Nicotine (27 page)

Soon they are making out in her bed.

PENNY RIDES HER BICYCLE FROM
Tranquility to Nicotine. She sees from a hundred yards away that the front door is open. Drawing closer, she sees that the downstairs windows are broken. She smells a pestilential smell.

She leans her bike on a shrub and climbs up to look over the porch railing at a safe distance from the front door.

A plastic bucket and salad bowl stand in the substance on the welcome mat. Round prints betray that someone used them to walk through it—one foot in each, presumably holding the rim of the bowl and the handle of the bucket. The trail of prints leads to the kitchen door. The house is silent. She feels sure it is empty. She recognizes the work of the monster. She calls out, “Hello!” to be sure. No answer.

She calls Rob on the phone. “Where are you?” she says.

“Pennsylvania Turnpike. Long story. I'm with Sorry and Jazz.”

“Hi, Penny!” Sorry calls out.

“Where are you going?”

Silence. “Portland? We don't really know. We had to get out of town in a hurry. Did you hear what happened?”

“Fuck, no! Nobody tells me anything. You're in Pennsylvania? You didn't even say good-bye?”

“Don't get upset. You think you have a right to be upset? You know who tried to murder me? Your fucking brother.”

“Why?”

“Why,” Rob says. “I guess that's what anybody would ask.”

“To get the house? It's trashed, so it's kind of a Pyrrhic victory.”

“Why are you asking
why
? As if anything could justify what he did!”

“I was just wondering.”

“Good-bye, Penny. You want to talk to Jazz or Sorry?”

“I'd rather talk to you.”

“Hey, Penny,” Jazz says.

“Is this one of those ‘don't call us, we'll call you' things? Fuck you, Rob! You too, Jazz!” Penny wipes her nose. On the sidewalk, she walks the edge of the yard until she is standing where the cracked, foot-high retaining wall rounds the corner. “I see a police car,” she adds, raising her eyes to see a police car.

“Where are you?”

“In front of the house. I came over on my bike.”

“Ride away,” Jazz suggests.

She rides away. Two blocks later, she halts and calls Rob again. Jazz answers, and she asks where Anka and Tony are. Anka: DJD. Tony: Morristown. She wipes her nose some more, and Jazz sings, “It's only castles burning.”

Penny interrupts her by asking, “So what happened? Who knocked over the buckets?”

“Didn't you hear Rob? We're all still totally in shock, especially him. I don't want to talk about it while I'm driving. We'll call you when we get where we're going. Hang in there. We love you, right?”

“We love you, Penny!” Sorry calls out.

Penny rides home to Tranquility.

THE MINIVAN STRUGGLES ON THE
ascents, but it makes up for lost time with its worn-out brake shoes on the downhills, and it is soon deep in the Appalachians.

It starts to rain. Sorry is driving, with Rob on her right and Jazz asleep on the bench seat. Squinting, she says, “I wonder if I need glasses, or if everything is really this blurry.”

“Let's find a place to crash,” Rob says.

“The next exit has three motels. One's a Motel Six. They're cheap if you book online a couple weeks in advance.”

“I thought we'd sleep in the van.”

“How?”

“I put the tools up here, we leave Jazz where she is, and you and me bed down in the back. How about it?”

“But where?”

“Truck stop.”

Sorry shakes her head. “Where is there a truck stop?”

“In eighty miles. Pull off and we'll get some coffee.”

They get coffee from the drive-through at a Jack in the Box and return to the highway.

Eighty miles takes about an hour and a half. Over sixty miles an hour, the road starts to feel bumpy no matter how smooth it is. Rob comments that his suspension is his reason to stay with the turnpike—the smooth ride. Sorry sticks to the white line at the right-hand side of the road while immense trucks heave past them in gales of spray. The windshield wipers scrape one way and slap the other. And still Jazz sleeps.

She wakes up to the clanking of tools hitting the floor in front of her. “We're turning in,” Rob says. He kisses her on the forehead. She glances out and sees towering semitrailers. Out on the highway overtaxed haulers pass with a furious choppy whine, tensing and releasing the air around the minivan. When the back is empty enough to fit Rob and Sorry—assuming they don't move around much—they climb in and lie down.

