Afterparty (21 page)

“Tell me about the teacher,” the old man said. “The one who fell.”

“Mr. Paniccia?” the director said. “That was an accident.”

“The file says—”

“I don’t think we should discuss that here in front of the girl.”

The foster mother looked as if she was about to say something, but then quickly rose and clacked away from them on her high heels, clutching her handbag. She was thin and blond, a woman carved from money. The bag cost more than what the director made in month.

The foster father said, “Why don’t you wait outside, Dad?”

This was the first of the three visits required before they could bring the girl home. The old man came each time, and spoke little. On the third visit, he helped secure the girl in her car seat (an infant’s seat, because she was so tiny), then sat in the backseat beside her. The teddy bear was placed between them. She held on to the deck of cards.

When they were well on their way to the airport, the old man’s son caught his eye in the rearview mirror and said, “Happy now?”

The old man didn’t answer. But yes, he was very happy.

It was not until later, when the son’s concentration was on the road and his daughter-in-law was either asleep or pretending to be behind her sunglasses, that the old man leaned close to the little girl and said quietly, “I have a present for you.”

The girl gazed out the car window, refusing to look at him.

He reached into his pocket and brought out a small box. Inside was a gold chain looped around a bronze ring. “This belonged to your mother,” he said. “One of them.”

He lifted the chain by his fingertips and let the ring dangle before the girl. The first step in building trust, he’d decided, was not dolls or toys. She was too smart for that. He needed to give her something of great personal value. “You see how it has six sides? I can tell you a story about that.”

The girl seemed not to hear him. She would not look at the ring.

His son said, “What are you doing now? Can’t you wait until we get home?”

The old man apologized. And when he looked back at the girl he realized that the chain had slipped from between his fingers. The girl’s gaze was fixed on the traffic outside. The old man scooted sideways, checking the seat, the floor of the car. Then he noticed that the girl’s left hand was closed, and peeking from under her fist was a glint of a gold chain.

—G.I.E.D.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

We lay in the dark, side by side, neither of us moving—yet I knew Ollie was awake. It must have been one of the first skills evolved by mammals, this hyperawareness to our cave-mates sprawled around us in the dark, an instinctive understanding of which movements were the random shufflings of sleep, and which were stirrings of restlessness, fear, or hunger. The rhythm of breath may have been our first language.

Dr. Gloria sat in an armchair near the window, legs crossed, notepad on her lap, writing. She did this all the time, filling page after phantom page. Who would read this invisible book?

Ollie and I were exhausted and should have been able to sleep—even here, in the heart of the Mohawk Nation, in the house that untaxed tobacco had built. The home of Roy Smoke. When he told us his name I thought he was fucking with us, but he assured us that Smokes had lived here for generations. He loaded us into a gleaming pickup that probably cost a fortune to keep in gasoline, then drove us three minutes down the road. Somewhere in the dark we crossed over from Quebec to New York. There was no port-of-entry on the Akwesasne Reserve, not even a border marker that I could see.

Roy’s house was a sprawling two-story McMansion with ten bedrooms and kids’ toys strewn across the carpet. “Oh those grandkids,” he told us, pushing a plastic trike out of the way.

Everyone was asleep, but his wife Linnie woke up to greet Roy, and didn’t blink when Roy said we’d be spending the night. She was a heavyset, apple-cheeked woman with stiff black hair and an easy way about her. She made a fuss over Ollie, who was still wet and shaking with cold, and gave her a fleece hoodie and sweatpants to wear. (Whatever was in Ollie’s backpack, it wasn’t clothes, and I didn’t dare ask her to open it in front of the smugglers.) The sweats were several sizes too big, but everything was too big for Ollie.

They sat us down in the kitchen and started hauling out chicken-fried steak, gravy, corn, mashed potatoes, and cornbread, plus a loaf of white Wonder bread and a bucket of real butter.

“They’re beigetarians,” Dr. Gloria said.

I wasn’t about to complain. Comfort food was exactly what we needed. Or what
I
needed. Ollie barely ate, and spoke even less. At first I chalked it up to the cold, but even after her chills had died down she seemed to be somewhere else, her gaze fixed on the middle of the table.

