Likes Read online

  * * *

  With the dog still barking, Emmett rounds the corner of the house and ambles along its shady side, now and then glancing into a window. What is he looking for? He’s suddenly not sure. The strange sense of purpose that brought him up the driveway and across the lawn has just as mysteriously deserted him. He drifts from window to window, and a part of him understands dimly that this is not the house he is looking for, that none of them are, that the house he is looking for and the girl who lives inside it are in some profound way no longer available to him. But he persists in his orbit of the house, for lack of any other direction. He reaches up to brush a bit of spiderweb from his face—the hedges are full of them—and when he does so is startled momentarily by the warmth of his own hand.

  * * *

  Automatically, she does the math. This has become an involuntary habit. When she got that ticket at the intersection, for instance—an outrageous amount, a stomach-twisting sum—she had paid it off by the time she reached home. By adding together the early-bird discount on Violet’s school uniforms and the first-three-months-free promotion on their cable package and the unblemished hundred-dollar bill that her great-aunt still sends her every year on her birthday, she’d made the ticket disappear. Ta-da! And now, hanging on for dear life to the strap of her messenger bag, she takes one look at the belongings shoved inside and immediately assesses the damage as minimal: two hundred and fifty bucks, tops. She can make that go away, no problem.

  * * *

  “Okay,” Lenny says, squinting at the board. “Okay, okay, okay.” When he pitches, he can say up to a dozen okays in a row without even noticing before he gets his first real word out. “Okay, so we start with a dead girl on the golf course, right? And the next morning, our guys, when they see the way her body is arranged”—he quickly contorts himself to illustrate—“they know this has gotta be one of theirs. The cervical fracture, the pattern of lacerations, it all matches the profile. But they’re confused, right? Because they have the benefit of hindsight. They know that the only thing Emmett Diggs was guilty of was being a black man who dared to love a white woman in 1961.” He takes a gulp of air. “So what they can’t figure out is: Who butchered the blonde lying next to the eighth hole? They spend the first two acts chasing down bad leads while Diggs stalks and seduces and kills one beautiful young victim after another—” The husband interrupts: “Lenny.” He tries to find the easy tone he uses when giving the kid workout advice. “This direction we’re going in—”

  * * *

  From inside the house, he thinks he hears movement, voices. A conversation. There’s someone in there besides the barking dog, and the thought obscurely comforts him. He isn’t alone, after all. He has somewhere to go now, someone to find. But he cannot summon up his whistling bravado from before; he is still hesitant and uneasy, and as he edges his way closer to the back steps he wishes he had a better idea of what he is supposed to do.

  * * *

  “It doesn’t make sense to me. If you were Emmett Diggs and you’d been rotting away in Attica, wrongly convicted for murdering the love of your life, tormented by the prison guards, and then after being thrown into solitary yet again for something you didn’t do, you suddenly find yourself free and at large and fifty years into the future—your first impulse is to go pick up women at the nearest country club?” That sounds more sarcastic than he wants it to. He needs to go slow. “I mean, wouldn’t Diggs want to exonerate himself? He’d want justice.” But who is he kidding; that’s not the kind of show he’s writing on. “Actually, vengeance. He wants to avenge her death. He’s hunting down the real killer, whoever it was who murdered his fiancée and framed him for it.” Lenny is nodding rapidly as if completely convinced but then asks politely, “Maybe that’s a more familiar take on it?” The co-executive producer agrees: “I feel like I’ve already seen that a million times.” The showrunner gives him an encouraging smile. “We’re trying to do something different here,” he explains. “Our mandate is to be edgy, to push the envelope.”

