INTERLUDE

NOW

“You made her cry?” Grosky asks.

“I made her cry,” Miriam says, batting the ashtray back and forth like a hockey puck between two goalies. She closes her eyes and tries to shut everything out. All the noise. All the memories. She tries to forget how this story ends but how can she? An impossible quest with too many monsters.

“I made my mother cry once,” Grosky says. He’s up and walking around now. Miriam has to admit: He has a lightness to his step, like he’s less a fleshy boulder and more a roly-poly balloon. Like his bones are hollow. Like he could move fast if he wanted to. “I was seventeen years old and I thought I was tough shit and I called her the c-word. I don’t even remember why. She wouldn’t let me go out with the guys or some shit. So I called her that word. She slapped me across the face so hard I thought I’d have a handprint at graduation, at my wedding, at my funeral even. Then after she slapped me she just broke down at the kitchen table. Sobbing.”

“That’s a heartwarming story. Isn’t that a Norman Rockwell painting? ‘Chunky Son Calls Slap-Happy Mama A Cunt?’ The 1950s were a more innocent time.”

Grosky doesn’t laugh this time. He just levels those pinch-skin eyes at her. Vills jumps in.

“So what’d you do?” the woman with the ink-scribble hair says to Miriam. “You made her cry, then what?”

Miriam says, “I went in, laid on the bed, and waited. Mother . . . stayed outside for what seemed like forever, crying. And not regular crying, but the gulping, hard-to-catch-your-breath, drowning-in-a-puddle-of-your-own-sorrow kind of crying. I thought about going back out there but I’d kinda made my exit and why ruin the theater of it? I was still mad. So I waited her out. She went inside. Eventually found her way to bed. That’s when I found my way to her computer.”

“To find out who was renting out that house,” Vills says.

Miriam nods.

“And?”

“It took me a little while to find the ad—but you don’t find a lot of rental places on Torch Key. Eventually I found it and gave the people a call. Nice guy. Gay, maybe. I made up some hasty horseshit about how my boyfriend Peter Lake and I were filming a porno there—I said, all very tasteful, mostly anal, which I thought was funny. He did not, which was the point. He gets mad and I explain, yeah, ooh, I’m mad too because the director skipped town and he owes us a check— and I said, we should both call him, but I only have his cell and he’s not answering that, so, hey, could you spare a porn star a moment of kindness and give me his other phone number? And he gave it to me.”

“You like to lie,” Grosky says.

“That’s not true, actually. The truth is usually way more interesting.”

“But you lie a lot.”

“The truth is a hammer, but a lie is a screwdriver. A more elegant tool. Sometimes you just want to pick a lock, not break a window. Even though breaking a window is always more fun.”

Vills pulls out another cigarette, lights it, hands it to Miriam. Then lights her own and plants her elbow on the table, leaning on her hand. “So, you called the number.”

“I called the number.”

“And?”

“It was a club. In South Beach. Nightclub called Atake.”

Vills tenses up. There it is. “Atake.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So what did you do then?”

“What do you think I did? I went to Miami.”

“And who did you meet at Atake?”

“C’mon, Catherine. I think you know.”

Now Vills really tightens up—chin off her hand, elbow off the table— and for a half a second her eyes are hot pins trying to stick Miriam to the wall. But then Grosky tilts his head down to get his own look, and Vills fake-laughs it away. “No, I don’t, and that’s why I’m asking.”

“That is where I met Tap-Tap.”