There was no one in the shower stall.
No one at all.
CHAPTER FOUR
She did not talk to herself while she got cleaned up and dressed. Rain was too embarrassed in her own eyes to pay attention to her thoughts. Embarrassed and scared and …
No, those adjectives were part of the conversation she didn’t want to have.
Bug stayed under the bed and would not come out even for treats.
Rain busied herself with doing everything quickly, efficiently, precisely. It was the way she used to do things when she was drunk or high and knew—or thought she knew—that people were watching. I’m not a junkie. Look how well I fold my laundry. Look how straight I walk down the street. See, I’m taking the train like a regular person.
She studied herself in the mirror. She was thin bordering on skinny. Wavy brown hair, ordinary brown eyes, pale skin, a good complexion. Her best features, she thought, were her lips—full—and nose—small. When she’d been a girl, people always said she had beautiful eyes. Large and expressive. That was before seven years of using drugs. Now her eyes had a shifty quality. It was hard for her to even meet her own gaze in the mirror, let alone other people’s. There was something about her now, even three years clean, that made people nervous around her.
As always, she turned away, unable to see the disappointment on her own face.
She had to reach under the bed and pull Bug out to put her leash on, but then the dog yanked her out the door and down the stairs. Once outside, Bug bravely peed on everything she could, pooped twice, peed some more, and then tried not to be led inside. After pulling, coaxing, cajoling, and threatening, Rain finally picked Bug up and carried her back upstairs.
“I’ll be back in a few hours,” Rain told the little dog. “It’s okay, everything’s fine. There’s no one here.”
Bug gave her a withering look and crawled back under the bed.
Rain looked at the bathroom, at the torn curtain.
“Shit,” she said.
She fetched duct tape and used strips of it to reattach the shower curtain. She also used towels to mop the floor, Clorox spray to clean the toilet seat, and too much soap and hot water to sponge away the memory of her own stupidity. Or paranoia. Or whatever. She kept her mental thesaurus shut as she soaped and rinsed and dried. She did not narrate her life as she dressed and applied her makeup. Shoes that were good for walking and would look nice in a job interview, and a small bag that looked like real leather. She’d placed the folder with her résumé by the door so she wouldn’t forget it. The clock above her tiny dining table told her it was time to go. She slid some treats under the bed for Bug and heard tentative crunching as she headed for the door.
Every single stair in the building squeaked in a different key of weary complaint. In the foyer, she caught Mrs. Grundy from 304 stealing Mr. Allyn’s newspaper. He lived in 107 and was always complaining that kids stole his paper. Rain knew the truth and made eye contact with the old woman as she tucked the Post into her ratty blue bathrobe. It was an open secret, and even when caught, Mrs. Grundy acted as if no one saw what she did.
“Haven’t seen you in a while,” said Mrs. Grundy.
“I saw you yesterday,” said Rain.
The old lady looked momentarily confused, then began climbing the stairs, one hand pulling on the rail and the other pressing her robe closed around her prize. Rain wondered how many steps Mrs. Grundy would have to climb before she forgot meeting Rain today. Or had she already forgotten?
The building was filled with oddballs and castoffs. No one was an actual friend of hers, but there were a few who Rain didn’t mind saying hi to. Mrs. Grundy was old, and local rumor had it that she used to be a porn star back in the seventies, but Rain didn’t think that was true. It was too much like the kind of thing people said to make the neighbors sound interesting. The woman who lived in 211 was widely believed to be a drug mule, and Joe Garrick, in the apartment across from Rain’s, was supposed to be in witness protection. She wondered what stories they told about her. People knew she went to NA meetings. They knew she rarely had anyone over. What did they make of all that? Who did they think she was?
She managed not to consciously think about the bathroom until she was on the 1 Train. It was a long, rocking, rattling trip to Manhattan, and with nothing else to do, all she had time to do was think. She shared a bench seat with a sad-eyed old Latina woman. Every seat on the train was full but there was no one standing in the aisles. More like Saturday commuters than Friday. Rain was aware of that from a distance the way most people are aware of things, but she put no actual thought on it.
