“Ms. Leech? It’s Jack, from across the hall. I know today’s not grocery day, but I have to talk to you. You didn’t answer your door, so I let myself in. Are you awake?”
As I turned sideways and worked my way through the mess, I began to wonder if something was wrong. Leech rarely had visitors. If she had a heart attack or stroke or even slipped and fell, she might go days without being found, maybe weeks. As far as I knew, her only contact with the outside world was with the weekly grocery deliveries, and I had no idea who Matteo arranged to take care of that.
I found her, very much alive, sitting on the edge of her bed.
Her face looked frightfully white, the wrinkles set so deep in her skin they might have been carved in with a chisel. She watched me enter the room with unblinking eyes. Her left hand held a fistful of quilt. She squeezed the material, kneaded the cloth like raw dough. Her right hand disappeared under the sheets. She wore a nightgown similar to the ones Auntie Jo had worn, all frilly lace and silk, stolen from someone’s closet in the seventies. Her feet were bare, her toes pressing into the hardwood.
“Ms. Leech, are you okay?”
“Okay, yes,” she said the words, then went silent. Her lips continued to move, though. A soundless mumble.
Had she had a stroke?
At her age, anything was possible. What was she now? Mid-seventies? Eighty? I had no idea. A twang of guilt hit me. I should know. This woman practically raised me with Jo, yet I knew so little about her.
“Do you want me to call a doctor?”
She said nothing, only stared, her lips quivering.
I snapped my fingers in front of her face. Bits of dirt flaked to the floor. “Do you recognize me, Ms. Leech? Do you know who I am?”
“I know what happens next,” she sang this more than spoke the words, a high girlish tone. Her lips formed a quick grin, then fell flat. She followed this with, “You are Jack Thatch, son of Edward Thatch and Kaitlyn Gargery, the boy across the hall, the bringer of groceries. Stealer of books. That’s who you are.”
Gargery.My mother’s maiden name.
I held up the yearbook and opened to her page. “Do you know why these people are circled? Look—here’s my mother, and my father, Stella’s father, Richard, and her mother, Emma…”
“Ah, Stella,” she said softly. “Cute as a button, that one.” Her eyes looked to some distant object. Then, she added for no reason, “Twenty-seven.”
“Twenty-seven what?” I flipped through the pages, holding the yearbook up to her face as I came to each circled image. “There are thirteen people circled. Who are they? You knew them all, didn’t you? Why are they circled?”
Her gaze was blank again.
I showed her the inscriptions at the front.Hey Eddie, Get a haircut, you shit! – Gene Glaspie.Gene Glaspie’s photo was not circled. I checked. “This is my father’s yearbook. Eddie. He’s not in his grave. Where is he? Do you know? What happened to him? Why did he leave this book for me? Why did he circle these photographs? Who are these people?” I turned to the back, to her picture, held it up. “I know you know!” I shouted these last words, unable to control the adrenaline coursing through my body, the book shaking in my hands.
“Three,” she whispered.
“Three what?!?”
The gun came up fast, a black metal blur in her right hand from under the sheets to her mouth. She pressed it so far back into her throat, I thought she planned to swallow it. Her thumb cocked back the hammer and—
I saw the back of her head explode out over the bed a fraction of a second before I heard the explosion of the bullet leaving the chamber. A rush of air pattered my face. All the air left the room, and the loud blast was replaced by a louder ringing in my ears.
Ms. Leech sat there for a moment, her eyes frozen with a quick wonder. Then she slouched forward and dropped from the bed to the floor.
I backed out of the room, out of her apartment, crossed the hall into my own apartment, and closed the door as quickly as I could. I tried to catch my breath,neededto catch my breath, but this night simply wasn’t going to let me.
Sitting on top of my backpack was a fifth of Jameson whiskey, along with a note:
Welcome to the party, Jack! Toast with me.
– David
I grabbed the Jameson bottle and note and managed to get back to my car before the shakes started, barely. I tore the cap off and took a hardy chug, welcoming the warmth as it burned away the—adrenaline, fear, anxiety, confusion, pain, sadness, hatred, anger—churning under my skin. I didn’t care where the bottle came from. I didn’t care what the bottle might represent. I didn’t care if the bottle was laced with the most acidic of poisons (I think part of me hoped it was). I needed the whiskey to drive away the image of Ms. Leech etched into the back of my eyelids. I would keep the drinking in check, though, goddamnit, I would keep it in check. Icoulddo that. Iwoulddo that. To prove this to myself, I drank only enough to lower a veil over the world. Then I twisted the cap back on and dropped the bottle on the floorboard of the passenger seat.
I was back on I-79 before I realized I had even started the car, and I was driving fast, nearly twenty miles-per-hour over the posted limit. I eased back on the accelerator, stopped swerving from lane to lane, and fell in line with the rest of the morning traffic. These people, these drones, driving to work, putting on makeup, eating breakfast sandwiches and laughing at the stupid little jokes coming from the radio. They had no idea. None of them.
When I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror, I didn’t recognize the person staring back at me. My hair was filthy and matted, eyes bloodshot. My skin was covered in dirt and mud and little specs of red. I tried not to think about those. I took Exit 63, just outside of Wexford, and pulled into the back of a Phillips 66 gas station. The bathroom door was locked, but someone had crowbarred the metal doorframe, rendering the heavy dead bolt useless. Inside, a loop of rope hung from the door, and someone had screwed a crooked hook into the wall to create a makeshift interior lock. I pulled the door closed, twisted the rope around the hook, and stripped out of my clothes. I expected the water from the tap to be brown, but it flowed clear and icy cold. I took what Auntie Jo would have called a “whore’s bath.” The paper towel dispenser was empty, so I used one of the shirts I’d packed to wipe away the grit from my face and hair. When finished, I changed into clean clothes from by pack, stuffed my dirty shirt, jeans, underwear, and socks into the trash in the corner of the room, then took the entire trash bag out and stuffed it into the Dumpster at the corner of the parking lot inside a cardboard box that once contained frozen burritos.
