Spirits in the Wires (21 page)

Coming tack to some stranger's apartment
to have a shower wasn't high on Suzi's list of things she would do. But so far, this wasn't so bad. Aaran was easy to talk to. He might be a little flirty—she could see his interest every time he looked at her—but he hadn't actually hit on her yet. And god, she'd needed a shower.

She came out of the bathroom now, hair tousled and still wet, wearing an oversized Heather Nova T-shirt under a terrycloth bathrobe. Aaran told her she could keep the T-shirt—”you wouldn't believe how much merchandise shows up in the office every week.” The dirty clothes she'd been wearing and that were in her duffel bag were all in Aaran's washing machine.

It was a little bit like heaven.

Aaran came out of the kitchen with a cup of tea for her. “I thought we'd eat in, considering you don't have anything to wear.”

“That's cool,” she told him.

“An omelet sound good?”

She smiled. “You guys and your bachelor food. I think cooking eggs is hardwired into you from birth.”

“We could have something else.”

“No, I love eggs.” She took a sip of her tea. “Say, would you mind if I checked my e-mail while you're cooking?”

He gave her a look of surprise.

“Yes,” she said. “Street people have e-mail. All we need is a Hotmail account and a couple of bucks for one of the Internet cafes. Hell, some public libraries even offer access for free.”

“Of course. The machine's over in the corner there.”

Suzi turned and saw the slim notebook computer sitting closed on a beautiful antique writing desk in a corner of the room. The desk appeared to be mahogany, with turned legs and little slots for envelopes at the back of the desk's surface.

“Would you mind connecting to the Net for me?” she asked. “I don't want to screw anything up on your machine. Don't worry,” she added when she saw him looking a little anxious. “I'll be fine once I'm in a browser. It's just that every machine seems to be a little different in how it connects.”

“No problem,” he said.

She followed him over to the desk and watched as he went through the protocols. Finally he double-clicked on the Explorer icon and the browser window came up to fill the screen.

“There you go,” he said, standing up.

She took the seat. “Thanks.”

She typed in the Hotmail URL and Aaran went back into the kitchen. While she was waiting for the page to come up, she glanced at the kitchen door, then quickly checked the “Favorites” drop-down menu, scanning the sites he'd bookmarked.

Okay, she thought. This was another good sign. No porn or weird sex sites. No “My Favorite Serial Killers” Web sites bookmarked.

Maybe he really was on the level. That'd be a first. But she'd been so dirty and was still so hungry, that she'd had to take the chance. People just didn't much care in this city, and Sundays were the worst for panhandling.

She'd actually been looking forward to this weekend. The week had been rough, but she'd done well in the Market on Saturday, cadging enough money to splurge on two nights at the hostel with enough left over for a laundry and a couple of decent meals. If she stuck to the soup and sandwich specials at the donut shop, that is. It would have left her nothing to start out the week, but at least she'd have been clean, well-rested, and fed. She would have been able to spend most of Monday applying for jobs before she'd have to start panhandling again.

Everything would have been fine except her good fortune hadn't gone unnoticed. On her way to the donut shop, a couple of guys dragged her into an alleyway. The knife one of them stuck in her face had her digging in her pocket and handing over the handful of small bills and change she'd managed to collect through the day. The one without the knife took the money. The one with the knife gave her an ugly little grin, then punched her in the stomach with his free hand.

She stumbled back into some garbage cans, lost her balance, and fell to the ground. By the time she got up, they were gone.

She supposed she was lucky they hadn't done worse. Really beat the crap out of her, say. Or even raped her. But she didn't feel lucky last night, huddled in a doorway, stomach sore and growling with hunger. And she hadn't felt lucky this morning, either.

So she'd taken the chance with Aaran and it looked like it was paying off. Hell, she might even take him up on the offer of his sofa for the night.

She took another sip of her tea as she logged onto her Yahoo account. There were a handful of new messages, but they were all spam. Still nothing from Marie.

Suzi sighed. She'd been so hoping to be able to open the lines of communication with her little sister again, but it had been almost three months now since that terrible day, and Marie still wouldn't respond to either phone calls or e-mail. Suzi wondered if they'd ever talk again.

