The Cormorant (14 page)

Grosky looks pale in the cheeks now.

Vills looks unfazed.

“So I think, I can stop this. I can change this so easy. She dies in her car, and we’re sitting outside a froyo shop and right outside
is her car
, and I think, this couldn’t be simpler. Remove the instrument of her demise and the demise cannot occur. So, she goes to the bathroom and
I
go outside to the car, and I take my knife and I squat down and I slash the tires. Or I try to at first – puncturing tires is harder than it looks, but I manage to hit the sidewall and they start hissing air. Then someone sees what I’m doing and my next and only move is to run like a rabbit. So I run.”

“You’re gonna tell me the girl still dies,” Grosky says.

“Hey, spoilers, asshole. But yes. Yeah. In a few hours I walk by the spot where she was supposed to go off the road and lo and behold, cops, ambulances, a charred body pulled from a blackened Toyota.”

“She got the tires fixed,” he says. “Fix-A-Flat.”

“Actually, no. But that probably would’ve worked. Took me a while to piece it together but what happened was, she calls her twin sister.
Identical
twin sister. And you know what that identical twin sister drives?”

“An identical car.”

“Right as a rimjob, Agent Grosky. The sister – Lila – brings the car, then decides she’s going to stay and have a frozen yogurt with some cute boy, and so Delilah takes her
sister’s
car. And then… same scenario. Texting. Crashing. Burning alive.”

Grosky breathes hard, nostrils flaring. Like he’s picturing all of it. “I see why that might mess you up a little.”

“The thing is, I don’t know if it was supposed to be that way all along or if… fate stepped in and made a few crucial readjustments. Maybe I was always a part of it. Maybe what she was texting was a message to her sweet boyfriend about the crazy bitch who slashed her tires. Maybe I made it happen. That’s the other trick, Agent Grosky. When I show up like that, I’m the pivot point. The fulcrum. It’s like I’m meant to be there even when I don’t want to be. Like I’m some kind of fucked-up version of Johnny Appleseed, traipsing across the country either causing people’s deaths or stopping them–”

“And you can only stop them by causing other deaths.”

“Yeah.”

“You got quite the mission laid out for you,” he says.

“I guess.”

“You ever wonder…”

“Wonder what?”

“If it’s real?”

“If my gift–”
Shit
. “My
curse
is real.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Shut up. I know it is.”

Grosky shrugs. “Because maybe you’re making it all up. Maybe your brain’s just inventing things to patch up the holes in your mental wall. Trauma eats away at us, Miriam. PTSD for some people is like always being on the edge of the knife. But for others, it’s like that knife keeps cutting apart all the things that keep us grounded in reality. And when we lose parts of ourselves, we fill in the gaps with things that seem sane and real but are so far off the books that… well, you start to have conversations like this one with a guy like me.”

“It’s all real,” she says. Her hands ball into fists.
But what if he’s right?
She banishes that thought to the wasteland.

“You know who might say that kind of thing?” Vills suddenly asks.

“You frizzy-haired twat,” Miriam says, “don’t you even say it.”

“A serial killer. A serial killer who has invented a complex supernatural justification so she may continue killing and salving the guilt over the act. A serial killer who has come to believe that she is a preternatural agent caught in a cosmic battle between fate and free will and that only she can turn the tides away and loosen the sinister grip of destiny.”

“That’s very poetic,” Miriam seethes. “And once upon a time, I really worried that maybe it was all in my head. But you’ll see. The
both
of you will see. By the end of all this, when it all shakes out, you won’t doubt me anymore.”

“Sounds like a threat,” Vills says.

“Maybe it is.”

“All right, all right,” Grosky barks, knocking on the table. “Let’s move this along. So, Miriam. You had your one phone call to make. I gotta know: who’d you call?”

TWENTY-TWO

RECOGNIZANCE

Late afternoon. Hot. Like being squeezed in a sweaty fist. Miriam stands outside the Monroe County detention center just northeast of Key West. It’s the sunniest jail building she could imagine: bone white, banded with seafoam. The water’s not far off, and the sound of the sea lapping at earth reaches her ears. A pelican snoozes on a nearby post, shovel beak pressed into damp feathered breast.

The late-day sun glints off a coming vehicle.

A turquoise Chevy Malibu circles the lot a few times like a dizzy shark, then loops around one last time and pulls up next to her.

Evelyn Black gets out of the car.

Her mother.

Jesus.

That woman has always been a dark little sparrow on stumpy legs – a human gallstone, a bitter apple seed, a black cancer shadow on a CT scan. And she’s still that woman with her black hair (now shot through with streaks of gray) and bangs that look like someone cut them with a camping hatchet, with her dark sunglasses, with her pursed lips like she just dry-swallowed an aspirin and is trying to work it down her throat.

But she’s also cloaked in the garb of Florida: beachy peach T-shirt with a palm tree on it, khaki shorts, a pair of flip-flops.

Flip-flops
.

It’s like watching the Devil paint his toenails pink.

The two of them stand there, an ocean of unsaid things separating them. Miriam grinds her teeth. Her mother starts to say something but then the words blacken and die, grapes to raisins.

Finally, Miriam says, “Hi, Mom.”

Her mother nods. “Hello, Miriam.” Her gaze drifts toward the detention building before she tilts her head toward the car. “Door’s unlocked.”

“Great.”

“Good.”

“Great.”

