her face. The fight in her eyes went out. She looked up at the Primary, and it sensed Despair, the most sustaining quality any meat could produce.

The Primary drank it up.

The doll shattered beneath Cheryl’s chin, just at her throat, and a thousand tiny shards of ice embedded themselves into her neck and chest. By the time her body hit the floor, the ice was gone and the beats of her cold-
shocked heart were already quieted, while around her the airport bustled with meats and noise again. It watched a number of them rush over to her and signal at each other before it pulled back into the Convergence, the black holes inside it temporarily eased.

No, it hadn’t. But it had looked so
much
like her, sounded like her, even smelled like her, for chrissakes. It had stood half-naked before him, wearing a ratty black broom skirt and no top at all. Then it stumbled toward him. Cuts haphazardly made up and down its arms and stomach bled a little when it moved. It stood barefoot, and its feet made little crunching sounds, like tiny bones breaking, as it walked over garbage in the alley, totally oblivious. It left white powder footprints in its wake that caught fire in blazes and then disappeared.

And yet, he wanted to hold it (her), to touch it (her), even ghost-pale and angry-eyed and very clearly not the real girl he’d fallen in love with. He wanted to pull it…her…close and tell her—tell it, he corrected with a grimace—everything was okay.

He wanted to say he was sorry, that he wished for all the world he’d never left the house that night, that if he could, he’d have taken death off her hands and the drugs from her system and made her free.

First, he’d seen something in the hallway of the rec center, a wave of hair, a flash of a long white arm, and
they had seemed familiar to him. He even thought he could smell her perfume. He’d gotten up and followed the glimpses, always just enough steps ahead of him to make him unsure, outside and around the side of the building.

And when he’d turned the corner, he found Chloe standing there, bone-thin, oatmeal-pale, looking sad and needy at the same time.

His brain tried to lodge a complaint that, logically, what his eyes were seeing couldn’t be possible. Chloe was dead. She had been for a while. He knew that. He
knew
it.

Then the thing that looked so much like her started collapsing from the inside out. Inky veins spidered outward from gaping, bruise-colored holes in the arms, giving the skin a kind of marblelike look. When the spidering reached the breasts, the nipples turned black and crumbled then blew away like ash. When the poison veins got to the face, the cheeks and forehead took on a drawn look, sadder and more sickly than when she’d been twitching and sweating and throwing up from withdrawal. It reached the eyes, and they turned a watery black, melting out of the head in sooty streams down the cheeks.

It hadn’t spoken to him at all, only held out those broken arms with their collapsing veins working death through its system. But once, it parted the lips, just a little, and he’d seen what looked like heavy threads weaving in and out of the soft, wet inner flesh of the mouth, sewing it closed.

That, maybe, more than anything, scared the hell out
of him. That…thing wasn’t a drugged out Chloe or even simply an overdosing Chloe. It was an already dead version of his ex-girlfriend, hopped up marionette- like on enough drugs to jolt a body into a grotesque parody of the movement of living things.

It made him sick. Scared. Disgusted that even then,
even then
, he still wanted to hold her (it) and tell it that he’d fix it, that he’d make up for everything, he promised, if she’d just promise to never go away again.

It was worse than seeing his dead aunt. Worse than seeing his brother, who he’d been trying unsuccessfully to get a hold of for days. Worse because of the things it said to him, the accusations and blame, worse because maybe, just maybe, it was right.

More than maybe.

“
You let me die. You made me die, you bastard. You never
were good for anything but ruining lives. It should have been
you, you fucking junkie. It should have been you
…”

It hadn’t been hard to get the handgun. He knew a guy named Rick in Rockaway, way up Green Pond Road deep in the woods in a place they called Split Rock, who owed him money and was willing to loan out a gun to repay a debt and not ask any questions about it. They weren’t Rick’s guns; he thought of himself as a collector, in fact, for the very purposes of trade, and he collected from the teenaged hoods of Morris, Sussex, and Bloomwood counties—kids whose wildest crimes, at least the wildest they were ever caught doing, amounted to little more than bungling breaking and entering and boosting car stereos. If these hoods managed to come
across any firearms, Rick was the guy to dump them off with.

