Claire was in the van across the street from the girl’s house. Ted was beside her. He had the gun.
The girl – Margaret Stone – was bald and chipmunk-cheeked, just like her pictures. She was on the large front porch watering a plant, her movements like a child’s: broad, lumbering, graceless. She claimed to be thirty-two and fourteen and sixty-one; she looked twenty or just under. Taller and stronger-looking than Claire had imagined. Margaret had always seemed so weak online, had cultivated such a fragile aura that even now Claire wondered if she had the right house, the right girl. But hanging to her knees was the white sweater Claire had crocheted the year before when she had been in such pain she’d asked two different doctors to kill her. It had taken six months to finish, and the stitches were uneven in places where Claire had been too weak to follow the pattern. Margaret – or Alyssa, according to her profile – had thanked her profusely, sending back a picture of it on a bed beside a sleeping Westie.
I got it today, Claire! she had written. You’re an angel.
Ted sniffed. “She the one?”
“Looks like her,” Claire said.
They’d been there for hours. The neighbors hadn’t noticed the van, or they hadn’t cared about it.
“Deathbed wasn’t comfortable, I guess.” Ted chuckled. “Must not have been a Sleep Number.”
“Let’s stay focused.”
“You used to know what a joke was,” he muttered.
“Used to be a lot of things.”
Margaret opened the front door to the house – a giant colonial with Grecian columns, stately brick, the whole nine – and the Westie came running out, barking. She threw something to the dog and he caught it, disappearing into the yard.
“So the dog is real,” Ted said. He started eating a candy bar. “Interesting.”
“She wouldn’t fake the dog.” She watched as Margaret bent over the porch rail to reach for something, the sweater stretched tight over her ass. “Too much work if she didn’t have one handy.”
“Mmm.”
Claire scratched the place on her chest where her port had been. There were times when she actually missed it. People knew what it was for, what it meant, why she looked such a fucking mess. They had treated her like an inspirational poster when they could see that hideous and glorious thing stretching her skin. Now she was just ugly and old and a woman.
“She talked about this greenhouse across the street,” Claire said. “Says she saw it growing up. Played in the yard. She was consistent about that.”
“Probably the same one.” Ted sucked a chunk of peanut out of his teeth and swallowed it. “We ought to be sure, though.”
He was in his fifties, like Claire. An old associate. She had violated her parole to contact him, invited him to a bar near the cancer center where she was being treated. Before she’d gotten sick, it had been Claire’s job to determine which men would refuse plea bargains and which would take them, who could shut his mouth, and who needed his mouth shut for him. Ted was the former on both counts.
She had worried that he’d dismiss her even if he showed; she’d been caught and put away, and nobody else from the old days could afford to be seen with her. But Ted had come. Brought her old gun, like she asked. Drank and listened and nodded and accepted, without reservation, that the girl deserved it. Claire had hugged him across the table, buried her face in his jacket, and he’d let her. Didn’t ask her to explain, to detail her humiliations. That she had called him was enough.
“I am sure,” Claire said. “That’s her.”
“All right, then.” He stretched his arms. The candy wrapper floated to the floor. “It’s your party.”
Claire thought he looked skeptical, but it was hard to tell. He was a professional like her. Or like she had once been. Now, she was only a once-upon-a-time, a ghost story old kingpins told—a nobody, even to the girl.
Margaret called for the dog, clapping and whistling. Claire noticed that the insides of her elbows were bandaged as if she’d recently had blood drawn from both arms. It figured. Katie Wilcox – Margaret’s new cancer-girl persona – had arrived, as Claire had known she would. Margaret’s favorite identity was the young girl who suffered beautifully or was made beautiful by suffering.
Margaret had retired, or at least taken a sabbatical, from the cancer game after she’d been caught. It had been ugly. Brutal. Users with glittering bible quotes in their signatures had expressed desires to behead Margaret, to cut into her healthy flesh, to leave her pieces out so that creatures more worthy of life could eat, could feast. The image of Margaret-as-carrion had sustained Claire for a time, gave her something to look forward to in those interminable days of vomiting and bleeding and restless non-sleep. And when she was better, she sought Margaret again and found her in another group, this one for survivors of sexual assault and incest.
Margaret spent thousands of words describing many rapes by her father, each more vicious than the last. She had claimed to be Soo Yi Dai, a refugee from a fabricated island in Southeast Asia. Soo Yi was desperate for money – for the mother with muscular dystrophy who was trying to follow her to America, for the sisters who were being sodomized nightly with all manner of objects by her sadistic father, who forced them to make him sticky rice and dumplings afterward.
“Did you bring the bullets?” she asked Ted.
“Uh huh.”
Claire watched him. He was looking Margaret over as she reached for something above her head, stood on the tips of her toes. The sweater barely covered the tops of her thighs.
Her pictures were similar – titillating in a way that seemed incidental. They weren’t provocative when taken one at a time, only in aggregate. Claire had studied thousands of them, and the camera’s eye was always voyeuristic. Margaret invariably appeared vulnerable and shy. Weak and sick, but still sexy. Fuckable. She had countless heartbreaking contexts into which she’d sewn herself like a quilt patch, but her catalogue of pictures told a quiet story of imperiled modesty. Photo-Margaret was the human incarnation of a too-short skirt the wearer tried in vain to tug down.
“Claire.” Ted rested his elbow on the box between the seats. Oriented his whole body to face hers. “We could stay out here, you know.”
His expression was one of respectful pity. There was a time when she would have killed a man for a look like that, but now she was grateful for it, for being seen, and she hated herself for that gratitude.
“No, we can’t.”
“You’re out. They let you out. Folks like us don’t get out.”
“They didn’t want to wipe my ass until I died. Called it ‘compassionate release.’” She fought to keep her tone steady. “Did you know that? What they call it?”
Her voice cracked. It had started after the second surgery; the doctors had said it could happen with throat cancers. She’d hated at first how weak it made her sound, how breakable. But she understood now that you didn’t need strength to eviscerate someone. That frailty could do violence, too. Margaret had taught her that.
“I know what they call it,” he said. “But you’re alive. Another fucking miracle.”
It was an expensive choice. She knew that. But a miracle could do that to a person. Redefine the meaning of risk. Of cost.
He sighed. “Why waste it?”
Don’t you understand what you mean to me? Margaret had written once. Claire had called her the night before her own surgery, seeking reassurance of all fucking things. Thinking about it made her wish she’d brought something sharper and less instantly lethal than a gun to use on Margaret.
I’m gonna die all alone and probably coughing up blood all over—sad emoji. But you’ve made me so happy these last few months. I don’t even mind dying so much now. Not now that I’ve gotten to know you before I go. It’s been like having a taste of heaven. You should know that.
Margaret’s cancer had flared up soon after, like hay fever in the Mississippi springtime. Another user – an alleged friend of hers – reported that she was indeed coughing up blood all over. Dying, at that very moment, right then.
Claire had spent her life in the valley of the shadow of death, but the idea of Alyssa choking to death on her own blood in a hospital had touched her in buried forgotten places. She had actually cried when Alyssa had pulled through when her screen name had become active again. Cried and sent along the sweater she’d made with shaking hands.
Margaret-Alyssa-Soo Yi Dai-Katie-Wilcox-Stone waved at a neighbor. Claire saw there was a stain on the front of the sweater – large and brown and untreated. Forgotten-about. Left to set in.
“Give me the gun,” she said.
