The Killing Circle

“Evelyn Sanderman. Pam Turgenov. Who else have you been?”

Angela crosses her arms. “’The Subway Driver’.”

“And very fine it is. Though not entirely yours.”

“What you did, you did it to be recognized.”

“That’s not true.”

“No?”

“I did it to have something that was mine.”

“Even if it wasn’t.”

“Yes. Even if it wasn’t.”

“That’s not what interests me.”

“What does?”

“People,” she says. “People are my interest.”

It was Angela’s belief that no matter how many times she changed her life—or sent her writing out under others’ names—he will eventually find her. Most recently, on the same day she had lunch with me, she went to get into her car in an underground parking lot to find a message written on her windshield in lipstick. Her lipstick. Taken from where she left it in her bathroom.

“He’s been in here?”

“And he wants me to know he has. That he can come back whenever he wants.”

“What did it say? On your windshield?”

“You are mine.”

At first, she thought his surveillance was meant only to threaten her. There was, she supposed, a pleasure he took in knowing her life was shrinking into little more than the exercise of nerves, the fidgety survival instincts of vermin. Now, though, she thinks there is also a logical purpose to his reminders: the traces he leaves may one day work to implicate her. Eventually something of his will stick, and it will be taken as hers. Just as I have begun to think of myself as suspect instead of victim, so has she.

As if to confirm this very thought, I look past Angela’s shoulder and notice something on the kitchen counter. Angela turns to look at it too.

“Where’d you get that?” I say.

“It was stuffed in my mailbox this morning.”

“It’s a Yankees cap.”

“Another one of his messages, I guess. Though I can’t figure out what it means. Are you okay? You look like you’re going to pass out.”

I’ve got both my hands clenched to the back of a chair to hold myself up. The room, the city outside the window, all of it teeter-tottering.

“That cap,” I say. “It’s the same one Petra was wearing when she disappeared.”

Angela looks at me. A wordless expression that proves her innocence more certainly than any denial she might make. Even the greatest actors’ performances show signs of artifice at their edges—it’s what makes drama dramatic. A little something extra to reach all the way to the cheap seats. But what Angela shows me is so confused, so without the possibility of consideration that it clears any residue of suspicion I held against her.

“It’s going to be alright,” I say, taking a step closer.

“Who is doing this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why us?”

“I don’t know.”

Outside, the sky dulls as it begins its fading increments of dusk, and beneath it the city takes on an insistent specificity, the streets and rooftops and signage coming into greater focus. Both of us turn to take it in. And both of us thinking the same thing.

He’s out there.

The grid patterns of skulking traffic, the creeping streetcars, the pedestrians who appear to be standing still.

He’s one of them.

I wake in the night to the digital billboards along the lakeshore flashing blues and reds and yellows over the ceiling. Money lights.

Sitting up straight against the headboard, I watch Angela sleep, her body curled and still as a child’s. I haven’t been with another woman since Tamara died, and it’s funny—perhaps the funniest of all the funny revelations of this day—that it is Angela whose hair I stroke back from her face as she sleeps.

I watch her for a time. Not as a lover watches his beloved in the night. I look down on her shape as a non- presence, a netherworld witness. A ghost.

But a ghost that needs to go to the bathroom. I fold back the sheet from my legs and slide to the bottom of the bed. Angela’s bare feet hang over the side. Pale, blue-veined.

I’m about to lift myself from the mattress when something about these feet holds me still. Three missing toes. The littlest piggy and the two next to it nothing more than healed-over vacancies, an unnatural rounding of the foot that sends a shiver of revulsion down to where my own toes touch the floor.

Angela may go by any number of different names, but the absent digits of her foot tie her to an unmistakable identity. The little girl in her story. The one who lost the same toes to frostbite when she slept overnight in the barn when her foster father disappeared into the woods.

That girl, the one with an unspeakable secret.

This girl, sleeping next to me.

22

This may be hard to believe, to accept as something that a person in a real situation would do (as opposed to what I am unfortunately not: a character in a story), but the reason I don’t ask Angela, having seen her diminished foot, if she is, in fact, the grown-up version of the little girl in her journal of horrors, is that I don’t want her to think I am so unsophisticated a reader. To assume that missing toes prove that whatever happened to the Sandman’s girl was autobiography and not fiction—a fiction that, like all fiction, is necessarily made of stitched-together bits of lived as well as invented experience—would reveal me as that most lowly drooler of the true-crime racks, the literal-minded rube who demands the promise of Based on a True Story! from his paperbacks and popcorn flicks: the unimaginative.

And why do I care if she held this impression? Pride, for one thing. I may be a charlatan author, but I’m still a good reader. Still on the endangered species list of those who know it is only foolish gossip to connect the dots between a writer’s life and the lives she writes.

There is this, along with another reason I keep any questions of frostbitten piggies to myself as I step out of her bedroom to find Angela pouring me a cup of coffee: I’m lonely.

“Sleep all right?” she asks, sliding a World-Class Bitch mug over the counter toward me.

“Fine. Bad dreams, though.”

“How bad?”

“The usual bad.”

“Me too. It’s why I’m up. That, and I have to be at work in less than an hour.”

I’d forgotten she has a job. I’d forgotten anyone has a job. Another of the side effects of the writer’s life. You start to think everybody can professionally justify shuffling around the house all day, waiting for the postman, pretending that staring out the window and wondering what to toss in the microwave for