Repo Madness (27 page)

*   *   *

Dr. Schaumburg asked me how I was feeling, and I told him I felt bloated, hungry, I had a headache, a muscle twitch, irritable bowels, and was in a bad mood. He told me that when I came back in for another test in ten days, he would see about adjusting my medication. I didn't tell him that some of the symptoms might have had less to do with the pharmaceuticals and more to do with having been brained with a chair leg.

I left the little cup in his capable hands and went out to try to find future repo Mark Stevens and his soon-to-be-ex–pickup truck. Through a process of elimination I found the place—most of the houses were summer homes, unoccupied in the dead of February. Fresh tracks in new snow up one driveway led to a small place with sawhorses in the front yard and a stack of new lumber off to one side. No one was home, and the vehicle that left the tire prints was not around.

My headache receded a little when I met up with a guy who decided he didn't want to pay for his Toyota because it stopped running. When I explained what a repo would do to his credit, he gave me a check, shaking his head over his plight but not blaming me. I'd get a hundred dollars for making the collection, part of the two-hundred-dollar fee that would be added to the end of his car loan. He shook his head over that, too.

Alan was asleep when I ate a burger for lunch. I threw away the bag and then, after a moment, opened the glove box, got out my medication, and threw that away, too. I didn't know what I would do in ten days when I had to take another urine test and, at that moment, I didn't much care.

Alan woke up and ran me through a review of everything we knew about the “case,” which was frustrating because once we took out our speculations, we really knew almost nothing.

Maybe it was just psychological, but I felt measurably better with the medication in the trash can and not in my bloodstream. I stopped in the Bear for a moment, and Kermit said the flights for the Wolfingers were all set. The tickets cost a little more than expected, because the people at the “Grand-Prize Center” insisted hotel reservations could only be made a week in advance, forcing an airline penalty that was probably further disincentive to collecting the Hawaiian vacation. I gave him thirty-two hundred bucks, thinking I had just wiped out my fiscals.

Darkness was settling in when I turned down my street in Kalkaska. I parked in the street and looked at my house. Footprints tracked up the sidewalk to the front door from the car pulled over by the tree Jake had decorated that morning. Katie's car. She was obviously back in town, and now she was in my house.

I got out of my truck and headed in to find out what was going on.

 

21

Lisa Marie's Autopsy

My small table was set for two. A tall candle burned in the center of it, putting out a warm light. Something good was cooking, and as I slipped off my shoes, Jake came up to me, wagging. “Are the two of you having dinner?” I whispered to him.

The bathroom door opened, and Katie came down the hallway. “Oh! Hi, Ruddy.”

She stopped about five feet away from me, smiling. She wore a pair of jeans I hadn't seen before, snugly fitting, and a silk blouse that matched her blue eyes. Her hair had been cut and was curled up softly on her neck.

“She's beautiful,”
Alan said breathlessly, articulating my feelings exactly.

“Hi,” I managed to say, instead of
Oh my God
or something. “How's your aunt?”

“It turned out to be mononucleosis,” Katie said. “Can you believe it? She's, like, in her late fifties, but she never had it as a teenager, and when you get it this late in life, they have trouble diagnosing it. They thought it was Lyme disease, because of the fatigue, but then she turned yellow and her neck got all swollen.”

Katie was not wearing her engagement ring. I swallowed back my disappointment. “So, she's fine?” I ventured.

“She's really sick, still, but yeah. She's going to fully recover.”

“That's good,”
Alan observed, probably just to remind me he was there.

“You look … amazing,” I told her with feeling. “I like your haircut. It's cute.”

She smiled at me. “I'm making that chicken you like,” she said.

“Sounds great,” I replied. I felt precarious, like one wrong word and I'd fall into a hole and be unable to get out. I so, so did not want to say a wrong word.

Katie went into the kitchen, dug in her purse, and came to me, holding a small envelope. I accepted it without comprehension—it was full of business cards. I pulled one out and saw her picture on it. “I got my license. I'm an official real estate agent!” She spun in a tight circle and then came into my arms.

