Scrap, p.17
Scrap, page 17
Standing in the track-lit studio, holding those Polaroids of Rachel’s sixteen-year-old body draped over Michael’s hairy torso, it came at me like a baseball to the jaw, fast and curved: I’m just going to burn the whole place down. I felt the insatiable need to obliterate the possessions that Michael Valentine held most dear: his artwork and the chapel he’d built in his own image. And this time I knew for sure, there was no one home. There was no one around for miles. I lit one of Michael’s cigarettes, then threw it into the highly combustible bin of linseed oil rags.
In the kitchen of my cabin, the tentacles of Michael’s cruelty were still lashing around in my brain as I cooked a box of Annie’s mac and cheese, and finally, I let myself cry. All of my pain leaked out over that sparkling bowl of white cheddar and shells. The truth was, I didn’t want any of this. I didn’t want to obsess anymore. I just wanted to be home with Jessica. I wanted to put my hand on her fat pregnant belly and ask her what she wanted for dinner. I wanted a family. And I knew in part that that was why I had driven to the Hamptons. I had absorbed enough about the Duncans’ lives to feel like I belonged. Naomi had just become another stand-in for my own mother. Just as Marcella-Marie was a stand-in for the baby with Jessica that vanished with that note in the fruit bowl. And I knew, standing under the warm glow of my kitchen lamp, I was a stand-in for Patrick’s son. I needed a fresh start.
In the morning I drank coffee, and walked down the road to Chester’s and asked if I could rent his extra car, a dusty mini-van he’d inherited when his grandma died. Chester wearing a tie-dye T-shirt and, agreeable as always, refused to accept payment. I drove immediately to Walmart to buy cleaning supplies and groceries. I started with the kitchen. In my time scrapbooking I’d ignored the basics, and the cracks between the sink and wall were ripe and the windows were so dirty they seemed fuzzy. I scrubbed the floor, I used baking soda and vinegar on the toilet, and brushed down the cobwebs from the ceiling with the broom. But I couldn’t clean the barn. I knew seeing even one picture of Tabitha or Naomi would make me relapse. I was like an addict avoiding one of their old corners. I decided I would keep it locked up; I would deal with it when I was strong enough.
Vigorously scrubbing, I felt like a criminal in those precious moments right after a murder, cleaning for absolution. There were so many podcasts where justice was cinched by the receipt from the hardware store: bleach, gloves, heavy duty trash bags, a circular saw, Windex. But I was simply trying to strip away the past with each dramatic thrust of the sponge, and once the house shone with that incriminating luster, I tore off in my borrowed van toward Asheville. I was determined to meet someone new. I wanted to fall in love. Aching for affection, I returned to the gay bar where I’d made out with that jewelry dyke Kenny, but I didn’t want her. I didn’t want anyone who knew about Jessica, or any part of my past. On the bar’s Wi-Fi, I downloaded Tinder and swiped through the slog of hikers, astrological tattoos, neurodivergent farmers, vegans, and self-described dog mamas.
While sliding through Tinder my phone rang. It was an unknown number. I was vaguely horny and answered hopeful that, maybe by some miracle, one of these Tinder witches had summoned my number. A stern voice replied to my boozy hello.
“Esther Ray?”
“Yes.”
“This is Chrissy Ash.”
My body tightened. Chrissy was using her lawyer voice: all steel, no bubbles. Her pose from our portrait session popped into my head and I could see every pore. I knew about the freckle near the inside of her nostril. I knew how her hair naturally parted when she turned her neck. I knew the ridges of her shoulders, but I had never heard this voice.
“Bryce didn’t want me to call you, but someone had to.”
“I signed his papers,” I snapped.
“And he appreciates that, but I just want to make sure we’re clear here. If you are to ever contact me, or him, or our family, or speak about us in any capacity publicly, we will come for you.”
“Is this a threat?”
Chrissy let out a dismissive sigh, not even willing to reply.
“So, he’ll kill me? Like he killed Naomi?” I prodded.
