“Anemic? Diabetic?” asked Leckbruge.
“I just…I just felt weak for a second. I’m fine.”
“I’m not altogether sure you are. And I would like to help you.”
“I don’t want your help.”
“Look, when you were raped—”
“I wasn’t raped,” she said, and with the last of her strength she stood, using her arm to lift herself to her feet. His hand fell away and quickly he tried to retake hold of her shoulder, but whether it was to help her or restrain her she couldn’t tell. His eyes, once sympathetic, seemed to have grown cold.
“Please, Laurel, you don’t want to go home now.”
“You’re wrong. I do.”
“Stay. Sit. Please. I need you to stay for just another moment. I can’t…I can’t let you leave like this.”
She breathed deeply and held the air inside her for a long moment, and slowly the world began to return to focus. “This sounds all about you,” she murmured. “Why is it that you middle-aged men all think the world revolves around you?”
His lips curled reflexively into a boyish grin. “Au contrare. What torments the middle-aged man most is that he has discovered the world does not, in fact, revolve around him. That, alas, is what ails us.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
He glanced at his watch. “I would like to continue this discussion.”
“And you may: with the Burlington city lawyers. But not with me.”
“It need not be antagonistic.”
“It is if you bully me.”
“I don’t mean to bully you. Honestly, Laurel. I don’t. There are others who might. But I personally would not bully anyone—let alone someone who has endured all that you have. Trust me.”
Laurel thought about this. Was he insinuating that he knew people who might be willing to intimidate her? “Was I just threatened?” she asked, more nonplussed than fearful.
“I don’t think so,” said Leckbruge. “But, please, make me one promise. Will you?”
“Unlikely.”
“I’ll ask it anyway. If you change your mind and realize the reasonableness of my client’s request, will you call me?”
She gazed at him, and he raised his eyebrows above those gigantic yellow spectacles in a gesture that may actually have been sadness. Then he looked at his watch once more and sat back down on his stool. She realized as she left the bar that she had never even tasted her wine.
LAUREL FOUND the front door to her apartment was partway open when she returned, and initially she thought nothing of it. She presumed Talia was home. If she imagined anything precise, it may have been her beautiful friend reading on the couch, her iPod in her lap with its cords snaking up to her ears, her head and her shoulders bobbing slightly to the music. Instead, however, she understood as she pushed in the door that Talia wasn’t there and they had been robbed. She stood in the frame, momentarily stunned, her eyes taking an inventory of the room. The window to their small balcony was open and the chair beside it overturned. The porcelain table lamp by the couch—a delicately hand-painted, Chinese fixture that had sat for years in her parents’ living room before her mother had redecorated after her father had died—was smashed on the floor. The coffee table had been upended, the books and newspapers tossed to the ground like so much recyclable detritus. And Talia’s small mandarin writing desk had been shoved closer to the door to their kitchen, as if someone had pushed it aside while ransacking its single drawer. The computer was still upon it, apparently untouched, and she was relieved they hadn’t stolen that, too—though she still had no idea of what precisely had been taken.
There was no way she was simply going to charge in there alone, and as quietly as she could she brought her backpack up over her shoulders and reached inside for the fist-size canister of pepper spray that she knew was sitting somewhere at the bottom. She had carried one with her wherever she went ever since she had returned to Vermont to finish her sophomore year of college. She had never used it, and she rarely thought about it: She wasn’t even sure she remembered how to operate the spray mechanism on this particular model, since she had barely glanced at the directions when she had pulled it from its clear plastic sarcophagus. Still, she was relieved she had it with her now, and when she had the device cradled safely in her hand she stood perfectly still. She feared she had made too much noise already. She didn’t even dare cross the hall to knock on Whit’s door. And so she remained there, absolutely motionless, and listened. At one point, she felt sufficiently courageous that she considered tiptoeing back down the stairs and leaving the house, but the whole place felt so still. Finally, when there hadn’t been a sound from the apartment for almost ten minutes, she cautiously stepped inside. It had become increasingly evident that whoever had been there was gone.