“I'm glad I'm exhausted and in shock,” Rob says. He swallows a painkiller. He closes his eyes. He falls asleep. The windows begin to fog.

A feeling of chilly dampness strikes Sorry in the kidneys. After one attempt to turn over without waking Rob, she creeps forward to her duffel bag. She pulls out her tablet computer. She nudges it into life and looks for cheap motels located near exits in western Ohio.

The lights dancing on the ceiling awaken Jazz. She asks Sorry what she is doing.

“Booking a motel for tomorrow,” she replies. “It's on me.”

“You have a credit card? Is it stolen?” She looks closer. “Visa Platinum. My word, aren't we bourgeois.”

“It's a relic from my secret past. I think Platinum might be the lowest level now, but they never cut you off. It's enough for a motel. I'm too tall to sleep in this cargo space. It's worth it. My gift to you.”

Jazz smiles her radiant smile and says, “I love you, Mama Sorry.” She stretches her arms, closes her eyes, and turns over.

“Sleep tight, little Jazzy J.”

Sorry crawls back to her overcoat, tablet tucked under her arm. She holds it above her head and reads a long feature in the
Times
magazine about a Parisian couturier until her arms fall and she loses consciousness.

THE NEXT EVENING, PENNY VISITS
Anka at DJD.

Anka tells the story: Matt's jealous rage, the death of the bucket monster, Rob's injuries, their night at the hospital, the fugitive trio petrified of Matt.

“Matt's always been pathologically jealous,” Penny replies. “Sex is the only way he's ever been close to anybody, so if he sees two people in bed, he automatically assumes they're having sex.” This is bullshit straight from outer space. She has no evidence to base this on, other than her desire to assert that Rob and Jazz would never, ever have sex.

Anka pauses. Briefly she wonders how Penny can be simultaneously in love with Rob and concerned about justifying Matt's
behavior. But maybe denial is inevitable at first when your brother tries to murder the man you love? Delicately, she agrees it's likely the case that Matt is a jealous person who jumps to conclusions. Soon she gets into the spirit of denial, laughing off the others' fears, even appending a slightly exaggerated account of Tony's scheme to turn the Morristown house into a survivalist fortress.

In the end, Penny says she's almost sorry she didn't see the bucket monster fall. She would have liked to join them on the road. “I missed all the fun,” she says. “I can't wait until they get back. We can found a new house.”

“Matt is mental,” Anka replies, “but it's Jazz who owns a nine-millimeter. I wouldn't live with her ever again, anywhere. I just hope I can stay here at DJD.”

“What will you do when you want a cigarette?”

“Don't let anybody know, but I bought this thing
.
” She opens the drawer in Susannah's cherry bedside table and pulls out a tin cigarette with a pink filter. The label identifies it as a V2. “It's a digital e-cigarette.”

“What's digital about it?”

“You hold it in your fingers, like this.”

“I'm serious. Is it part of the Internet of things? Do they know when you're smoking it?”

“I don't think so. I think they just mean it works on electricity.” Anka leans her head back and puffs a cloud of sweet-smelling vapor that quickly disperses. “It was either this or that gum that tastes like snuff. It averages out to cheaper than analog cigarettes, if you do it enough. And you become a nonsmoker. Nobody here knows I own it, so you better not tell them. I even smoked today at
work,
because there's no smell.”

“You're going to end up addicted to nicotine, if you're not careful.”

“I know! But it's a small price to pay for a room in a nonsmoking house.”

THEY PLAN A FORAY TO
recapture Anka's paintings and whatever else they can grab that means anything to anybody—hard-to-replace things, like people's winter boots and the sacred BVM dildo.

Anka asks Sunshine whether the DJD community, with all its protest acumen, happens to own any gas masks (no).

So the plan is to run in and loot the house as best they can, as fast as they can, and either nail down the broken doorframe and lock the place, or board the doorway shut somehow using tools and scrap wood from the garage. The entire procedure will be conducted, insofar as they are able, without either of them taking a breath.

