“You don’t get it. You don’t know—Optimal owns everything in this town—it’s everywhere—”
“You don’t get it.” His voice cracks against a note of pain, and it touches a place deep inside me and suddenly I realize that the anger is just grief, just fear, just worry. “Fuck Kaycee Mitchell. Dead, alive, burning in hell, wherever she is. Fuck her. She ruined enough. Don’t let her ruin you, too. Don’t—”
I kiss him. Taking the words off his tongue with brute force. We knock a pile of books off the table, crash down to the chair and then onto the floor. We topple the lamp and it shatters on the ground, making the room go dark.
“You can’t fix yourself on me,” he says, undoing his belt. “You know that, right?”
“I’m not here to fix myself,” I say, pulling him closer.
Because maybe I can’t be fixed at all.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Knocking. Someone is at the door, knocking again and again.
I’m in my own bed, but the smell of Condor is everywhere and all over me.
More knocking.
My phone’s dead, and I have to find the microwave to read the time: 8:12. Only bad news comes this early.
I twitch open the blinds with two fingers and my heart stops. Sheriff Kahn is scowling at my door as if it’s been talking back. I can tell just from how he’s standing that he’s been there awhile.
The paintings are still sitting in my living room: each of them looks like something ripped from a body, like some horrible inner secret.
Kahn starts knocking again before I’ve shuffled one of them beneath the sofa.
“One minute.” Sweat sticks my hair to my forehead. I’m wearing the shirt I had on yesterday, but inside out. “One minute.” I shove the other two paintings under my bed.
I look for a lie, for an excuse, for something to say, but there’s nothing. One time I lost control of my car on Lake Shore Drive, and after a few seconds of panic, while my car was spinning over black ice toward the ditch, I landed on a moment of peace just like this one. The collision was inevitable. All I had to do was wait for it. It was almost a relief.
“Abby.” Sheriff Kahn looks like a mourner at a funeral he’s secretly excited about: like he’s trying a little too hard. Some tragedies are inexplicable. People run. Girls run away all the time. “I’m sorry to bother you so early.”
The morning light feels like a terrible uninvited houseguest. I stand there blinking and sweating, while Sheriff Kahn refracts light from his shoulders.
“Not as sorry as I am,” I say, and then immediately regret it. I try again. “Can I help you?”
“I have some bad news,” he says. I watch him force himself to look directly at me.
“I saw you called.” I pause, taking in his expression, but I can’t read it. “And honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Kahn flinches. He waves a hand as if to shake off a fly. “I’m not here about that.” The pause is long enough to contract the whole world into a heartbeat. Not here about that means here about something else, and I make a sudden pivot to possibilities I didn’t even know I should fear. For a wild second I think he must be here about Kaycee Mitchell, or whoever was pretending to be her.
“I have some bad news about your father.”
What’s funny is that right away, it feels like I was waiting for him to say it.
“Can I come inside for a minute?” he asks, in a softer voice.
—
It’s amazing how many different ways there are to suffocate. You can suffocate in water as shallow as a puddle, by smothering and by choking. You can even suffocate by breathing if you’re breathing the wrong air.
It was TJ who found him. He went to see him just a few hours after our meeting with Dr. Chun. It was part of their routine. On Mondays he usually went over to inspect the trees of course and for a ginger ale. It seems important for me to tell Sheriff Kahn this, about the routine of it. It seems important for me to prove I knew his routine—at least, some small part of it.
I don’t know why I feel the need to give off the impression that I know more about my father’s daily life than I actually do—like when I justified renting my own place to Monty’s mother. Strangers make you feel like family should be the most important thing. Blood is thicker than water, that kind of thing. How are you supposed to act when it’s not?
TJ’s story is short. He says my dad seemed moody and confused. He talked a lot about my mother. He ranted about cancer and the government, how the disease was invented by a U.S. lab back in the fifties to try to get people off their Social Security.
He gave TJ his hacksaw as a gift, one of his favorite tools.
And then TJ called me twice, with no answer. Sheriff Kahn doesn’t say that part. I doubt he knows.
My head is full of ringing echoes, voices I can’t make out, someone screaming for air.
Sheriff Kahn tells me that TJ cried in his office. He feels guilty, he tells me, for taking the saw.
When TJ found him this morning, the car was still running in the garage, coughing out its last vapor of gas.
Sheriff Kahn tells me that he would have felt no pain. It’s a peaceful way to die. He tells me it’s just like sleeping.
I wonder whether when he opened up to me in the car, he’d already decided.
For a moment, I can’t remember if I hugged him when I said good-bye.
But I know I didn’t.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
I don’t sleep. I don’t eat much, either. But somehow a day slips by, and then two.
My father committed suicide two days ago now. Choked to death on his own car fumes. Maybe it was the confusion, maybe he was just too proud to be taken to the ground, or maybe his loss of faith was too dark to bear.
Sheriff Kahn is nice enough to give me those two days before returning to arrest me. Breaking and entering. Vandalism. Maybe he feels bad for me because he skips the handcuffs and just reads me a sworn statement made by the night manager at the U-Pack. Zombielike, I watch Kahn’s lips move as he explains what I did. That I failed to stop my car and present identification to the night manager. When he tried closing the gates, I steamrolled right on through them anyway. They don’t seem to know about Kaycee’s paintings, and how I hauled them off with me. Shitty security cameras, apparently.
The paintings are still stashed under my sofa and bed—I can almost smell them. I can’t bring myself to confess or return them. I’m even afraid to see them again—afraid that, like dead bodies, they’ll have started to rot.
“To be honest, what they’re after is a check. Frank Mitchell’s another story, though. He’s a wildcard. I know I don’t have to tell you that. He could press charges.”
Wildcard. The word makes me think of playing cards with Kaycee, sitting cross-legged on my porch. Whoever had won the last round got to pick a wild card, and Kaycee always picked the king of hearts. “Suicide King,” she called it, because of the knife drawn straight through his head.
“What were you doing out there, anyway?” Sheriff Kahn asks.
I’m too exhausted to lie. “Frank Mitchell got that unit right after Kaycee supposedly ran away.”