She saw the doors to both Talia’s and her bedrooms were open, and she peered into each room. They seemed undisturbed. She pushed her bedroom door flat against the wall, prepared to use the pepper spray and run if she felt the slightest resistance behind it. She saw her CD player on the bureau and her small television set on a shelf in the armoire. She didn’t have a lot of jewelry, but the teak box with her earrings and bracelets and a couple of necklaces was still atop her dresser. So was her own iPod. She checked the bottom drawer of the bureau, and sure enough her checkbook and passport were still underneath her sweaters—which were, as she kept them, all perfectly folded. Everything was exactly the way she had left it Friday morning.
She sat down on her mattress, wondering what it meant that nothing seemed to have been stolen. And then it hit her: Nothing had been taken because the only thing the intruder had wanted was in her cabinet at the UVM darkroom. The snapshots, too, because she had wanted to keep everything together. Suddenly, even the way Terrance Leckbruge had tried to detain her at the wine bar seemed ominous—because, of course, it was. While they had been together downtown, Leckbruge had known someone was at her apartment, and he had wanted to keep her with him as long as possible while his associate, whoever it was, tried to find Bobbie Crocker’s negatives and prints. She recalled the way he had checked his watch and tried to prevent her from leaving.
“Laurel?”
She looked up, and there was Talia in the doorway to her bedroom.
“Someone was here,” Laurel told her, her voice a stunned monotone. “Someone trashed our apartment. They were after Bobbie Crocker’s negatives.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Something’s in them. The negatives. Something’s in one of the negatives I haven’t printed yet. Or something important is in one of the ones I have, and I didn’t recognize its meaning.”
“Laurel,” said Talia again, though this time it wasn’t a question. She was wearing a gray sweatshirt with the words “Make my day” printed on it, and there was a deep bruise forming along the back of her left hand and a string of badly applied Band-Aids on her right. Her hair was a rat’s nest, and she looked exhausted. Instantly, Laurel remembered: paintball. She was supposed to have helped Talia chaperone the youth group’s paintball outing that day.
“Oh, Talia, I forgot. I am so sorry. I really blew it, didn’t I? I don’t know what to say. It’s just been a completely weird, completely awful day. I blew off my best friend, and now I’ve come home to find our apartment was trashed by—”
“Gwen’s dog.”
“What?”
“Gwen is away this weekend, and she asked me to walk Merlin,” Talia grunted, as she limped over to the edge of the bed and sat down beside Laurel, trying to massage one of her sore shoulders with her hand. Gwen was the aspiring veterinarian who lived in their apartment house, and Merlin was the good-natured but gigantic foo dog—part canine, part lion—that Gwen continued to insist was a mere mutt from the animal shelter. “You know, I hurt everywhere,” Talia continued. Then: “Don’t feel guilty. No, strike that. Do feel guilty. Feel guilty as hell: I could really have used you today.”
Laurel felt like they were havin
g two conversations at once: paintball and what had happened to their apartment. “Gwen’s dog made this mess?” she asked.
Talia nodded. “About, like, fifteen minutes ago. It’s my fault. I’d just finished walking him. Actually, he walked me. I hobbled. Anyway, I thought I heard a noise in our apartment, so I went upstairs to give you hell for leaving me alone in the woods with a dozen teenagers with semiautomatic Piranha-brand paintball rifles. You didn’t answer, but there was definitely something scratching around inside—”
“There was someone here? Did you see him?”
“Not someone. Some animal. It was a squirrel.”
“A squirrel,” said Laurel.
“Yeah, our window was wide open, and a squirrel was running along the couch when I opened the door. And Merlin saw it and went nuclear. Chased it everywhere. Toppled that nice lamp of yours, banged off the coffee table. Twice. Practically dove off the balcony when the son of a bitch scooted down the maple tree there. And I was, I am sorry to say, far too banged up to move with the kind of haste I would have needed to grab Merlin before he and the squirrel did in our living room.”
