When he went to the bar for another round, he ordered two rum and Cokes. It tasted like crap-Jameson, neat, with a chaser of Guinness had been his poison of choice-but since Caroline was drinking it, she wouldn’t be able to smell the alcohol on his breath.
After several more rum and Cokes, Caroline hauled him onto the dance floor, and they swayed and bumped against each other, jostled by the sweating couples around them.
Caroline hooked her arms around his neck. “I like you,” she shouted.
“I like you too,” he said, and they kissed.
It was so good to feel something, he thought. To feel anything.
They woke up together the next morning on Caroline’s futon. “Was this a mistake?” she asked.
“Probably.”
“You weren’t supposed to say that.”
She made him breakfast-cereal, scrambled eggs, coffee, toast with peanut butter. “Do you ever think of leaving Cambridge?”
“To go where?” he asked.
“ California. I went through a little town south of San Francisco once, Rosarita Bay. It’s a sleepy little place, very quiet. It’s not very pretty or anything, but for some reason it draws me. I love the idea of making a fresh start there, no one knowing who I am.”
“Sounds nice.” His head was pounding; he could have used a drink.
“Not tempted to join me someday?” she said hesitantly. He must have appeared alarmed, because she laughed and got a little defensive. “That was impulsive. Stupid. Never mind.”
“Not stupid. Just sudden.”
“Too sudden?”
He looked at Caroline. He did not know this woman. He was not in love with her, and she was not in love with him. But they might grow to love each other. It was possible. It seemed like the first opening of possibility in his life in a very long time, a fissure. “Maybe not.”
She had to go to Chez Henri soon. She was pulling a double shift, covering for another waitress. “We’ll talk more tomorrow?”
“We’ll talk more tomorrow,” he told her.
He was awoken before dawn. He had gone to bed early and fell dead asleep-the first good night’s sleep he’d had in months, hangover-induced, no doubt. On the other end of the phone was Pritchett. “Want to come down here?”
“Here” was Marcella Ahn’s house. When Toua drove up to it, a fire truck, an ambulance, two black-and-whites, and an unmarked police car were parked out front.
“What’s going on?” he asked Pritchett, his former partner.
The inside of the house had been trashed, furniture overturned and broken, upholstery shredded, wine bottles smashed onto the floors and splattered on the rugs, paintings tattered, clothes scissored into strips, mirrors shattered. Can’t Stop. Won’t Stop was spray-painted on one wall, Cunt on the front door.
“Anything taken?” Toua asked.
“Strange, not much,” Pritchett said, “just a laptop and some notebooks and fountain pens. We found them down the street in a dumpster. Notice anything else out of whack?”
“Yeah.”
Marcella Ahn was in the ambulance, a blanket over her shoulders, shaking and crying. She had been out of town for a reading, returning to find her house in ruins. “Do you believe me now?” she said to Toua. “Do you believe me now? It’s her. I’m sure of it.”
“What’s this all about?” Pritchett asked him.
He had been a fool. He had trusted her, had let himself get lulled into careless affection for her.
Based on Toua’s statement and case reports, they arrested Caroline Yip, and, knowing that with no record she’d make bail, they issued a restraining order against her.
It had been a decent ruse, and it might have worked, everyone believing the MOD were on another search-and-rampage mission but had been spooked by something-a noise, a neighbor-into leaving before they could gut the house of its possessions, except for one small but critical error. Can’t Stop. Won’t Stop, besides being unusually well-punctuated with apostrophes and a period, had been sprayed with blue paint. The MOD were Bloods-red bandanna. Blue was the color of the Crips, their rivals.
In the end, the charges against Caroline were dropped. She had no alibi for the hours after the restaurant closed at 10:30, but there was little evidence to prosecute her, no prints, no eyewitnesses of a woman with long hair on a bicycle, nothing incriminating found in her house like a spray-paint can or soiled clothes.
Nonetheless, Caroline Yip chose to leave town. Toua saw her as she was packing up a U-Haul van to drive to California.
“She used you, you know.”
“I think if anyone did, you used me,” Toua said.
“You have a funny way of interpreting things. Don’t you get it? She faked it. She set me up. Set you up. Hasn’t that occurred to you? Marcella invented this insidious plot to frame me and run me out of town.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Who knows. What makes one person want to destroy another? Huh? She has everything, yet it’s not enough.”
“There’s no point in pretending anymore.”
“She’s a vulture. She has some sick bond to me. She needs to humiliate me. She needs my misery. She can’t function without it.”
“You need help.”
She slammed the doors to the van shut. “I feel sorry for you,” Caroline said. “You missed it. It could have been something real, and you missed it.”
He watched her maneuver the van down the driveway and onto the street, then headed inside the studio to pack his own possessions. He had things to do. First on the list, he needed a bed for his new apartment.
Could Marcella Ahn have been that smart and calculating? He hadn’t looked at the water bill very closely. She could have doctored it. She could have known all along that he’d been on the MOD task force. She could have wrecked her own home, orchestrating everything to this outcome.
He picked up his duffel bag. He didn’t want to believe it. Believing it would mean that Caroline was right, he’d missed his chance to emerge from the deadness he felt. It was easier to believe, all things considered, that he’d been betrayed by her. She was a devious person, a liar, conniving and malicious, rent with envy, hopelessly bitter. It was comforting to think so. He could live with that kind of evil. It had a passion and direction he could understand, even a touch of poetry.
THE COLLAR
BY ITABARI NJERI
Roxbury
Hey. You better snap the fuck out if it,” Nina told him, popping her fingers in a circle around his head. “She’s not your friend. She’s the en-na-mee,” Nina half sang. Didn’t think she had to emphasize the obvious to a thirty-two-year-old ex-Marine on his way to a doctorate from M.I.T. But the more she heard, the more she wondered about the terms of discharge and criteria for admission.
Isaac faced an assault charge that was aggravated, Nina discovered, by stupidity: violation of a restraining order.
“You don’t know to cross the street if you see her?”
“She was boarding the same bus.”
“What’s your point?” That’s all they had at Dudley Station, transfer point to anywhere in Boston -buses. “Take another one.”
And his stab at “resolving things”-on the crowded #1 to Cambridge -happened after the arraignment.
At the arraignment, his best friend showed up with both sets of grandparents, a trio of uncles, and a chorus of cousins.
“I didn’t know she had that many relatives in America,” the ex-corporal droned, still shocked and awed.
Nina tilted her close-cropped curls and smiled, picturing it. “You think she flew some in from Johannesburg?”
“And she was wearing her collar.” Isaac said it in a slow monotone matching the zombie gaze that was pissing Nina off. “I’ve known that girl three years and I ain’t never seen her wear her collar.”