“You’re insane, I can’t believe you came to my house. I can’t believe I sat for your painting. You’re so lucky you’re not locked away,” Chrissy nearly screamed, then hung up.
Chrissy was already saying “our family.” I was filled with rage and her hard voice rang like a bell in my skull, empty and cruel. I tried to imagine Naomi’s brown eyes, watching Chrissy slink around her own stone kitchen with a glass of pinot. Did she know she was fucking her husband? Did she want to snap Chrissy in half? Or had she rolled her eyes, relieved she no longer had to drain Bryce’s cock? It’s always better to know. I wished I had known that Jessica was fucking other women. I wished I had been granted the opportunity to make her cry. To make her taste my pain. I took an inhale and looked around the room at the gay bar and tried to shake it off. I needed to return to me. To my body. To my desires. I looked back down at Tinder.
I spent the next month and a half fucking. I wanted to spawn. And in the midst of each date, I wished my strap-on was a real dick so I could fuck a child into Sarah with her dyed blue armpit hair, or Lisa who worked at a zero-waste brewery, or Franzi who loved gothic romance novels. I wished that pregnancy could be an accident. An operatic twist to an arbitrary Thursday. Not a didactic plan involving kitchen equipment, medical-grade freezers, and endless conversations. After a string of dates, none spectacular, I realized I was looking at these women as egg sacs: potential hosts to my future, and I hated myself for it, assuming this was what being a heterosexual man was like.
I decided I liked Sarah with the blue armpits. Not enough to ask her yet to host my progeny, but she taught a yoga class in the neighboring town on Thursdays, and she’d come over after with a roast chicken from the one good restaurant. She liked to eat on the porch. Always barefoot. She was constantly talking about food, planning our next meal before the one we were eating was over. I took solace in the inanity of her voice as it listed possible sides: fried plantains, Cobb salad, Cajun grits, coleslaw. I convinced myself that maybe this was how life should feel—numb, with a stretched stomach lining.
Patrick and I had returned to the quiet orbit of each other’s lives. The intensity of our car trip lingered but not outwardly, we, as usual, merely nodded to each other when we passed on the road. A lump always formed in the back of my throat as the echo of his voice at Taco Bell, loud and fatherly, returned. I had kept my promise. I had walked away. I hadn’t even opened Instagram or TikTok or googled the Duncans. I’d let the tangle of whatever Naomi’s reasoning for hiring me lay dormant in the corner of my brain. I was even auditing a weaving class, keeping my mind occupied, threading bamboo cotton under and over, under and over, on a huge old loom that looked out at the Hammersmith knoll. Craft was again a salve, a place where I could give over to process.
On the nights Sarah slept over, she’d wake at dawn to make coffee and twist into a series of complicated positions in the living room. When I finally got up that Friday, coffee was on the stove and chicken bones danced in the sink, but she wasn’t in her usual yoga spot. I wandered around, mug in hand, calling her name. Then through the window I saw the barn standing doors open. I jolted. My internal siren blaring. I tore down the path, spilling the hot liquid on my flannel legs.
“Babe it’s such a beautiful space, I would love to hold a class here someday,” Sarah said opening her eyes as she heard me clobber toward her.
Taking in the hollowness of her surroundings my face contorted. The barn was completely empty, her bright-orange yoga mat placed dead center.
“What?” she asked, confused by my mouth hanging agape, “It’s perfect for yoga.”
“There was . . . supposed to be . . .” I was stuttering. How could I explain what was supposed to be here? All of Naomi’s plastic boxes were gone. All of the extra material and the organized piles of papers, including the line of finished books which had sat in their proud row on the table by the door. There was nothing. Not even the boxes of Jessica’s shit or my own filing cabinet that held my passport and birth certificate. Sarah’s mouth was moving, she was saying something but I couldn’t hear her because I was busy doing the mental inventory of everything I had lost. After another stunned moment, I ran back up the path to the house, I needed to know the four photos were still taped to the top of the junk drawer. I thrust my hand in and felt for the edges. They were there.
