Black Iris (27 page)

Did I howl? I’ll never tell.

———

Umbra had an Ides of March theme going on. Dancers in slashed, bloody togas swept through the halls, sipping goblets of wine. Every hour they reenacted the murder of Caesar in the Cathedral.

The irony was not lost on us.

They were there first, Armin in a V-neck, clean-shaven, impeccably handsome, Blythe in snug leggings and a loose sleeveless top, gorgeously sulky. I wore my usual nerdy skinnies and plaid. Nothing special. This could’ve been any night.

Just like old times.

They were talking when I arrived, but broke off and stepped apart. I joined them in a cone of hot cherry light. We looked like characters in film noir, all shadows and lurid red highlights.

The last time the three of us were together in one place was the night we’d hurt Zoeller. The night we’d fucked each other.

That same dark energy sizzled between us now.

“We need somewhere to talk,” I yelled over the bone-jolting bass. “Private.”

Armin seemed to sigh. His eyes closed for a second. “Follow me.”

Down to the Oubliette, where I’d danced to his music, her touch. Where the three of us had been careless and free. I trailed a hand along the brick wall, remembering. Things would never be like that again.

I knew the room before I stepped in. After a series of abrupt turns and seeming dead ends we came to a hidden door that opened onto a long, rectangular chamber. Armin pulled the chain on the single bare bulb. It looked exactly how I remem
bered: an old wooden bar at the far end, taps rusted shut. Tarnished mirrors leaning behind fat fresh candles. Ladder-back chairs arranged in a circle.

I dropped my bag and locked the door behind us. On the inside panel, the Umbra eclipse logo was sketched in chalk.

Armin retrieved a box of matches and we all lit candles. Light flickered weirdly through the room, casting skewed, startling shadows, as if there were more people here than merely the three of us.

We took up positions at triangle points in the circle, like in truth or dare.

No one spoke.

Dust in the air suspended marks the place where a story ended.

I saw it in both of their eyes. They knew that once this began, it wouldn’t stop until we’d all been torn apart.

Armin sighed again. “We each got one, Laney.”

They held up their phones. On Blythe’s was a pic of me and Armin getting out of a cab, his hand on my waist, possessive. That day we met for coffee. I’d spent the rest of it in his bed while he kept me warm. On Armin’s phone Blythe and I were walking home together, hands linked, heads tilted close. Autumn, the leaves a tessellation of fire. We’d begun kissing in the stairwell and barely made it to her bed before we’d fully undressed.

“Huh,” I said.

Armin looked at me a long moment. Then at Blythe. Then he said, “I got more.”

He scrolled through pics. I didn’t need to see. The blond and brunette blur. Me and her, together. Damningly.

“I got more, too,” Blythe said, flashing her phone at us. Me and him going into apartments, coming out, hair tousled, mouths swollen. Post-Zoeller.

“Huh,” I repeated, mesmerized.

“Care to explain, Laney?” Armin said in a tight voice.

Blythe was angry about something. “I’m the one owed a bloody explanation.”

“You?” he said.

“Me, yeah. You told me it was over.”

“That’s hardly the issue. Because what I see here is that you did it to me again.
Again.
After you promised it was nothing.”

“You arsehole.
You
promised
me
. You promised you wouldn’t touch her.”

“So you could do this behind my back? Fuck you.”

“No, fuck you, Armin.
Fuck you.
”

I stared at them, dazed. Perfect, I thought. Hiyam set us up perfectly.

I’d never given her enough credit.

Blythe leapt to her feet, paced through dappling shadows. “I can’t fucking believe this, you lying bastard.”

Armin gazed at me. His eyes were dark and full of knowing. “How long has it been going on?”

“Has what?” I said, at the same moment that Blythe spat, “September.”

We looked at each other, me and her.

“September,” Armin echoed.

“Yes,” I said.

My hands tingled. I’d done some oxy but not my usual dose, and this wasn’t a chemical high. This was . . .
feeling
. Fear. Anxiety. Exhilaration.

“I’ve been fucking her since September,” I said in an even tone. “I lied to your face. I never loved you.”

The first domino teetered. I held my fingertip against it, giddy.

Armin sank into the chair as if all his bones had melted. He exhaled, not a sigh but a sound of release, long and mournful.

Blythe moved toward him, amped. “That’s right. The whole bloody time.”

“You did it to me again.”

“I didn’t plan to, but it happened.”

“You fucking did it to me again.”

She loomed above him. “You always hung it over my head. You never forgave me. What did you want from me?”

He sat up and gripped her forearms, bronze on gold. “I wanted you to give a shit. About what you did to me. To us.”

“Christ’s sake, I’ve apologized a million times.”

