Pieces of Her

  Andrew coughed into the crook of his elbow so he wouldn’t have to take his hands off the wheel. They were going deeper into the city. His eyes were trained on the road. In the sunlight, she could see the faint line of a scar along his neck where he’d tried to hang himself. This was three years ago, after he’d taken too many pills but before he’d shot up enough heroin to stop his heart. Jasper had found him hanging in the basement. The rope was thin, a clothesline, really, with a metal wire that had gouged out a slice of Andrew’s skin.

  Jane was overwhelmed with a mixture of grief and regret every time she saw the scar. The truth was that, at the time of the attempt, she had hated her brother. Not because Andrew was older or because he teased her about her knobby knees and social awkwardness, but because, for most of his life, Andrew had been a drug addict, and there was nothing he would not do in service of his addiction. Robbing Annette. Fighting with Jasper. Stealing from Martin. Relentlessly dismissing Jane.

  Cocaine. Benzodiazepine. Heroin. Speed.

  She was twelve years old when it became clear that Andrew was an addict, and like most twelve-year-olds, she only saw his misery through her own lens of deprivation. As she got older, Jane had been forced to accept that the shape of her life would always bend around her brother. To understand that the entire family would forever be held hostage to what Martin called Andrew’s weakness. The arrests, the treatment facilities, the court appearances, the favors called in, the money handed under the table, the political donations—continually sucked away all of her parents’ attention. Jane had never had a normal life, but Andrew took away any hope of a peaceful, sometimes ordinary existence.

  By the time she’d turned sixteen, Jane had lost track of the family meetings about Andrew’s problem, the screaming and blame-laying and accusations and beatings and haranguing and hope—that was the worst part of it all—the hope. Maybe this time he’ll quit. Maybe this birthday or Thanksgiving or Christmas he’ll show up sober.

  And maybe, just maybe, this concert or performance that was so important to Jane; the first one where she had been allowed to choose her own music, the special one to which she had devoted thousands of hours of practice, would not be overshadowed by another overdose, another suicide attempt, another hospitalization, another family meeting where Martin railed and Jasper glowered and Jane sobbed while Andrew pleaded for more chances and Annette drank herself into a blameless stupor.

  Then, suddenly, Nick had gotten Andrew clean.

  The arrest on the cocaine possession two years ago had been an eye-opener for both of them, but not in the expected, relentlessly hoped for, way. They had been arrested by an Alameda County sheriff’s deputy, otherwise Martin would have as usual made the charge go away. The Alameda deputy had dealt with too many spoiled rich kids before. He was determined to see the case through the court system. He’d threatened to go to the newspapers if some kind of justice was not meted out.

  Which was how Andrew and Nick had ended up living at the Queller Bayside Home, the last group home that Robert Juneau had been kicked out of.

  That was where Laura had found Nick. Nick had introduced her to Andrew. Then Nick had formulated a plan, and that plan had finally given Andrew a cause that urgently demanded his sobriety.

  The Porsche screeched to a halt. They were outside Nick’s apartment complex, a squat, low building with a wobbly metal railing around the upper-floor balcony. He didn’t live in the best area, but it wasn’t the worst the city had to offer, either. The place was clean. The homeless people were kept at bay. Still, Jane hated that Nick couldn’t live at the Presidio Heights house with the rest of them.

  Except that now he could.

  Right?

  “I’ll go check,” Andrew said. “You stay here.”

  Jane opened the car door before Andrew could stop her. A sense of urgency overwhelmed her. All of the doubts she’d had for the last half hour would be wrapped up in Nick’s arms and explained away. The sooner she was with him, the better she would feel.

  “Jinx,” Andrew called, trailing behind her. “Jinx, wait up.”

  She started to run, tripping over the sidewalk, heading up the rusty metal stairs. Her boots were stiff and hurt her feet but Jane did not care. She could feel that Nick was inside his apartment. That he was waiting. That he might be wondering what had taken them so long, that maybe they no longer cared about him, had lost their faith in him.

