Four Months after the Accident
JULY 1983
I tell myself it’s not a betrayal to talk to Sab about Jude. I am worried about her, I confide. In the two weeks since we’ve returned from the trip to Harmony, she has not been herself; she has not even been the strangest or worst version of herself. When I ask her about the loan shark debt, she tells me she’s “paying it down.” I offer to join her at work and she argues there’s no point; we’d just be splitting half of her salary, and it would make sense only if I had my own roster of houses, which is impossible, since we only have one car. I protest, arguing that together we could work faster and make time for more houses, and still she declines; she’d rather I stay home and rest, maybe even look for a job with fewer physical demands. She is coming home from work later and later each night, occasionally after I’m already in bed or fitfully asleep on the couch, waiting for any sight or sound of her, my mind racing to the direst scenarios: she’s been kidnapped by her loan shark, she’s been murdered, she’s been in an accident just like my own, her brain rewired in inexplicable and irrevocable ways, the final ties to our past severed for good.
“I hate seeing you so stressed out,” Sab says. “What can we do about it?”
I tell him I can’t answer that without more information, and propose a plan: that coming Thursday—which has always been her latest night—we’ll follow her home from the last house on her roster, and maybe discover something she’d rather I not know.
On the appointed day, when Sab’s hulking old car pulls into my complex, I notice that the scapular has been replaced with a playing card dangling from a chain: the same Jack of Hearts he’d used in his magic trick, still marked by the words Here’s your third chance.
“What’s this about?” I ask, giving it a swat. “Did the religious dudes finally fail you at poker?”
He pulls out and heads to Roosevelt Boulevard, turning right. “I redecorated on your account,” he says, “since this is now your car. I just bought myself a rad new Mazda, and I want you to have this one.”
He takes his eyes off the road just long enough to look at me straight on, and I can see he’s serious.
“That’s so nice of you, on top of all of the other ridiculously nice stuff you’ve done,” I say. “But I can’t take your car. I can’t pay you for it.”
“You either take it or it’s going to the junkyard. Trying to sell it won’t be worth the effort. It’s old, but it’s got a little bit of juice left.”
I look down at my hands, which suddenly seem out of place in my own lap. “But I don’t drive. I haven’t driven since…” And there I stop, my mouth refusing to release the words.
“I know,” he says, and taps my knee with his fingertips. “But you will. Probably sooner than you think.”
We’re quiet the rest of the ride to Ardmore, the town where Taxidermy House stands on a tidy cul-de-sac cluttered with old stone mansions and flowering dogwood trees. I picture Jude dusting antique tables under the mute judgment of those mounted animals, and the memory of the dead rabbit comes back to me: that sweet, flattened foot; those dead and blind open eyes. I want to know what it means and why it has lodged itself so firmly in my mind.
For an hour we wait, parked across the entrance to the cul-de-sac, the radio turned low. We don’t kiss or hold hands or even talk. Finally, around six o’clock, the Killer Whale noses out from the cul-de-sac, and as Jude passes I can just make out her hair, teased to historic heights.
“Go,” I tell Sab.
“Shouldn’t I wait a minute?”
“She doesn’t know this car. Let’s just go or we risk losing her.”
Jude merges onto the highway, settling into the rush-hour traffic. Sab inches up on the Whale’s right side, staying back just enough to keep us obscured. I slouch a bit in my seat, fearing both my sister’s sharp eye and the peculiar twin radar that keeps us hyperattuned.
The drowsy summer sun begins to fall, casting erratic streaks across a sky so much bluer than the one over the city. Jude flips on her headlights; Sab does the same. We drive for forty minutes, keeping careful distance, and the world seems to expand—the houses planted farther apart, meandering green fields, scattered herds of goats and cows, the bustle of industry falling away. I don’t know where we’re heading, but some strange foreboding settles over me, a déjà vu from my lost past.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“Not entirely sure, but somewhere in Delaware County. Southwest of where we started.”
I sense we are almost there, wherever there is. As if on cue, Jude slows down, sliding into a spot along a quaint Main Street—brick storefronts with flower boxes in full bloom, well-dressed couples strolling arm in arm. It is Harmony on steroids: triple the traffic, the buzz, the people. The uncanny similarity only deepens my unease.