“You never meant it once. And here’s the proof, Blythe. You didn’t care, so you did it again.”

She reversed his grip, dug her nails into his skin. “You don’t want me to apologize. You want me to lie.”

“I want you to be a human being who feels remorse.”

“You want me to pretend I love you.”

Armin sat back, his face contorted with pain. “How could I have been so blind? How could this happen twice?” That smoky voice wavered in a haunting way. I’d never heard him cry before. “It was right there in my face, but you convinced me I was imagining it. Convinced me so well, Blythe. So well.”

Except Blythe was a terrible liar.

“What is he talking about?” I said.

She spun toward me, her eyes shining. Tears. “Fuck this. Fuck him. Let’s just go.”

“Not yet.”

I turned my phone in my hands. Armin eyed it with a distant expression. He did not seem quite present, as if part of him had receded from the moment and floated in an empty, remote space. I knew the feeling.

“Apollo,” I said.

The feeling inside me was incredible. Like petals opening up, a dark place receiving light for the first time.

This was the real moment I’d been waiting for.

“You know what’s on here, don’t you?” I said.

“No.”

“Yes, you do. You’ve known this was coming for a long time.”

That handsome face looked weary. “Show me, Laney. Go ahead.”

It’s crazy, that the defining moment of your life can be nothing to someone else. Like an infatuation, an unrequited love, every bit of you is drawn to it, orbits that heaviness at the center of your universe, everything you think and feel revolving around it and yet, nobody knows. Even the one who caused it. Especially the one who caused it.

I fetched my bag. Inside, two objects, one glass and one metal.

“First we’re going to play a game,” I said, in the grand tradition of every villain ever. “You’ll like it. It’s called truth or dare.”

I set the bottle down carefully and turned. And like every villain ever, I raised the gun.

APRIL, LAST YEAR

I
t rained all day. April was wanton and cruel like that, mixing dull roots with spring rain. Which is an apt antidepressant metaphor.

“She’s getting twitchy,” I said, kicking a stone into the river. Raindrops dotted the surface, a million needles pricking silver skin.

“That means it’s working.”

Zoeller walked beside me. Our breath fogged in the chill. Ever since the pill switch we’d been watching her like a science experiment: Mom, cooking in a petri dish full of Zoloft. Nothing happened the first few weeks, but as we neared her birthday the tics began. Footsteps pacing the halls. Overtime at work, then awake all night at home. Once she was up till dawn working furiously in the garden. In the morning I found the early irises plucked bare, gathered into a neat heap of indigo petals.

“I’m pretty sure she’s manic,” I said.

This was the danger with bipolar people: the depression was soul-crushing, the blackest black, more intense than “normal” depression, but if you gave them antidepressants it could swing back the other way into mania.

Which was precisely what we aimed for.

“She’ll snap,” Zoeller said. “Wait for it.”

I had my phone ready at all times to film one of her epi
sodes. Some night she’d drink too much, pick a fight, put me in a chokehold or try to throw me out again, and I’d capture it in glorious HD. Insurance. If she and Dad split, she’d never win custody. She’d be kicked out of the house and Donnie wouldn’t be alone with the Gorgon while I went to college.

The perfect plan, all tied up with a little bow.

Except something nagged at me.

“What if she does something really fucked-up?” I said, ducking under a branch. Rain dripped off the trees in sterling bracelets and crystal charms, piling on the ground, melting into mirrors.

“Then get your dad’s gun.”

The idea of pulling it on her seemed absurd. She was too big, too mythical.

Zoeller saw it in my face. “You’re still afraid of her.”

“I’m not afraid for myself. I’m afraid for Donnie.” Z offered a hand to pull me over a pool but I ignored him. “She’ll keep making excuses to refuse treatment. She’s selfish and likes her mania too much to give it up. Besides, she never wanted us. She only had us as some kind of life insurance policy for herself.”

“Your mom is too vain to destroy something she created.”

Harsh, but possibly true. “So just cross my fingers and hope she doesn’t kill her darlings.”

“Or control her breakdown.”

I paused, quicksilver rippling around my feet. “What do you mean?”

He wouldn’t say more till we reached a bank of black mud where the cobblestones ended. Spring threw the river into a frenzy, tearing dead leaves and branches loose, all the clotted, brooding thoughts of winter sweeping away. Z crouched at the waterline.

“Come here.”

I approached warily. His lessons tended to involve attempted murder.

“Give me your hand.”

I snorted.

Z waited, patient.

I gave him my damn hand.

His was brutishly huge but the skin was smooth, surprisingly so. He pried my fingers open, rubbed the cold out. I jerked away.

“Stop being such a dyke.”

Not even worth a response.