“What’s wrong?” Sarah asked, now standing in the doorway with a look of extreme bewilderment.
“I was robbed,” I said hoarsely. I elbowed her out of the way and marched down the road.
Sarah followed, “Babe, what? You were robbed?”
“You need to go,” I snapped over my shoulder, “I have to deal with this.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Just go, ok?”
Sarah was pissed, “Are you mad at me? I only went in the barn because I was bored ’cause you slept in so late. Jesus.”
I was almost at the top of Patrick’s drive, I paused to look back at her, “Sarah this isn’t about you. Just go. Ok?”
“Explain what’s going on,” she demanded.
“No,” I yelled, now marching forward.
“Esther, I can’t deal with your inability to communicate. If you can’t explain this to me, it’s over.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Sarah storming up the hill, her svelte limbs swinging. I felt a small pellet of relief forming in my gut that it was, in fact, now over. I kept walking until I got to Patrick’s.
“Who’s there?” Patrick grumbled in response to my knocking.
“Me. What did you do with all of the books?”
Patrick opened the door in a ratty red robe.
“And the boxes. And the papers. And my filing cabinet, where are they?” I shouted.
Patrick looked confused, “What are you talking about, Esther?”
“The barn is empty. What the fuck did you do with all of it?”
“I didn’t do anything. I don’t even know—”
“Yes, you did. You knew where the key was.”
Patrick rubbed his face, unbothered, which infuriated me.
“You’re not my fucking father, you had no right.”
The word father triggered something, a crest of anger spreading, “Esther, I didn’t do anything with the barn. I put the key back after looking through that mess. I did you a favor.”
“You got rid of everything,” I sneered, “because you think you’re some sort of savior.”
Patrick took a deep, frustrated breath, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I looked at him, his brows deeply furrowed like two supine worms, and realized he was telling the truth.
I waited on the porch while Patrick put on a pair of jeans and a sweater ringed with moth holes and followed me up the hill. We stood side by side staring at the barren barn.
“They would have needed a big truck,” he said, removing a cigarette from its pack, “we would’ve seen it come up the hill.”
I was silent, remembering the whale-like moan of the black vehicle revving up the drive, and the time it had taken to unload all of Naomi’s boxes.
“They must’ve cleared it out when I went to go get you. That’s the only time I’ve been off the mountain longer than the post office.”
“But who is they?” I asked.
Patrick took a long drag of his cigarette, the wrinkles next to his mouth deepening as he inhaled, “I reckon whoever runs Red Rock Capital.”
14
I’d watched a bizarrely addictive TV show with Jessica in which professional cleaners intervene with a usually disheveled, often near-senile hoarder. The hoarders always blubbered, releasing high-pitched whines because every Almond Joy wrapper had a deep and singular meaning; and how could they be asked to throw out that misshapen Reebok when it was an epic poem which only they could understand? On the show they explained it was a process; de-hoarding had to be done piece by piece, as each decision to throw something out was a trowel-scrape toward a brand new neural pathway. If the cleaners had just thrown everything away while the hoarder was in Bora Bora, there was a one hundred percent chance that the hoarder would return home and simply begin hoarding again. And I now understood. Each piece of the Duncans’ papers had had meaning. Each scrap was a piece of a puzzle I had not yet solved, and I wanted desperately to fill the barn back up.
I forced Patrick to come with me to talk with the ever-cheerful Chester, who lived at the bottom of the mountain.
“I mean, yeah—it was about a month, maybe more, back in March.”
I nodded. Patrick was silent. Chester offered us pert little clementines from a ceramic bowl he’d made himself. And I knew from his darting eyes he wanted me to compliment the vessel.
“Nice,” I said, nodding my head toward the bowl.
“Oh, thank you, Esther!” Chester clucked.
“They came at night?” I asked.