“So we weren’t robbed.”
“Not likely,” said Talia. “Not by the squirrel, anyway. I saw him leave, and he left empty-handed. Or empty-clawed.”
“There wasn’t anyone here.”
“Nope. Just the squirrel. Man, I wish I’d had my Piranha. That squirrel would have gone through the winter with neon-colored fur.”
“You know, I think I did leave the window open this morning.”
“So you were home then. I thought I heard you return from David’s. And still you forgot we were supposed to play paintball?”
“Really, Talia, I wish I could make it up to you. I just…I just forgot.”
“Where were you? You didn’t answer your cell. You weren’t at David’s—”
“You spoke to David?”
“No, he wasn’t home, either. Were you with him?”
Laurel shook her head.
“Then where were you?”
“The darkroom.”
“You were in the darkroom on a day like today!”
“Well, I also met a man—”
“An older man, no doubt,” Talia said.
“Yes, but it wasn’t like that. It was a lawyer who wants Bobbie’s pictures. That’s where I was just now. I was meeting with him because he has a client who believes all those photos belong to her. And I am simply not going to give them up. They’re too important! And…”
“Go on.”
Laurel suddenly had the sense that she was talking too much and she heard a frenetic urgency in her tone that she could tell from Talia’s gaze was alarming her friend. And so she stopped speaking. It was all too complicated to explain, anyway.
After a moment, Talia looked away from her and then laid back on the bed. “I think I’m just going to stay here and die,” she said, clearly hoping to direct the subject away from Bobbie Crocker’s photographs. “Would you mind? There is no part of my body that isn’t sore.”
“Was it that awful?”
“Awful? It was spectacular! The only thing in the world that’s more fun than paintball is really good sex. And trust me: The sex has to be really, really good.”
“Are you kidding?”
“I’m not. It was awesome. You have no idea what you missed. I may never be able to sit up again. I may stay like this forever. But it was worth every gash and cut and bruise. We started out really badly. Whit came along—”
“Whit?”
“Uh-huh. Thank God. I needed another chaperone, you know—and a captain for a second team. And Whit took it incredibly seriously—more seriously than I did. It is so clearly a guy thing. Women can do it. But it’s not instinctive with us the way it is with guys. He took a team and I took a team. And for the first two hours he just spanked us. I mean spanked us hard. It was pretty harsh, trust me. But then I figured it out. I just, like, totally got it: You actually need to view it like chess at first and plan your moves. And then, all at once, as soon as you’re in position, you stop thinking and you pretend you’re at the wildest party you’ve ever been at in your whole life, you’re on the dance floor, and you are totally out of control. You just give it up completely. And once I understood that? Well, Whit was a dead man for the rest of the day. We were unstoppable, and I didn’t have the kids on my team who live for their PlayStations. I did it with soldiers like Michelle. You know Michelle, right? Shy little Michelle? Well, we took no prisoners. None. Zip, zero, nada.”
“It all sounds sort of violent,” said Laurel.
“Sort of? Hello? I found myself snaking through a quarter mile of mud and pricker bushes on my stomach so I could sneak up behind a half-dozen teenagers I’m supposed to be mentoring in the ways of the Lord. When I rose up to nail them, I heard myself screaming they better drop their rifles or their brains would be roadkill.”
“Did you really say that?”
Talia paused. “Actually, I think I said something much worse. But we won’t go there.”
“And they dropped their rifles?”
“Well, if you want to know the truth, I didn’t really give them the option. I think Matthew tried to get off a round before I gunned him down. But he didn’t have a prayer. None of them did. I torched them all. Next time, you have to join us. You simply must.”
Laurel smiled politely and hoped she looked sincere. But she wasn’t sure that she did. “Okay,” she murmured. “I’ll really try.”
