Crazy Love You (22 page)

Megan didn't answer me, just put her head in her hands.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm so sorry.”

I started to drive and we wound up at this old diner off the highway where we'd been before. Megan ordered pancakes with bacon and scrambled eggs; she always ate like a truck driver when she was stressed. I ordered black coffee and wished I had a joint, something to take the edge off. But there was no escaping this. I had to tell her everything now, or lose her. I might lose her anyway. If she was smart she'd go running. And if I loved her, really loved her, I'd let her go.

Detective Jones Cooper came to our house the day after the art room fire. It was Sunday morning, and I was playing video games. My dad was reading the paper. We were both feeling down because we'd been to see my mother the day before and it hadn't gone well. It seemed like she was never going to be able to come home.

“I want to die, Nick,” she said. “Why didn't they let me die?”

“We have a son,” he whispered to her. I was sitting right there, playing my Game Boy. Maybe they thought I couldn't hear them; maybe they were just too far gone in their own unhappiness to care. “He needs you.
I
need you.”

“I don't even exist,” she said. “I'm a ghost.”

“Don't say that,” my father said. “Please.”

My father and I went out to dinner that night, him staring at his food, me shoveling it in, not talking. We hadn't really talked since the blowout we'd had after my last visit with Dr. Crown. And I hadn't been back to art class. Miss Rose showed my father my work, then he and Dr. Crown had used it against me to get inside my head. I hated them all. The only person I was still talking to was my grandmother, and she was around less and less. Who could blame her?

When the knock came at the front door, something inside me went cold. I got up and left the room, went upstairs, and closed my door. My father had bought me an artist's draft table for Christmas. And that's where I spent my time when I wasn't plastered to the television. I stood at my window and saw a squad car, as well as Cooper's maroon SUV. My stomach bottomed out. What had she done now?

I heard the door open and close downstairs. And then there was silence, a stretching silence that went on too long. Finally, I crept from my room and stood on the landing, listening.

“This is the second arson attempt in The Hollows in under a year,” I heard Cooper say. “Both of which followed an altercation with your son. Ian is going to need to come in for questioning.”

“This is ridiculous,” my father said. “You
know
us.”

“I'm sorry, man,” said Cooper. “This isn't personal.”

They let me ride in my father's car, though I would have preferred the squad car. I'd never been in one, and I was childish enough to think it would have been cool. The gravity of the situation hadn't dawned on me. And to be honest, a kind of apathy had settled. Too much stress, unhappiness, loneliness. I was shutting down in significant ways.

It must have showed, because Cooper was different with me during this second questioning. He was more distant, treating me less like a troubled kid needing his help and more like an adult suspected of a serious crime. The gloves were off. He walked me through the station and led me to an interrogation room, a gray room without windows. We sat with a narrow metal table between us. My father stood in the corner.

“What did you and Miss Rose argue about?” Cooper asked.

There had been an argument; I remembered that much. I remembered that I wanted to confront her. Dr. Crown said that I had a right to talk about my feelings, that I didn't have to keep them buried down deep.
Because feelings don't stay down. Unexpressed anger and sorrow have a way of finding unhealthy releases if suppressed.

“She showed my drawings to my father.”

“And you didn't want her to do that?” He raised his eyebrows, as if musing, trying to understand.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“My drawings are private.” I could feel the anger start to come alive. There was a tightness in my throat, a little race in my pulse.

“But it was parents' night. Your dad came to see your work, right?”

“She didn't ask me if she could display them for parents' night. I would have said no, if she'd asked.”

He nodded, rubbed the crown of his head. He settled back into his chair.

“I can see why that would upset you. I think I would be angry, too. You argued about it?”

I shrugged. The truth was, I didn't exactly remember what happened. I went to art class, same as always. When I saw her, I felt the rise of anger, the sting of betrayal.

“Ian,” she'd said. She'd worn that warm smile. Her raven curls were pulled back, her dark eyes always looked like she was just about to cry from happiness. “Your father was so impressed with your work.”

“She described you as enraged,” the detective said now.

“No,” I said. “I don't know.”

“The other students say you were yelling. You called her a bitch, told her you hated her.” He looked down at his notes. “You screamed, ‘How could you show him? I trusted you.' Sounds like you were pretty mad.”

I could feel my father looking at me. If he'd been smart, he'd have told me to keep my mouth shut, wait for the lawyer. But he wasn't smart, not about things like that. People like my father always think that you tell the truth and everything works out fine. In fact, the opposite is often true.

“I don't remember saying that,” I said.

Jones Cooper looked at me hard, a deep frown creasing his forehead. “So you don't remember your argument with Mikey Beech. You don't remember your argument with Miss Rose. But these things happened. A lot of people were there to bear witness—each time.”

I listened to the buzz of the fluorescent lights, my father clearing his throat, the
tap-tap-tap
of my own foot. There was no noise outside the room.

“Are there any other blank spots in your memory, Ian? Say, for example, last night. Or on the night of the Beech fire.”

“No,” I said. “I didn't do that. I didn't set any fires. Okay, I get angry sometimes. I guess I say things I don't mean. But I wouldn't do anything like that.”

“You know what, son?” Jones Cooper didn't take his eyes off me. They were dark, unyielding—black holes that sucked in everything. “I don't believe you.”

I tried to stare back at him, but I couldn't hold that gaze.

“Honestly?” he said. “I think you're a stone-cold liar.”

“That's enough, Cooper,” my father said. I could hear a note of impotent anger in his voice. “Ian, not another word until the lawyer comes.”

“That's fine,” said Detective Cooper. “You're gonna need one.”

He left the room. And my father and I dwelled in an expanding silence.

“What's wrong with you?” my father asked.