“No, early evening, around six. I remember because their truck hit Bear Break Curve the same time as my clay delivery, and my guy had to back up about a half mile so they could pass each other up on Hemsley Hill.”
Patrick nodded. He’d been right. And if it was Bryce, then it explained why he had dropped the charges as he knew I’d had the documents; the pieces of paper that traced two decades of Red Rock Capital’s intricate tax fraud. Patrick explained the details as we walked back up the hill: that the scrapbooks contained documents that revealed a nearly impossible-to-trace pattern. Assets ritually disappearing and quietly resurfacing in the wrong place. Between puffs of cigarettes, he’d likened it to the sort of information which ends companies and puts Patagonia-vested men in cushy jail cells.
We walked back to my house and I made coffee. Patrick’s masculine form in my kitchen still seemed out of place. I yearned for him to transform into Jessica, into any woman, then I could relax. Patrick kept a nervous eye on his phone while the coffee spittled on the stove.
“I think you should count yourself lucky,” Patrick said solemnly. “But I can’t believe you didn’t look in the barn all month.”
“Well, I was trying to move on and like, let it go.”
Patrick sighed, knowing from the tone of my voice I was blaming him.
“They took my stuff too. My fucking passport and birth certificate, social security card . . . everything. All I have left is the deed to this place which happened to be taped to the fucking fridge.”
“You can get it all replaced,” Patrick replied oddly light, “happens all the time.”
“Yeah, but I can’t let Bryce get away with this.”
Patrick accepted his mug, “Esther, I was an accountant for small companies my whole life. Nothing major, but people when they cheat, they’re desperate to keep it quiet. He did you a favor taking it all back. You signed the NDA and the restraining order, you don’t have a choice. Let it go,” he said, borrowing my annoyed tone.
“I have photos of three of the spreads.”
“Delete them.”
I released a pathetic, “No,” then pushed back in my chair. “The question I keep asking myself is why she put that sort of financial shit in the scrapbooks? What had she wanted to happen?”
“None of those questions are relevant.”
I rolled my shoulders back, annoyed at his return to that fatherish tone.
“He should go to jail.”
“Bryce dropped the charges and he took his stuff back.”
“He murdered her.”
“She died in an accident skiing. Let it go,” Patrick’s voice was hard.
I was whining now, “But it was tax fraud, he should at least be held accountable . . .”
“Everyone fudges.”
The truth was, I had no real proof. Of the three spreads I had photographed, only one had a spreadsheet and it probably wasn’t enough. My stomach knotted. We sipped in silence as my feverish urge to refill the barn grew hotter.
Patrick downed his coffee then got up, slapping his knees with his hands.
“Just try and take it easy, ok? And promise me you won’t contact him.”
I nodded. The second Patrick was out the door I ran to my iPad and opened up my cache of true crime podcasts. I needed fuel for my rage. I relapsed, choosing one from my trove of tales about people who had vanished. Leaning back, my brain was instantly relieved by the podcaster’s nasal voice. I listened as the low electronic music buzzed underneath the story of a near-blind, chain-smoking mother, who disappeared in the middle of the night without her keys, eyeglasses, or cigarettes.
I spent the next hours greedily consuming descriptions of individuals who seemed to simply have dissolved into the ether. I imagined there was a run-down nightclub, some limbo, with dark clanking music where all of these missing beings were forced to line dance until justice was served. Thinking about them all there, the birthday girl, the charismatic boyfriend, the nearly blind mom, and the college freshman in her short blue skirt, all sifting through the haze of smoke, sipping cheap drinks with thin red straws electrified me. Naomi wasn’t missing, but somehow, I knew she was there too. She would be dressed in her Moncler jacket, moving in time to the music because she too needed justice.
It was barely noon, but I opened a bottle of wine and listened to another podcast, this one about a girl who disappeared walking home from a friend’s house in southern Texas. On popped the voice of the missing girl’s father, a shaky baritone, who explained that he has handed out flyers on the corner she was last seen for seven years, because, he said, “Someone knows something.”