  * * *

  She doesn’t want to let go of the bag. Despite knowing what the contents are, and of how little value, despite being aware that there’s nothing inside the bag that she wants or needs or even really likes, she won’t let go. A treacherous thought occurs to her, unbidden: her husband must in some way be at fault. It all makes sense. He forgot to lock the door when he left for work that morning, which is why some guy, some stranger, was able to waltz into their house and have a look around and help himself to a bagful of their stuff. And now, like everything else concerning the house, she’s going to have to take care of it. How dare he! Just one more pushy person trying to take advantage of her: the contractors with their ridiculous bids, the Korean dad in the Lexus who has twice cut her off in the carpool lane at school. Don’t even get her started on Anne-Marie, the simpering but secretly ruthless head of HR, who managed to chisel away at her salary requirements until she was left with a comprehensive vision plan and three weeks’ vacation while basically working for free. Well, enough is enough. They’re not going to get away with it. She’s sick and she’s tired and she’s not going to take it anymore. Where has she heard that before? Somehow nothing in this moment feels entirely her own, from the words in her head to the sneakers braced on the floor to the hand that is holding so tightly to the bag strapped across the man’s body.

  * * *

  He’s running out of time. He’s only a few feet away from the front door. “Let go,” he tells her, in a voice he doesn’t quite recognize. Hopefully it sounds deep. And forceful? He’s not even sure she’s heard him. Her grip is still strong but her face has gone sort of blank.

  * * *

  The husband focuses on his breath, takes a second to regroup. He smiles back at the showrunner. “Okay,” he says, “okay”—he’s starting to sound like Lenny, for God’s sake—“I guess I understand why, for purposes of edginess, we want Emmett Diggs to be killing white women. But what’s still unanswered for me is how he becomes a killer in the first place. How does a man start out perfectly innocent and then turn into a person who’s capable of murdering someone?”

  * * *

  Just as he is wondering how he will get inside, Emmett discovers that the back door is already open for him. And not just open, in fact, but missing. The back door is lying on the pantry floor, wrenched from its hinges, and if he’s not careless he can walk right through the doorframe without getting splinters caught on the sleeve of his jacket.

  * * *

  She’s showing no sign of letting go. “I have a gun,” he tells her, no longer caring about his voice, and reaches behind his back to draw it from the waistband of his pants.

  * * *

  Ha! Does she look stupid? Not just nice but stupid? He makes a big show of going for his so-called gun and when he lifts up his arm to reach behind him she sees for the first time the tattoo running the length of his forearm, a long dark tattoo that looks as if it might be a blade or a sword, extending from the inside of his elbow to his wrist, a tribal-looking tattoo, abstract and arty, the sort of tattoo you’d find on someone working in a cheese shop.

  * * *

  The husband almost laughs at the stupidity of his own question. As soon as it’s out of his mouth, he’s already thinking, Um, let’s see, where to begin: The legacy of Jim Crow? Mass incarceration? The criminal-justice system? Police brutality? Underemployment? White flight? Redlining? Profiling? Misrepresentation in the mass media? His first episode of network television: at least four to five million viewers will be tuning in. His first episode of network television: a weekly paycheck larger than he’s ever seen, green envelopes with residual payments inside, Writers Guild health insurance for his wife and kid. His first episode of network television, and he doesn’t want his mother and father to watch it.

  * * *

  “I have a gun.” Emmett can hear more clearly now that he’s inside the house. And emerging from the kitchen into the living room he sees them, and he thinks a
t first that they’re dancing together, or maybe the boy is helping the woman lift something small but heavy. Their bodies are that kind of close. Her back is toward him, so that when the boy raises his fist he can’t see what’s happening on her face but he can see the boy’s face and like a mirror it reflects his own bewilderment. The face asks, What am I doing here?

  * * *

  She was right. There is no gun. She knew it! Just as she knows that this whole big windup with his arm is silly. Pow! Right in the kisser! He can wave his fist around all he wants. See how he lets it hang there in midair, giving her an even better view of his tattoo. Nice try; he gets points for dramatic effect. Bang! Zoom! To the moon, Alice! She knows he’s not going to do it.

  * * *

  Something is required of him in this moment, he knows. Someone is scared and needs his help. What’s confusing is the question of who. Even though the boy is looming over her and has his fist cocked, they both look to him like they’re in trouble.

  * * *

  Arm raised, hand clenched, he sees it then, clearly: she thinks he’s a joke. He sees it in the stubborn way she holds her body, the blank look, the total absence of fear. He’s a lightweight. A joker. He’s not going to do it. Actually, he thinks, yes I am.

