Crazy Love You (20 page)

“Okay,” I said.

“Let me watch you do one.”

I took a board and a bag, and put them together exactly as he'd shown me. Then I slipped a copy of
X-Men: Dark Phoenix Saga
from the stack he had told me was especially valuable.

“You have good taste, Ian,” said Brian. He leaned a slender arm against the shelf. “She's one of my all-time favorites.”

“Mine, too,” I said. I stared at the cover for a second—her wild red curls, impossibly lush body, maniac grin. Jean Grey was a woman pushed to the brink and beyond. I slid it gently inside and handed it to Brian. I knew he'd keep that one behind the counter. I thought about that issue sometimes; it was worth about six thousand dollars the last time I looked for it.

“Good,” he said again, and gave me a pat on the shoulder. “You get it. Go to town.”

I was in heaven, sitting there on a little rolling stool, putting the comics in their protective sleeves, watching them glitter and shine, arranging them carefully on the shelves. I don't know how much time passed, but eventually I heard someone push through the curtain. I turned to see a slim old woman in a gray wool coat move into the room—not your usual comic book customer. Probably buying for a son or a grandson, I thought. She walked around the room, looking at the books, then she ran a hand through her short gray hair and issued a sigh.

“Can I help you, ma'am?” I asked the way Old Brian had taught me.
Be open, be helpful and friendly, no matter what.

I stood up to face her. She looked vaguely familiar but I couldn't place her. It was like that in The Hollows. There were no strangers.

Her eyes were dark and glittering. She was small, smaller than I was, but she seemed stronger, more powerful somehow. There was something about her gaze that made me want to avert my eyes, and I dropped them to my shoes. It wasn't that she was unkind or intimidating. It just felt like she saw me in a way that people usually didn't. She looked right past my acne, my overweight slouchy self, and into the heart of me. What she saw there, I didn't know.
I
didn't even know what was under there.

“I don't know too much about comics,” she said. “Do you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know a little bit. I'm learning.”

I knew a lot but I didn't want to brag.

“So, if I were going to buy my first comic, what would you recommend? Pick one for me.”

I walked over to the shelf by the door, grabbed a copy of
Watchmen
, and handed the heavy book to her. “It's a classic,” I told her. “Everything that's great about the form.”

She held it in her hand, looked at me, and smiled. “Thank you, young man.”

“You're welcome.” My first sale! I was stupidly proud of myself.

I thought she would turn and walk away but she didn't, she kept looking at me.

“Can I get something else for you?”

“I think we have someone in common,” she said. “You're Ian, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Do you know a girl named Priss?”

The name sounded strange on the air. I just stared at her—someone else who knew Priss. She was the first adult I had encountered who had actually seen her.

“She's my friend,” I said. “Do you know her?”

She gave a crooked little nod. “I do know her. How is she?”

I shrugged. I wasn't sure how to answer. She was just Priss—wild, unpredictable, loyal, lonely. But I didn't have the words for all that, so I said nothing. The woman seemed about to say more when a couple of kids walked into the room laughing in big guffaws. Two boys, geeks like me—one bespectacled, skeleton thin, the other round and sloppy with a ripped, stained red sweatshirt and greasy hair. They fanned out and started looking at the shelves.

When I looked back at the woman, she was moving through the curtain. I couldn't follow. It was Brian's number one rule: don't leave kids alone in the comic book room. I helped the big one find a
Spider-Man
he was looking for, and the other was just along for the ride, gazing longingly at the shiny covers. I felt bad for him; I knew what it was like to want something and not be able to afford it.

By the time I followed them up to the register, the old woman was gone.

“That woman . . .” I said to Brian after the boys had left.

“Watchmen,”
he said. Brian could only identify people by the books they bought. “She left this for you. You know her?”

I shook my head as he handed me a folded white piece of paper.

Call me if you want to talk about Priss
, she had written in a thin, scrawling hand beside her name and a phone number. It was a name I recognized, but couldn't place.
And be careful.

“She was a little creepy, huh?” said Brian. He wore a frown of concern. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. I stuffed the paper in my pants pocket. “It's cool.”

I remember being almost giddy with relief, even though the encounter
had
been unnerving. Someone else had seen Priss. This woman, whoever she was, knew her. It wasn't that I had doubted that she was a real person. I wasn't crazy like my mother. I knew the real world from delusions. She had a scent, a touch, a shadow—a physical presence in the world. Now I could prove to my dad that Priss was not a figment of my imagination. She was real, and not just to me. That's all I could think about; the warning scratched on the paper registered not at all.

•  •  •

Julia and Binky did, in fact, beat us back to the Hamptons. Megan had sent them a text message from the road to tell them we were on our way. She'd done quite a bit of texting—more typing than I was used to seeing her doing. And her phone was binging every few minutes. What was she telling them? Our ride out was awkward and silent. We barely exchanged a word. She was already unstrapping her seat belt as we pulled into the driveway, and was out the door the second after I'd stopped the car. She slammed it hard behind her.

Julia was waiting for us, and seemed to pick up on all our negative energy the moment we walked through the door. She shot me a strange look and ushered Megan upstairs, leaving Binky and me in the foyer staring after them.

They liked having her home; I could tell. She was still their little girl in a lot of ways. Too many ways, I was starting to think. But maybe that was Priss's voice in my head. Maybe it was normal to go home to your parents when things got rough—if you had parents to go home to. Maybe I was jealous. I'd been on my own, emotionally speaking, since my mother went away; it hadn't always been easy. Megan lived like someone who had a safety net beneath her. I never felt like that; I was always looking down at hard concrete and broken glass.

“Drink?” said Binky.

“Please,” I said.

I followed him to the bar, where he poured me two fingers of scotch into a crystal lowball. Then we made our way out to the deck. It was cool, the air full of salt and sand, but the rain falling on Manhattan was not falling on Long Island. The surf crashed loud and fast against the shore.

