And underneath that, I knew I had to try.
“Okay, we’ll wait until tomorrow,” I said. “But after that, I’m killing him.”
I called the hospital from my bedroom. The intake nurse had put my name and cell number in Aubrey’s chart along with the lie that I was family and his contact person. The person on the other end couldn’t tell me much except that Aubrey had been admitted and they were keeping him under observation. When they offered to have the doctor call me back when he had a minute, I said yes and let the call drop.
All around me, Eric’s things loomed like ghosts. His shirts, his furniture, his magazines. I turned on my laptop, checked my e-mail, Googled unsuccessfully for anything that talked about gunshots being fired in the Commerce City suburb of Denver, and tried to think of something else I should look for, some piece of data that would turn the whole world right again. I wound up staring at the screen with a feeling that there wasn’t enough air in the room.
I wanted to cry, but I was also tired of crying. I wanted to scream and throw things and make the world be fair, but I didn’t know what I meant by the world anymore. The fact was I’d let myself look forward to this day, to after-Coin. I’d let myself imagine a future where maybe I’d have friends, even a lover, and money and safety and options. Instead of that, I was locked down, hiding under Eric’s undetectable protections while the people who’d killed him walked free.
The disappointment and despair were as familiar as coming home.
I wasn’t sure until the second time that I’d actually heard the knock at the door. I said to come in. Ex walked in slowly, his hands in his pockets, his eyes shifting onto anything besides me sitting cross-legged on the bed. He leaned against the wall beside the dresser. From where I was, his face was both toward me and echoed in profile in the mirror. He looked like a magazine cover.
“How serious are you about going after Coin?” he asked.
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. After a few seconds, he seemed to find an answer in the silence. He drew a long breath and let it out slowly.
“I think that you shouldn’t,” he said.
“I kind of have to,” I said.
“Aubrey.”
“That’s part of it, yeah. I got him into this. If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t have been so vulnerable. He wouldn’t be where he is now.”
“And you’re in love with him.”
I looked down at my laptop screen.
“Things with him really aren’t as straightforward as all that,” I said, trying to lighten the tone. “Aubrey and me…I don’t know. I have a problem dating someone with a wife. Maybe it’ll work out. Maybe it won’t. But I won’t know as long as he’s in a coma, right?”
“You do what you have to do to protect the people you care about,” Ex said.
I smiled and nodded because I thought he was talking about me and Aubrey. I thought the gray, sorrowful tone in his voice was him giving up on talking me out of trying again. I didn’t understand that he was actually apologizing until morning came and I found out Ex had gone and taken the guns and all of Eric’s books with him.
Fifteen
The rage felt good. I broke every plate in the kitchen, china shattering against the tile floor. I screamed every obscene word and phrase I knew and then started inventing. I tipped the chairs over and threw a full coffee cup against the living room wall, leaving a dark stain on the paint and a gouge in the plaster. My muscles felt warm and loose and I was about three inches taller than normal, the righteous anger puffing my body larger and stronger and making me sure of myself. I nursed it because I knew that when it was gone, there wouldn’t be anything left.
Midian and Chogyi Jake didn’t try to stop me or restrain me or talk sense. Midian just sat on the couch, his wrists still bound, his belly still bandaged. Chogyi Jake followed me in silence, standing witness to my violence with the same impartiality he’d had during my meltdown at the shopping mall. I shouted at him a few times too, but he didn’t react at all, and it started to take the momentum out of my tantrum.
When I lost that too, I sat on the stone hearth in front of the empty fireplace-my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands-and cried. The house was trashed. It was going to take hours just to clean it up. Part of me wanted to go get the broom and dustpan and start putting it all back together, if only to prove that I had a little control over something. Most of me just wanted to sit there and give up.
“He meant well,” Chogyi Jake said. His voice was soft.
“He’s a fucking asshole,” I managed between sobs.
“He’s a fucking asshole who meant well.”
I glanced up. Coming from anyone else, the amusement would have been an insult. Coming from Chogyi Jake, it seemed like compassion. Midian coughed, then winced. His bound hands went to his side. Shirtless, he looked like something from Jim Henson’s worst nightmare, his flesh ropy and dark and implausible. The bleeding had slowed, but whatever Coin had done to him was a long way from being healed. The same could be said of all of us.
“I thought we couldn’t leave the house,” I said. “I thought it wasn’t safe.”
“It isn’t,” Chogyi Jake said. “Ex is risking himself to keep you from harm.”
“Or to keep me under his fucking control.”
“Yeah, well,” Midian croaked. He always sounded like something in his throat was about to come loose. “Who’d have guessed a Jesuit priest would be paternalistic.”
“Ex-priest,” I said.
“Whatever.”
“Rest,” Chogyi Jake said. “This will all be much better if we can regain some sense of our center.” His eyes were bloodshot. I should have been taking care of him, not the other way around.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m tired,” he said. From him, it was like an admission that he was near collapse. I realized that I didn’t know how deeply our failure with Coin had hurt him. I felt bad that I hadn’t thought to ask.
The house had become a submarine, dead on the ocean floor. Everything looked the same, apart from the damage I’d done. But the air was different. The light that pressed in at the windows trapped us. Whatever magic Eric had put on the building to keep us safe, I could feel it weakening, and I didn’t know how much of that was true and how much was just my own growing fear and hopelessness.
I sat in the kitchen, my stomach too knotted for food or coffee. Chogyi Jake went to each of the windows and doors, chanting and pouring out lines of rice and salt. Propping up the wards. Buying us time.
I pictured Aubrey sitting across from me. His honey-colored hair. His bright eyes. His fingers closed around mine. In my imagination, all the anger and weirdness from our failed date was gone. I wanted badly for it to be true. Tears ran down my cheeks. I let them.
“I blew it,” I said to my imaginary Aubrey. “I don’t know how I managed to fuck everything up again, just like always.”
My hands were rubbing my thighs, the palms pressing into the denim hard enough for the friction to warm them. To hurt a little.
“I think I have to run away now,” I said. “I’ve lost you and Ex. And Midian, kind of. I mean since he turns out to be one of the bad guys, that kind of takes him off my assets column. So…”
My hand was tapping on my thigh, just a light movement, like a kid tugging at her mother’s dress. I watched my own fingers, my mind mostly empty, but aware of something happening in the background. Some thought that was struggling to bubble up from my subconscious.
“I’m down to nothing,” I said. “Taking on Coin now is a hundred times dumber than when we did it before. I don’t have the books. I don’t have the rifles. I don’t have the magic bullets. I’ve lost…”
I put my hand into the pocket of my jeans, looking for something without knowing quite what it was. It came
