Crazy Love You (35 page)

All the Whispers were saying the same thing over and over:
“Mommymommydon'tmommyplease.”

She ran until she fell, twisting her ankle with an ugly snap. She lay a second, then pulled herself up and started limping. But the sound of footfalls, her name being yelled into the night—they were right behind her. I felt it all in my own bones and blood—her terror and confusion. But there was nothing I could do for her. I was inside her. I was dreaming her. Her pain and fear were mine. I couldn't help her any more than she could help herself.

When I came back to myself, I was lying on the ground, doubled over. I lay there writhing from what I'd seen and felt. I thought of Eloise and what she'd said about me—that I could see things like she did. If I couldn't, this wouldn't be happening to me. There wouldn't have been this wide doorway inside me where Priss could walk through.

And that's how the police found me, weeping on the ground like a child. I never even heard the helicopter that had been tracking me through the woods with its heat-seeking technology or the police as they moved through the trees. They cuffed me and took me in. I heard the Whispers as the police car carried me off. They were laughing, of course.

Déjà vu. I am here again, surrounded by grim and accusing faces. I have been here many times—after the fires, and Marley's disappearance, after rages in bars which led to brawls, for allegedly pushing someone into traffic, after miscellaneous drunken disorderly episodes—throwing a chair through a window at an East Village restaurant, crashing some glasses off a bar, tipping over a table.

But I haven't stood only before cops and judges. Once I was called before the disciplinary committee at Parsons for trashing the office of a teacher who'd given me a poor grade. Another time my pill dealer showed up with some muscle, claiming that I'd come to his place and robbed his stash. He was a skinny kid with spiky hair and thick black-framed glasses, not intimidating in the least. But his enforcers looked like escaped convicts on steroids, damaged, angry, high on pills. The thugs pushed their way into my East Village walk-up, roughed me up a little, then stood over me with the same face: accusatory, unyielding. Why was I always in the wrong? They didn't want the pills back; they just wanted the money. I paid them, even though I'd have sworn on my mother's life that I hadn't taken his pills. I was a pussy like that, and they were bigger and meaner. (Later that day, in the treasure box, I found a huge Baggie stuffed with a rainbow, every possible color of brain-altering chemical candy. How had it gotten there?)

Every time, in the face of every accusation, I wholeheartedly pled my innocence. I wasn't lying. I
believed
. I had no memory of most of the incidents; others were fuzzy and indistinct. All of them involved Priss in some way, her whispering in my ear, or telling me what I should do, or that she'd handled it, or what that asshole on the other end of the bar had said to her.

When are you going to stop blaming me for your problems, Ian?

“Are you high, Mr. Paine?” asked the squat, dark detective who sat across from me now. “What are you on?”

I thought of the bottle of blue pills. I had no idea what they were or where they'd even come from. I couldn't have answered him if I'd wanted to.

Anyway, the problem at the moment wasn't that I was high. The problem was that I was
sober
and growing more so by the minute. My head was pounding, that migraine still looming like a storm on the horizon. I was shaking, nauseated. Had I been on something, I'd have been in much better shape.

I was starting to think that pills were my big issue. The pot, the booze—those were predictable. Weed was great—it made me happy and lazy. Booze gave me confidence, connected me to the extrovert within. But pills were cutting these jagged little holes in the fabric of my life—they altered me. I was someone different depending on every color—spaced out on red, hyper but focused on blue, blank on black, inexhaustible on purple. Dr. Crown had prescribed a mild antidepressant for me years ago. And ever since then, I'd been on something or other—Ambien to sleep, Ativan for anxiety. Not to mention the recreational drug use, the stuff I got from dealers. You really weren't supposed to mix either. And I did. All the time.

“I want a lawyer,” I said.

He leveled a reptilian stare at me, cool and menacing.

“Where is she?” he asked. He kept his voice low. “Is she alive?”

The question jarred me, brought reality crashing back into focus. Megan was
missing
. It wasn't a dream or something I'd drawn; the woman I loved had fallen down Priss's rabbit hole.

