“It was Andy’s idea to send you to Berlin.”
Jane knew he was telling the truth, just as she knew that Nick was a surgeon when it came to transplanting his ideas onto other people’s tongues.
Nick said, “He thought if you knew he was sick, that you would . . . I don’t know, Jinx. Do something stupid. Make us stop. Make everything stop. He believes in this thing that we’re doing. He wants us to finish it. That’s why I’m taking him to Brooklyn. You can come too. Take care of him. Keep him alive long enough to—”
“Stop.” She couldn’t listen to his bullshit. “I am not going to let my brother suffocate to death in the back of that filthy van.”
“It’s not about his life anymore,” Nick insisted. “It’s about his legacy. This is how Andy wants to go out. On his own terms, like a man. That’s what he’s always wanted. The overdoses, the hanging, the pills and needles, showing up in places he shouldn’t be, hanging out with the wrong people. You know what hell his life has been. He got clean for this thing that we’re doing—that we’re all doing. This is what gave him the strength to stop using, Jane. Don’t take that away from him.”
She gripped her fists in frustration. “He’s doing it for you, Nick. All it would take is one word from you and he’d go to the hospital where he can die in peace.”
“You know him better than me?”
“I know you better. Andy wants to please you. They all want to please you. But this is different. It’s cruel. He’ll suffocate like—”
“Yes, Jane, I get it. He’ll suffocate on the fluids in his lungs. He’ll have eight minutes of agonizing terror, and that’s—well, agonizing—but you need to listen to me very carefully, darling, because this part is very important,” Nick said. “You have to choose between him or me.”
What?
“If Andy can’t make the trip with me, then you need to go with me in his place.”
What?
“I can’t trust you anymore.” Nick’s shoulder went up in a shrug. “I know how your mind works. The minute I leave, you’ll take Andy to the hospital. You’ll stay with him because that’s what you do, Jinx. You stay with people. You’ve always been loyal, sitting with homeless men down at the shelter, helping serve soup at the mission, wiping spittle from the mouths of dying men at the infection ward. I won’t say you’re a good little dog, because that’s cruel. But your loyalty to Andrew will land us all in prison, because the moment you walk into the hospital, the police will arrest you, and they’ll know we’re in Chicago, and I can’t let that happen.”
She felt her mouth gape open.
“I’ll only give you this one chance. You have to choose right here, right now: him or me.”
Jane felt the room shift. This couldn’t be happening.
He looked at her coldly, as if she was a specimen under glass. “You must have known it would come to this, Jane. You’re naïve, but you’re not stupid.” Nick waited a moment. “Choose.”
She had to rest her hand on the sink so that she wouldn’t slide to the floor. “He’s your best friend.” Her voice was no more than a whisper. “He’s my brother.”
“I need your decision.”
Jane heard a high-pitched sound in her ears, as if her skull had been struck by a tuning fork. She didn’t know what was happening. Panic made her words brim with fear. “Are you leaving me? Breaking up with me?”
“I said me or him. It’s your choice, not mine.”
“Nick, I can’t—” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Was this a test? Was he doing what he always did, gauging her loyalty? “I love you.”
“Then choose me.”
“I—you know you’re everything to me. I’ve given up—” She held out her arms, indicating the world, because there was nothing left that she had not abandoned for him. Her father. Jasper. Her life. Her music. “Please, don’t make me choose. He’s dying.”
Nick stared at her, icy cold.
Jane felt a wail come out of her mouth. She knew how Nick looked when he was finished with a person. Six years of her life, her heart, her love, was evaporating in front of her eyes. How could he so easily throw it all away? “Nicky, please—”
“Andrew’s impending death should make your choice easy. A few more hours with a dying man or the rest of your life with me.” He waited. “Choose.”
“Nick—” Another sob cut her off. She felt like she was dying. He couldn’t leave her. Not now. “It’s not just a few more hours. It’s hours of terror, or—” Jane couldn’t think about what Andrew would go through if he was abandoned. “You can’t mean this. I know you’re just testing me. I love you. Of course I love you. I told you I’m with you.”