For the first ten minutes of the ride, Rain sat, purse and folder on her lap under her clasped hands, eyes looking at nothing in particular as she replayed everything that had happened that morning. It was all lurking right below the surface, and it still made her shiver. She would have bet her entire new welfare check that there was someone behind the curtain. She’d felt his hand. She’d seen the shadow of him back there.
The fact that no one had been there was almost scarier than if there had been. Rain thought she was past all that kind of bullshit. The fantasies and hallucinations. Being crazy. Crack was a gentle high, but it wasn’t psychedelic. When she wanted to walk straight out of her mind, she dropped N,N-dimethyltryptamine—DMT. Or smoked it; but the pills always flipped the switch faster. Either way it was a rocket-ship ride to elsewhere, and it worked every time. Her favorite dealer, Bone, called it “Void,” and that was a good-enough name, and they described the effects as a “tourist high.” Not because it was favored by actual tourists but because once it hit the bloodstream you were no longer in your own country. Rain agreed with that.
Some of her friends were afraid of Void because when it was in full swing, it broke apart all understanding of reality. The so-called real world was suddenly false, its laws suspect; while the other world was incredibly and insistently real. More real. Way more. There were new physical laws, new languages that only travelers to that land understood—and when she was there, Rain did understand it; but not once the high wore off. Coming back and coming down was like what she imagined dementia would feel like. She was aware that she had lost parts of her intelligence, her memory, her clarity and was now in a reduced “lesser” state of consciousness.
On the day she got out of the hospital after giving up her baby, she took her first trip to that far-off place. She never wanted to come back, because there was nothing real or solid or beautiful back here.
It wasn’t the distortion of reality that ultimately made her switch to crack. It was the grief of losing that enhanced insight. On that level, she could talk with Noah, she could understand where her dead lover was and what he was experiencing. On that level, they could be together, and their baby was always with them. Only there, though, and never here. Crack did not allow her to visit that place, but it took away her ability to care that she could not stay there.
Since then, though, she’d had a few DMT flashbacks, but they were quick, and even when they were firing she knew what was happening. So, no, this wasn’t that. And she didn’t think it was a flashback at all, because she’d been high for so long that she knew every flavor in that box of chocolates. The jittery coke high, the mellow weed high, the floaty XTC high, and the dreamy take-me-away high of good crystal meth. This wasn’t like any of them. This felt more like her mind was slipping a gear. Rain had some experience with that, too. For the first eight weeks of each rehab, it had felt like her brain was a computer streaming five different movies at once, and none of them in English. She’d screamed her way through a lot of long nights in several different hospitals and knew what those fantasies were like.
What happened this morning just made her feel crazy.
Her heart still wanted to race out of control and she had to fight back the tears. She knew what they told her every time she went to a meeting, that being clean didn’t make you anything but a junkie who wasn’t currently high. Alcoholics we
re always alcoholics, and addicts were always addicts. All a clean day meant is that you worked the program that day. Tomorrow was another battle. And your body would never forget that it wanted to be high. That demon was always there, and the fight had to be fought every day.
“Please,” Rain said again, whispering it aloud to give it power but saying it quietly so no one could hear.
Even so, the old Latina lady next to her turned and looked at her. She had the most comprehensively wrinkled face Rain had ever seen. She wore a pair of glasses hung around her neck on a colorful beaded chain and had a dark mole on her forehead exactly where an Indian bindi would be.
“En realidad el fuego nunca se apaga. ¿Sabes?” she said.
Rain’s Spanish was only okay. She could get along but the woman spoke very quickly, and it took Rain a second to run it through her mental translation circuits. Something about fires? No, about fires not going out? Or never going out?
Something like that.
“Sorry—?” said Rain, then added haltingly, “Yo no entiendo.”
The woman studied her for a moment and there was a small, almost knowing smile on her thin lips. Then she said, “Él le habla a su mamá.”