Panic pulsed through me, and my belly went to acid. What did Priss want? Did she want me? Did she want Megan? Did she want our child? Did she just want to destroy my life, what was left of my sanity. And why? For vengeance?

It didn't seem like that could be right. Eloise had said that revenge wasn't a primary motivator. And as I thought about it, it
did
seem watery and insubstantial as far as a motive. Because there is no revenge, not really. I knew this because of my mother. You might seek punishment for someone who wronged you, and you might even find it. But nothing fixes the wrong thing, nothing makes it better, or hurt less. Not even hurting the person who hurt you. That just makes you feel worse. The only one you can really punish is yourself.

People act out of love or they act out of fear.
It had sounded overly simplistic to me at first. But I was starting to believe that Eloise was right. Because fear and love have a million different shades and textures, present themselves in all sorts of complicated hues and colors.

No, Priss didn't want revenge. Our relationship was so much more complicated than that; we had been together for a long time. We were completely entwined in so many sick and unhealthy ways that I didn't even know where I ended and she began. I had to get out of this police station to find her. But my hand was cuffed to a metal bar on the table.

“Mr. Paine? Are you with me?”

The detective had been talking, and I'd heard his voice. But I'd been listening to my own manic thoughts; he was no competition.

“Yes,” I said.

“You had an altercation with your fiancée in Central Park. What were you fighting about?”

I closed my eyes and tried to remember exactly what had happened. What had I said to Megan that caused her to look at me with such pain on her face? But there was a white noise blocking out my memory of the encounter.

I wanted to say:
I asked her to run away with me and she wouldn't. I wanted to take her somewhere far from Priss and all her little games. But she wouldn't go.
I could hardly say that, could I? It didn't sound good at all. It sounded downright crazy, actually. So I didn't say anything.

“Tell me about the fire in your apartment,” he said. He'd obviously decided to change tack.

“What fire?”

“There was a small fire,” he said. “The super put it out fairly quickly. Looks like something was left on the range top. Papers. What were you burning?”

A small fire? The super had put it out? In my memory, I saw the flames licking at my windows. Okay, I hadn't burned the building down. That was good.

“Nothing,” I said. “I didn't start that fire.”

“Witnesses saw you leaving with a bunch of your belongings shortly before the fire alarms started going off.”

I remember sitting in the parked Scout, watching the orange glow. But the time between meeting Megan in the park and that moment was gone. Whatever small measure of relief I'd felt just now disappeared with the bubble of dread that was swelling in my stomach.

“No,” I said.

“Any idea who started it, then?”

I shrugged. What a punk I must seem like to him. Did he see my fear? My confusion? Or did he just see a criminal, an arsonist and possibly a killer, sitting before him? But his wide face was blank, his demeanor rock solid. Jones Cooper had shown temper, emotion. He was mad at me for being a screw-up, for lying. This guy—Ferrigno, he'd said his name was—gave nothing.

“Who else has access to your apartment, then?” he asked.

Another question I couldn't answer.

“Look,” I said. “I need to get out of here.” And this elicited a patient smile from the detective.

“We have a lot to talk about,” he said. “Whatever other commitments or plans you happen to have are going on hold until we find your fiancée, okay? Her parents are here, you know.”

The thought of facing Binky and Julia made me physically ill. I could only imagine their terror. And of all the accusing faces I'd met in my life, theirs would be the worst.

“I don't know where she is,” I said. “I wish I did.”

I heard how it sounded, hollow and disaffected. But I couldn't be further from that. I was jittery with my need to get out of there and find Meg.

They probably had enough to hold me for a while as a person of interest, even if they couldn't charge me with anything yet. On television, they have to let you go for this reason or that reason. But in real life, they have all sorts of little tricks for keeping you. I thought the next question would be about Detective Crowe, but it wasn't. I certainly had no intention of bringing this up.

The detective got up and started pacing. “Can you run down the day for me? Give me a time line?”