Nick reached for the door.
“Please!” Jane grabbed him by the front of his shirt. He turned away his head when she tried to kiss him. Jane pressed her face to his chest. She was crying so hard that she could barely speak. “Please, Nicky. Please don’t make me choose. You know that I can’t live without you. I’m nothing without you. Please!”
“Then you’ll go with me?”
She looked up at him. She had cried so hard for so long that her eyelids felt like barbed wire.
“I need you to say it, Jane. I need to hear your choice.”
“I c-can’t—” she stuttered out the word. “Nick, I can’t—”
“You can’t choose?”
“No.” The realization almost stopped her heart. “I can’t leave him.”
Nick’s face gave nothing away.
“I—” Jane could barely swallow. Her mouth had gone dry. She was terrified, but she knew that what she was doing was right. “I will not let my brother die alone.”
“All right.” Nick reached for the door again, but then something changed his mind.
For just a moment, she thought that he was going to tell her it was okay.
But he didn’t.
His hands shot out. He shoved Jane across the room. Her head whipped back, broke the glass out of the window.
She was dumbstruck. She felt the back of her head, expecting to find blood. “Why did—”
Nick punched her in the stomach.
Jane collapsed to her knees. Bile erupted from her mouth. She tasted blood. Her stomach spasmed so hard that she doubled over, her forehead touching the floor.
Nick grabbed her hair, jerked her head back up. He was kneeling in front of her. “What did you think would happen after we did this, Janey, that we would run off to a little flat in Switzerland and raise our baby?”
The baby—
“Look at me.” His fingers wrapped around her neck. He shook her like a doll. “Were you stupid enough to think I’d let you keep it? That I’d turn into some fat old man who reads the Sunday paper while you do the dishes and we talk about Junior’s class project?”
Jane couldn’t breathe. Her fingernails dug into his wrists. He was choking her.
“Don’t you understand that I know everything about you, Jinx? We’ve never been whole people. We only make sense when we’re together.” He tightened his grip with both hands. “Nothing can come between us. Not a whining baby. Not your dying brother. Nothing. Do you hear me?”
She clawed at him, desperate for air. He banged her head against the wall.
“I’ll kill you before I let you leave me.” He looked her in the eye, and Jane knew that this time, Nick was telling the truth. “You belong to me, Jinx Queller. If you ever try to leave me, I will scorch the earth to get you back. Do you understand?” He shook her again. “Do you?”
His hands were too tight. Jane felt a darkness edging around her vision. Her lungs shuddered. Her tongue would not stay inside of her mouth.
“Look at me.” Nick’s face was glowing with sweat. His eyes were on fire. He was smiling his usual self-satisfied grin. “How does it feel to suffocate, darling? Is it everything you imagined?”
Her eyelids started to flutter. For the first time in days, Jane’s vision was clear. There were no more tears left.
Nick had taken them away, just like he had taken everything else.
August 26, 2018
13
Andy sat at a booth in the back of a McDonald’s outside of Big Rock, Illinois. She had been so happy to be out of Mike’s truck after two and a half monotonous days of driving that she’d treated herself to a milkshake. Worrying about her cholesterol and lack of exercise was a problem for Future Andy.
Present Andy had enough problems already. She was no longer an amoeba, but there were some obsessive tendencies that she had to accept were baked into her DNA. She had spent the first day of the trip freaking out over all of the mistakes she had made and was probably still making: that she had never checked the cooler in the Reliant for a GPS tracker, that she had left the unregistered revolver in the glove box for Mike to find, that she had possibly broken his testicles and actually stolen his wallet and was committing a felony by taking a stolen vehicle across multiple state lines.
This was the really important one: had Mike heard Paula tell Andy to look for Clara Bellamy in Illinois, or had he been too concerned that his nuts were imploding?
Future Andy would find out eventually.
