“Listen,” he said. “Have you ever talked to your aunt Wave? Have you guys ever had any contact with her?”
“You mean Aunt Kate’s sister?” I said. “The one that lives on the commune or something? I always thought her name was Waverna.”
He put his hands up and tucked his hair behind his ears, and I could see that there were letters on all eight of his knuckles, though it wasn’t clear enough to read what they spelled.
“I’ve got her number,” Rusty said. “I think you should call her.”
12
THE MAIN INSTINCT was to run away from him as far as I could. Maybe it was the fault of a bad Skype connection, but his face had really freaked me out. Disturbing, I thought, so I went out in your mom’s car just to clear my head.
Either I believed my dad, that Rabbit was murdered, or else I didn’t believe my dad, and Rabbit died by accident.
Or else there was a third path: I didn’t believe my dad, but I did believe Rabbit was murdered.
I choose the third path, I thought to myself, and I cruised down the curve of Cedar Hill. It was snowing on top of the snow that was already layered on the ground, and a salt truck rumbled along in front of me.
Maybe because there was something so screwed up about Rusty’s eyes. There is a part of our brain—the amygdala—that knows things we don’t, but it has no words. But it can recognize danger, and that was what I felt when I saw Rusty’s face.
I choose the third path, I thought. And so I brought up my phone at a stoplight outside the dreadful towers of Cleveland Clinic. I texted El W with Rabbit’s phone.
Hey where r u?
It took a while for her to respond. I had passed the battlements of the hospital complex and was back in the post-post-industrial rubble of old mansions that had been abandoned and then converted into beauty parlors and convenience stores and so forth and then those closed and were boarded up and now the mansions were covered with dead vines and dirty snow and looked like they were returning to the earth. There were acres of vacant, snow-drifted lots that might have once been the parking for a warehouse or a factory. And then finally my phone blooped.
Who is this?
And I was rolling past this place that was called, seriously: Fresh Start, Inc. It was one of those cinder-block things from the 1970s, and all the windows were broken out, and it looked as if there may have been a bad fire a long time ago.
A friend of Rabbit
Really, I knew I shouldn’t be driving and texting. I shouldn’t have been driving at all. But the road unfolded out the window pretty smoothly, and my hands did the things they were supposed to do when operating a vehicle, and besides, this was a part of the city where you were not likely to see pedestrians, or police, or even other drivers. Seeing a car on this street would be like seeing Rusty’s face. Certain alarms would go off. But then another text came from El W:
You know the hookah bar on Euclid?
Yeah. What do u look like?
Green dress
13
SHE WAS SITTING by herself at one of the low booths and there was a hookah on the wide coffee table in front of her. Maybe thirty years old, white girl, and, like, twenty or so pounds overweight. She was wearing a green dress, without a doubt. It was like a dress from the 1950s or something, a deep cleavage neckline, and made of that kind of shiny material—satin? Silk? The hose of the hookah wound its way over her stomach and across her breasts and she drew from the mouthpiece and blew out a cloud of the flavored vapor. The hose was kind of intestine-like, umbilical. It wasn’t sexy. More like body horror.
“You’re the friend of Rabbit,” she said. She had short dark hair and a kind of harsh face. I was very aware of her nostrils.
“Yeah,” I said. And when she gestured, I sat down across from her. I could sense the snake of hookah pipe, and I made a conscious effort not to look at it. “I’m just making the rounds,” I said. “Rabbit was a really good friend.”
“My condolences,” she said. The tip of the hookah pipe was like the reed of a bassoon, and she put it to her lips as if she were drawing in a note. “He was in terrible shape,” she said. “It’s too bad nobody was able to help him sooner.”
“Yeah,” I said. My hands twitched a little as I reached in my pocket and took out a hundred-dollar bill. I set it down on the table next to the hookah pipe, but I tried to make the gesture casual. “Like,” I said. “Like, I’m just still trying to process my, like, grief. You know? And I was just wondering if you’d be willing to look at his phone. Maybe I’m not seeing everything that needs to be seen, you know?”
She was motionless. You’d think that she was the sort of person who would wear heavy makeup, but she didn’t. She looked thoughtfully at the phone, and then at the hundred dollars that I’d set down. She brushed the hose of the hookah aside. She took the money first, then Rabbit’s phone.
“What am I looking for?” she said. “I don’t even know what we’re talking about here.”
“I guess,” I said. “I’m just trying to understand his contacts. Because there’s so many people I don’t know, and I was, like, his best friend and I’m just…”
“Oh my God,” she said. “Are you the guy who kissed his mom?”
She started laughing, and then it turned into coughing, and then she put the pipe tip into her mouth and sucked up some more hookah and blew out the flavored smoke or vape or whatever.
“Oh, honey,” she said at last, and her voice softened. “I’m so sad for you.” She gave me what seemed like a genuinely sympathetic look.
I was blushing, but I didn’t say anything. Suddenly I realized that probably most of our friends and their friends and acquaintances had heard the story of Rabbit walking in to see me kissing his dying mom. His version of it.