“I’m serious,” Talia said, exhaling loudly, contentedly, despite her aches and pains. “And I know I owe you a lamp. Is there any other wreckage? I dragged Merlin back downstairs before I could really survey the damage.”
“Just the lamp. And you don’t owe me anything. Don’t even think about it.”
Talia pushed her ragged body back up into a sitting position, resting her weight on her elbows. It was apparent to Laurel that this small feat had taken serious effort. “Well, I’ll buy us a new one. And I should clean up this mess myself. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can bend over.”
“You stay here,” Laurel insisted. “I can pick up the pieces. Do you want something to drink?”
“Morphine.”
“Will wine be okay? Or juice?”
“Wine’s fine. But crush an analgesic in it…or morphine.”
“Okay,” she said, hoping they really did have a bottle of wine in the kitchen. She honestly wasn’t sure.
“Tell me something,” Talia said suddenly.
“Sure.”
“Why haven’t I seen you since you got back from your mom’s?”
“Is that true?” she asked, though she knew that it was.
“I can’t believe you’re pissed at me,” Talia continued, “because I am far too adorable for anyone ever to be pissed at me. At least for more than, like, a minute. But someone with a less-healthy ego might wonder what’s going on here. I mean, I haven’t seen you since before you left for Long Island, and then today you left me to the lions.”
Laurel felt an eddy of autumn wind in the room, and so she closed the window and locked it. She thought for a moment before answering, because she was of two minds. On the one hand, she had always taken a small amount of pride, perhaps unjustified, in the reality that she was attentive and responsible in the eyes of her family and friends. She didn’t let people down. On the other hand, she wondered if the reason she forgot about paintball wasn’t that she was so focused on Bobbie Crocker’s work; perhaps it was because a part of her understood that the last thing in the world anyone should expect of her was a desire to run through the woods with a toy gun. Perhaps she forgot because Talia should never have asked her to join the group in the first place.
“I didn’t mean to leave you to the lions. And I’m certainly not mad at you. Why would I be?” she asked. She recognized a small iciness in her voice and did nothing to rein it in.
“So you’ve simply been busy.”
“Yes.”
/> “With David?”
“No.”
“Not with your dead homeless man, I hope.”
“Why do people refer to him that way? He wasn’t homeless! We found him a home—”
“Hey, Laurel, chill. I didn’t mean—”
“And why must being homeless be anyone’s sole distinguishing feature? I notice you didn’t describe him as a photographer. Or a veteran. Or a comic. He was very funny, you know. Frankly…”
“Frankly what?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“There’s nothing to say. Just…nothing.”
Talia lurched slowly to her feet and narrowed her eyes as if to say, I’ve had enough of this, thank you very much. Laurel hadn’t noticed it before, but the girl had a gibbous-shaped bruise the color of eggplant on the side of her neck. “I think I’m going to go take a hot bath,” Talia said quietly. “I can get my own wine.” Then her roommate limped past her into the kitchen, where Laurel heard her reaching into the cabinet for a glass and into the refrigerator for the wine. Laurel waited, unmoving, until she heard their bathroom door close. Talia did not exactly slam it, but she gave the door a demonstrable thwack.
She had a nagging sense that she didn’t feel quite badly enough that Talia and she had snapped at each other—that she just might have overreacted when her friend had referred to Bobbie Crocker as homeless. But this had been a stressful week, hadn’t it? And it had been a very long day, right? And, besides, what did any of it matter when Crocker’s work—when her work—might be in jeopardy? When there remained negatives left to print? The most important thing to do now, Laurel decided, was to return to the UVM darkroom and find a secure place for Bobbie Crocker’s negatives and photographs. Just because someone hadn’t tried to take them that afternoon didn’t mean someone wouldn’t try to steal them tomorrow.
The rest—Talia and David and Mr. Terrance J. Leckbruge—would just have to wait. The mess on the living room floor would just have to wait. And so she shouted through the bathroom door that she was leaving again, and then she started down the old Victorian’s creaky wooden stairs.