Rick had been surprised but delighted to see Jake, and hugged him like a long-lost brother. He even seemed disappointed when Jake said he’d come to do business and couldn’t stay long. But it was all business, in the end. Rick didn’t care any more about Jake than whatever Jake could do for him. And at one time, Jake had done his fair share. He’d been a frequent visitor at Rick’s place back when his habit had been manageable enough to work off in trade. And maybe as a nod of remembrance or fondness for those old times, Rick had handed him the gun upon request without so much as a raised eyebrow. More likely, his discretion was a result of not wanting to be involved—the less he knew, the less he’d be able to testify to in court, should the occasion ever arise.

In spite of his visits to Rick’s and his full awareness of what was bought and sold there, Jake had never fired or even held a gun. The thought of actually pointing it and pulling the trigger absolutely terrified him. But he didn’t see any other way.

He’d considered the possibility of keeping the gun on him as protection, until he’d managed to straighten the whole mess out, but the thought was short-lived. He knew better; guns didn’t work on the dead. And in his gut, he knew that guns wouldn’t work, either, on any kind of monsters that masqueraded around as the dead.

But they worked on people. They offered one bright
flash and deafening noise and then instant peace. He was afraid that he was left with little else as an alternative. He’d be damned if he’d fall apart and go crazy, and going back to getting high just flew in the face of everything he hated and resented about whatever these ghostly creatures were and what they were doing to him.

Slim pickings, optionwise
, he thought, and uttered a short, bitter laugh as he held the gun in his hand. The cigarette clamped in his mouth sent up tendrils of smoke that got in his eyes and made them squint and tear. He sat in his bedroom, on the edge of his bed, feeling awkward and out of place. The air of the house felt different to him. He couldn’t shake the sensation of unseen eyes following everything he did, criticizing, passing judgment, watching from the street straight through the walls.

The eyes of the dead, maybe.

There was, he thought as he held the gun, surrounded by the cottony, thick quiet, more than one way for someone to die on you, more than one way for someone to leave your life. People got mad or hurt and passed out of your life forever. People dumped you. People continued to forget to call back. They were all like little deaths. It hurt just as much to have people taken from you. Worse when they took themselves away from you on their own.

And if there was more than one way for someone to die on you, maybe that meant there was more than one way to kill someone. More than one way to lose someone forever.

The metal warmed slowly to his touch. It fit in his palm but didn’t really feel comfortable there. It felt like having extra fingers. Deadly, cold fingers.

He thought of Chloe, and the fight.

The other woman had been a skinny-assed girl named Ali, with thin brown hair that was always in her eyes and pale, freckled skin, and tight T-shirts and jeans. She meant nothing more to Jake than the source of an occasional bag of smack; in fact, the longer he talked to her, the clearer he saw the stuck-groove loop of her words and the shallow repetitiveness of her thoughts. She possessed a kind of glassy calm, a sort of casual and accidental balance, like a sudden shock or a strong enough wind might blow her right over, but until then, she was just sort of hanging on.

There had been one night when Jake had no money, and Ali had drugs, and he’d been feeling sick and shaky and achy and sweating and all she’d wanted was a kiss. Just a kiss with a little tongue, and—

The memory made him feel sick, the heat of regret flushing his neck and cheeks.

It had only been a kiss, and kissing her had tasted like dry paper and cigarette smoke, but Jake’s timing had always sucked, and Chloe always had a knack for catching him doing something wrong.

Chloe thought Jake kissing anyone but her was about as wrong as wrong got.

They fought for hours—Christ,
hours
—and he couldn’t take it. The shakes, the ache, the awful alternate heat and chills. He’d simply lost patience. He’d given up hope trying to make them or anything else in
his life work, and he’d gotten up and stormed out of the house.

He might have ended up exactly like Chloe, but his friend Joe down the street only had a few joints laced with heroin. Joe had handed them over willingly enough, and what there was in the joint calmed Jake down enough to sit there with his friend and watch the football game drinking beers until, as Joe put it, he could think of Chloe without wanting to punch a wall. That didn’t take long. The heroin took most of the edge off, and the beer and football took off the rest. Jake and Joe didn’t go back right away, though. They waited until they had a plan. Jake was to stop home, grab some stuff, and crash at Joe’s. Joe even went with him back to the house.

