Vicious Grace

SIXTEEN

I sat at the table for a while after David left, then went up and bought myself a latte I didn’t want so that I could keep sitting. The music moved on, landing on eighties nostalgia, some guy telling me it was always mesh and lace and offering to stop the world and melt with me. But the coffee wasn’t bad if I put enough sugar in it, and the emotional equivalent of a loose scab was forming in my heart. I knew the grief and anger and fear were there, but if I didn’t jar myself or scratch at it, I could ignore them. I wasn’t, for instance, in tears. That was a start. I could almost think Aubrey might leave me without breaking down.

The Sunday afternoon crowd stayed light. Behind the counter, a nice-looking blond guy and a hatchet-faced woman who seemed too old to be steaming milk for a living talked about television while they cleaned the wood-grained laminate and straightened stacks of prepackaged biscotti. The beautiful girls were joined by two equally beautiful guys. They laughed and flirted and raised arch eyebrows. The trains of the El came by now and then, the clatter of their passage competing with the music. I remembered Kim sitting at the Bump & Grind Café with a latte and heartache of her own. I even remembered feeling sorry for her.

The scab shifted a little, threatening to slip off and expose the wound. I looked out the window, forcing myself back to the here and now. Either it was later than I’d expected or the clouds were thickening. The darkness had spread from under the El and was loitering in the street. I considered calling Ex or Chogyi Jake. Or a cab. I wanted to talk to Aubrey. I wanted to talk to Uncle Eric.

This was the moment when I needed a best friend. Sad and sobering, but I didn’t seem to have one who wasn’t already hip-deep in the problems I wanted to get away from. I pulled my cell phone out of my backpack and stared at it. There were almost two hundred contacts in the phone book, most of them put there by Eric. A few that were particularly mine. None of them felt right. All those numbers and no one to talk to.

Except.

My heart sped up just a little as the whole plan popped into my head. It wasn’t like thinking of it so much as remembering something I’d already planned. I picked up my cell phone and went back to the counter, digging through my backpack as I walked. The blond guy trotted up with a professional, practiced smile.

“Get you something else?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Stay there for a minute. Here.”

I still had the same wallet I’d had at ASU. The fake leather was cracked and the fabric underneath showed through. I opened it, pulled out a hundred, and put it on the counter.

“I need a little favor,” I said. I started dialing my old phone number. The shape of the digits on the number pad were familiar and alien at the same time. “Just ask for Curt.”

“Curt?” the guy said.

The phone on the far end started ringing. I passed my cell across the counter.

“Curt,” I said. “You know him from school.”

The blond guy mouthed school? and then I heard the click and a compressed, distant voice saying hello.

“Hi,” the blond guy said. “Is Curt there? This is John. From school.”

The voice on the other end muttered something. The blond guy widened his eyes and pursed his lips in a little mock-naughty oh, enjoying the game of it. A new voice came on. Younger. Male. Questioning.

“Curt?” the blond guy said. “Great. Hang on.”

He handed the phone back to me. I pushed him the hundred. He looked at me like I was being silly and pushed it back.

“Hey, little brother,” I said. “How’s the Bible belt treating you?”

There wasn’t even a moment of shocked silence.

“Sure, I’ve got the syllabus in my notebook,” Curt said. “Let me just get to my room, okay?”

He sounded so much older than when I’d left home. There was gravel in his voice now. I supposed he was probably shaving. It broke my head. While he bumped and clattered down the hall to his room, I made my way back to my table. A long way away, a door shut.

“Hey,” he said softly. “What’s up? What are you doing?”

“I’ve been traveling with some friends. We’re in Chicago.”

“Wicked.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It got a little weird. I just needed to hear a friendly voice.”

“Well,” Curt said, “everything here is a fucking opera production. Jay’s thinking Carla—that’s the fiancée—got knocked up on purpose so he’d have to marry her. And it turns out her mother’s Mexican, and Mom is dead set on making sure no one at church knows about it. Dad is saying that Jay should have thought about all that before he sinned, which effectively puts him on the same side as Carla and our new Latino branch of the family. Oh it is high, high drama.”

“Yeah?” I said, leaning back. “Tell me all.”

For almost an hour, Curt poured out gossip and trivia and the family’s dirty laundry. He never asked how I was doing. He never asked what was going on with me or if I had a boyfriend or if I was happy or what I was planning to do next. He was the perfect self-involved teenage boy, and I loved him for it. When at last my father’s distant bellow demanded to know who Curt was talking to and why it was taking so long, Curt signed off with “Call me back and I’ll tell you the rest.” I put my phone back in my pack. I’d run the batteries down below half their charge on that call alone, but it had been worth it. I didn’t know if it was the reminder of a life larger and broader than my own occult minicabal and our very real problems or only the glimpse of the world I’d escaped, but I felt calmer. Still angry. Still hurt. But calmer.