“Nothing,” I said. I turned to look at him. He was standing away from me, looking pale. “It was her, Dad. It was Priss. She did it. She likes fire; she likes to watch things burn.”

His mouth dropped open, but he didn't say anything. The look on his face—I'd never seen it before. It was unreadable. But it filled me with dread.

“I met someone,” I told him. “An old woman who says she knows Priss.”

My father shook his head, looked confused. “Who?”

Before leaving the house for the police station, I'd grabbed the piece of paper from the drawer by my bed. I'd had a feeling I was going to need it, that today was going to be the day that I had to prove that Priss was real. I handed him the note, told him quickly how the old woman had come to see me at the shop, what she'd said.

I expected him to react with relief, to jump into action. But that's not what he did.

“Oh, good Christ.” He rubbed his face vigorously. When he looked at me again he seemed so angry, so hopeless. He took a quick step toward me and I flinched, thinking that he was going to hit me. But he did something that hurt even worse; he started to cry.

•  •  •

“Ian,” said Megan. She looked distressed, taking in all the details of my long, sad story, my strange history with Priss. “Are you telling me that Priss isn't real?”

The diner was empty except for an old waitress behind the counter and a cook visible in the kitchen. A pie case turned by the cash register and emitted an unpleasant whirring noise. Heavy in the air was the smell of grease and burned coffee. Megan had cleaned her plate, but her coffee sat untouched. It had gone cold.

“No,” I said. “She's real. I've just never been able to
prove
that she was real.”

She leaned back from me, looking down at her hands. “You know that doesn't make any sense, right? You know it sounds totally crazy.”

I didn't say anything. I had the sense that the waitress was eavesdropping, but when I turned to give her a withering look she wasn't even there.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“Why do you think she's real?” Megan asked. I loved this about her, her willingness to roll up her sleeves and get to the bottom of things. Unlike me, she didn't judge; she examined, explored. “In spite of all evidence to the contrary, why do you think she's real, Ian?”

“Because my mother has seen her,” I said.

The words hung in the air. Yes, my mother—the baby killer, the mental patient who has been hospitalized on and off for twenty years—has seen Priss. I went on. “And I don't control her, you know? I mean, she's
outside
of me. She does things I don't want her to do. I'm—afraid of her.”

Megan still hadn't said anything. I could see her working through what I'd told her, turning the information over.

“And this other person who knows her?” said Megan. “Eloise Montgomery? Why didn't she help you? Why couldn't she prove to your father and to the police that Priss was real?”

How to put it? “She was
unreliable
in some ways,” I said. “Not everyone thought she was
all there
.”

Megan frowned, and I could see she was about to probe for clarification. But I reached for her hands and squeezed them tight. That heart-shaped diamond glittered like all the hope I held inside. It was small but pure, flawless. She had been right to choose it; it was so much nicer than the one I had chosen. I had selected a ring for flash, for what it told the world about me; she'd chosen one for beauty, for simplicity.

“I'm not crazy,” I said.

Her eyes filled, and she turned her hands to clasp mine.

“I know you're not,” she said. “I believe you.”

My breath caught in my throat. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.”

“So, how do you reach Priss?” she asked. “When you want to get in touch with her, do you call her? Do you go see her? Does she have a job?”

“I call her,” I said. “Or I go see her. She has a place on the Lower East Side, a total dump walk-up on Rivington Street.”

I didn't want to tell her that Priss was a squatter. She moved from place to place, staying with the same ragtag group of friends in various abandoned places throughout the five boroughs. It was becoming a harder and harder existence, as even the worst neighborhoods were gentrifying. She'd never worked, as far as I knew. She'd inherited money when her mother died. There was a house in The Hollows, supposedly; she went there sometimes. I didn't want to tell Megan any of this because it sounded like a lie. Priss's answers to questions about her life always sounded like lies to me, and double that when I repeated them to someone else. But I had learned not to push Priss, not to question her. She didn't like it.

“So call her,” said Megan. “Ask her to meet us somewhere.”

“Why?” I said. “What does that accomplish?”

“We can tell her to leave us alone, or we're going to inform the police that we suspect her of being the one who pushed me onto the subway tracks.”

It was a practical solution, offered by a very smart, but totally naive and pampered young woman, one who believed that everyone around her was as upright and honest as she was. She thought that she could reason with someone like Priss. I tried to imagine how Priss would react to a confrontation like that. It wouldn't be pretty. I felt myself cringing.

“That might not be the right way to go,” I said. I was getting a big headache; it was a slicing pain between my eyes.

“You have to stand up to her, Ian,” said Megan. She lowered her voice to a fierce whisper. “You're afraid of her and she knows it. She's terrorizing you. She's terrorizing me. I mean, she's homicidal—she may have tried to
kill
me. What will she do next?”

Megan was right. Priss had gone too far.

“Okay,” I said. Lamely. Weakly. Unconvincingly. (Pick an adverb, as long as it means I sounded like a loser.)

It was a bad idea, but I wanted to appease Megan. If I refused to call Priss, how did that look? I took the phone from my pocket and called up her contact info, and I pressed the field to make the call. Her picture, from the cover of the most recent edition of
Fatboy and Priss,
filled the screen.

“Put it on speaker,” Megan said. Her eyes fell on the image of Priss and stayed there. There was something in her expression that I hadn't seen before and couldn't name. I pressed the speaker button. The waitress, now pretending to read a paperback, was definitely listening.

The generic greeting was broadcast into the diner, a mechanized voice droning:
“You have reached 212-555-8128. Please leave a message.”

“Priss,” I said. “We have to get together and talk, okay? Why don't we meet at the Shake Shack around one today? Let me know.”

I ended the call and looked at Megan, who gave a solemn nod. She looked so tired, and I felt like a monster for putting her through all of this after everything else she'd been through tonight. She needed rest, not drama.