That went past too quickly and she didn’t know what it meant. She dug a phrase out of a back closet of her memory. “Um … por favor, habla mas … um … despacio.” Asking her to repeat it slowly.
“Hay oscuridad, y le está a apagando su luz.”
“Yo no comprendo.”
The old woman’s smile flickered, and she turned away to look out the window at the nothing passing by. Rain studied her for a moment, replaying the words, trying to sort them out, but they didn’t make any real sense. She was half sure the woman said something about someone looking for his mother, but there was no context. Who was looking for his mother? Was the woman talking about her grandson, maybe?
And the other comment made even less sense as Rain pieced it together. Something about darkness smothering light. Like that. She almost asked, but it was pretty clear the woman didn’t speak English. Or didn’t want to. Besides, Rain knew she’d better go over the stuff for the interview. She turned away, opened the folder, and then began fishing in her purse for her reading glasses.
Which were not there.
“Ahhhh … shit!” she cried, and several people turned around to look at her. People on trains always look annoyed, and when you did something loud or unusual, the annoyance turned into open hostility. Or maybe it was contempt. Either way, Rain immediately shut down into herself, muttering apologies, looking contrite, feeling stupid. She searched her purse again. And again. The glasses still refused to be in there. She looked around as if expecting them to be floating there in the air. “Damn it.”
She slapped her purse down on her lap and seethed for a minute and then picked up the folder again, opened it, and squinted at the papers. Her résumé and the details she pulled off the company website. She could read UNCLE SAM TAX SERVICE because it was in large block letters. The rest was a smear that looked like it had been dunked in water. Rain bent toward it until her nose was almost touching the pages. That helped, but not a lot. The fact that her eyes were getting bad was something she’d been trying to ignore.
A light tap on her right shoulder startled her, and Rain almost growled at the interruption, but it was the old woman. Her face was creased into a smile so wide it made her eyes almost vanish into wreaths of wrinkles. It made her look like a kitchen witch, or one of those Russian nesting dolls. And her eyes—the sadness in those eyes seemed bottomless.
“¿Por favor…?” she said as she lifted her own reading glasses from around her neck and held them out, the colored chain swaying.
“Oh, no,” Rain said immediately, “I couldn’t.”
The woman paused and then in creaking English said, “Please, for his sake.”
His? Rain figured it was some kind of Jesus reference. She looked at the glasses. They were old-fashioned, with horn-rims and a tiny hairline crack along the side of the left lens, but the woman looked so earnest and so clearly happy to be able to help.
Rain really needed to nail this interview because her shit heap of an apartment, her groceries, and her prescriptions for migraine medicine were, inconveniently, not going to pay for themselves. The tax-preparing job was something she knew she could do. Rain was always good with numbers and with deciphering things like word problems and math codes. When she was banging her dealer, she helped him work his numbers and manage his stock. Not something she could put on her résumé, but it was what it was.
The woman moved the glasses an inch closer, repeating, “Por favor.”
“Okay,” said Rain, “just for a few seconds. Thanks so much.”
The woman pressed the glasses into her hand and then folded Rain’s fingers around them. The woman’s hands were as fragile as bird bones and as cold as ice. Almost creepy, but mostly sad. Rain was twenty-six, and this woman had to be at least sixty years older. None of them looked like easy years, either. The woman nodded and kept nodding, her eyes cutting back and forth between her and the glasses.
Rain smiled awkwardly and nodded back as she raised the glasses and put them on. The chain drooped under her chin, and she felt a little silly. But, damn … she could see. When she glanced down at her résumé, the words were sharp and clear. Sharper and clearer, in fact, than they ever were with her drugstore glasses. She raised her head and looked around. Everything was clear. It was weird, because without glasses she could see things clear after about six feet, but closer than that everything became progressively blurry. But now, it was all crystal clear. It was kind of freaky, because Rain couldn’t remember ever seeing the world with that much clarity. Or that much depth.
“Wow,” she said. “These are great. I can see everything.”