She could understand Marie being upset. Traumatized even. The two of them had been sitting around the kitchen in the house Suzi had shared with her husband—so far as she was concerned, her ex-husband—Darryl. Darryl had been drinking that evening. Nothing hard, but he'd gone through the six-pack that had been in the fridge. When he came in looking for another beer and found they were all gone, he'd flown into a rage.

That had been new. Not his anger, but the fact that he wasn't controlling it in front of Marie. He was usually so careful when there was anyone else around and he knew Marie adored him, so he seemed to take special care when she was present. But not that day. That day he'd backhanded Suzi so hard, he knocked her off her chair. When she started to get up, he hit her again. Swore at her. Swore at Marie when she started to cry. Told her she'd get the same if she didn't shut up, which only made Marie cry harder.

He took a step toward her, hand lifted, but Suzi'd managed to get in between him and her little sister. She took the blow. And something snapped inside her. Her fear and weakness shattered, and she was surprised to find courage waiting for her. Or maybe he'd just pushed her so far that she was past being afraid or feeling weak. She just didn't care anymore. Or maybe it was for Marie, to protect her little sister from the monster that her husband had become.

Whatever it was, he read something in her face that made him back away. He gave her one long look, the promise of pain to come lying in his eyes, then he stormed out the front door, slamming it behind him.

Suzi had turned to Marie then, wanting to comfort her. But Marie pushed her away.

“How could you?” she'd cried. “What did you do to him?”

And then she fled herself. Out the back door.

Suzi had stood for a long time in the kitchen, leaning heavily against the kitchen counter before she'd finally picked up the phone. She started to dial 911, but then slowly cradled the receiver. She made her way into the bedroom. Every breath she took made her wince. She'd taken the old duffel bag that had accompanied her on many a camping trip and stuffed it with a few essentials. Took the grocery money. Then she left, too.

It wasn't the first time she'd left her husband. But it was the first time it stuck. The first time the old love she'd felt for him hadn't managed to smooth over her hurts and anger. The love was finally gone.

But so was any support she should have received. She didn't know what Darryl had told their friends and her parents—or maybe it was Marie who had talked to Mom and Dad—but overnight she seemed to have become a pariah in their eyes.

So she set aside enough money for meals and a couple of nights in a motel, then took a bus as far as what was left would take her. Which is how she ended up in Newford, basically broke and all too soon living on the streets. Funny how fast that could happen. Funny how prospective employers could read your desperation no matter how well you thought you'd hidden it.

Pimps tried to recruit her, but she'd managed to keep them at bay. She could have worked in a strip club, but she preferred the indignity of panhandling to dancing naked to a room full of Darryls.

She rubbed her face, then pinched the bridge of her nose with her forefingers.

Her gaze remained on the computer screen, but she hadn't really seen it for quite a few minutes now. She was focused on some far-off, unseen summation of her life that scrolled by in her mind's eye.

It was odd, how distanced she felt from it all. Had three months on the street already made her that hard? It seemed so easy to look at the story of her life as though it belonged to someone else, as though she was hearing about it, rather than having lived it herself. Is this what she had to pay to be strong enough to be free? She was happy that she'd proved resilient enough to make it on her own—even just living hand-to-mouth the way she did at the moment—but had to wonder at the cost.

She used to
feel
things so intensely. And she supposed she still did. But what she felt was
now.
The relief of being clean again. The warmth of the tea. The chance to relax for a moment, instead of having to be focused on her safety in dangerous surroundings.

She couldn't feel her past in the same way.

She didn't like Darryl, but she didn't experience that residue flash of anger or hatred when she thought about him. She didn't even feel the fear anymore. She believed that her parents and Marie had treated her unfairly, but the hurt she felt was intellectual, not in her gut.

How could all of that have just faded?

Sighing again, Suzi tried to put all of this out of her mind and focused on the computer screen in front of her. She deleted the spam unread, then composed her usual message for her sister.

I miss you, Marie. Please write.

She sent it and was about to close the browser when a small window popped up in the middle of the screen. She expected an ad and was already moving the cursor to click on the little “X” in its corner when the image registered.

It was a grainy, black-and-white photo of a young, good-looking black man standing in some kind of forest that looked like it had been built out of old circuit boards, wire, and other electronic litter. His face was tilted up so that she felt as though she was looking down at him from a higher perspective.