  * * *

  Bam! Pow! Right in the eye. She stumbles backward, nearly falling on her butt, letting go of the bag.

  * * *

  Lenny brightens. “Actually, I’ve been thinking about that! And here’s where we can introduce some really dark, interesting stuff in the B story. You’ve seen The Manchurian Candidate, right? Okay, so what I’m thinking is: The warden has been doing some crazy psychological experiments on the inmates. Including Emmett Diggs. They’ve made him into an assassin and he doesn’t even know it! Using, you know, radical brainwashing techniques, like a mixture of what they do in A Clockwork Orange plus electric shock therapy plus hypnosis? So what we come to realize is what triggers him is white women—” Abruptly the husband pushes away from the table, his chair squealing against the floor. He stands, rising to his full height, the sight of which makes Lenny pause and shoot a quick glance at the showrunner. “Everything okay, buddy?” the showrunner asks. The husband looks at him evenly. “Yes,” he says. “I’m just getting a Coke.”

  * * *

  There’s more blood than he expected. The lady is holding her eye with the hand that was on the messenger bag, and he can see blood coming through her fingers. In her other hand she’s still holding the telephone. The person on the other end seems to have finally hung up.

  * * *

  The husband walks right past the office kitchen and keeps heading down the hallway until he arrives at the elevator, which he takes to the lobby. After nodding at the security guard, he pushes through the glass doors. He stands on the empty sidewalk, squinting in the sunlight, barely registering the traffic going by. Then he slowly rotates to face the building. The security guard moves to open the door for him, but the husband shakes his head, pulls his car keys from his pocket, and turns toward the parking garage. The only place he wants to go right now is home.

  * * *

  Emmett hangs back for a moment, surveying the scene. On the one hand, he wants to go to the woman, who is sobbing in disbelief and dripping blood on the floor. But even though he has no way of knowing that a very good plastic surgeon will sew up her eyebrow with twenty-two stitches, or that her husband, despite his first show being canceled, will go on to write for a relatively popular supernatural police procedural, or that the woman, upon being asked by a female officer as they load her into the ambulance, “Now, were you in any other way assaulted?” will feel for the first time afraid, or that the dog, after attacking a UPS delivery driver, will be taken to a rescue organization up north that specializes in Australian shepherds, or that the daughter, having been told that her mother tripped at the gym and split her eyebrow open on a barbell, will grow nervous whenever the woman puts on exercise clothes—he somehow senses that regardless of the blood and tears his attention should be focused elsewhere. The sound of the front door opening softly makes him look at the boy (a little heavyset, still wearing the satchel slung over his shoulder), but before he can cross the room and reach him, before he can open his mouth and say, “Hey, brother,” the boy has closed the door behind him and is gone.

  JULIA AND SUNNY

  Our friends, our very good friends, are getting a divorce. Julia and Sunny, lovable and loving, whom we’ve adored from the beginning, when we were all in medical school. The past few years have been difficult, we know that; we’ve known that for a while. It’s not news to us that there’ve been problems, some counseling. A furnished short-term apartment. But still: it is a shock. Julia and Sunny, both in our wedding. And the same with us, for them. All those ski trips, the late-night card games, the time we hiked the Inca Trail and threw up repeatedly in the high altitude. There are kids now, and if any of us went in for that sort of thing, we’d be godparents; that’s the kind of close we are. Or were? There are moments when we feel as if we don’t know them anymore.

  Julia’s family owns property in New Hampshire, right on a lake, a place the four of us have been going to for so long that we can’t help but think of it as ours. When we were in school it was close enough that we could go up anytime we wanted, but now with Julia and Sunny living in Missouri and us in South Pasadena, it’s no small feat to get there every summer, as we have. The third week of June, without fail.