I watch Jude walk across the street, purse strapped across her body, her elbow keeping it in place. She looks both assured and resigned. She disappears into a building with a red awning that reads The Monkey Bar. Inside the lights are dim, and I lose sight of her.
“Now what?” Sab asks.
“We just wait,” I say, although I want nothing more than to press my face against the window and see what I can see. “I want to know exactly who she’s meeting with. I need to know.”
The sidewalks fill with more people, the volume rises, the sky darkens. I don’t know how much time has passed: a minute, five, a half hour. I am sweating, a stray bead or two stinging my eyes, but I don’t bother to wipe them; I can’t risk missing a second. My obstinance is rewarded when Jude finally exits. From my crouched position, I try to read her expression but her eyes are lowered. She reaches her car, glances back once at the bar, and drives off.
“Want to follow her again?” Sab asks.
“No,” I say, and find myself, to my shock, getting out of the car. Behind me I hear Sab’s voice—wait, wait, want me to come?—but I don’t have the energy to respond, and with each step closer to the bar my breath grows thinner, raspier.
I see her right away, sitting at a cafe table with claw feet and a scalloped edge, sipping the last dregs of her drink. The back of her chair looms higher than her shoulders, giving the impression that she’s a child merely playing at adulthood. One step closer and she comes into focus: Nancy, the limping stalker girl, the one with the fake charity who made me sign our names. The one who sent me to an empty house in search of a psychic—a house containing nothing but evidence of an abandoned life.
The connection, when it comes, does a slow, shivery crawl from my brain to my gut, freezing everything in its path. The dead rabbit in Harmony and the “rabbit hole” graffiti in the house are somehow related, and Nancy knows everything my mind has forgotten, and our encounters have not been accidental at all.
I sit down across from her but can’t manage to speak; I am grateful when she does so first.
“Jude?” she asks, confused, but then she tracks my face, assessing my expression, the set of my features. She knows us, I think. She knows us well enough to tell us apart.
Her back goes rigid and she says my name like a sigh: “Kat.”
“Nancy,” I say. “So we meet again.”
She laughs, her deep, honking bray belying her small frame. “You sound like a spy-movie cliché,” she says. “But I suppose you’ve forgotten things like that.”
“What is your business with my sister? And what is your business with me? Why did you send me to a psychic who doesn’t even exist?” I try to speak evenly, betraying neither fear nor anger; either reaction might hurt Jude in some way I don’t yet know.
Nancy sips her wine, her stack of bracelets fidgeting with each raise of the glass.
“She does exist,” she says. “Obviously, she moved since the last time I saw her.”
“Fine,” I say, working to stay calm. “Answer the other questions. What business do you have with me and Jude?”
“I know you’re aware of Jude’s loan shark debts. Well, I’m her loan shark. The interest is accruing, and I’m not a bank. If she declares bankruptcy, she’ll still have a debt with me. Tonight she came here begging for mercy, wondering if there was another way to pay me back.”
She says this with a strange and proprietary glee; somehow this is personal. I recall the picture of Jude’s necklace and the accompanying threat: You left this behind and you owe me. Clearly Nancy had written that note. I distinctly remember Jude calling the loan shark him—why, to throw me off? Throw me off of what, exactly? I try to reconcile this fragile wisp of a creature having any hold over my sister.
“So you’re a loan shark?” I ask. “And people actually listen to you?”
“Jude’s my only client right now,” she says. “And she listens very carefully.”
“How long is this going to go on?” I ask. “How much more does she owe?”
“That’s up to Jude.” She stands, fishing a clutch of bills from her wallet.
“What do you mean, up to Jude? What’s her debt total, and how much did she pay so far?”
She takes two steps away, my question still hanging in the air. She spins and asks a question of her own: “How well do you really know Jude? How well do you really know yourself?”
Her words are a direct strike, loosening all of the uncertainty and fears about my past, tossing them like confetti in my mind. The answer is both available and mercurial, entirely dependent on how many questions I am willing to ask, and if I choose to believe what I find.
“You might want to do some digging,” Nancy says. “For your own good.”
I leap up from my chair to watch her walk down the street, her limp exaggerated in her haste, the gait of someone with her own private pain.