Amen maxine, p.22
Amen Maxine, page 22
“You need to let me out so I can show you,” I say.
My hands are shaking. I don’t even know how to hold a gun; I’ve only seen it in movies. Is there a safety or something I’m supposed to undo? I have no idea. My finger floats above the trigger.
“Tell me first,” he says.
“I can’t tell you,” I say. “I have to show you. It’s not something I can explain.”
A long moment passes in the dark, so long I wonder if he might have left. And in this moment, all I can think of is Michelle. I love her to the point of pain. I’m so ashamed that we are her parents, that this is what it’s come to. That I let this man lie to me and fuck with my head so badly I don’t know who I am, what I’ve done, what I’m guilty of or capable of—but I vow now, right now, hands heavy with a gun, heart woken up, that I will not let him destroy me. I can’t. Because I’m her mother. I’m bound to her. I owe this to her. To keep going. To survive.
And if need be, if it comes down to it, to kill a monster.
Even the one I love.
As the door hinges open with a groan, the light blinds my eyes for a moment. I can’t see anything but his figure looming and in the jolt at the sight of him, I squeeze my finger tight on the trigger. The gun pops and shudders with the force of it. Perhaps my heart has stopped with it. My eyes adjust, just fast enough to see that I’ve turned his head into a bloody pudding as he falls to the floor with a thump like a bag of bricks.
I put the gun down and sit with my hands over my mouth for a long time, squeezing my eyes shut, sobbing with no sound, nausea and head pain and confusion and regret and so much fear, so much fear over what I’ve done, over whether or not I just made the greatest mistake of my life or whether or not I am finally free.
It isn’t until I hear Michelle crying suddenly from the other room that I open my eyes again and pull myself to a standing position. I wipe my face and glance one last time at the gun on the floor, stooping down and picking it up to take my shirt and wipe it of fingerprints before letting it drop again. I turn and though I see Jacob’s figure there ahead of me, see all the spatter and the pink and the red, I don’t focus on it, don’t scan it for detail.
The one thing I do focus on, as I step over his body, is a Maglite flashlight fallen on the floor near his right hand.
He kept it next to the bed, for protection; he always said if anyone broke in, he would hit them over the head with it. And the sight of that makes me stand a bit taller, helps my tears dry a bit faster—because if I hadn’t shot him when he opened that door, what then? Was he ready to bash my head in again?
“It’s okay, sweetpea,” I tell Michelle, picking her up from her crib. She’s teary-eyed in her pig pajamas. Who knows how long she’s been crying, which loud noises woke her. My God, what would have happened to her if Jacob had had his way? I can’t think of him—I can’t think that I—is Jacob really dead? “It’s okay.”
My motherly voice calms us both, seems to center us both. Stops her crying and stops my morbid merry-go-rounding.
I take her out to the living room, balancing her on my hip as I gather up the pieces of Maxine and gently put them into a paper bag. My pulse is swirling in my ears. I have to get out of here. Where to go, I have no idea. I need to talk to Maxine. There’s a hole in my middle, a screaming hole, and though I’m sure it’s about the fact I just killed Jacob—I just killed Jacob—the fact Maxine has been smashed to bits on our carpet hurts almost as bad. I begin to cry because I want to ask her what to do, where to go, but she’s silent and broken.
Holding Michelle tight as she rests her cheek on my shoulder and sinks back into sleep, I squeeze my eyes shut and think through my options. I could call the police, of course. There’s a chance they would see this as self defense. But there’s a chance they wouldn’t, too, and that is enough for me to know I can’t do that. Being separated from my baby, going to prison, these are not options for me.
Perhaps if I could get Maxine repaired she could help me think this through. Maybe there’s a way we could get rid of Jacob’s body and make it look like he disappeared of his own volition—he’s made rash decisions before in his life, his mom would back me up. Moving to a new city, going on a sudden unexplained vacation, marrying a woman he just met. Michelle and I could keep our lives without him. I would never tell a soul.
“I don’t know,” I whisper, eyeing the brown bag holding Maxine. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do. I killed him. I killed him.”
Quietly, still in shock, I go out into the night and get into the car, strapping Michelle in who wakes up again cranky and red-faced. I soothe her and give her kisses, crying too suddenly as it hits me—this is real. This really happened. We were a family and now we’re a mother and a daughter and we have nowhere to go. I’m terrified.
I climb into the driver’s seat and catch a glimpse of myself in the rearview. Horrific. Covered in blood, a wound on the top of my head still glistening. I take out the baby wipes and clean my face and then grab a beanie that has been under my seat since last winter. I put it on and check the rearview again, relieved to see someone who looks more like a person and less like a woman who stepped out of a horror movie. With shaking hands, I take out my phone and search for an electronics repair shop open this late—and there’s just one, which closes in ten minutes. I pull out of the driveway and speed toward the strip mall to try to get there in time.