  It was at the lake house, two summers ago, that Julia began talking about letting some air into the relationship. Those were her words. She sat on the splintery bottom step, gnawing on a coffee stirrer and swatting at the blackflies, frowning, saying that she’d been depressed over the winter and started taking Lexapro. Lexapro? We tried not to let our eyes meet. Julia had always been so sparkly. And with all that energy! Loping off into the dawn, her orange nylon jacket bright in the mist. There was nothing she loved more than to run and swim, to travel impossible distances by bicycle, to sign up for half marathons on holiday weekends. She always wanted us to join her but never shamed us when we didn’t. She never noticed when her running shoes tracked stuff all over the rug. But for an athletic person she was mystical too, full of superstitions and intuitive feelings. During our second-year exams, she brought each of us a little carved soapstone animal she’d found in a global-exchange gift shop behind the pizza parlor and insisted that we give them names. Hers, named Thug, looked as if it could have been a tapir. With the help of our animals we managed to pass our exams, to do well on them, in fact, and we celebrated by having a dance party and eating too much Ethiopian food and then, years and years later, felt unspeakably touched to discover Thug sitting on the windowsill of their guest bathroom, looking fine. That was Julia—sentimental and fond, likely to invest inanimate objects with meaning, always sneaking off to exercise—the Julia we knew, and it was hard to imagine that person in the grip of a dark Midwestern winter, writing herself a scrip for antianxiety meds. She tossed her chewed coffee stirrer into the grass and said listlessly, “It’ll biodegrade, right?” When asked what she meant by some air, she sighed. “I don’t know. I’m still figuring that out.”

  Where was Sunny when she told us this? He must have been off somewhere with the kids. It’s easy to allow that to happen: he’s good with them, naturally, one of those rare people who manages to still act like himself when he’s around them. Our son, Henry, has formed a strong attachment to him, somewhat less so to their daughter, Coco, who is eighteen months older and a little high-strung. They don’t always play well, so having Sunny there to facilitate was helpful, maybe necessary. He kept them occupied with owl droppings and games of Uno; he coated them in deet-free bug spray and took them into the woods hunting for edible plants that we then choked down as a bitter salad with our dinner. Wherever he might have been with them that afternoon, he wasn’t at the house to add his thoughts on letting the air in. Julia was the one who started us wondering, and for a long time afterward, hers wo
uld be the only version we knew.

  In a way, it was almost like being back at the beginning, back before there was a Julia and Sunny, back when there was just Julia, knocking tentatively at our apartment door, bearing bagels and cream cheese, rustling in her workout clothes, desperate to talk. She wanted to learn all she could about Sunny, who had kissed her briefly on a back porch at a party, and as the people who usually sat next to him in immunology, we were interesting to her. Among the topics we covered were his note-taking, which was haphazard, his penmanship, loopy yet upright, the scuffed leather satchel in which he carried his books, the silver ring he wore on his right hand, the involuntary tapping of his foot. All three of us liked the dapper way he dressed, as if ready at a moment’s notice to spend a day at the races. We liked, too, the things he’d say to us beneath his breath during the lecture, comments that were off-kilter and often very funny. He was easily the handsomest person in our class.

  This was the point at which Julia would kick off her sneakers and we would really dig in. That woman Sheri—now what was that all about? Sunny had dated her at the very beginning of the year. She was a type that schools were eager to get their hands on back then: definitely not premed, but the kind who does something interdisciplinary, like East Asian studies, and then takes time off and has life experiences. In Sheri’s case, she had doubled in classics and dance-theatre at Reed. She didn’t have any piercings, at least as far as we could tell, but she did have a large tattoo on her right shoulder of a woman who looked suspiciously like her. Same flaming red hair, same wide red mouth. But how could we be sure? Asking would be rude. And she was difficult to have a conversation with, precise and cold in her way of speaking but nervous in her body, a little twitchy, her eyes darting about. Yet Sunny had wooed her, had undoubtedly slept with her! That haughty kook. At Halloween, they dressed up as a garbage collector and a bag of garbage. She was the hottest bag of garbage we’d ever seen, all silver duct tape and clinging black plastic, wobbling slightly in a pair of bondage boots. Soon after Halloween she and Sunny split up. “And a good thing too,” we pointed out, given the accidental comedy of their names. Julia had never noticed this before, and now she laughed and laughed, with genuine delight. “Sunny and Sher-i,” she repeated, eyes shining, and stretched her long limbs in the morning warmth of our apartment, already perfectly at home.