I got another latte with a slice of pound cake this time, and tried to put the situation in order. I knew that I needed to deal with the haugsvarmr one way or the other. I also knew that I couldn’t do it while I freaked out about all my friends leaving me, so I needed to find Aubrey. And after him Chogyi Jake and Ex. If I was on my own, it would crush me. But Chogyi Jake was right; I’d been crushed before. Hadn’t killed me. The ache in my chest came back, just to remind me how bad it had been. How bad it would be this time. It didn’t matter. Before I could do anything else, I had to know where I stood.

I tried calling Aubrey’s cell and got voice mail. Either something was up with his cell phone or he wasn’t taking my calls. That was all right. He’d just found out that his marriage had ended because of something about a thousand times more complex than he’d thought. With that kind of unfinished business hanging loose, I figured I knew where to find him. On my way out the door, I waved to the blond guy behind the counter and bowed my head a little. Thank you. He rolled his eyes and waved back. It was nothing. The small complicity was nice, and I tried to hold the feeling as I hailed a cab and gave the driver Kim’s address.

A stiff wind had picked up by the time I reached Kim’s place. The air was heavy and muggy, with the ozone smell of impending rain. The blue skies were gone; the storms were coming back. I pulled my jacket tight around my shoulders. Steel and concrete stairs rang under my footsteps. I kept telling myself it would be okay and at the same time imagined ringing the bell and having Aubrey open it wearing a sheet. The fake iron apartment numbers were cracked. The pale door had a long scratch in it. Clouds had muffled the late afternoon light. I waited for what seemed a long time to see if I would press the doorbell. Then I did.

Kim answered the door wearing old gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt. Her hair hung in limp, sweaty lines, and her eyes were bloodshot and rimmed red from crying or sleeplessness or both. Her gaze tracked up and down slowly, judging me.

“You look like shit,” she said.

“Is he here?”

“Did you expect him to be?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“I don’t know if that makes you an optimist or a pessimist,” Kim said. She walked into the apartment, leaving the door open as if she expected me to follow, so I did.

For a moment, I thought the little apartment’s disarray came from yesterday’s revelation, but the clutter was too deep for one day’s work. Piles of magazines lurked at the edge of a patterned beige couch. An exercise bike lurked in the corner, dry cleaning bags hanging from its handles. Cobwebs haunted the corners of ceiling and wall. A plastic laundry basket commanded the dining room table, and I couldn’t tell if the clothes in it were dirty or clean. The air smelled like old pizza. It was the kind of place I might have lived in without the windfall of Eric’s fortune. Kim glanced around, seeing it because I was there. She shrugged.

“It’s home,” she said, almost apologetically. “You want a drink?”

“I don’t want to intrude,” I said.

“Stop being so fucking formal. How about rum and Coke? I don’t have the vodka for screwdrivers.”

“Um. Sure.”

I had never seen her like this. The aggressive intelligence was still there, but not so tightly controlled. Her hypercompetence had slipped, and the despair behind it showed. I sat on the arm of her couch and watched her over the breakfast bar. The kitchen was tiny, so she just spun slowly in place, reaching up for a glass, turning to pluck a bottle of Captain Morgan out of a cabinet, and then opening the refrigerator for a red and silver can. She didn’t have to move her feet.

“Aubrey took off, then?” she asked.

“Most of last night. And again this morning,” I said. “I figured he’d come here.”

“Haven’t heard a word from him. Why would he be here anyway? I just told him I’d been sleeping around on him. I don’t think men usually find that endearing.” She pushed a glass across the bar, the soda still fizzing, and started another one for herself.

“But the Mark of Naxos. The love spell . . .”

Kim waved her hand, pushing the words away.

“So what if he used magic to get me into bed? I’m still the one who chose not to tell Aubrey about it. I’m still the one who chose to take off instead of trying to figure things through. Did you think sleeping with Eric was the only way I betrayed Aubrey?”

“But . . .” I started. My head felt like it was full of cotton ticking. I felt like I’d tricked myself into arguing against Eric, and I wasn’t sure exactly how it had happened. Kim drank half her rum and Coke in two swallows, then coughed. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“I think I owe you an apology,” she said.

I had imagined a thousand scenarios in coming to Kim’s apartment. Aubrey absent, Kim apologetic, and rum and Coke hadn’t figured into them.