It's so strange, what happens as the minutes pass since I took my husband’s life. It settles into reality numbly; it becomes a giant looming wordless something that I won’t let myself think about. My focus instead becomes knife-sharp. I am focused on the next thing. That’s all there is to think about. The next thing is repairing Maxine.
I pull into the parking lot in front of Ed’s Electronics. In the front of the store, a young man in thick glasses wearing a backpack is locking the door. The shop’s Closed sign is displayed, the lights are off.
“No.”
I unbuckle my seatbelt, rush out my door.
“Excuse me,” I call out, waving my arms. “Excuse me, sir. You can’t be closed.” My voice climbs, splits. “You can’t.”
“Oh … uh, sorry. Yeah. We close at ten,” says the guy, looking back at me. “But we open again at ten tomorrow—”
“I can’t—I can’t wait that long,” I say, coming closer to him, tears spilling. “You don’t understand. This is an emergency.”
“We repair electronics.”
“I know.”
“You have an … electronic emergency?”
“Yes. I need something fixed right now.”
“What, you spill soda on your laptop or something?”
“No. It’s much more complicated than that. Please, you don’t understand. I’ll—I’ll pay you double your usual fee. Triple. Whatever you want. I’ll give you five hundred bucks on top of what you charge—just for you to keep.”
The guy raises his bushy eyebrows and considers this. “Cash?”
“MyCash,” I say, holding up my phone.
“All right,” he finally says. “Bring your device inside and I’ll take a look. But if it’s something that needs parts, we’re not going to be able to do it tonight.”
“Thank you so much,” I say, breathing deeply with relief, wiping tears away.
“Yeah, sure,” he says, giving me a look I know well now, the this lady’s unhinged as hell look, before turning around to unlock the door again.
“Let me just get my baby,” I say to him.
“You have a baby with you?” he says, annoyed.
“She’s sleeping. It’ll be fine.”
I go to the car, take out the carseat carefully so as not to wake her, and grab the paper bag with Maxine in it. Inside Ed’s Electronics, only one light is on near the back. When I walk further in, I hear the locks click shut behind me. The shadows and the darkness of this unfamiliar place with its shelves teeming with machine parts, gutted computers, and coiled, serpentine wires all radiate a sinister vibe. That and the fact I’m locked up alone with a man I’ve never met. He could do anything to me and who would know? These are usually things I would fear, but right now, there’s no fear left. I’m the one who should be feared; I’m the one who just shot a man in the face.
I get a flash of the blast, the instant red jelly mess the bullet made of his head, and then swallow hard and focus instead on what is here right now. The fluorescent glow of the back table where the guy is waiting for me with a tired expression. He opens a diet soda and slurps it down.
“Let’s see what you have,” he says.
With a crinkle, I put the bag on the table. “It’s a digital assistant.”
He pulls the parts out and lays them on the table in front of him, furrowing his brows, rubbing the stubble on his chin.
“Not on the market yet,” I go on. “It’s in beta mode. My husband—” My voice catches and it takes a moment to find itself again. “He worked—works—at Jolvix.”
The guy’s eyes light up behind his frames. “Is this one of those Maxines they haven’t released yet? Holy shit.”
“Yeah.”
“The ones with the advanced predictive AI, right?”
“That’s it.”
“And it works?” he asks, turning Maxine’s silver body over, exposing her nether region I never looked at before, where a gash has left her open, her bottom broken, her board exposed, a pile of her shrapnel on the surface where he’s working. “Are the predictions accurate?”
There’s something about the sensual way he’s touching her, the light in his eyes, that I don’t like. I fear that he covets her. That he knows how rare she is. He could take her from me.
“More or less,” I say. “Honestly, it’s more just a digital assistant—helps me keep my grocery list, orders things I need for the house, tells me the weather, that type of thing.”
He fishes a screwdriver out from a toolbox behind him and comes back, unscrewing her broken bottom. “Figures,” he says. “They keep trying to design that shit—” He glances at Michelle, sleeping under her fuzzy blanket in the carseat behind me. “Sorry, that crap. Like did you read about the Predict app?”
“I did.”
He gazes at Maxine’s insides and I throb, seeing her reduced to plastic parts like that. He takes a pen-sized flashlight and peers closer. “So it really looks like the damage is in this bottom area, which is the audio amplification system. This is built like a lot of other digital assistant machines, with the motherboard up top. Since the damage is all to the bottom of this, what you need will probably just be a new tweeter because that’s borked—” He points to a cracked button-shaped thing that sits in the pile of parts. “And it looks like a mono amplifier went here.” He touches a space where it appears a tiny rectangle used to live. “Do you know where it went?”
“I don’t. It’s not here?” I ask, pointing to the pile.
He answers slowly. “That’s a charger, the busted tweeter, and some chunks from the bottom.”
“Okay,” I say, trying to control the tightening in my chest. “And if I don’t have it?”