It didn’t seem to bother Roy or Linnie. Roy talked as I ate, explaining at length the justness of his tobacco business. I thought of Christian soup kitchens where the price of the meal was a sermon, and like other homeless people, I took the deal. Roy let me know that the tobacco trade was absolutely legal and, more than that, integral to their tribal independence. Canada, he said, had no right to place taxes on products that the tribe produced, on their own land. Tobacco had transformed the Akwesasne Reserve from a third-world nation to a first-world one. If Canada would stop illegally seizing their product, they wouldn’t have to run it over the water in boats.

I didn’t ask him what smuggling
people
across the border had to do with tribal self-determination; this person shut up and ate, pausing only to nod in agreement.

Afterward Linnie showed us to a guest bedroom, gave us towels, and pointed out the bathroom. Finally we were alone. But still Ollie looked grim.

“What’s going on?” I asked her.

“We shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“In this bedroom?”

“In this house. These people are criminals, and they’re being kind to us for
no reason whatsoever
. They’ve been paid. We should be driving the hell out of here, now.”

I didn’t need to remind her that we had no car, and our ride wouldn’t be here until the morning. “If they were going to axe-murder us they would have done it by now,” I said. Then: “No, you’re right. Axe murderers always try to kill you
after
you’ve gone to bed, when you’re having sex.”

Ollie was not amused. She pulled off the pile of decorative pillows covering the queen-size bed and crawled in, still wearing the fleece suit. I stripped off to my underwear and got in beside her … where we lay, wide awake, listening to each other breathe.

“He knew about Rovil,” I said. “How the hell does he know?”

“He could have tapped Bobby’s phone before I made you stop using it. He could have followed you when you mailed the FedEx package. Were you followed?” She sounded angry.

“No, I wasn’t—fuck, I don’t know,” I said. “How would I know?”

“And we don’t know if Rovil’s still coming.”

“He’ll come if he can,” I said.

Ollie didn’t answer.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Dr. Gloria looked up from her notepad. “You have to consider what she’s gone through.”

What
she
went through? I thought we’d both had it pretty rough.

“Think, Lyda,” the angel said. “What happened back there? Tonight.”

Well, a shit-load happened back there. The fake drug exchange, the man in the black hat, Hootan getting shot. Then the run to the boat, and Aaqila …

Oh.

Ollie was facing away from me, her head tucked into her chest. I could picture Ollie, the rock raised above her head. The way she looked down at Aaqila’s body. She’d killed someone for me. I put an arm over her stomach and pressed my forehead into her back. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

Ollie didn’t move. Then she said, “For what?”

“For Aaqila. The Afghan girl.”

“She was shooting at you. I hit her in the head.” She said this calmly.

“I know, I know. But I put you in a position where you had to do that.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I sat up so I could see her face. “Ollie, I never wanted you to kill for me.”

Ollie blinked up at me. “She’s not dead. At least not when I left her. She was still breathing; I checked.”

“Oh. Thank God.” Maybe, I thought, Fayza wouldn’t hunt us down now.

“But I would have if I needed to,” she said.

Not for the first time I wondered what Ollie had done before she’d been an analyst. She said she’d been in the army, but she refused to talk about where she’d been deployed, or what she had done. I’d never pressed her. It wasn’t that kind of relationship.

“Keep telling yourself that,” Dr. Gloria said under her breath.

“I never should have put you in that position,” I said.

“You didn’t put me in that position,” Ollie said. “
I
put me in that position. It was my plan.”

“Because I forced you to break out of Guelph Western. I made you go off your meds, then—”

Ollie sat up. “Are you that egotistical?”

That stopped me. Ollie got out of bed looking like a child wearing her mom’s clothes. “You didn’t force me to do anything,” she said. She dropped her voice. “You didn’t make me go off my meds, or trick me into helping you. I
chose
to help you. So did Bobby. You think you’re so damn smart that you can manipulate everybody into doing what you want?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“Of course she does,” Dr. Gloria said.

“I’m the one who fucked up,” Ollie said. She started pacing. “I should have known that the cowboy would still be tracking you.”

