Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (27 page)

“Oops,” she said.

At about two she came over and we watched
Hawaii 5-O
and then
Columbo
. We wore the same clothes we wore last night and we smelled like Hell, like blood and disinfectant and stale beer. I made us coffee with big shots of amaretto from my parents’ liquor cabinet, and Tracy made grilled cheese sandwiches. She made really good grilled cheese. After sandwiches we went back to the TV. We watched
Sally Jesse Raphael
and
Three’s Company
and
Hart to Hart.
Mrs. Hart was kidnapped. Again. Max and Mr. Hart found her. Big fucking surprise, Max. Try our case and see how you like it.

In the evening we walked up to Brooklyn Heights. On Hicks Street we got wonton soup and lemon chicken and mai tais at SuSu’s YumYum. The walls were covered in scratchy red velvet and we sat in red and black chairs.

“I wish we could live here,” Tracy said. She meant the design, which was already pleasingly retro. But I think she also meant the quiet and the kindness and the never-ending supply of food. Tracy’s father meant well, but the kitchen was usually empty.

“My dad got laid off again,” she said when we were almost done eating. She looked down at her plate, the remains of lemon chicken and fried rice.

We both knew what would happen: He’d start drinking earlier and earlier, more and more, until he was drunk all day, every day. Then he’d realize what he’d done, sober up, apologize to Tracy, and start looking for a job again. Then he’d start drinking again.

“That sucks,” I said. “You can always stay with me.”

“Thanks. But then, you know. I worry if he’s eating. He falls. You know.”

From SuSu’s we went to a bar we liked across the street that had a padded door with a porthole-like round window like bars in old movies. After mai tais we figured we should stick to beer and got big pints of Genny at the bar. We smoked cigarettes and put Frank Sinatra songs on the jukebox. At the bar a few old men argued about sports or politics or whatever old men argue about.

“I don’t understand,” I said, once I was finally drunk enough to talk about Chloe. “I mean—”

But I didn’t know what I wanted to say.

“I know,” Trace said. “I mean—”

But she didn’t know what to say either.

At midnight we went home. We kissed good night on the cheek, but it felt cold. At home I took off my dress and put on a big Ramones T-shirt over my tights and got into bed and drank amaretto from a stolen bottle I kept underneath. I put on the TV.
Unsolved Mysteries
was on.

I couldn’t sleep. I thought about Chloe. About how Chloe had been the one person. About how solving mysteries had been the one thing. How Chloe didn’t want us and the mystery, her mystery, didn’t want us to solve it.

It felt like the inside of my body was a desert. A dead place.

I got out my notebook and wrote:
Someday this will make me a great detective. Someday this will make me a great detective.

But it didn’t seem true anymore. If you were really devoted to the truth you had to admit that there wasn’t much of a point to it all. Not without the one thing that had made sense, at least a little. Not without solving mysteries.

Under my pillow I had four codeine pills from when I’d broken a tooth on the Case of the Broken-Into Bodega. When I saw the dentist I told him I didn’t want any painkillers—they made me feel funny—and it worked: he gave me fifteen pills. The first one had been heaven; the next ten had each been progressively less wonderful, tolerance already building.

I took the four I had left and washed them down with the rest of the bottle of sweet liqueur.

When I fell asleep I dreamed I was dead.

I was in a black, barren lot. It could have been a city that burned down or a forest that died.

I lay on the dirt like a doll, broken and forgotten, shattered glass glittering around me. My eyes were closed, my lips were pale and blue.

Days passed. Ages passed. I was dead for years. I was dead for centuries.

Slowly, barely there, I felt something push my arm. It pushed again and again.

I wondered if it would hurt me.

It did. It pushed hard and then harder.

Pain never ended, apparently. So that was the big reveal, after all that.

I felt something scrape on my hand and I realized it was teeth, or a hard mouth, gently biting on my hand, my arm, not breaking the skin.

I felt the hard mouth on my neck, brushing the skin. The mouth searched and found the neck of my dress, and grabbed it.

The thing with the hard mouth pulled on my dress, and dragged me away.