“Look at you,” she said. “Your heart is broken.” She said this matter-of-factly, as if she were telling me that I had a stain on my shirt, and I didn’t say anything. Was my heart broken? I didn’t know. Maybe.
She leaned back. She had expended her sympathy, and now she relaxed again, settling into the gaudy pillows. She regarded the screen of Rabbit’s phone. “So what am I looking for?” she said. “I’m not going to go through every single contact.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just want to figure out. I mean, he sort of disappeared, and then he turned up dead, and I just…I’d like to figure out what happened to him.”
“Oh,” she said, and looked at me brightly. “You think he was murdered.”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “I just want to know.”
El W regarded me. Her eyes were lavender—colored contacts, I guessed—but it gave her a supernatural vibe, like she was a psychic or something, which I supposed was what she was going for. I figured if I asked her to read my palm, she would know how.
“That’s really sweet,” she said. “When I die, I hope there’s somebody who loves me enough to think that I must have been murdered.”
“Gergely,” I said, and tried to pronounce it the right way, the way Mike Mention had. Gair-gel-ee. “Do you know who that is?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, Rabbit!” she said softly, as if he had done something surprising and dirty. “That’s too bad.” Then she looked at me and shrugged. “Gergely,” she said, “is a creature of the night.”
“What does that mean?” I said.
“He’s just a mild sicko,” she said. “He likes to tie up teenage boys. So he’ll give you dope if you let him tie you up. Straight white boys preferred.”
She smiled at me apologetically. “Oh, sweetheart, you look so stricken!” she said. She gave my hand a pat. “You don’t want to think of your poor dead friend that way, I know. But Rabbit was pretty desperate.”
14
WHEN I GOT home my dad was awake. He was sitting on the couch in the TV room with the old afghan draped over him and a space heater blowing. Watching a chef competition on the Food Network. It was always kind of sad and disturbing to come across him
in this state, because his eyes were so bright and attentive and interested in the moronic action onscreen, and he had the gentle smile that you might wear if you wanted to signal: oh! please tell me more!
Maybe the kind of look he gave his patients? The kind of smile that convinced people that he was listening? And maybe a part of him was. A part of him was genuine and caring and compassionate and really wanted to help.
Then there was another part. Something as blank as a reptile, and I could see that, too, in the way he cocked his head as, on TV, one of the chefs was about to be eliminated.
I had been noticing it more and more, that blankness. Maybe because I was getting older—when you’re a kid you just accept that your dad is the way he is; you don’t question it when your mom calls him “spacey” and makes a beloved family joke out of it.
I could remember this one day. I was about eight or nine, and my mom and I came across him in the dining room. We were standing in the threshold and my mom suddenly stopped still. She put her hand out and softly touched me so I didn’t go forward. “Shhh,” she said, and pointed. Shhh. As if we had encountered a rare woodland creature.
Dustin was standing in front of a houseplant that was on a stand near the front window.
He had the watering can in his hand, but you could see that he’d forgotten that he planned to use it. He was just staring at this fern, apparently mesmerized by it, smiling his thoughtful smile, and my mom leaned into me confidentially. “Look,” she whispered. “Astral traveling.”
Astral traveling: A part of his mind wasn’t in his body anymore, and when my mom was alive she made this seem secret and mystical and kind of funny. Now that she was gone, it wasn’t so charming anymore. If a part of his mind wasn’t in his body, where was it?
I cleared my throat. “Hey,” I said from the doorway. I had been standing there for a few minutes by that time, and I didn’t want to startle him. “I’m home.”
He looked up, startled anyhow. Though I didn’t know if he was actually startled, or just pretending to be startled, or whether, for him, there wasn’t any difference between the two.
“Oh!” he said. “Hey! Did you just get in?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was just out for a while. Talking to a friend.”
“I’m glad to hear that. You really need to…cultivate a support group in times of”
“Right,” I said, and then the music on the television indicated that something dramatic was going to happen, and his eyes shifted. He stared and then seemed to catch himself. “Oh! Do you want to watch TV?” he said. “We can change the channel.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m not in the mood.”
“Oh?” he said, as if my mood was of interest. He looked at my face attentively. “Have you been,” he said. “The things we discussed, have you been”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I’m not trying to pressure you,” he said. “That’s the last thing I want.”
“I’m thinking about it,” I said.
And he gave me that same smile. That same interested smile he gave his TV show, and his patients, and for the first time I realized that it was not a human smile. It was a protective coloration. An adaptation of some sort. He would project it equally at a television, or a son, or a houseplant, but whatever was really inside him was crouched and peering out stealthily. “Let me know,” he said, “if you’d like to talk.”
15
I WAS IN the parking lot of Kaiser Permanente in your mom’s car and I was trying to call Dennis, but he didn’t pick up.
