“That sounds lovely but I’m just going to take it easy this weekend.”
“Why don’t you do something fun, if you’re feeling up to it? A spa day. Send me the bill.”
“Maybe I will. You know, as ex-husbands go, you’re not too bad.”
“Damning with faint praise.”
Rachel says goodbye and goes upstairs to tell Kylie the plans.
“You goofed, Mom. Stuart’s supposed to stay here this weekend. His parents are going to his stepsister’s graduation in Arizona,” Kylie says.
“Oh, crap, yeah.”
She calls Marty again. “We can’t do it. I’m an idiot. Sorry. Stuart’s staying with us this weekend. His mom is going to Phoenix.”
“Stuart? That weird freckly kid? He can come too. Ginger won’t mind.”
“You’ll have to ask Stuart’s mom. I doubt she’ll say yes. She doesn’t completely trust me, and therefore, by association, she won’t trust you.”
“No, it’ll work the opposite way. She’ll see that I am the dependable one. Text me her number and I’ll call her.”
Rachel texts him the number and of course Marty works his charms with Stuart’s mom. The weekend is Rachel’s.
Any other chemo patient would spend that time taking it easy and recovering.
Rachel is going to hunt for the monster’s lair.
She goes downstairs to Pete.
“I mean, it’s sensible, right? If we find them with Erik’s app, they won’t be able to track us or anything, will they?” she asks, looking for reassurance.
“I guess as long as you don’t piss them off too much, we should be fine. We’re just doing the equivalent of a phone trace. They won’t even know we’re looking for them. I doubt we’ll find them, but if we do we’ll let the authorities take care of it. An anonymous call to the FBI should do the trick.”
“So we’ll be safe?” Rachel asks again, thinking more about Kylie than herself.
Pete nods.
“OK,” Rachel says and she knocks the wooden tabletop as a charm against the possibility of something going wrong.
60
A house in Watertown, Massachusetts, in the late 1990s. It’s another one of those Spielbergian suburbs filled with kids shooting hoops, riding bikes, playing street hockey. There’s the sound of trash talk, skipping rhymes, laughter…
But 17 Summer Street is a house of mourning, not a house of mirth.
It’s been six months since the Princess Cruise from Nassau. Cheryl isn’t over it. How do you get over something like that?
She’s been going to therapy and she’s on several different antianxiety medications. None of that helps.
What helps is being numb.
Every morning, as soon as Tom and the twins are gone, she makes herself a vodka tonic that is mostly vodka. Then she puts on the TV and swallows a Klonopin and a Xanax and zones out.
The morning creeps by.
At eleven thirty, the mail will come. When she was a little girl, there were two deliveries a day. Now there’s only the one, at eleven thirty.
She knows what the postman will bring.
A few bills, some flyers, and another one of those letters.
She closes her eyes, and when she opens them, the sun has moved across the sky and it’s time to check the mail.
She ignores the junk and the bills and opens the letter that is addressed to her. Dear Whore, it begins.
The rest of it accuses her of being a slut and a terrible mother who is responsible for her son’s death.
This is the thirteenth letter she’s gotten like this. All of them written in block capitals with a black ballpoint pen.
She puts it with the others in a shoe box in the linen closet.
She makes herself another vodka tonic. She finds a cocktail umbrella and floats it in the glass. She watches a bit of Days of Our Lives and goes upstairs.
She sits on the bathroom floor and opens up a bottle of Nembutal. She pops one in her mouth and takes a drink. She pops another in her mouth and takes another drink.
She swallows the entire bottle and lies down on the bathroom floor.
At four o’clock, Margaret and Oliver come home.
They’ve gotten used to walking home from school by themselves.
Oliver turns on the TV. Margaret goes upstairs to read. She’s a good reader. Two years above her grade level. She’s reading The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin. It’s very gripping but eventually she needs to go to the bathroom. She finds Cheryl lying on the floor in there.
There’s foam around her mouth, her pupils are fixed and dilated, but she’s still breathing. Margaret brings Oliver upstairs and both children stare at Cheryl.
“The letters,” Margaret says.
“The letters,” Oliver agrees.
They look at her for a while. Her face is the color of the wallpaper in Tom’s study, a kind of pale yellow.
Tom doesn’t get home until seven thirty. The kids are in front of the TV eating microwaved pizza.
“Where’s your mother?” he asks.
“She must have gone out,” Margaret says. “She wasn’t here when we got home.”
“But her car is parked across the street,” he says.
“Oh, really?” Margaret says and goes back to the TV.
“Cheryl!” Tom shouts upstairs but there is no answer. He storms into the kitchen and grabs a Sam Adams from the fridge. He takes a bite of pizza.
When he does finally go upstairs, it’s too late. The Nembutal has induced respiratory failure leading to cardiac arrest.
He sinks to his knees and takes his wife’s cold hand.
He begins to cry.
“What have I done to deserve this?” he wonders out loud.
And then he remembers.
61
Erik’s been at it all night. He is five cups of coffee in. He is six layers down in the Russian doll of anonymity and fake identities. He has scrubbed the traces and is using a brand-new MacBook with a bogus IP address that locates it in far-off Melbourne, Australia. He is deep in the maze, but he is safe. Or thinks he is.
He’s pleased with his research. All the building blocks are in place.
Always were in place.
The Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions are optimal. The information is there if you know where and how to look. All those hints, all those personal ads, all those confessions. Every new person introduced to The Chain adds a geometric level of instability. The thing has been teetering on the verge of collapse for a long time. It’s just figuring out a way to harness the data points into a shape.
He sips coffee and reads an interesting paper by Maria Schuld, Ilya Sinayskiy, and Francesco Petruccione on prediction by linear regression on a quantum computer. Their algorithm is fascinating.
But it is, he knows, a distraction, something for future analysis.
Amazon’s Alexa is playing Physical Graffiti for the third time tonight. He stops to listen to the opening riff of “Trampled Under Foot.”
He looks at the photograph of himself, his wife, and his daughter in front of MoMA, in New York. His wife’s favorite place in all the world. His wife and daughter are grinning while he looks pained.
He shakes his head and fights the tears and looks at the bullet points on the screen that he will have to condense for his Chain notebook.