The thing dragged me for hours. Maybe years. My eyes were closed but I felt my dead body roll over sharp rocks, broken glass.

Finally, we stopped. The thing let go of my dress.

All of a sudden I felt a hot breath and the strangest sensation on my face, something rough and wet, like damp sandpaper, rubbing over and over again. The rough wet thing reached my eyes. It poked gently at my eyelids, pushing again and again until my eyes were open.

I could see. Above me was a huge black bird with a red featherless head, cleaning my face. The bird leaned back.

I sat up. I was alive.

We were in a forest. Moss carpeted the ground. Ferns bloomed underneath giant trees with rough red bark.

We looked at each other. The bird had tiny black eyes that saw everything.

It bent down low. It smelled like dirt and dead things. Its feathers were black-brown and dull.

It whispered in my ear.

“This is not the price you have to pay. This is not your punishment for loving something.”

Suddenly it hit me, hard, across the face.

It hit me again.

I opened my eyes. My vulture was gone. Lenore was standing above me, slapping me.

After I opened my eyes, she stopped.

“Jesus, baby,” she said. “You scared the hell out of me.”

I looked at her.

“You didn’t wake up,” she said. She looked scared. “Your phone was ringing and ringing and you didn’t wake up.”

I had my own phone line; Kelly had somehow jury-rigged it, cutting into someone else’s line. Sometimes I listened to the Puerto Rican family whose line it was. The wife was having an affair. No one knew except the youngest son.

“What’s wrong with you?” Lenore said. “What happened? Are you sick?”

I shook my head, heavy and thick. “Nothing,” I said. “Just sleepy.”

She looked at me. “You sure?” she said. “You sure you didn’t take anything?”

“Of course not,” I said, still groggy and half-asleep. “What would I take?”

She sat at the edge of the bed.

“You know I worry about you sometimes,” she said. She put a hand on my knee.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” I said, confused. But the words came automatically. “I’m okay.”

“Really?” she said. She looked worried.

“Of course,” I said. “But I better see who called. It might be our case. Maybe Tracy found something.”

“That detective game you guys play,” she said. “At least I know when you’re playing that, you’re safe. Right?” She said it with a little desperation in her voice.
Right?

I nodded.

Suddenly she reached over and pulled me into an awkward hug.

“You know I love you, right, kid?” she said. “I mean, I know I’m not the best mother in the world. But you know I love you, right?”

I hugged her back. “Of course, Mom. I know that.”

She pulled away and smiled. “Okay. Go call your friend back. It’s late, but you’re on vacation, right?”

She left. But on the way out she stopped and looked at me. Her gaze was sharp and stung a little where it hit me.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said sharply. “You look like shit. Go call your friend.”

She left. I stood up, head spinning a little, and called Tracy.

“I had a dream,” she said. “A dream about Chloe. We have to go see Chloe.”

“Did you solve the case?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I can think we can solve it tonight.”

And all of a sudden, I was alive again.

I went to the bathroom and made myself throw up the rest of the pills.

Tracy met me on the front steps of my house. It was two thirty a.m. The block was quiet. From far away we heard solitary motors, sirens, a long low whistle. We walked to the train station. We lit cigarettes and couldn’t tell the difference between our frozen breath and our smoke. I was still fuzzy and slow from the pills, but I was quickly coming alive. As we walked, with every step life became more real.

I looked at Tracy and I knew that she, like me, felt absolutely, entirely real. The coldness of the air, the smell of the subway station, the feel of cold painted metal on our hands as we lifted ourselves up to jump the turnstiles—every sense was sharp and every input was distinct and clear.

No one else was waiting for the G and no one else was on the train and no one else got on. But it felt as vibrant and busy as rush hour. That girl from last night was another person, long gone.

“What was it?” I asked. “Your dream?”

Tracy frowned. “Something about Chloe,” she answered. “We have to get her out of there.”

“If we have to drag her,” I said.

“Yes,” Tracy said. “Even if we have to drag her.”

I knew we would get Chloe where she was supposed to be. We would go back tomorrow if we had to. Every night. But we would get her where she was supposed to be.