Uh, no, not really.

I grasped at it. With effort, I pieced it back together. I came back from Long Island, found out that I was being evicted from my apartment, that my money was gone, went with Meg to meet Priss, who never showed, came back to find my place trashed. Priss was there when I got back. Detective Crowe came to see me. I saw a video of myself pushing Megan onto the subway tracks. Priss knocked him out; I ran like the coward I am. Feeling the boom about to be lowered, I went to get Megan. I remembered her in the park, looking at me with that shocked expression of pain. Then I was in the Scout, the back of it packed with essential belongings.

I didn't tell him any of that, but I felt irrationally proud that I had at least some grasp on what had recently transpired in my life.

Instead I said, “I need a lawyer.”

He came back to the table, took a seat.

“We're running out of time here, Ian.” He was going for gentle, earnest.

“I want a lawyer.”

From a small table by the door, he retrieved an iPad. He brought it over and pushed it toward me. I could see from the frozen frame that he was about to show me the surveillance video from the tracks.

“I'm serious,” I said, as if I needed to make that clear. “I need to talk to a lawyer. Right now.”

He pressed the triangle on the screen and it played. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't. I was transfixed by that hooded figure moving through the crowd. I watched poor Megan get pushed again, saved again. I watched the train enter the station, Meg lying on the platform, a crowd forming around her. I watched the figure walk toward the camera.

“Stop it,” I said, moving to grab the tablet. “I've seen it.”

But he moved it out of my reach, held it up so I could see. But when the hooded figure turned his face up to the screen, Ferrigno pressed the pause button. Then I just stared at it, leaned in close, and took it from him. It wasn't me on the screen. It was Fatboy.

Or rather someone wearing a Fatboy mask, part of that merchandising initiative my publisher had launched late last year—the rubber mask with obese jowls and an angry red-and-white field of acne, empty holes for eyes. He wore a crazed, toothy smile in that mask; I don't know why. In the books, Fatboy almost never smiles. There had been Priss masks, too, and long red wigs. But those didn't do as well—maybe because the rest of Priss was so hard to imitate. Her huge bust and impossibly small waist, those meaty but shapely thighs, that heart-shaped ass—she was a male fantasy. No woman alive ever looked like a comic book girl.

I sat staring, transfixed. The figure looked smaller than it had the first time I'd seen it. But the black hood, the black T-shirt . . . both were innocuous. There were no other clues as to who it might be behind the mask.

“Who is that?” he asked. He nodded toward the frozen frame.

“I don't know.” My brain hurt; I was having that mental brownout again, the internal lights flickering. I was dull and heavy, more like myself than I liked to feel. I'd have given anything to pop something, anything, in my mouth, to feel that wash of something other than my own addled thoughts.

“Was there someone else in your apartment when Detective Grady Crowe came to talk to you?”

I didn't have an answer. I had wondered when this subject was going to come up.

“He said you kept looking behind him. Then, when you saw that video, you ran. He gave chase but you took the stairs and he said you were in pretty good shape, and him not so much. By the time he got to the street, you were gone. He couldn't get back into the apartment.”

So, she didn't hit him? He wasn't dead or hurt? Oh man, I didn't need a lawyer, I needed a doctor. I needed a room next to my mom at the crazy house. I pressed my head into my free hand.

“Work with me,” Ferrigno said. He kept his voice soft and low. It was almost soothing. “What's happening? Where is Megan?”

I couldn't talk to this guy. I couldn't tell him any of this. Surely, they'd lock me away and I'd never find my way back to Megan. I needed help and I could only think of one person who could help me, improbable as my choice was.

“I want to talk to Jones Cooper,” I said, after long seconds passed by.

Detective Ferrigno stood and walked over toward the door. I thought he was going to leave but he leaned against the wall. He had a gray, unhealthy look to him, a big paunch, dark rings under his eyes. He was a guy who wasn't taking good care of himself, and it was starting to take a toll.