She chewed the straw on her milkshake. She watched the screensaver bounce around the laptop screen. She would have to save her neurosis about Mike for when she was trying to fall asleep and needed something to torment herself over. For now, she had to figure out what the hell had landed Paula Kunde in prison for twenty years and why she so clearly held a grudge against Laura.
Andy had so far been stymied in her computer searches. Three nights spent in three different motels with the laptop propped open on her belly had resulted in nothing more than an angry red rectangle of skin on her stomach.
The easiest route to finding shit on people was always Facebook. The night Andy had left Austin, she’d created a fake account in the name of Stefan Salvatore and used the Texas Longhorns’ logo as her profile photo. Unsurprisingly, Paula Kunde was not on the social media site. ProfRatings.com let Andy use her Facebook credentials to log in as a user. She went onto Paula’s review page with its cumulative half-star rating. She sent dozens of private messages to Paula’s most vocal critics, the texts all saying the same thing:
DUDE!!! Kunde in FEDERAL PEN 20 yrs?!?!?! MUST HAVE DEETS!!! Bitch won’t change my grade!!!
Andy hadn’t heard back much more than Fuck that fucking bitch I hope you kill her, but she knew that eventually, someone would get bored and do the kind of deep dive that took knowing the number off your parents’ credit card.
A toddler screamed on the other side of the McDonald’s.
Andy watched his mother carry him toward the bathroom. She wondered if she had ever been to this McDonald’s with her mother. Laura hadn’t just pulled Chicago, Illinois, out of her ass for Jerry Randall’s birth and death place.
Right?
Andy slurped the last of the milkshake. Now was not the time to dive into the silly string of her mother’s lies. She studied the scrap of paper at her elbow. The second that Andy was safe enough outside of Austin, she had pulled over to the side of the road and scribbled down everything she could remember about her conversation with Paula Kunde.
—Twenty years in Danbury?
—QuellCorp?
—Knew Hoodie, but not Mike?
—31 years—interesting math?
—Laura full of the worst type of bullshit?
—Shotgun? What made her change her mind—Clara Bellamy???
Andy had started with the easiest searches first. The Danbury Federal Penitentiary’s records were accessible through the BOP.gov inmate locator, but Paula Kunde was not listed on the site. Nor was she listed on the UC-Berkeley, Stanford or West Connecticut University alumni pages. The obvious explanation was that Paula had at some point gotten married and, patriarchal constructs aside, changed her last name.
I know how marriage works.
Andy had already checked marriage and divorce records in Austin, then in surrounding counties, then done the same in Western Connecticut and Berkeley County and Palo Alto, then Andy had decided that she was wasting her time because Paula could’ve flown to Vegas and gotten hitched and actually, why did Andy believe that a shotgun-wielding lunatic had told her the truth about being in prison in the first place?
Snitch and two dimes were basically in every prison show ever. All it took was saying them with attitude, which Paula Kunde had plenty of.
Regardless, the BOP search was a dead end.
Andy tapped her fingers on the table as she studied the list. She tried to think back to the conversation inside of Paula’s kitchen. There had been a definite before and after. Before, meaning when Paula was talking to her, and after, meaning when she’d gone to fetch her shotgun and told Andy to get the hell out.
Andy couldn’t think of what she’d said wrong. They had been talking about Laura, and how she was full of bullshit—the worst type of bullshit—
And then Paula had told Andy to wait and then threatened to shoot her.
Andy could only shake her head, because it still didn’t make sense.
Even more puzzling was the after-after, because Paula hadn’t given up Clara Bellamy’s name until after Andy had kicked the shit out of Mike. Andy could take it at face value and assume that Paula had been impressed by the violence, but something told her she was on the wrong track. Paula was fucking smart. You didn’t go to Stanford if you were an idiot. She had played Andy like a fiddle from the moment she’d opened the front door. She was very likely playing Andy even now, but trying to figure out a maniac’s end game was far beyond Andy’s deductive skills.
She looked back at her notes, focusing on the item that still niggled most at her brain:
—31 years—interesting math?