  She had lost faith. She had doubted him.

  She wasn’t a fool. She was a monster.

  Jane ran harder. Every step felt like it was taking her farther away. Andrew jogged behind her, calling her name, telling her to slow down, to stop, but Jane could not.

  She had let Agent Danberry get into her head. Nick was not a con man or a cultist. He was a survivor. His first memory was of watching his mother screw a police officer, still in uniform, who paid her in heroin. He’d never known his father. A series of pimps had beaten and abused him. He’d attended dozens of schools by the time he hitchhiked across the country to find his grandmother. She’d hated him on sight, woke him up in the middle of the night kicking and screaming at him. He’d been forced into the streets, then lived in a homeless shelter, while he finished school. That Nick had managed to get into Stanford despite all of these hardships proved that he was smarter, more clever, than anybody had ever given him credit for.

  Especially Agent Danberry with his missing tooth and cheap suit.

  “Jinx,” Andrew called from the other end of the balcony. He was walking slowly because he couldn’t run anymore. She could hear his coughing from thirty feet away.

  Jane reached into her purse for the key—not the one she kept on the chain, but the one for emergencies that she kept in the zippered pocket. Her hands were shaking so hard that she dropped the key. She bent down to get it. Sweat covered her palms.

  “Jinx.” Andrew was leaning over, hands on his knees, wheezing.

  Jane opened the door.

  She felt her world tilt off center.

  Nick wasn’t there.

  Worse, his stuff wasn’t there. The apartment was almost empty. All of his cherished things—the leather couch he’d spent hours thinking about, the tasteful glass side tables, the hanging lamp, the plush brown carpet—all of it was gone. There was just a large, overstuffed chair facing the back wall. The beautiful brass and glass kitchen table set was gone. The big television. The stereo with its giant speakers. His record collection. The walls were bare; all of his cherished art was gone, even the pieces that Andrew had drawn for him.

  She almost fell to her knees. Her hand went to her chest as she felt her heart tear in two.

  Had Nick abandoned them?

  Abandoned her?

  She put her hand to her mouth so that she wouldn’t start screaming. She walked on shaky legs into the middle of the room. None of his magazines, his books, his shoes left by the balcony door. Each missing item was like an arrow piercing her heart. Jane was so terrified that she almost felt numb. All of the worst thoughts spun through her head—

  He had left her. He knew that she was doubting him. That she had stopped believing in him, if just for a moment. He had disappeared. He had overdosed. He had found someone else.

  He had tried to kill himself.

  Jane’s knees buckled as she tried to walk down the hall. Nick had threatened to kill himself more than once and the thought of losing him was so wrenching to Jane that each time she had cried out like a child, begging him to please stay with her.

  I can’t live without you. I need you. You are the breath in my body. Please never leave me.

  “Jane?” Andrew had made it to the door. “Jane, where are you?”

  Nick’s bedroom door was closed. She had to brace herself against the wall as she made her way down the hallway. Past the bathroom—toothbrush, toothpaste, no cologne, no shaving set, no brush and comb.

  More arrows slicing open her heart.

  Jane stopped outside the bedroom. Her hand could barely grip the door
knob. There was not enough air to fill her lungs. Her heart had stopped its steady beat.

  She pushed open the door.

  A strangled sound came from her throat.

  No bed with its puffy duvet. No side tables with matching lamps. No antique chest of drawers Nick had lovingly refinished. Only a sleeping bag was rolled out on the bare floor.

  The closet door was open.

  Jane started crying again, almost sobbing from relief, when she saw that his clothes were still hanging on the rack. Nick loved his clothes. He would never leave without them.

  “Jinx?” Andrew was beside her, holding her up.

  “I thought—” Her knees finally sunk to the floor. She felt sick again. “I thought he—”

  “Come back through here.” Andrew lifted her to standing and practically carried her out of the room.