As darkness falls, they approach the house. Anka gets close to the entrance. She quails. She twitches and covers her mouth. She says, “Fuck it, who cares,” and turns back, saying she cannot imagine taking anything porous or permeable out of that reeking hell—not art, not shoes, not curtains, not anything. She will start over.

PENNY FEELS THE SAME WAY.
Time to go to zero for a reboot.

She doesn't hear from Matt. That surprises her. He ought to be calling to complain—to say mean things and ream her out verbally. But he doesn't. Not a peep.

It feels like a sign that maybe he is backing away from her life. One more emotional male Baker who can't turn it off, falling away. Female Bakers are different. Merchants of patience. To indulge passionate impulses in her current situation would make her crazy. Even remembered emotions would make her crazy. She doesn't know where Rob is. Even
he
doesn't know where he is. She needs to watch and wait and hoard her feelings for future reference.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, SHE VISITS
her mother in Morristown. They watch Tony mow the lawn.

“Such a nice man,” Amalia says.

“Yes, very nice.”

“And so funny. Now he is staying here because Norm's old house is a big mess, like I always said. Now you see, I was psychic!”

Penny asks whether she has heard from Matt.

“No,” Amalia says. “But Tony tells me how your lover and Matt's lover ran away together—that's so funny—”

“I wouldn't put it like that, but whatever.”

“Do you still want to fix up that house? Tony says it is completely filled from top to bottom with shit.” She laughs. “No matter. That house takes four corner lots zoned for mixed use, you know? It's worth much more without the house. We could put in a gas station, or a church!”

“Oh god, leave me out of it. I've had just about enough of that house. What I need to do is get my job search moving. I can stay in the house where I'm living for now. I just need a job and money, so I can travel and be independent and do what I want. You know. Start living my life!”

She is sincere. She wants to get a grip, her act together, her ducks in a row, and offer Rob a place to stay, which he will surely accept—once he calms down—now that he's homeless. But before she starts some stressful new job with zero vacation days, she needs to figure out where he is, and go see him. So she needs a way to pay for a trip to see Rob, plus a big apartment to put him in. Also she needs a distraction until it all works out, and a new job would certainly be distracting.

“Well, as for job searching, I have been thinking about your career potential,” her mother says.

“I always wished you would,” she lies.

“You specialized in purchasing, so you always consider working in consumer products. But it's not a growth area.”

“I know. Globalization is stalled out. Everybody sees through that BRICS nations stuff now. The emerging markets are tanking.”

“But
tech,
Peñana. Now the bank is going into sourcing raw materials for tech companies. Tech commodities! At a bank, can you believe it?”

“Like pork bellies and corn futures, but tech.”

“Rare earths and lithium. There is so much tech growth in the mature markets. Developing nations are on the ropes. It's a fire sale! But we have to do monitoring and oversight, because the investors and the governments—oh my god, what liars they are! They say they're mining with energy from a wind farm, and we visit and look on the satellite, and there's no mine and no wind farm. They bluff like poker players.”

“Or nations at war,” Penny says.

“Exactly. You would have travel and responsibility. Your languages would be so valuable. If you write a résumé like this, I will bring it to the bank and they will
jump
on you.” Amalia touches her arm. “Commodities analyst! You will make top dollar. Excellent compensation. You
really
can do this. I know it.”

“It actually sounds interesting. I'd be like a spy.”

“The bank is becoming an empire with colonies. But you know who will do it if we don't do it? Organized crime.”

“So I'd be doing well by doing good,” Penny says, joking without smiling.

“I want you to have money, Peñana. Nothing in the world is more expensive than your anarchist revolution.”

Amalia smiles, but Penny knows she isn't joking—especially not about the price of revolution. She promises to put together a commodities-enabled résumé as fast as she can.

When Tony comes in from the yard, she can't stop herself from congratulating him, as though he had won an award. He does seem to be in an enviable position as lord of the manor. Having lost several pounds, he is dressed in natty new clothes. A barbershop has restored a kind of dignity to his head.