Why was I in the parking lot where I used to wait for Terri to get out of her sessions in the infusion room? No doubt Dustin would find it very psychologically symbolic, but the truth was I knew it was a place that had great privacy. You could sit here all day at the edge of the lot, where the fence was overgrown with vines and small trees, and no cop would ever hassle you.
Dennis’s voicemail: “Hey, it’s Dennis; leave me a message. Or better yet, send me a text.” So I texted him.
I really need to talk to you
I guess u know Rabbit is dead. I don’t know why u havnt called me maybe ur mad? But weird stuff is happening at home and I rly need 2 talk 2 u.
—
I started to say: I need your help. But then I decided I wanted to hold on to at least a little dignity, so I erased that.
I waited.
—
I turned the ignition on and let the heat blow for a little while. It was late afternoon, but the parking lot’s halogen lamps had already come on in the dim January light. I was the only car parked in the far back row, and feathery pieces of snow occasionally dropped from the trees. The thick honeysuckle vine that gripped the fence was coated in a film of ice, and parts of it were formed into hunched shapes by the accumulated snow.
—
I sent Dennis an email. WTF? You’re not going to respond?
I called his phone again. “Hey, it’s Dennis; leave me a message. Or better yet, send me a text.”
Where are u? Are u OK?!?
—
That feeling of calling and not being answered. That particular, peculiar sinking. The image of Rabbit thrashing around in the dark water of the Cuyahoga River.
I checked Dennis’s Facebook page, and there was a picture of him partying with two girls that had been posted two days ago. Fuck you, Dennis, I wrote in the comments section.
16
IT WAS AFTER nightfall, and I was still sitting in the parking lot.
I smoked cigarettes and snorted a little of the dope that I’d gotten from Xzavious Reinbolt, and I felt this weird sensation of being trapped—like, kind of a panicky hesitation that you couldn’t get out of, looping around and around in your mind until you felt like you’d been entirely mummy-wrapped in indecisiveness.
I don’t know why I felt so nervous. I took out the number that Rusty had given me. Aunt Waverna. Wave, he had called her. The back of my mind kept whispering: It’s really not a good idea.
—
It was a male voice that answered, and I almost hung up. The voice was deep, gravelly, blunt—the first thing I imagined was an old construction worker with a shaved head—and it surprised me to hear myself speak.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m looking for Wave?”
There was a long silence. And then the hostile voice said: “Who is this?”
“It’s her nephew,” I heard myself say. “My dad is her cousin?”
“Is that right?” the man said. “I don’t think you know what a nephew is.”
“Um,” I said. I had no idea what he was trying to get at, and I hesitated. I only heard my voice distantly as it spoke. “My dad’s name is Dustin Tillman. She’ll know who that is. And I’m his son. Aaron. I guess I kind of really need to talk to her.”
Another pause. “How’d you get this number?” the guy said.
“I found it in my dad’s address book,” I said. Which seemed like a good enough lie.
“I kind of doubt that,” the man said. “But tell me what you want her to know, and I’ll give her the message.”
“It’s not a message,” I said. “I guess I just need to talk to her. To ask her, like, advice? I mean, I think it’s kind of urgent.”
“Hm,” the man said. “What kind of urgent is it? The urgent that she’s-inherited-a-million-dollars kind of urgent? The kind of urgent where your dad’s dead and you need to know how to clean up the body?”
“Um,” I said, and put my hand through my hair.
“Listen, son,” he said. His voice was almost kind, in an unfriendly way—like a boss who is trying to gently explain to you why you’re so stupid. “First of all, you’re not her nephew, you’re her first cousin once removed. She doesn’t know you. She hasn’t been in touch with your dad for thirty years. What do you think would inspire her to come to the phone and give you urgent advice?”
“Rusty gave me her number,” I said. “Rusty said I should call
her.”
I guess that was the right answer, because it seemed to give him pause. A long silence emanated from his end of the phone line. Then, at last, he sighed.
“I’ll take down your information,” he said. “If she wants to talk to you she’ll call you back.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Let me get a pencil,” he said.
17
I GOT TO Rabbit’s house at about midnight.
It was hard to park in his driveway—so many bad vibes—but it seemed like the best way.
The most unobtrusive, because of Cleveland Heights cops. You don’t want to run into them.
The driveway had been cleared, which was strange since the walks hadn’t been scooped. But I guessed maybe they had a service that was still clearing the drive, even after both of them were dead. That was a creepy thought.
His mom’s car wasn’t in the garage, of course. I was aware that he had probably driven it that night. That night: I guessed that he must have parked somewhere near the path below the bridge, and probably the car had been towed away at some point. Now, most likely, it was sitting in a west side junkyard.
So I slid your mom’s car into the garage and turned off the lights. The neighbors’ houses were all dark, but still when I got out of the car I crouched and crept a little. The one neighbor was a mean old Irish cat lady who had once called the police on me and Rabbit and Dennis because we were sitting in Rabbit’s yard listening to hip-hop music she found offensive. The other neighbors were an aloof religious black family who generally pretended that Rabbit and his mom didn’t exist.