TWENTY-THREE

ARE WE THERE YET?

The choice went like this:

Miriam heard Gabby’s voice in her head –
they inflict themselves on other people
– and she thought,
Yep, that’s about right
. She’s a curse. A weapon. A punishment. The ol’ albatross around the neck. And so she asks herself: who does she want to punish more? Who should catch the bite of the whip, the cut of the knife?

Louis, well… she’s tired of hurting him. Last time she saw him, he was ready to give up and give in, ready to become a killer in service to her twisted worldview. But that isn’t him. He isn’t a killer. He’s killed for her once already. And if she knows Louis, that death will cling to him like a hungry ghost. Always eating away at him.

She’s done her damage to that poor bastard. She’s chipped her name into his granite, and any more than that might bring his whole foundation crumbling down. Thinking about him makes her soul sink and soar, and it fills the hole between her heart and her stomach with equal parts
panic worms
and
love petals
, and the reality is, she cares too much about him to hurt him any more. (Even though right now her most burning urge is to pick up a phone and call him so she can cry and tell him all of this.)

Ah. But her mother.

Cruel, conservative Mother. Mother with her Bible. Mother with her box of matches and her lighter fluid and the ring of stones where she burned any of the books and comics and CDs Miriam had snuck into the house. Mother with her prayer. With her judgment. With her guilt.

Always with the guilt.

And so the choice became easy then.

Mother had done damage to Miriam.

So maybe it was time Miriam did some damage in return.

Now she sits in the passenger seat of the Malibu, flitting a sneaky gaze toward this woman who purports to be her mother but who may in fact be an alien creature nesting in her mother’s stolen skin.

Because things are
not
adding up.

The peach shirt. The khaki shorts. The flip-flops.

That’s part of it.

Her mother is fastidious. Or was. Growing up, if Miriam tracked mud in the house, she’d be on her knees for hours, scrubbing stains while Mother looked on, sniffing dismissively and shaking her head, and when Miriam finally thought the stain was gone, her mother would descend upon the ghost of those footprints and continue her white-knuckled exorcism of filth.

Every piece of dirt, every dust mote, was an enemy combatant. She was like a mother monkey picking lice. Pick, pick, pick.

The car, though…

It’s a mess.

An old coffee cup in the cup holder. Some mail piling up in the back seat – circulars and coupons and penny-pincher papers. A layer of fuzzy dust gathering in the space where the windshield meets the dash.

And then there’s the ashtray.

It sits, pulled halfway out.

It’s filled with the stubs of cigarettes.

She thinks,
This is someone else’s car.

It has to be. She can smell the smoke in the upholstery. It makes
her
want to smoke. But instead she just stares. At this imposter. This mystery woman clothed in her mother’s flesh.

They’re quiet. Both warily watch the other. Miriam watching when she thinks her mother isn’t looking and her mother looking when she must think Miriam isn’t watching. But they both see. They both know.

Finally–

“Do you need me to drop you somewhere?” Mother asks.

She blinks. “I need my car out of the impound, but impound’s already closed for the day.”
The car’s broken anyway, but I could sure use that money
. “So. Ah. Eh, no. No.”

“I can take you to my house.”

“OK. Yeah. Fine.” Miriam clears her throat. “Where, ah, is your house again?”

“Delray Beach. It’s a drive.”

“A long drive?”

“Long enough. Four hours.”

“Oh.” Not like she has anywhere else to be
.
“OK.”

Another seven-mile span of silence.

“So, what have you been up to?” Mother asks. A slow-pitch softball of a question, a question to an acquaintance you haven’t seen in six months, not a daughter who ran away from home almost a decade before.

Oh, you know. The usual. Seeing how people are going to die. Stealing from them. Or saving them by killing other people. I was a drifter and a thief. Now I’m a psychic assassin battling fate and – I’m sorry, am I boring you? It’s so mundane, I know. But hey, it’s a job and I’m pretty good at it, so you can finally be proud of me, Mommy Dearest
.

Instead she says, “Traveling.”

(Like asking John Wayne Gacy, “What have you been up to?” and he says, “Entertaining children.”)

“Oh. That’s nice.”

“It’s all right. And, uh, how about you?”

“I moved to Florida.”

“I can see that.”

“Yes, of course.” Her pinched lips form a small, puckered smile that fades as fast as it arrived. “I did some work with Habitat for Humanity, but mostly I just… I just retired here. It’s nice.”

“It’s hot.”

“It’s Florida.”

“It’s
winter
.”

“Are you wearing sunscreen?”

“What? No. Like I feel like covering myself in glop and smelling like a piña colada all day? Ew.”

“You should. You’re fair-skinned. You’ll burn.”

“Ugh.”

“And get some bug spray. A lot of mosquitoes down here and they’ve started to carry dengue fever–”

“Bug spray smells even worse than tanning lotion. It’s like stripper perfume, except it also kills flying insects.”

“Your hair is short.”

“It is. It was long last year.”

“Oh. And it’s got some…color.”

“That’s because…” Miriam throws up her hands. “Because, I dunno, I fuckin’ like color.”

Miriam drops that f-bomb just to see her mother flinch –
two for flinching, you cranky prude
. But she doesn’t flinch or wince or make any face at all. She just stares placidly ahead and finally says:

“You’re different.”

“I’m not. I’m the same girl I always was, just now on the outside for everyone to see.” Her mother gives her a look. Not angry. Just sad.