The woman laughed as if Rain had just told her a great joke. She touched Rain’s arm. “Muy bonita.”
Very pretty. Rain wasn’t sure if that was a reference to the world as seen through the glasses or a compliment. Rain nodded as if she understood, then bent to study her notes. The train rumbled along, and the old woman turned away, seemingly content to study her own reflection in the dirty glass. Rain read through the papers. The thin crack in the left lens was a minor distraction, with the sliver creating a tiny distortion. Not too bad, though, if she concentrated mostly on her right eye.
Rain went through the job requirements and some notes she’d printed out about recent changes in the New York State tax codes. It was dense stuff, but she was able to navigate it. Last night she’d downloaded several copies of a blank tax form and practiced filling them out, inputting different income and deduction amounts. Those papers were in the folder, and she went through point by point to check her math. Although she was a high school dropout, Rain had taken and aced her GED and had snuck into some accounting classes at NYU. This was something she could do and do well, if she could only catch a break and get the job.
A scream jolted her out of her thoughts, and she caught a glimpse of a little boy go pelting up the aisle, shrieking with laughter. She turned by reflex because he was so loud, so cute, and running too fast.
Then she stared. Frowned.
The aisle was empty.
Rain leaned out and craned her head to see where the kid went. He looked familiar, with brown hair and eyes and rosy cheeks. She’d seen all that in a flash through the one slice of tilted lens in the borrowed glasses. The kid was quick. He ran by and then must have ducked down somewhere out of sight.
But as she looked, she felt her smile beginning to falter. Where had the kid gone? No one seemed to be looking down or over their shoulders. And no one else had reacted to the scream of laughter, even though it had been as loud and piercing as a seagull’s cry.
Which is when Rain’s mind replayed the sound.
It was a sharp scream, no doubt. But was it a shriek of laughter? Was that really what she’d heard? The more it echoed through her head, and the more the aisle remained stubb
ornly empty, the more that cry sounded like something else.
It sounded like a scream.
Rain took off the glasses and turned to the old woman. “Did you just see that kid…?”
Her voice trailed off.
The seat next to her was empty. Rain blinked in surprise. She was in the aisle seat; the woman would have had to squeeze past her to get off. She touched the plastic seat beside her.
It was cold.
Rain looked down at the glasses she held in her other hand. They were there. Beaded chain, crack, horn-rims, and all. But there was no one seated next to her at all.
“I—” she began to say, but had nowhere at all to go with it.
She got up and walked quickly along the aisle, peering down behind every seat back, looking for anyone crouched down and hiding on the floor. There was no little boy on the train. No old woman, either. Not on that car or on the cars in front and behind.
She returned to her own car.
“What?” Rain asked quietly. Asking it of the day, of the moment. She stood with her feet wide to brace against the swaying motion of the motor, one hand gripping a metal upright, and yet she felt as if she were falling, falling, falling.
CHAPTER FIVE
People on the train kept looking at her, then looking away when she met their stares, and Rain realized that she’d become the Other.
That was a therapy word one of her shrinks tried on her. It was something different from the parasite. It was an external, social thing. The Other was the person who so clearly did not fit into the acceptable pattern of a group of strangers that it immediately unified them as “the people who are not the other.” She’d seen it enough times with madmen and loud drunks and people who talked to themselves. She’d been part of the group at times, and she’d been the Other. Like now.
The Other was different from the Predator. That was when someone was clearly or possibly a threat. Gangs, moody types in long black trench coats, teenagers in hoodies, sweaty men clutching suspicious parcels. The Predator made everyone afraid but did not bond them into a unified group. Only the Other did that, and there was no coming back from it. Once the group has classified you as some kind of freak, then you will be the freak for the rest of your shared experience. In this case, the length of the commute to Manhattan. And the problem was that being under the social microscope tended to make people act weirder. Back when Rain was using, she’d realize that people were looking at her in judgment and she would give them something to validate their opinions. Sometimes she was openly provocative, sometimes loud, sometimes she’d yell at them.