“Congratulations! That's wonderful!” I told her.

She eased out of our embrace far too soon, heading back into the kitchen. “I really missed Jake, so I picked him up at Kermit's. He was so excited, he practically ran to my car!”

“He ran? I can barely get him to get out of his chair.” I gave Jake an accusing stare, and he glanced away guiltily.

Katie poked her head into my refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of champagne. “And I was thinking, I have this big news, who can I tell? Who do I celebrate with? And it just seemed … I wanted to celebrate with you.”

My mouth was a little dry. “Good decision. You want me to open that?”

“You are, after all, the professional barman.”

I took the bottle from her, and now we were standing very close, smiling into each other's eyes.

“Ruddy…,”
Alan warned.

I glanced away, sensing her puzzlement as I did so, and focused on peeling the foil from the champagne. It was my fault—I'd actively tried to connect with Alan, I'd wanted him back, and now he was here, in my head, ruining my life. The cork popped out, and I blinked. Katie put a hand on my back as I poured, and I knew that when I filled the glasses, we would clink them and sip and then put them down and kiss long and deeply, that I would touch her through that silk blouse and that she would lead me down the hallway. The chicken would be overcooked.

But none of that was going to happen as long as Alan was here.

The bubbles boiled up in the thin flutes, giving me a reason to stay focused on my pouring. Alan made a distressed noise because he could feel my rising excitement, knew what I was thinking, knew he couldn't possibly live through what was going to happen next.

So I went into my head, wandering its corridors, turning the corners, and descending deeper into myself. I pictured Alan, not as a person but as a presence, finding him there in my consciousness. I mentally reached out to him and strongly, and firmly, pushed and pushed until he was forced into the darkest recesses of my mind, a closet with a door that I could close and lock. When I finished and resurfaced, Alan was gone.

I turned and grinned crookedly at my fiancée. We sipped champagne, we folded into each other's arms, and as we went down the hallway, all I could think was that if I could force Alan away, it meant he wasn't real.

I had a mental disorder. When I was talking to Alan, I was really only talking to myself.

*   *   *

The chicken cooked for an extra hour or so, but it was still pretty good. We opened a bottle of wine after the champagne, but neither one of us was really interested in drinking much more. It seemed more important to go back down the hallway to the bedroom for act two.

Later we lay sprawled, legs entangled, the candle from the table now on my dresser, tracing a bright-yellow circle on the ceiling. Katie's head was on my chest.

“I guess I was surprised to see you,” I ventured, when what I really wanted to ask was,
Are you back for good?

She sighed contentedly. “I figured a few things out.”

“Oh? Care to share?”

She looked up at me. “We never dated.”

“Sorry?”

“I think that's what's been bothering me the most. When I lost my home, I moved in here, like, same day. We barely knew each other at that point, and then from that moment on we were living together. Instead of being that wild, fun time of exploring and learning about each other, I was over here, trying to figure out how to fit all my stuff into your closet. You know? It kind of took the romance out of it.”

“Well, but we did have a rather intense moment together,” I offered mildly, thinking back to
how
she lost her home.

“Right. Not the most romantic of circumstances,” she replied levelly.

“I get it,” I told her.

“I couldn't understand why I wasn't happier when we got engaged, but now I know. You gave me a ring, but we were living as if we were already married. Did I want that, a life predecided because I had no other place to live? You move in with someone because you love them and want to be with them all the time, not because your house trailer was destroyed. You get engaged because you want to be married, not because you already are.”

I searched for something to say. “I'm sorry for everything,” I murmured. An apology worthy of Jimmy Growe.

“No, no, you did nothing wrong. In fact—God, Ruddy, that thing I said, about how my dad wouldn't have liked you, I was just being a bitch. I thought you were denying me sex to prove some kind of point, and it pissed me off. I said what I said to get back at you. I'm so sorry.”

“I would never deny you sex to prove a point or for any other reason.”

