Getting to Long Island under the radar is not an easy feat.

Can’t rent a car, there’ll be a record. Plus the tollbooths have cameras. The trains have cameras, too.

It’s hard to get things done without Ginny’s pull, but it’s not impossible. It took a little work, but Tibo knew a guy with a car, and that guy was willing to not ask questions. I handed the driver a pile of money and he agreed to the plan.

I filled the trunk of his car with blankets. Told him to stick with the speed limit and obey every traffic rule. Just to be safe. I don’t know how long the ride took because I fell asleep.

After he dropped me off, he went to a pool hall where he could meet up with a friend and establish an alibi. Better to have it and not need it. While he was doing that, I was cutting through side streets, climbing through bushes and shrubs.

Getting things done without Bombay is also not an easy thing, but he’s taught me enough that I could pop into an Internet café and do a little research and cover my tracks. I found out that Bret Carte lives with his parents, and he’s been popped twice for sexual assault. Somehow he got a job guarding drunk women. The politicians will work themselves into frenzy over this.

It’s dark and the houses are spread out so far that even if his neighbors looked outside, they wouldn’t see me crouching in the bushes behind his house, watching him through the kitchen window.

The ski mask and the black clothing help.

The gun I borrowed will also help.

I check the clip for the twentieth time, just to be sure, my hands shaking a little as I push it back into place. I watch Carte for a little while, puttering around his kitchen. The child inside me expected fire and brimstone. That there’d be some outward sign of rot.

But he just looks like a guy with a bad attitude.

Still, I don’t know why I didn’t see it. He was right there in front of me. I could have reached out my hand and touched him.

Funny thing is, trapped in that trunk for the ride out here, in the dark with the roar of the engine and my own solitary thoughts, I didn’t falter.

I am ready to end this.

 

Things were never easy between us Chell, but do you want to know my favorite memory of you? The one that comes back to me right now, so easily?

It was the night of the blackout. Remember that? The entire metro area, dark.

It was so hot that day. It was even worse inside my apartment, which is why I left to go for a walk. I went outside and I ran into Good Kelly and she told me there was a party on Tibo’s roof that night.

The last time the city went dark like that was back in the seventies. I wasn’t alive for that but I heard stories. My dad told me working that night was chaos. Every stereotype and scary story you’ve ever heard about New York City came true. Riots in the streets, looting, people attacking each other. It was his first week with the FDNY and he nearly quit. But of course he didn’t.

So this blackout was making me think of him, and whenever I thought of him it was kind of rough. I didn’t really want to go to the party, but I’d been sequestered in my apartment, ignoring the phone, sitting on my fire escape, chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking the cheapest, ugliest beer I could find at the bodega.

But that night, finally, with the power out, there would be no light pollution, and we’d be able to see some stars. More than the twelve strong enough to fight through the haze. The thing that had been deprived of us for so many years.

I thought that maybe it was the kind of experience that shouldn’t be taken in alone on a fire escape.

I left my apartment and found grills lining the sidewalks, carried down from roofs so frozen food could be cooked before it thawed and spoiled. Stoops were jammed with people drinking and playing acoustic instruments. Many of them barefoot, like a blackout turned the city into a provincial back-road town. Civilians mingled with police officers, standing at intersections, directing traffic through the clogged streets. I ate a cheeseburger cooked by a stranger, and when I thanked him he tossed me a beer.

When I got to Tibo’s building I was having second thoughts, thinking maybe it wasn’t the best time to be around people. No one needed me sulking in a corner, because then everyone would hover over me and want to know if I was all right and that would just make it worse for all of us.

But lingering by the staircase that led to the roof, I heard your voice though the open door, and that was enough to get me to the top.

The sky was orange on one end, fading to dark blue on the other.

There were a few dozen people cooking, putting yellow tape and construction cones by the edges of the roof. There was a band setting up on a wooden deck. People were hauling around coolers and passing out drinks.

I found Lunette sitting on the lip of the roof, one leg dangling over the chasm, her plaid shirt buttoned down just enough to make me feel bad for looking. She was struggling to get an empty Zippo to light. I offered her mine. She took two drags and said, I thought you were dead.

Yes, well, those rumors were exaggerated.

Two buildings over there was a ruffle of red. Even in the fading light, those legs looked like the same poison darts I saw on that burlesque stage in Coney Island. I couldn’t see your face because it was buried in some gent’s beard. Lunette saw it, too.

That’s messed up if Chell knows you’re here, she said.

It’s fine.

Right. Listen, why do you keep doing this to yourself? And by this I mean Chell. And by Chell I mean her breaking your heart on a weekly basis. Why don’t you just find yourself a nice girl and settle down.