“I threw a fit,” she said. “I was embarrassed and . . . No. I was humiliated. I am humiliated. I don’t like my private business being thrown around in front of everyone. When I saw that file, and how he had played me, and that all of you were going to have to know too . . .” She paused. Her chuckle dripped with self-loathing.

She took a sip from her glass, and I mirrored her, then looked down at the drink. She mixed them strong. I wondered how many she’d already had. How many it would take to wipe away what had been in that file. She shook her head.

“Anyway,” she said. “I could have done that better. Sorry. For what it’s worth, I’ve been looking at it, and I think we can put something like the Invisible College’s spells back in place.”

She must have seen the confusion in my expression. She put up a hand, palm out, in a gesture that asked for my silence.

“I’m not saying it’s easy,” she said. She walked out from the kitchen to lean against the dining room table. “They’re riders. What they did was one big thing. Poof. Done. Using dinky little human spells and cantrips, it’ll take maybe six months. A year. And the haugsvarmr will probably be pushing back pretty hard that whole time.”

“Okay,” I said. “Hold on. You’ve been figuring out how to put the lid back on Grace Memorial?”

Now it was her turn to look surprised.

“Well, yes,” she said. “You aren’t still thinking about letting it loose, are you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hadn’t exactly been thinking about it at all.”

“What have you been thinking about?”

“Whether Eric’s having”—I stumbled a little, and then recovered—“done what he did to you and Aubrey meant that all my friends would ditch me. If Aubrey is going to break up with me and go back to you. If Chogyi Jake and Ex would decide that anything Eric touched is too tainted to be around. Whether doing one deeply shitty thing really means Eric was a bad person, or just that he did one really shitty thing. Like that. Oh, and talking David Souder out of going to Grace Memorial.”

“He was going to the hospital?” she asked sharply. “Why?”

“It’s calling him,” I said. “He thinks his grandfather’s still alive in that coffin and wants out.”

“We have to keep him away from there,” Kim said sharply. “Between being inside the labyrinth and the connection to his grandfather, he probably wouldn’t be able to resist it. Even if he didn’t want to, it could force him to break the interment. What did you tell him?”

I recounted David’s call, our meeting, the outlines of our conversation. But even while I looked for the right words, I was amazed by how totally she’d ignored everything else I’d said. Aubrey, Chogyi Jake, Ex. Even Eric. It was eerie, and then it was perfectly clear. Eric’s file on her had pulled the rug out from under both of us. I was obsessing over my fears and grabbing for anything consistent and solid in my life. Kim was focusing on the things she could control and ignoring anything that she couldn’t. She was pretending that everything she’d lost didn’t matter. Seen from that perspective, it wasn’t so weird.

But it wasn’t what I needed.

“That’s got to be why Eric had the secret rooms fitted out with the cell,” Kim said. “If he was going to have Souder as a negotiating point, he’d need to control him.”

“Kim. Stop it. Okay?”

The light from the kitchen put half her face in dim shadow. Annoyance tightened the corners of her eyes. She crossed her arms.

“Stop what?”

“Can we just put the riders and magic and all that away for a minute? We need to talk. About Aubrey.”

“No we don’t,” Kim said. “What would we say about him?”

I blinked. He was my lover and her husband. Their marriage had been torpedoed by my guardian angel. Of course Aubrey was the axis that everything turned on. At least, I’d thought he was. And yet standing there under Kim’s gaze, I couldn’t think what exactly I’d intended to say. I took a stab at it.

“You love him,” I said.

“So what?” Kim said, a rattle in her voice like a car engine going bad. “You think Aubrey’s the worst thing Eric did to me? Do you know what it would have meant to get the position at LSU? Or, God, the England job? I would have been working with the best people in my field. I would have had the money and resources to do real work. Something basic. Something the field could really build on.”

“You aren’t doing real work here?”

Her cheeks flushed red and her nostrils flared. A line of bloodless white appeared around her lips.

“I am third researcher behind two people I helped train,” Kim said, her voice getting louder. “I am teaching undergraduate cell biology. I’m a PhD in a medical center. All these MDs look at me like I’m some kind of trained chimp. Eric Heller didn’t just take away my marriage. He sabotaged my career. He ate my life.”

“I’m sorry,” I said softly.

“Why?” Kim demanded. “Did you tell him to do it?”

“No, but—”

“You were off getting drunk at senior prom or something. You were taking your SATs. Do you know how old I am?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Thirty-seven,” Kim said, pointing at me accusingly. “And I’ve published in goddamn Nature. So yeah, you’re sleeping with the man I love. So what? What do you want me to do about it?”

“Forgive me,” I said.

“I want you to forgive me.”

The rage drained out of her. She seemed to shrink into herself. She coughed out a last, empty laugh and drank the rest of her rum and Coke.