She chuckled. “Actually, I think my dad would have loved you.”

“Maybe not
loved,
” I responded cautiously.

She rolled and propped herself up on one elbow so she could look into my eyes, her gaze earnest. “I think I started questioning everything, not just how our relationship skipped dating and went straight to me picking up your socks from on top of the hamper every day—”

I groaned softly.

“—but us.
You.
I started having doubts about you. But then my mom helped me see the other side.”

“Your mom,” I repeated stupidly.

“Yeah, she was there, you know, at Aunt Kjersti's bedside. It was kind of hard not to talk to her.”

“And your mom said you should give me another chance?” I tried to picture Marget arguing on my behalf, and couldn't make it work.

“Oh God, no.” Katie laughed. “Just the opposite. She says you're a loser, and that you've told me all these lies about how my dad died, and I can do so much better, and how she always liked Dwight, he's got a real job, you know, not stealing cars but a decent career with a pension and benefits.” As she spoke, Katie's voice took on the vaguely Minnesotan lilt of her mother's accent.

“Sounds like I'm growing on her.”

Katie grinned at me. “I guess I've just never thought much of my mother's advice on matters of the heart. Or anything else. If she disapproves of you, that's the best endorsement a man can get.”

“I'll try to continue to earn her distrust.”

Katie's eyes searched my face. “But I do love you, Ruddy. There's so much stuff with my mom, and I hardly see any of my girlfriends, but I know, no matter what, I love you. Being away from you, missing you, taught me that. Now that I have my own place—I've never lived alone before; I had roommates, and having a trailer on my mom's property didn't count. But now that I have my own place, I feel like for once in my life I've got freedom of choice. So: I choose you.”

“I choose you, too, Katie.”

“So we'll figure it out.”

“Yeah. We'll … date. Go to the movies. I'll ask you to prom.”

She laughed.

Katie slept in my bed that whole night. Jake spent a lot of it hunting around for a place to lie down—he liked having her back but didn't believe it meant she could reclaim her pillow.

I was awake for much of the time, watching Katie sleep in the glow of the moon. I could understand just how close I'd come to blowing it. She was right; we hardly knew each other when we moved in together, and because it was my house, she adapted to my ways, while all I did was grumble about the number of her items in the bathroom. I silently vowed to myself that from that moment on I would always put my goddamn socks in the hamper.

I didn't hear her get up, but the sound of the shower running dragged me into consciousness. I felt the sore spot on the back of my neck and gingerly rotated my head, wincing. When I stood up, Jake turned in circles and sprawled across the blankets, relieved to have the bed all to himself.

I went in to make coffee. Katie smelled it and came in for a cup, wearing only a towel, and I expressed my enthusiasm for this convenient outfit by reaching hungrily for her. She laughed. “Okay, now I have to get ready for work.”

I volunteered to cook breakfast. This time, at Jake's insistence, I made bacon, too. Katie ate and I watched her and she smiled at me watching her. “Might be fun to do this again tonight,” I finally ventured.

Her gaze was frank, and I steeled myself against what she had to say while she considered her words. “I have a six-month lease on the place in East Jordan,” she finally said. “With the roads iced up, it's going to take me more than an hour this morning. When I walk, it's eight minutes.”

“Okay, then.”

A small smile crept onto her lips. “Maybe some nights you could sleep over there.”

“I would really like that.”

She went back to finish getting ready, and I stealthily set the plates on the floor for Jake to lick. It's just easier than scrubbing them at the sink, and the dishwasher would sterilize them anyway. When Katie emerged, wearing her work clothes, her face carefully made up, she was so pretty, I felt a pleasant hollow sensation in my chest. She came to me and kissed me good-bye. “I'm getting lipstick on you,” she breathed.

“It's okay.”

She motioned to Jake to say good-bye. Watching her lean over my dog, stroking his ears, I did something I wouldn't have expected: I reached out to Alan, and I invited him back in. I felt his presence inside me like an increase of internal air pressure, just the slightest change of my sense of being.