It’s complicated. And what do you mean ‘settle down’?

You know what I mean. You need something stable.

Stable how? Stable like horse?

I regretted the words before I said them but I said them anyway. Lunette took a long drag of her cigarette and poured the smoke out of her lungs. She said, I’ll let you take that one. But just know I do so under great duress.

Look...

Don’t say anything. I’ll tell you this much, at least I’ve accepted that it’s never going to be good for me.

Chell gives me something no one else can.

Right.

Lunette got up and walked away. I went in the opposite direction, toward the last building at the end of the row, where no one else had set up camp. I leaned against a dormant steam pipe.

If I was still a kid, I would have laid on my back and stared at the sky, and I would imagine my dad up there somewhere, in heaven maybe, and he would be watching down on me. I would find the brightest star and say that it was him. And every time I saw it I would find solace.

But the sun was gone and laying on my back, all I could find, filling every inch of my vision, was an overcast sky.

I lit a cigarette and slid myself to the corner of the roof and looked over the edge. I thought about my dad being gone and the anger that threatened to push me over. I wondered if the fall would be enough to stop it.

Ashley?

No matter how many times you’ve seen me cry, I never wanted you to see me cry again but I couldn’t seem to stop when you were around.

You sat down on the roof next to me and said, Why didn’t you tell me you were here?

I didn’t answer, so you lit your own cigarette. I listened to you inhale and exhale, the smell of cigarette smoke lingering with the perfume of lavender.

You said, You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?

I couldn’t hide it. The muscles in my stomach convulsed. You pulled my head close to your chest and stroked my hair. You said, You’re thinking about whether the fall would be enough, weren’t you?

… Yes.

Honey, I promise you, it’s never going to be okay, but it’s going to get better.

I don’t believe you.

You know how I get along with my dad. We’re okay, but we’ve never been close. When my mom died, you know how hard it was? And you’ve got a great mom. I wish I could have had a relationship with my dad like you had with yours.

You kissed me on the cheek, and I asked, Who’s the gent?

You laughed and said, Some guy. He left already.

Where is he from?

Connecticut.

Of course. No one who lives here is actually from here anymore.

He’s not a gent.

He had on a sweater in the middle of June. I’m sorry, he’s a gent. Anyway, forget him, I hope wherever he’s going he has better luck than we’re having here.

With what?

I pointed up and said, No stars.

Ashley.

I was hoping we could see them. That’s why I came. That’s the only reason I’m here.

Ashley.

I thought, maybe if I go out and try to be social and I saw the stars, I don’t know. It would remind me how small I was. That my problems are small in comparison. Does that even make any sense?

Ashley Florian Fucking McKenna. Will you please stop talking?

You placed your hands on either side of my face and turned my head, and all that light I expected to see in the sky was scattered across the city.

The roofs were webbed with long strands of white Christmas lights. Miles of them, stretched around the corners of the buildings and cutting patterns over the deck. There were lanterns, and candles with covers to block the wind. All across the city there were dots of light, the golden glow of candles in windows and the blue tint of flashlights shooting through the streets.

With all the darkness, that light reached out forever.

No remnants of my father’s blackout.

The words you whispered to me right then, I didn’t hear them. Not really.

You said, We found the angels of our better nature, Ashley.

The music started. A couple of acoustic guitars, then a violin and an accordion. Bongos and a xylophone. A banjo. The music swelled in waves, slow and relaxed, and then someone plugged an amplifier into a generator and the music crashed into us.

You pulled me to my feet and into the crowd. There were more people than could possibly be safe up there, but no one was worried about that. No one was worried about anything. We raised our hands to the sky, stomping our feet and singing the words to songs we didn’t know.

In the weeks and months and even years after my dad died, my life was full of people who would ask me if I was okay. And I hated that question. He was murdered by the mistakes of our past. Mistakes none of us were responsible for making.

You never asked me if I was okay. You just held my hand and let me cry.

No matter how things broke down between us, I will always have that.

You and me on that roof, floating amongst the stars.

 

Carte is standing by the refrigerator, putting something away, his back to the sliding door that isn’t locked. I push it open and lead with the gun. It’s the first thing he sees. He looks at it, frozen, like he doesn’t know what it is. Then the realization hits and his body goes rigid.

I climb the rest of the way into the kitchen and put my finger up to my lips, so he knows to be quiet. I don’t like that he lives with his parents and I’d like to keep them out of this.