She waited to see if anything was going to happen, finger hesitating on the mouse button that would make the window disappear. But the message, when it started to scroll across the bottom of the window, wasn't an ad.

… aaran … help … me … aaran … help … me …

For a long moment she stared at the words as they continued to scroll across the bottom of the small window. Finally she raised her gaze to the kitchen door.

“Aaran,” she called.

He popped his head out the door.

“You better come see this,” she said.

She got out of the chair to make room for him in front of the computer.

“What is it?” he asked as he took her place.

But then he looked at the screen, took in the picture, read the words scrolling under it. His face drained of colour. He turned to her.

“How did … what did you …”

“I didn't do anything,” Suzi said. “Honest. That window just popped up.”

She bit at her lower lip, trying to figure out what she'd done, why this was freaking him out so much. He looked like he was about to have a stroke.

“Do … do you know that guy?” she asked.

Aaran gave a slow nod, his gaze returning to the screen.

“His name's Jackson Hart,” he said. “He works at the paper and … he's one of the disappeared.”

“I don't get you. What are ‘the disappeared'?”

Aaran started to answer, but then shook his head. He got out of the chair and picked up the TV remote. He switched on the TV, and CNN came up on the screen. Suzi came and sat beside him on the sofa and tried to make sense out of the bizarre story that the anchorwoman was reporting.

I've come out onto the f
ire escape for another smoke, but it's mostly just to get away from all the planning and conversation going on inside.

It's quiet out here, almost peaceful, if it wasn't for the anxieties pressing on my heart. The city's just beginning to wake up—Sunday mornings it always takes its time. Even most of the stores don't open until noon. I lean on the railing and look down the alley that runs behind Holly's building. Nothing's moving here, only a cat sniffing at the base of the dumpster behind Joe's cafe, a few buildings down.

I start to take another drag from my cigarette, but pause, my gaze caught by the red ember burning at its end. It's funny, how quickly you get back into these things. And what do you get? A momentary calm. Something to do with your hands. But mostly it leaves your mouth tasting like crap and you get to carry the stink of the smoke around with you. Lovely. I can almost see Saskia wrinkling her nose, the frown marks forming between her eyebrows.

I flick the butt away, watch as it explodes in a shower of sparks on the pavement below.

I miss Saskia so much it's a constant pain in my chest.

I've never had a lot of luck in my relationships—at least not the romantic ones. I always pick the women who are different, I mean
really
different. Spirits and ghosts and those that are just
other.
But it's not the same with Saskia, for all her otherness. I mean, we're all mysteries to each other anyway, aren't we? So, she's a little more mysterious, that's all.

What I do know is that we've made a good life with one another, snugly fitting together the separate pieces of who we are, but remaining individual at the same time. How often do you get
that
in a relationship?

I can't bear the idea of her being gone forever.

Whoever or whatever's responsible—man, woman, or some damned spirit in the wires—they'll pay.

Funny, I'm beginning to sound like my older brother Paddy. Violence was the way he solved most of his problems. Me, I prefer to find more peaceful solutions. Usually. But right now …

I guess it's true that most anybody can go over the edge, if you push them far enough. If you push them hard enough. Because right now, I just want to hit something. If I had whoever took Saskia away from me in front of me right now, and there was no way to bring her back, I think I could kill them. I could …

I shake my head. She's not gone forever, I tell myself. We'll get her back, one way or another. We have to.

I find myself remembering a dream I once had. I was at a book signing, opening a book to sign it for a reader, and all the words slid off the page and fell onto the floor. A couple of people were standing to one side—one of them was Aaran Goldstein,
The Daily Journal's
book editor. He turned to whoever he was with and said, “I've always said that his words don't really have any staying power.”

It has nothing to do with my life right at this moment, except for the helplessness I felt in the dream.

I stand and stare down the alley, watching Joe from the cafe down the street step out his back door to throw a garbage bag in the dumpster. The cat that was there earlier is long gone. The door closes with a bang behind Joe as he goes back inside.

I listen to the other sounds of the city, the traffic over on Williamson, a distant siren, but it hardly registers.

I think of Saskia.

The world of hurt I carry twists inside my chest again.

Eventually, I light up another smoke.