“I like you, Ian,” said Binky. He said it easily, offered a warm touch to my arm. “And that's not always an easy thing for a father to say to the man who's marrying his daughter. As a dad, you don't want to give that little girl away. You can't understand that now, but you will when you have one of your own. I hope you do; I hope you have a bunch. We just have our Megan.”

He took a swig of his drink and I knew I wasn't supposed to talk yet. It was one of those talks, one where you were required to shut the fuck up and listen.

“We lost a child,” he said. “Did Megan tell you?”

“She did tell me,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

He took another deep swallow of his drink and kept his eyes on the yawning black distance in front of us. “That pain, that grief, that guilt . . . it takes you apart and puts you back together again. You're not the same person afterward. You go on for your other child.”

Why was he telling me this? Was this going to be some speech about how I needed to protect his daughter? Had Megan told them about my mother? I'd never asked. I didn't keep it a secret, or ask her to. But it wasn't something people went around shouting from the rooftops. It was too horrible even to be sensational gossip.
My mother killed my sister and would have killed me if I hadn't had a disobedient streak. And she's been in a mental hospital ever since.

Binky moved over to one of the Adirondack chairs and sat down, the ice clinking in his glass. I sat beside him.

“Even though Meg doesn't remember the incident or her brother, I think she has had it the worst. Time heals us, even if you don't think it will. Julia and I, impossible as it seemed in the moment, moved on without him. We had to. But Meg, I think, was defined by our grief. In a way, she was formed in it. She has always been such a good girl, so careful with herself, so well behaved and conscientious. I always wondered if she was taking such care for us, you know? To spare us more pain.”

I thought about what Megan had said about her bouts with depression, the pressure she felt to be perfect.

“She's told you about her depressions?” Binky asked, as if reading my mind.

I said that she had, and he nodded slowly.

“Right,” he said. He drained the glass and put it down on the arm of the chair. I did the same. He wouldn't drink more; I knew that. But I wanted another. Left to my own devices, I'd probably have had three.

“But how much time do you really spend talking about
Megan
?”

There was an edge to his voice that put me on the defensive. “What do you mean?”

“I mean it seems to me like an awful lot of time is spent on you. Your dark history, your mentally ill mother, your problems with work, your recreational drug use. Megan is a caretaker. It's in her nature to comfort and fix. That unfortunately, unwittingly, is how we raised her. But in a marriage, you're supposed to take care of
each other
.”

I saw a form way down the beach, just a thin line moving in our direction.

“I know,” I said. “I do take care of her. I will.”

“What about this woman?” asked Binky. “This friend of yours.”

I felt an embarrassed flush heat my face. God, did she tell them
everything
? There was something childish about that, I thought.

“It's a problem,” I said. I leaned forward in my seat, suddenly feeling uncomfortable. “I'm taking care of it.”

“See that you do,” said Binky. “I don't want to be the asshole father-in-law who doesn't think anyone is good enough for my daughter. And I like you, Ian.”

The fact that he had to say it a second time was making me doubt his sincerity. He went on.

“I think at your
core
you're a good guy. But I'm starting to get concerned for my daughter. I'm wondering if you guys are ready for marriage, if you know what it means.”

There was a lash of fear, followed by anger. The form was drawing closer, getting bigger. It wasn't much of a night for a walk on the beach; the surf was angry and the wind wild.

“Megan seems to think this woman has something to do with what happened tonight,” he said. “Is that true?”

“I don't know,” I said. How could he know that? Did she text him from the car?

“She says you haven't called the police,” he said.

I hadn't called the police. I couldn't. I told him so.

“I don't understand,” he said.

“They won't believe me.”

He was staring at me hard now; I could feel his eyes boring into the side of my face. I was getting that cornered animal feeling I sometimes got. I was hot, even though the air was cold. I kept my eyes on that person walking up the beach; I stood to get a better look. The shape was familiar to me. The most familiar shape in the world.
Oh God, how did she find us here?

“Why won't they believe you, son?” Binky said. His voice had the gentle, level tone that people take when they think there might be something wrong with you. “Make me understand that.”

I couldn't answer him, just kept my eyes on Priss as she drew closer.

“Ian,” said Binky. His voice was stern, fatherly. I heard him rise from his seat, but all I could see was Priss. “I need you to tell me why you think no one will believe you.”

I started moving toward the staircase. I had to get to her before she got to this place. If she came here, if these two worlds collided, I couldn't bear it. Everything here at Binky and Julia's was clean and good and right. It was safe. It was wholesome. I wouldn't let her defile that. Before I could get to the stairs, I felt Binky's hand on my arm.

I turned to face him and found that red veil of rage coming down over my eyes. I don't want to tell you what happened next.

Even though I'd basically attacked Dr. Crown, he still wanted to see me. So, once a week, my dad and I made the trek out to his office after school. I endured these visits, mainly because I knew we'd stop at Burger King on the way home.

“How are you doing, Ian?”

That's how Dr. Crown began every session, looking at me with what I'm sure he thought was a warm smile. To me, it seemed condescending to the point of goading. I think he was a nice man, probably good at his job. I hated him.

“Fine,” I said. (In case you're wondering if this and the phrase “I don't know” are the most oft uttered words of my boyhood, they were.)

“Anything going on at school that we need to discuss?”

“No.”

“Have you had any feelings you couldn't control?”

“No.”

There were two big topics of conversation, things we worked on. One was my rage problem; I apparently had one. The other was Priss; no one believed she existed. They thought I was making her up, my imaginary friend and scapegoat for the Beech fire. Of course, no one had ever come out and said that precisely. There was zero physical evidence connecting me to the fire, which was why the investigation had been dropped.