Zoeller placed a stiff, ice-crusted leaf in my palm.

“Land it on that,” he said, nodding at a boulder jutting midstream.

“How?”

“Figure it out.”

“It’s impossible.”

He rocked back on his haunches, bored.

This was a Zoeller puzzle. There was some trick.

My first thought: lesson in humiliation. He wanted me to wade in and place it by hand. But ever since we’d confessed our personality disorders he’d softened toward me a little, no longer so casually cruel. He showed legit interest in my life. In his deranged way, he was helping me deal with Mom.

If this kept up, I might actually start thinking of him as a friend.

God.

For the next fifteen minutes I made a complete ass of myself.

I threw leaves like a child, and the wind blew them back into my face. I rigged them on sticks that snapped in the current. I found a loose string and made some kind of fail slingshot that nearly took my eye out. I slipped in the water twice. By then I was too incensed to feel the cold.

“How do I fucking do it?” I said.

Zoeller beckoned me back to the shore. When he took my hand this time, I didn’t balk. He placed the frail stem of a frozen leaf between two fingers and pinched them closed.

“How?” I said again.

Our faces were unsettlingly close. I could feel his breath when he spoke. “Let go.”

I looked at the rushing water, then back at him. “You are a total waste of time.”

“I’m serious.”

“This is another dumb thought exercise in how you can’t control anything and life is meaningless, random pain. I never should’ve read you Eliot.” I started to stand.

His hand contracted. “You control when you let go.”

We both looked at the water. It was chaos, wild and elemental, madness. But if you looked long enough you could discern threads, slick silver, jet black, splitting and merging and weaving in a living loom. There were patterns, if fleeting, ephemeral ones.

His thumb pressed down, opening my fingers. The leaf whisked away and rode a fat black swell and slapped itself onto the side of the rock.

You’re fucking kidding, I thought.

When I looked at Zoeller he was still uncomfortably close, and my heart sped up. Anxiety. He was, after all, a sociopath.

The rain that had been weak and skittish all day thickened.

“Shit,” I said, standing. I felt weirded out, off-kilter.

We headed for the car, silent, but halfway there the rain became a downpour and we ran, splashing through puddles and throwing ourselves, soaked, onto Mom’s spotless leather.

My hands shook. It took three tries to get the key in the ignition.

“What are you feeling?” Zoeller said.

“I don’t know.”

It wasn’t the cold, or not just the cold. Something was out of balance inside me. Something moving fast, accelerating. Skewing my center of gravity.

I’d always thought the way to get free of Mom was to become stronger than her, but it wasn’t that at all. The way to win was to let go. Stop caring. Stop trying to control everything. Let it flow. Look for the opportunity, the current that could carry me where I wanted to go.

Let it happen, Laney.

This thing you want.

I drove to his house.

The mansion was lit up like a church, dazzling rays of gold piercing the pewter haze. We walked through the rain to the dismal RV in back.

Freezing inside, like always. That cold chemical smell. The creepiness of it all, the least safe place I’d ever been.

Zoeller glanced at me and stripped off his sopping hoodie. Then his shirt. Milk-white skin, molded by muscle. A faint trail of blond hair disappeared below his belt.

When he reached for the zipper of my hoodie I didn’t move.

“No kissing,” I said as he took it off. “Just fuck me.”

“All right.”

That was the last thing either of us said that night.

———

In the morning I walked home in runny makeup with a depressing taste in my mouth and my head full of weirdness and found my mother hanging in the garage.

I knew. I knew how unstable and dangerous she was. I smoked a cigarette and thought, Is this the only way I can hurt her back?

The only way I can free us from her?

So I watched Lady Lazarus writhe on that cord. Filled my lungs with smoke while hers starved for oxygen. But she didn’t come back, not then, not one year in every ten, not with flaming hair to eat men like air. Her throat cinched shut, pulled tight by ten feet of braided nylon and the infinite heaviness of the dark seed inside her.

I could’ve saved her. Saved us both.

But I let it happen.

I let her go.

———

At the hospital they fed me Xanax to calm the panic. Which was good, because the highest risk of confession lay in those first few hours.

Whirling lights. Flashing chrome. White sheets.

A frantic burst of activity in the ER, paddles to her heart.

The grim faces, the shaking heads.

Time of death: 6:36 a.m.

At 6:36 in the morning she’d be walking through the garden with her coffee, trailing fingertips over the rose leaves, sucking the sweet dew, the bead of blood from a hidden thorn. Smiling mysteriously at some wry internal observation she’d never share. Lifting her face to the pink sun, caffeine singing in her veins. Beautiful and terrible. Alive.