  Jane leaned into him as they walked up the hallway, her feet dragging across the bare floor. He took her into the living room. He flipped the light switch. Jane squinted from the glare. Even the light fixtures were missing. Bare bulbs hung from the sockets. Except for the massive chair that looked like it belonged on the street, everything that Nick had ever cared for was gone.

  His clothes were still in the closet. He would not leave his clothes.

  Would he?

  “Is—” she couldn’t say the words. “Andrew, where—”

  Andrew put his finger to his lips, indicating that there might be someone listening.

  Jane shook her head. She couldn’t play this game anymore. She needed words, assurances.

  “It’s all right.” Andrew gave her that careful look again, like she was missing something important.

  Jane looked around the room, desperate for some kind of understanding. What could she be missing in this bare space?

  The bare space.

  Nick had gotten rid of his things. He had either sold them or given them away. Was he cleverly foiling the police so they didn’t have anywhere to plant their listening devices?

  Jane couldn’t stand any more. She sat on the floor, tears of relief flooding from her eyes. That had to be the answer. Nick hadn’t left them. He was fucking with the pigs. The almost-empty apartment was just another one of Nick’s games.

  “Jinx?” Andrew was clearly concerned.

  “I’m all right.” She wiped her tears. She felt foolish for making such a scene. “Please don’t tell Nick I was so upset. Please.”

  Andrew opened his mouth to respond, but a cough came out instead. Jane winced at the wet, congested sound. He coughed again, then again, and finally walked into the kitchen where he found a glass drying by the sink.

  Jane wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She looked around the room again, noticing a small cardboard box beside the hideous chair. Her heart fluttered at the sight of the framed photo resting on the top.

  Nick had given away almost everything but this—

  Jane and Nick last Christmas at the Hillsborough house. Smiling for the camera, but not for each other, despite the proprietary arm Nick had draped over her shoulders. Jane had been out on tour for the previous three weeks. She had come back to find Nick antsy and distracted. He had kept insisting there was nothing wrong. Jane had kept begging him to speak. It had gone on like that for hours, sunset to sunrise, until finally, Nick had told Jane about meeting Laura Juneau.

  He had been smoking a cigarette outside the front gates of the Queller Bayside Home. This was after the cocaine bust in Alameda County. Both he and Andrew were serving their court-mandated sentence. That Nick had met Laura was pure happenstance. For months, she’d been looking for a way into Queller. She had approached countless patients and staff in search of someone, anyone, who could help find proof that her husband had been screwed over by the system.

  In Nick, Laura had found a truly sympathetic listener. For most of his life, he had been told by those in authority that he didn’t matter, that he wasn’t smart enough or from the right family or that he did not belong. Pulling in Andrew must have been even easier. Her brother had spent most of his life focused on his own wants and needs. Directing that attention toward another person’s tragedy was his way out of the darkness.

  I felt so selfish when I heard her story, Andrew had told Jane. I thought I was suffering, but I had no idea what true suffering really is.

  Jane wasn’t sure at what point Nick had brought in other people. That’s what he did best—collected stragglers, outsiders, people like him who felt that their voices were not being heard. By that Christmas night at the Hillsborough house when Nick had finally told Jane about the plan, there were dozens of people in other cities who were ready to change the world.

  Was it Laura who’d first come up with the idea? Not just Oslo, but San Francisco, Chicago, and New York?

  Queller Healthcare was one company in one state doing bad things to good people, but going public would infuse the company with enough cash to take their program of neglect nationwide. The competition was clearly working from the same business plan. Nick had told Jane stories about treatment facilities in Georgia and Alabama that were kicking patients out into the streets. An institution in Maryland had been caught dropping mentally incapacitated patients at bus stops in the harshest cold of winter. Illinois had a waitlist that effectively denied coverage for years.