The kind of dark that greeted them in the front hall was almost physically empty, as if some spark that normally made it a habitable dark had been snuffed out. It was the dark of warehouses, the dark of dead- end streets, a shade or dimension less than what he’d left.

Jake found Chloe in the bedroom. She looked pale and a little bluish around the closed eyes and the cheeks. She wore only her underwear, and the rest of her looked pale, thin, and kind of bluish, too. On the night table next to the bed, there were a few razor blades she’d used to cut up her arms, stomach, and thighs—something he’d never seen her do and hoped for all the rest of his life he never saw anyone do again. Her blood left little irregular spatters on the sheets. But there was also a needle—her needle (they always used their own, and never shared needles with anyone)—sticking half out
of her arm, just below the rubber band where she’d tied off.

Jake thought he knew what she’d done right away. He tore through the room, looking in all the secret places where he suspected she stashed stuff to hide it from him. He found one empty heroin bag, a prescription bottle for Xanex with some woman’s name he never heard of and only a few pills rattling around in the bottom in the first night table drawer, and on the floor just under the bed, an empty bottle of Rum-plemintz, the kind she always complained tasted like mouthwash.

She’d been planning for this. She’d prepared for it. He couldn’t imagine why, or for how long. There was more, he guessed, than just the thing with Ali, but…why couldn’t he remember? What else had they been fighting about?

Jake thought about all that as he called 911 and managed to report the overdose in a fairly calm voice beneath the barrage of guilt. When he got off the phone, he broke down in tears, his whole body shaking from the inside. Joe stood behind him, uncomfortable, and patted his shoulder.

“
I don’t know, Jake, I’ve never done heroin before. I’m
afraid, Jake. I’m afraid
.”

Years ago, that one time, the first time, had been the only time he’d even asked her to do it. At least, as far as he could remember. But she’d chosen to do heroin that time, and every time after that. He hadn’t killed her. He hadn’t even been home, and if he’d known, if he had any idea at all what she was planning to do…

Still, she’d only ever done heroin in the first place to be with him, to keep up with him. To connect. Like he’d told Erik. And he guessed she’d overdosed to get away from him.

Taking the cigarette from his mouth, he ashed it into the tray at his feet. He followed the pattern of the blanket, the one he’d taken from that apartment they’d shared, and his gaze fell to what would have been her side of the bed, to the pillow he’d also taken, the one she’d hugged and cried into on those nights he couldn’t score them anything at all.

Yeah, there was more than one way to kill someone. With a final drag of the cigarette, he crushed it in the tray and straightened up. Jake’s grip on the gun tightened.

He wondered if it would hurt. He hoped it would, just a little. It shouldn’t be over without any sort of…exit moment. There should at least be a single moment of pain, of awareness, for someone like him. A moment to feel alive and aware, guilty and afraid of what would happen next. A moment to connect with the death that seemed to follow him everywhere he went. Jake raised the gun to his temple.

The phone rang, and he jumped, startled out of his thoughts, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He took the gun away from his head and looked at it as the phone rang. The safety was still on, and for a moment he thought,
God, I can’t do anything right
, and then pointed the gun at the telephone and made a gesture as if shooting it off the hook. It rang again. He sighed. A fourth ring. A fifth.

After the sixth ring, Jake put the gun down on the bed next to him and got up to answer it. His brother had told him once that maybe there was no such thing as fate, but there sure as hell were carefully placed coincidences. And even on the day you check out of life— those were his exact words, the “day you check out of life”—even then you shouldn’t ignore those coincidences when they are laid right in your lap.

The phone rang again, and Jake picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Jake.” It was Erik, his sponsor.

“Oh, hey, man. Look, I’m sorry for freaking out on you the other day. I just—I’ve been under a lot of pressure, and I just, I dunno. Had a little break with reality.” He eyed the gun on the bed with impatience but kept that out of his voice. “Everything’s okay now, though.”

“No, it’s not.”

“No, really, I’m telling you the truth. I just…needed a few days to get my head together. You know, to think straight. I’ll be back at Saturday’s meeting, I just—”

“Jake,” Erik said calmly, “please don’t bullshit me. I know what’s wrong. At least, I’m pretty sure I know. And I think we should talk about it.”