“You’re not Eric,” she said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“My life got better because yours got ruined,” I said, “and I like you.”

She looked at her glass, the brown-stained ice rattling in it like stones. A gust of wind pressed at the windows, making the cheap curtains shudder and shift. Kim shook her head.

“You want another one?” she asked. Her voice was smaller.

“Probably not. I’m kind of a lightweight.”

“You don’t mind if I do,” she said, taking the three steps back to the kitchen. “I’m somewhat experienced. Does Aubrey make you laugh?”

I didn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t expect me to.

“He used to be the only one who could really get me going,” she said. “He’d do that Bill Clinton imitation, and I’d just start losing it. You know the one?”

“Yeah,” I said, even though I didn’t. “He’s great.”

“He is.”

Kim poured herself another rum and Coke. I watched how much rum she was putting in this time. I was amazed she had any left in the bottle. She drank it fast, and then looked at me solemnly.

“I’m drunk,” she said.

“Yeah, I know.”

“I didn’t mean to be.”

“Oh, I think you had it coming,” I said. “I’ll go. Let you rest up.”

“Okay.” And then, as I reached her door, “You don’t need my forgiveness.”

Outside, a soft rain glowed in the streetlights and darkened the sidewalks. I wondered where Aubrey had gone if not to Kim. On one hand, the relief that he hadn’t been there was like someone taking a stone off my belly. On the other hand, the clarity I’d been looking for was just as far away. Worse. Before, I’d had to figure out why Eric wanted the thing under Grace set free and what he wanted from it in exchange. Now I also had the option of muffling it again, taking back what I’d done. I could do anything, but I couldn’t do everything. And if I sat on my hands and waited, David would eventually be drawn to the hospital. The rider would get free, and I didn’t even know for sure whether that would be a bad thing.

The only thing the rider had done that I knew about was confuse David and give Oonishi’s dreamers their shared nightmare. But what if David had been right and the thing under the hospital really was just thrashing in its sleep? It might not have meant any harm. If the Invisible College had bound something good, something that we could work with to make the world safer or better, then maybe everything Eric had done made sense. Maybe Eric had been viciously ruthless, but not evil. What if the rider was really some kind of angel? Confusion and despair, and a weird anger for Aubrey and Kim and me swirled together like the weather. If there was just some way to know . . .

Standing at the curb, looking for a taxi to flag down, I surprised myself with a frustrated cry.

“Fine,” I heard myself say. “If that’s what it takes, then fine.”

With the same near-disembodied sense I had during a fight, I pulled my cell phone out of my pack, looked up my recent call history, and found the number I wanted. Standing in the rain, my hair getting slowly heavier, I listened to the distant ring. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but my body carried me forward.

“Hello?”

“Dr. Oonishi,” I said. “This is Jayné Heller.”

“Chogyi Jake’s assistant?”

I felt myself smile.

“Yes,” I said.

“I haven’t had a chance to finish the interviews you wanted,” he said.

“That’s fine. I was wondering if you were running your sleep study tonight?”

“No,” he said. “We have three sessions a week. But I could have you observe tomorrow night, if you’d like.”

“Actually,” I said, “I want you to let me in when there isn’t anyone around.”

Jesus, I thought, I do? And then, a heartbeat later, Wow. I really do.

“I suppose . . . I mean . . .” he said, and then sighed heavily. “Is this really necessary?”

“Yes,” I said. My voice sounded so convinced, I started believing it myself.

“Fine.”

“Can you meet me there?”

“It will take me half an hour,” he said. “We can meet at the emergency room waiting area. I’ll take you in from there.”

“Perfect,” I said. “Thank you.”

I dropped the connection, then stood staring at my own hand for almost a full minute. The sense of dislocation was gone, and in its place the warm glow of anticipation. I didn’t have David locked in the condo, but I knew where to find him. I was in as good a negotiating position as Eric would have been. From the time we’d left, part of me had wanted to go back to Grace Memorial and face this thing down. Eric had planned to do it, and apparently without help from Ex or Chogyi Jake or Aubrey. And if he could, so could I.

“Right. Enough screwing around,” I said, as if there was someone to agree with. Eric, maybe. The Eric I’d known and trusted. The part of me that was him. The one I’d aspired to be.

Rahabiel. Haugsvarmr. Daevanam Daeva. Leyiathan. Legion. I didn’t care anymore. Grace Memorial had already hurt my people and threatened my little created family. I wanted answers. I wanted to know what the rider could tell me. I wanted to kick some unreal ass and make the universe take back all the hurt that my coming to Chicago had done. And anyway, the fear felt like exhilaration.

I was going back to Grace.