“The detective is cursed,” Silette wrote in 1959. “Solving mysteries is the only time he will be truly alive. The rest of his life will be a distant blur, good only insomuch as he can use the things he sees there in his work.”

CC and Chloe were sitting on the couch in the office in Hell. In the corner, a man we’d never seen before was doing fat lines off the desk. But it was obvious CC and Chloe hadn’t been doing any coke. She was nodding off on CC’s shoulder. In the middle of the room, where Chloe had been doing her little act yesterday, a boy about our age was trying to get something going with another young boy. Both boys wore jeans and no shirts and had short blonde hair. The first smacked the second halfheartedly across the ass.

“Harder,” the second boy whined. “Come
on.
”

“Shut up,” the first boy said. “You’re so lame. No one’s even watching.”

Chloe woke up when we came in.

“
You
again,” she said. “What the fuck do you want?”

Tracy didn’t answer. Instead she went over to the sofa, sat next to Chloe, and began to whisper in her ear.

At first Chloe scowled and pulled away from Tracy.

“Fuck
off
,” Chloe said.

Chloe cursed Tracy a few more times. She stood up to leave but Tracy held her down, an easy job even for tiny Trace. Chloe was literally nearly skin and bones, her abdomen concave.

I didn’t know what Tracy was saying. Maybe she would tell me or maybe she wouldn’t. Tracy liked secrets.

Chloe started to squirm a little in her seat, to turn away from Tracy like a baby turning away from food it didn’t want but needed. But Tracy kept talking and kept her hands on Chloe, pinning her down, and didn’t let go. After a minute Chloe’s face became smoother, quieter. More like the face I remembered.

Then Chloe started to cry.

“No no no,” I heard Tracy whisper. “You didn’t know. It’s okay. It’s all okay.”

Chloe said something but I didn’t hear what, and they whispered to each other for another minute. Chloe looked at Tracy as if Tracy was telling her the answer to a question she’d had all her life.

I realized not one person in this room other than Tracy or me cared if Chloe lived or died. And that she had put herself here deliberately and intentionally, in this city of the dead, where no one would ever love her.

Chloe started to sob, and clutched Tracy.

“It’s okay,” Tracy said. “We’re all going to be okay.”

Tracy stood up and Chloe stood up with her. I took off my coat and put it over her and together we walked out of the room through the club and out to Eighth Avenue.

First we went back to Chloe and Reena’s apartment. Chloe didn’t stop crying. Not in the cab, not when we pulled up, not while she waited outside while Tracy talked to Reena. Later I would find out that Tracy had told Reena that Chloe couldn’t see her right now. Reena understood. She was just glad Chloe was all right. She stayed in her bedroom with the door closed as Chloe, still crying, went into her room and packed a few bags.

“I have an aunt,” Chloe said. “In L.A. I want to stay with her.”

“You sure she’ll take you?” Tracy asked. “You don’t want to call first?”

“She’ll take me,” Chloe said defensively. “She said if I was ever in trouble I could stay with her. She loves me. I know she does.”

She said it as if we wouldn’t believe her. As if no one could believe it.

She was still crying as she finished packing and still crying as we took the train up to Port Authority and still crying as we all pooled every penny we had and bought Chloe a bus ticket to L.A., plus twenty dollars for food on the five-day trip.

The sun came up as we sat in Port Authority. Homeless people took most of the benches. Pimps and their bright-eyed protégés kept a sharp eye out for new arrivals.

Nothing good ever happened in bus stations. Not until now.

At eight Chloe’s bus started seating. She hugged us each, hard, still crying.

“Thank you so much,” she said through her tears. “Thank you forever and ever.”

Chloe got on the bus, still crying. Tracy and I got on the A train and took it to the F to the G to home.

It was nearly ten by the time we got off the train in Brooklyn. The sun was bright and the cold had abated a bit. A year later, Tracy disappeared, never to be seen again, and a year after that I left Brooklyn forever, leaving Kelly alone with the mess we’d made of our lives. But for now Tracy was smiling, which was rare. Her cheeks glowed and she looked more alive, somehow. More like she belonged here. She had solved her mysteries.

“What should we do today?” Tracy said, blinking in the bright sun.