Her face was so still. More consummate than sleep, a stillness that would never change, the still point of the turning world. I stood at the glass ER doors, screaming, beating with my fists until red smeared the clear and they dragged me away and gave me more Xanax and a white blank space opened in my head.

By afternoon I was totally unhinged. I hadn’t eaten or slept in two days. Everything blurred—Zoeller, Mom, Donnie sobbing his heart out, Dad crying, everyone so sad, so fucking sad because I took her away.

Autopsy
, a white coat said.
Toxicology report.

Confess before they figure it out. Before they accuse me of a cover-up.

Jesus God. This was real. This was a real thing that had happened, was happening. Would keep happening for the rest of my life.

A thousand times I opened my mouth, and they stuffed drugs in it. The one time in my fucking life when I didn’t want to be high, and everyone kept getting me stoned.

They marveled when the initial dose didn’t work. They put in more until I stopped grabbing their coats, their collars.

Send me a fucking priest. Someone take my confession.

Go home
, Dad said.
Both of you.
He had to stay and fill out paperwork. The dead generate a lot of paperwork.

His eyes looked through everything like X-rays. He did not see me trying to spit out the truth.

Donnie never stopped crying. Not once. When the energy left him it was just water, leaking endlessly down his face.

And me, Laney Keating, the killer, driving him home.

No one had taken down the noose. I found that out when I pulled into the garage.

———

I pounded on the thin metal door until it began to dent under my fist.

Zoeller opened it, blinking. Naked except for boxers, hair mussed. His eyes cleared when he saw me.

“Laney.”

I stood in the cold, my hands hanging uselessly, staring up at him.

“What’s going on?” he said.

I couldn’t get words out. What words were there for this?

I stood there, mute and limp, until he drew me inside and
sat me on the couch. Just because we’d fucked last night—a lot—didn’t mean there was any tenderness between us. He sat on the armrest, watching me curiously. Emotions fascinated him. Things we can’t experience personally are always fascinating.

“Do you have anything?” I said.

He rummaged in a cupboard and handed me two pills. I didn’t even care what they were. I swallowed them dry.

“We did it.”

His head tilted, almost avian.

“We killed her.” The words fit strangely in my mouth. “She’s dead.”

“Who?”

I spoke in a slow, dull voice. “My mother is dead. She hanged herself.”

Compression of the carotids. Rapid unconsciousness. Night sweeps in from the edges, sound blurring into an ocean roar. The world shrinks smaller and smaller to a pinhole of light, to the diameter of the last artery still feeding blood to the brain, to a singularity where all you have ever dreamed and felt condenses into one bright, trembling speck, then closes.

My palms smacked the coffee table, bracing me from a fall. Zoeller’s arms wrapped around me. Too woozy to fend him off.

“I’m fine,” I said.

As soon as he let go I collapsed to the floor in a dead faint.

I woke on the couch. Z sat in an armchair nearby, watching. He’d put on sweatpants but no shirt. His body was meat. I felt nothing, not even revulsion.

“When was the last time you ate?” he said.

I tried to sit up. Something invisible pushed me back down.

“You’re dehydrated. At least drink something.”

Water bottle on the table, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I chugged the water. When I put it down I wanted to puke.

“What happened?” Zoeller said, his voice hushed.

“We triggered her mania and she killed herself.”

If I just said it enough, maybe it would stop sounding so real. It would become a fact, a thing in a book, not my real life.

“Tell me about it.”

So I told him. How I’d watched unwittingly. Found the note with my name. The sick realization, when it was over, that this was not what I had wanted at all, at all.

“What did the note say?”

“I couldn’t read it.”

He seemed to understand. “What did she look like? The body.”

I straightened, suddenly awake. “You sick fuck. You’re getting off on this.”

“Tell me, Laney. I know you want to tell me.”

“Her face was fucking white. There was no blood in her head. It pooled around her throat in a necklace the color of a deep bruise. The vessels in her eyes burst. Is that what you want?”

I stood, forcing the tears down. My hands raked through my hair.

“We have to tell them. It was an accident. It wasn’t supposed to go this far. We can explain.”

“Did you know?”

I looked at him askance, fearfully. “Know what?”

“Was she still alive when you got home? Did you let her die?”

This was the question I couldn’t answer.

I didn’t know. I didn’t know if it was intentional. I didn’t know if I fully understood what was happening, if keeping my feet on the porch and finishing the cigarette was an act of murder, or innocent apathy.

I knew I hated her that morning. I knew that much.

“It was an accident,” I whispered again.

Zoeller eyed me with dispassion. “We’re not telling anyone.”

“They’ll find out we switched her meds.”

“They won’t find out anything. Your mom had a prescription for Zoloft.”