I wave the gun at the table, indicating that he should sit. He obeys. I slide out a chair across from him. I give him a minute to let the gravity of it sink in. Make sure he gets a good look at the gun. I put it on the table, resting it on the butt, but I don’t take my hand off it. Then I ask him, “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you kill her?”

He pauses. “Who?”

“Do not fuck with me right now.”

He brings his hands to his face and rubs the skin around his temples, contorting his face. “I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. Or else you wouldn’t have done it.”

He looks away from me. “I’m sick.”

“Who else did you attack? There was someone else, wasn’t there? A second woman.”

He peeks at me through his fingers, like a child. “How did you know that?”

“Because you’re sloppy. There were two sets of DNA.”

He speaks so low I can barely hear him. “She wouldn’t report me to the cops. She loves me.”

My hand tightens around the gun. There is so much bad about him. So easy to believe the world would be better without him in it. I fight to keep my voice steady. “The girl you dumped in Queens. Tell me what happened.”

“Why?”

“Consider this your last rites.”

“You can’t kill me.”

“You killed her. Why can’t I kill you?”

His voice catches, thick in his throat. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

He cries. A trickle at first, then gushing. Tears streaming down his flushed face. He wraps him arms around himself, hugging himself, and leans forward.

He’s a blight. A big broken thing.

The sight of him bawling, that’s not what does it. What holds me still is the kitchen. The way it looks. The faux-wood surfaces and the stainless steel appliances. The boomerang pattern on the countertops. The cuckoo clock over the stove’s exhaust fan. It looks like a kitchen anybody could have grown up in.

My parent’s house has the same boomerang pattern on the countertops.

“Listen,” I tell him. “I’m not your mother. I’m not your priest. I’m not your lawyer. I’m not even your conscience. So don’t fucking rationalize what you did. Just tell me why. Tell me why you would do that to somebody. Somebody who never hurt you.”

“I wasn’t myself.”

“Stop it. I want a real answer.”

He looks at the floor. “She had no right to talk to me like she did.”

“Like what?”

“She was pretty and I tried to talk to her. And she blew me off like I was a joke. And I’m not. I’m not a joke.”

“No. You’re not a joke. You’re a man, right?”

“It’s not like that. But I was angry.”

“Why were you angry?”

“Because. Sometimes I get angry. I can’t control myself.”

“Why do you get angry?”

“People not respecting me.”

“Why?”

His eyes flash red. “Because I’m not smart. I’m not handsome. I’m big. That’s all. My whole life people laughed at me. Told me I was stupid. And I’m not stupid. It’s not right. It’s not fair.”

“You showed her, I guess.”

I look down at the gun, sitting on the table. His shoulders slump, like the air has been let out of him. His face is blank.

Those last few moments of Chell’s life must have been so scary. So painful.

The worst part, the very worst part, is that I see him for what he is.

Someone who’s been hurt, and the only way he knows how to cope is to hurt other people. What Tibo said, about humans just being animals. We are, but with one major difference: We’re the only animals who need to share pain.

He looks at me with eyes huge and pleading, but for mercy or death, I can’t tell. I’m not even sure he knows.

The kitchen is silent, save for the sound of us breathing and the hum of the dishwasher. The gun is heavy and cold and hard.

Violence is a learned trait. If it’s learned than you can choose to unlearn it. I stand up from the table, a little dizzy, the oxygen in here too thin. The gun is still trained between Carte’s eyes.

He sits back, waiting for the shot.

My rage is a white hot point in my stomach, burning like a sun. Begging to be given life in a terrible fucking explosion that will obliterate him, and me with it.

Inhale, exhale. Unlearn it.

He asks, “Are you going to kill me now?”

I chew on my words for a minute, trying to put them in the right order. “I needed there to be some kind of explanation. Like a reason she died. A conspiracy or a vendetta. Something I could contextualize and understand. I fought so hard to put a story on her death because I didn’t want to accept the reality that sometimes terrible fucking things happen, and you can’t control them. All you can do is learn from them and try to be better. I don’t know. I don’t know if this even makes sense.” I grip the gun so hard it hurts. Deep breath. “No. I am not going to kill you.”

“Why?”

“I’m breaking the cycle.”

And I leave.

Down the patio stairs and across the backyard, to the next street over. I leave Bret Carte and everything he did in that kitchen. Hopefully along with a part of myself that I never have to see again.

When I’m a few blocks away and out of the shadows I ditch the mask, pull out the burn phone I bought earlier in the night, and call the 9th Precinct, ask for Detective Grabowski.

As the phone rings I hold it against my face in the crook of my shoulder, and check the gun with shaking hands, just to make sure it’s still empty. I don’t know why I need to check, but I do.