Had Paula gone to prison thirty-one years ago while a pregnant Laura ran off with nearly one million bucks and a fake ID to live her fabulous life on the beach for thirty-one years until suddenly the diner video appeared on the national news, pointing the bad guys to her location?
Hoodie had strangled both Laura and Paula, so obviously both women had information that someone else wanted.
The mysterious they who could track Andy’s emails and phone calls?
Andy returned to the laptop and tried QuellCorp.com again, because all she could do now was go back and see if she’d missed anything the last twenty times she had looked at the website.
The splash page offered a Ken Burns-effect photo slowly zooming onto a young, multicultural group of lab-coated scientists staring intently at a beaker full of glowing liquid. Violins played in the background like Leonardo da Vinci had just discovered the cure for herpes.
Andy muted the sound.
She was familiar with the pharmaceutical company the same way everybody was familiar with Band-Aids. QuellCorp made everything from baby wipes to erectile dysfunction pills. The only information Andy could find under HISTORY was that a guy named Douglas Paul Queller had founded the company in the 1920s, then his descendants had sold out in the 1980s, then by the early 2000s QuellCorp had basically swallowed the world, because that’s what evil corporations did.
They could certainly be an evil corporation. That was the plot of almost every sci-fi movie Andy had seen, from Avatar to all of the Terminators.
She closed the QuellCorp page and pulled up the wiki for Clara Bellamy.
If it was strange that Laura knew Paula Kunde, it was downright shocking that Paula Kunde knew a woman like Clara Bellamy. She had been a prima ballerina, which according to another wiki page was an honor only bestowed on a handful of women. Clara had danced for George Balanchine, a choreographer whose name even Andy recognized. Clara had toured the world. Danced on the most celebrated stages. Been at the top of her field. Then a horrific knee injury had forced her to retire.
Because Andy had had nothing better to do after driving all day, she had seen almost every video of Clara Bellamy that YouTube had to offer. There were countless performances and interviews with all
kinds of famous people, but Andy’s favorite was from what she believed was the first T chaikovsky Festival ever staged by the New York City Ballet.
Since Andy was a theater nerd, the foremost thing she’d noticed about the video was that the set was spectacular, with weird translucent tubes in the background that made everything look like it was encased in ice. She had assumed that it would be boring to watch tiny women spinning on their toes to old-people music, but there was something almost hummingbird-like about Clara Bellamy that made her impossible to look away from. For a woman Andy had never heard of, Clara had been extraordinarily famous. Newsweek and Time had both featured her on the cover. She was constantly showing up in the New York Times Magazine or highlighted in the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” section.
That was where Andy’s searches had hit a wall. Or, to be more exact, a pay wall. She was only allowed a certain number of articles on a lot of the websites, so she had to be careful about what she clicked on. It wasn’t like she could just pull out a credit card and buy more access.
As far as she could tell, Clara had disappeared from public life around 1983. The last photo in the Times showed the woman with her head down, tissue held to her nose, as she left George Balanchine’s funeral.
As with Paula, Andy assumed that Clara Bellamy had been married at some point and changed her name, though why anybody would work so hard to create a famous name, then change it, was hard to fathom. Clara had no Facebook page, but there was a closed appreciation group and a public thinspo one that was grossly obsessed with her weight.
Andy had not been able to locate any marriage or divorce documents for Clara Bellamy in New York, or Chicago’s Cook County or the surrounding areas, but she had found an interesting article in the Chicago Sun Times about a lawsuit that had taken place after Clara’s knee injury.
The prima ballerina had sued a company called EliteDream BodyWear for payment on an endorsement contract. The lawyer who’d represented her was not named in the article, but the accompanying photo showed Clara leaving the courthouse with a lanky, mustachioed man who looked to Andy like the perfect embodiment of a hippie lawyer, or a hipster Millennial trying to look like one. More importantly, when the photographer had clicked the button to take the photo, Hippie Lawyer was looking directly at the camera.