  As Nick had explained, Martin would be the first target, but meaningful change required meaningful acts of resistance. They had to show the rest of the country, the rest of the world, what was happening to these poor, abandoned people. They had to take a page from ACT UP, the Weather Underground, the United Freedom Front, and shake these corrupt institutions to their very foundations.

  Which was fantastical.

  Wasn’t it?

  The truth was that Nick was always either outraged or excited about something. He wrote to politicians demanding action. Mailed angry letters to the editors of the San Francisco Gate. Volunteered alongside Jane at homeless shelters and AIDS clinics. He was constantly drawing ideas for incredible inventions, or scribbling notes about new business ventures. Jane always encouraged him because Nick following through on these ideas was another matter entirely. Either he thought the people who could help him were too stupid or too intransigent, or he would grow bored and move on to another thing.

  She had assumed that Laura Juneau was one of the things Nick would move on from. When she’d realized that this time was different, that Andrew was involved, too, that they were both deadly serious about their fantastical plans, Jane couldn’t back out. She was too afraid that Nick would go on without her. That she would be left behind. A niggling voice inside of Jane always reminded her that she needed Nick far more than he needed her.

  “Jinx.” Andrew was waiting for her attention. He was holding the Christmas photograph in his hands. He opened the back of the frame. A tiny key was taped to the cardboard.

  Jane caught herself before she could ask what he was doing. She glanced nervously around the room. Nick had told them cameras could be hidden in lamps, tucked inside potted plants or secreted behind air-conditioning vents.

  She realized now that Nick had removed all the vents. Nothing was left but the open mouths of the ducts that had been cut into the walls.

  It’s only paranoia if you’re wrong.

  Andrew handed Jane the key. She slipped it into her back pocket. He returned the photo to its place on the cardboard box.

  As quietly as possible, he pushed the heavy, overstuffed chair over onto its side.

  “What—” the word slipped out before she could catch it. Jane stared her curiosity into her brother.

  What the hell is going on?

  Andrew’s only response was to yet again put his finger to his lips.

  A groan escaped from his mouth as he got down on his knees. He yanked away the material along the bottom of the chair. Jane strangled back the questions that wanted to come. Instead, she watched her brother take apart the chair. He bent back a section of the metal springs. He reached deep into the
foam and pulled out a rectangular metal box that was about four inches thick and as tall and wide as a sheet of legal paper.

  Jane felt her muscles tense as she thought about all the things that could be inside the box: weapons, explosives, more photographs, all sorts of things that Jane did not want to see because Nick didn’t hide something unless he did not want it to be found.

  Andrew put the box on the floor. He sat back on his heels. He was trying to catch his breath, though all he’d done was tip over a chair. The harsh lights did his complexion no favors. He looked even sicker now. The dark circles under his eyes were rimmed with tiny dots of broken blood vessels. The wheeze in his breath had not abated.

  “Andy?”

  He tucked the box under his arm. “Let’s go.”

  “What if Nick—”

  “Now.”

  He shoved the chair back onto its legs. He waited for Jane to walk ahead of him, then he waited for her to lock the door.

  Jane kept her mouth closed as she crossed the balcony. She could hear their heavy footsteps against the concrete, the sharp click of her boots, the hard clap of Andrew’s loafers. His wheezing was more pronounced. Jane tried to keep the pace slow. They were on the first landing to the stairs when he put out his hand to stop her.

  Jane looked up at her brother. The wind rustled his hair. Sunlight cut a fine line across his forehead. She wondered how he was managing to stay upright. His face had taken on the pallor of a dead person.

  She felt safe to ask, “What are we doing, Andrew? I don’t understand why we had to leave. Shouldn’t we wait for Nick?”

  He asked, “Back at the house, did you hear Jasper telling those feds what a good man Father was?”

  Jane couldn’t joke about Jasper right now. She was terrified that he’d somehow get pulled into this thing that none of them could control. “Andrew, please, will you tell me what’s going on?”

  “Jasper defended Father because he’s just like him.”