“How could you possibly—”

“Not the cowboy exactly, though I should have realized back at the marina that he was watching us too carefully. But somebody. Someone went to the church after you did, then killed those people and took the printer.” She was trying to keep her voice down, but she was talking fast, growing more agitated. “He
had
to have followed you. But who is he working for? We know now that he’s not working for the Millies.”

“Not after he shot them,” I said.

“So he’s working parallel to us, trying to shut the church down. His accent was American. Does that mean anything?”

“It sounded fake to me,” I said. “A little too John Wayne. He could be anyone who watched a lot of movies.”

“But American beneath that,” she said. “Midwestern.”

“Okay.” I wasn’t going to argue with a woman who used to monitor phone calls for a living. “So a drug agent then. DEA.”

She fanned the idea away. “No, not a cop—he wouldn’t be working alone. Maybe an ex-officer.” She spun suddenly, looking at nothing. “What if he’s working
for
the church? Plugging leaks? He follows you, sees you talk to Luke and Pastor Rudy, then kills them. He gets to Rovil somehow. Then he follows you to the beauty salon, then to Cornwall—I should have spotted him!”

“Easy, easy,” I said. “Edo’s a billionaire; he can afford to hire good people.”

“You’re sure it’s Edo, then.”

“Pretty fucking sure.”

She said nothing for a moment, then: “If you find him, will you kill him?”

I laughed nervously. “Jesus, Ollie!”

She crouched down in front of me. “You can trust me. If there’s something you’re going to do, or something you’ve done…”

“I haven’t—”

“You can know that whatever it is, I’ve done worse.”

“You want me to confess my sins?” I tried to make it into a joke, but my heart was beating fast.

When I was a girl, before my mother’s disease made it impossible, we went to church three times a week, and every night during revival week. It was at a revival service when I was twelve years old that I first felt God working on my heart. As I sat there in the pew during the altar call, I suddenly understood that if I didn’t surrender to Him I would go to Hell when I died. It wasn’t Hell itself that scared me—or not
just
Hell. It was the idea that my mother was going to Heaven without me.

I began to shake in the pew. I wanted to go up and be saved, but I was afraid to move. In my church we called that “being under conviction.” And then my mother touched me on the shoulder, and it was like a boulder tipping off the edge of a cliff. I plummeted, into the arms of a loving God.

“What is it?” Ollie asked.

My eyes had filled with tears. When—how—did that happen?

“You can tell her,” Dr. Gloria said.

“I’ve never told anyone,” I said to both of them.

Ollie put a hand on the back of my arm.

“I remember a knife,” I said.

*   *   *

I told her everything I could remember, which was hardly anything at all. I’d woken up on the floor of Edo’s apartment suite, blinded by a white light. In my hands I felt the wooden handle of a knife—and then someone took it from my hands.

“But Gilbert confessed to killing her,” Ollie said.

“Yes, he did.”

“So it couldn’t have been you.”

“Unless he was lying.”

“Why would he do that?” she asked. “Do you remember stabbing Mikala? Striking her at all?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t know,” Ollie said. “What does your angel say?”

“My angel tells me what I want to hear,” I said.

“I will ignore that,” the doctor said. “Aren’t you glad you told her?”

‘Glad’ was the wrong word. I felt like I’d stripped naked in the middle of the street. The fact that Ollie had not shut down, that she’d opened her arms to me—I just couldn’t fathom that.

Ollie and I talked for another hour. I was aching to fall asleep, but she was growing more excited by the moment, churning through all this new information.

I took a breath and said to Ollie, “Do you have that bottle of Alisprazole?” The antianxiety meds she’d stolen before leaving the hospital.

“They’re in my clothes,” Ollie said warily. She’d draped her wet things on doorknobs and across the room’s furniture. “But I’m not taking them.”

She was going for maximum cognitive sharpness, even if that meant flirting with paranoia. Off meds, her Clarity-wired brain was in charge. On them, she was that slave to agnosia she’d been back in the NAT, unable to connect the dots. No doctor had been able to find a chemical balance between the two extremes. My job was to decide when the paranoia was becoming too dangerous and force her back on the Alisprazole.