Crazy Love You (19 page)

They are all laughing and giddy as they start moving toward shelter. Molly is holding up her dress, keeping it off the ground and staying close to the ushers holding their umbrellas. She doesn't see right away the shadowy figure walking up the aisle toward them.

Then she does. “Who's that?” Molly asks.

Fatboy's heart starts to pound as the figure draws closer.

“I think there's been some mistake,” the shadow says. “I didn't get my invitation.”

Fatboy stares at her. She is nearly translucent in the next skein of lightning that opens the sky. The crack of thunder is deafening.

“Well,” she says. “Aren't you going to introduce me to your wife?”

Priss.

•  •  •

Outside, a storm had been unleashed and rain was battering the windows.

“Life is not a comic book, Ian.” Megan held the pages in her hand. She looked at them with disdain and then lifted them at me as if proving a point.

I know, I thought. But I wish life
were
a comic. Then I could draw the world and write the ending I want for us.

But I just stayed silent, because that's not what she wanted to hear. She wanted to hear that I was grounded in the real world, solid and able like Binky. Never fall in love with a girl who has a great father. You'll never measure up, and you'll kill yourself trying. Not that I was exactly trying. I'm just saying.

“You don't write something on the page and then it happens,” she said. “It's a coincidence. A weird one, okay? But a coincidence.”

“Unless . . .”

Her mouth dropped open a little as she put the papers down. I could see her hands shaking, and she was so pale she was almost gray. She should have been resting.

She lifted her palms. “Unless
what
?”

“Unless she was here and saw those sketches. Maybe it gave her ideas.”

Megan lowered herself back onto the couch. The rain was really coming down now, big silver tears streaking the windows, which were glowing orange and yellow, picking up the light from passing cars and the streetlamps.

“Is that the kind of person we're talking about?”

“She's never hurt anyone I care about before,” I said. I was really thinking aloud—which, guys, you should
not
do when arguing with your distraught fiancée. Think before you speak. “But then again, I've never had a real relationship before.”

Megan had, of course. She'd had two significant men in her life: Her high school sweetheart, whom she was with through her sophomore year in college. They both went to the Country Day School in Riverdale, and then on to Columbia.

Then there was the guy she met at Columbia, whom she'd dated until about a year before we met. He was a medical student. Both of her exes were smart and handsome, breakups amicable enough, and each of them remained her friend. And either of them would have taken her back in a heartbeat; that was clear. I'd met them both on separate occasions, and each looked at me as if I had stolen his ice cream cone.

You're not the kind of guy I thought she'd end up with
, Biff had said. Okay, his name wasn't really Biff. It was Kirk. Kirk Pasich. But it
could
have been Biff—beefy, preppy, well coiffed, charming. I felt like the Hulk beside him, and not in a good way—in an angry, clumsy, awkward way. I was aware of my tats, and my wild black hair, and the fact that I hadn't taken a shower, and couldn't remember the last time I'd shaved.

Oh, yeah? What kind of guy did you expect her to end up with?

Uh, me
, Kirk said, and he gave me a kind of sad, self-deprecating smile that I couldn't get motivated to knock off his face. I felt bad for him, actually. I hoped to never be in the past tense of Megan's love life. What a desolate place that must be.

I patted him on the shoulder. “Sorry, dude,” I said.

He shook my hand, offered a sheepish grin.

That was the kind of people Megan knew. Nice people, good people. She collected them and they stayed in her life forever. Because she was kind and sweet, funny and expansive, generous and thoughtful. All the things I wasn't. Is that what they mean when they say someone completes you? But what about the other person? What does she get?

“You think she'd—
hurt
me?” Megan said now.

“I really don't know,” I answered.

The truth was, I never knew what Priss was going to do, not even on the page. She defied me even as I tried to write Fatboy's happy ending. She wasn't going to let him go, not without a fight. She wasn't supposed to show up at the wedding; she just did. I was wrestling with her in ink and in life, and losing on both planes of my existence. I didn't feel good about myself.

I could tell that Megan didn't feel good about me either. She was probably thinking about Kirk—how clean, how strong, how upright he was. How she'd never been in a mess like this with a man like him. She'd wrapped herself up in the blanket and curled into a little ball, leaned against the couch arm. The thunder rumbled and the lights dimmed a moment, then came back up. Then she dug into her pocket and handed me a card.

“You need to call the police and tell them about this woman,” she said.

Her voice had grown stern, her eyes dark. There was that expression again. I stared at the shape of her face. How could I put that on paper—what lines, what shadows, what colors?

“If you really think she's a suspect, then you need to tell them who she is, where she lives, where she works, and where they can find her. You know—all the things you won't tell
me
about her.”

I held the card in my hand, nodding, staring at it.

“Ian?”

“Okay,” I said. I sounded young, defensive—a kid agreeing to do something he didn't want to do.

“If it's her, then your
friend
pushed me onto a subway track.” Her voice had gone shrill, gone up an octave. “I seriously nearly died the most terrifying, ugliest possible death. Are you
getting
that?”

“Of course I get that.” I tried to sound soothing, but I think it just came off as patronizing.

“Then why aren't you
angrier
?” Her voice grew softer, her eyes filled.

“I
am
.”

But I was really more frightened, and I think she could see that. There was a flash of disappointment in her eyes. It cut me. No woman wants to know that you're afraid. She doesn't want to hear that you're scared and not sure you can control the situation, and a little bit of a coward. When she's frightened, she needs you to be the hero, the man with the gun. I wasn't that; I never had been. I didn't know if I could protect her, or even myself, from Priss.

I was just standing there shrugging with my hands out—not the posture of a superhero.

“What do you want me to do, Meg?” It even sounded a little whiny.

She got up then, tossed the blanket to the floor, and made for her things. She pulled on her shoes.

“Where are you going?” I asked, moving after her.

“Home,” she said. “I want to go home.”

“Uptown?” I said, blocking her passage. “I'll take you. I'm staying with you. You have a concussion. Be mad at me, okay. But I'm staying with you.”

Her face softened, more of the old Megan, the real one, the one I met in the park. Was she changing? Was I changing her? Can you do that? Can you change a person for the worse—bring out things that weren't there before you entered her life? Or were they already there, dormant, just waiting for you to let them free?

“No,” she said. She rubbed her eyes. “Home to Long Island. I can't work tomorrow anyway; I already called and told them I can't watch Toby this week.”

It was best if she just stayed and got some rest. I tried to reason with her, but she just kept moving around, gathering up her stuff—her iPhone, her scarf and hat.

“Your parents just left, they won't be back there yet,” I said finally.

“Well, I'm not staying here,” she said, looking around the loft. “If she has access to this place then I'm not safe here.”

It was pouring outside; it was Friday night. It was going to take us forever to get to her parents' place.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll drive you.”

I picked up her bag and walked with her to the door. She looked back at the loft.

“I hate this place,” she said, quietly. “It's so cold.”

I felt an irrational lash of anger, and was surprised to realize I was clenching my teeth as I locked the door behind me.

I discovered comic books in a supermarket. My mom used to let me sit by the spinning rack, looking, and flipping through the pages while she did the shopping. I remember the first one I picked up, how it flapped in my hand, fell open to pages rich with color and the most amazing images.

Initially, I just stared at the pictures, mesmerized by the beauty of the women, the power of the men, the fantasy of the universe they occupied.
Batman, Superman, The Avengers,
the
X-Men, Daredevil
—how much better it was than anything I had ever seen in the gray, dull life of my suburban upbringing. School, the supermarket, our isolated house, the thick woods, the squeaky swing set in my backyard. Nothing real ever compared to what I saw in those magazines. If I'm honest, it never has.

My mom was happy to buy me whatever comics I wanted. At fifty cents or a dollar, they kept me busy for hours. First looking at pictures, then realizing there was a story, then trying to draw what I saw on the pages. I'd always had a gift and a love for art, so it was natural for me to try to re-create what I was seeing. This was before Ella was born, so I was young—maybe seven or eight. Even then, I wanted to climb inside those books and disappear. I wanted to get bitten by a spider, or fall into a vat of toxic waste and emerge a superhero with powers beyond my imagining.

“The kid lives in a fantasy world,” my father would complain, looking at the stacks of comics. But I could see that light in his eyes, too. Every boy wants to be a superhero. “Hey, let me see that
Batman
.”

Eventually, I found a place in town, Second Hand Knowledge, a used-book store tucked inside a shabby strip mall off the main drag. It was a windowless box of a shop with moldy carpet and a water-stained ceiling. There were shelves and shelves of used books with bent-out spines and coffee-cup-stained covers, dog-eared pages—mystery, romance, science fiction, old classics. There was a man behind the counter, his red ashtray always overflowing with butts, his teeth and fingers stained yellow. He knew everything there was to know about comics.

There was a back room, well lit and clean, where he kept the comics—bagged and boarded, in pristine condition. I kept my comics mint for him, because unlike old paperback novels, I knew he wouldn't take the comics unless I'd treated them with respect. I'd bring in the ones I could let go of and trade them for the ones I wanted. Everyone knew the shop owner as Old Brian—though he wasn't that old, maybe in his forties when I first knew him. He lived over the store, and never left the strip mall . . . he ate at the pizza place, got his groceries at the 7-Eleven. He
seemed
old, though, walked slowly with a limp, was stooped over, head gone prematurely bald.

I should have seen him as a cautionary tale, someone so lost in a world of make-believe that he'd forgotten to live his life, that he'd grown old while he was still young. That for all he knew about comics—the larger-than-life characters, the big, purple stories, the dystopian cities, the mythical universes—there wasn't anything else in his life.

But I thought he was the coolest guy alive—because he was the first person other than my family to treat me with any real kindness and respect. He was my first friend. He answered all my questions, taught me everything he knew. He never teased me or told me I was an idiot. And later, when I was older, even after I became Fatboy and the school freak, he gave me my first job. He called me “comics manager” and paid me $6.50 an hour.

That store, those books, my art—they saved me. More maybe even than Priss. Because it was while facing the sketch pad, with a pen in my hand, that I have always had the most power. There, I know who I am. I know what to do. I can use lines and color to create and understand the world. I can disappear inside those pages, and emerge a superhero like Clark Kent entering the telephone booth and coming out Superman. I went in as one thing, came out as another.

I guess I was about twelve when Brian gave me the job. I remember that my dad had to take me to the courthouse to get my working papers, which I thought was the greatest thing in the world. He gave me permission to hop another bus after school that took me to town rather than out to my house. And the school bus would let me off by the pizzeria. I'd stop and eat, and then go to work.

Old Brian showed me how to board and bag the first editions on the first day.

“Comics are an important American art form,” he told me. “And they deserve to be treated with care and respect.”

He had a stack of boards and a pile of cellophane bags. He took one in each hand.

“First, you put the board in the bag,” he said. He demonstrated, slowly slipping the gray cardboard into the shimmering sleeve. I tried not to notice that his fingertips were yellow from cigarette smoke. “Then you put the comic on top of the board. Like so.”

He was really into it, reverently slipping
Batman: Haunted Knight
into the plastic.

“Then you peel back the strip and seal the bag.”

He handed it to me, and nodded to the shelf where it belonged. I placed it there.

“Good,” he said with an approving nod. “Now remember: never, ever use tape when you're boarding and bagging. That adhesive can damage your comic.”