“I have a sixty-watt mono amplifier IC, I don’t know if it will be exactly what was in here,” he says. “But I have some parts scrapped from similar devices. It might not sound exactly the same, but it should work.”
“Sure,” I say. “Whatever to get this working again.”
He lingers a moment, studying the machine in his hands, then me. His eyes fall to my chest for a moment and then he turns around to go back into another room behind the table, one that says Employees Only.
I look down at my chest—there’s blood spatter on it. Yes, I wiped off my face and covered my head wound. But my gray sweatshirt’s a gory constellation. How could I have overlooked it? My blood pressure spikes and I reach out to touch Maxine’s skin, for comfort. He’s in a back room now, where I can’t see him. What if he’s calling the police? What then? Should I run? My eyes water and I feel like I can’t breathe for a second until he comes back out of the room with a tiny chip in his hand.
“This should do it,” he says. “Give me a second to get it in and put it together. And then the tweeter, I have this from the same machine I stripped the mono amplifier from.” He holds up a dome-shaped thing. “It’s not a Maxine, but it’s one of those older models this was based off. So it might sound a little different, but it should work the same.” He sits on a stool and starts working, taking out a soldering iron. “The bottom I think you’re just going to need to duct tape for the time being, until you can order a custom replacement.”
I nod, sedated by my sense of relief. He’s making it sound so easy. Soon Maxine will be back with me. I notice him glancing at my sweatshirt again and I fold my arms, my ears ringing.
“So … what happened, might I ask?” the guy says as he focuses on the miniature task at hand. “How’d it break? Why the emergency?”
“Funny story,” I say. “I’m an artist. I was working on a piece for an exhibition tomorrow, which features Maxine and a whole lot of red paint. I dropped her—it—and it just busted completely.”
“Ah,” he says. “I wondered what was going on with your sweatshirt. It looks … alarming.”
“Right?” I laugh. “I look like I just killed someone.”
“You kind of do,” he says with a smile.
And the tension has melted, just melted, like butter in a pan. Michelle stirs behind me and I stoop down to rock her. Once she dozes again, her eyelashes no longer aflutter, I stand back up.
“Anyway,” I go on, relishing the fantasy now, enjoying the lie. “That was why I was so desperate coming here. Without Maxine, there’s no show tomorrow. It would have been a disaster.”
“Where’s the show?” he asks.
“It’s being held at a gallery in San Jose called the Green Light,” I tell him excitedly.
“Nice,” he says.
As he continues to work, I chew my cheek and pace along the shelves, getting lost in the woods of my mind. For a moment, I’m exhilarated by the idea that I could be an artist, getting ready for a show. That my life is not my life. That my husband is not a corpse in my house. It’s so exquisite, the fiction I spin, that it isn’t until I hear the screech of the duct tape that I’m pulled out of it. That I remember where I am and what’s really happening. I walk back to the table where the man is working. He plugs Maxine in and she lights up in a rainbow of colors. I nearly burst into tears at the sight of it.
“Oh my God,” I say, clamping my hand to my mouth.
“Rowena,” Maxine says, her voice a bit quieter, a bit tinnier, but still there. “Rowena, what happened? Are you safe?”
“I’m fine, Maxine, everything’s fine,” I say, not being able to help the tear that falls down my face. I try to catch it quickly, but I notice the man noticing, eyebrows raised. “You can shut her off,” I tell him. “Save battery power.”
He does so. “Just send me the five hundred and we’re good.”
“You sure?” I ask, taking out my phone and opening the app.
“Yeah. Parts were nothing. It was scrap we keep in the back. My handle’s Jacob_L4873.”
My finger, lingering above the phone screen, shakes uncontrollably. “Jacob?” I repeat.
“Yeah.”
“Your name is Jacob?”
“Yes.”
“I figured your name was Ed.”
“Tell you a secret,” he says, leaning in. “There is no Ed.”
I force a sound from my mouth I hope resembles a laugh.
“Well, I’m Rowena,” I say. “Nice to meet you.”
“That’s funny, I figured your name was Carrie Woodward,” he says. “Since it’s on the inside of Maxine.”
It is, in this second in time, as if gravity itself has shifted. I can’t move. I have to put the phone down as I find my words. “Wait—what?”
“Yeah, you didn’t notice it? Oh right, you’ve probably never looked inside. Guessing it’s the name of whomever worked on this, since you said it’s in beta and it’s not commercially sold. Sometimes these things in beta, they’re marked with the name of the programmer or the person who worked on it. Like a signature, you know?”
Carrie Woodward. Carrie Woodward. Carrie Woodward?
Carrie. Fucking. Woodward.
I can barely type the word Jacob into my phone without wanting to throw up. After I send him the money, and he gets the alert on his phone, I thank him and gently pick up Michelle’s carseat and head toward the glass door pitch black with night.
“Good luck at your show,” he says.
I freeze. Takes a second to register, but I turn around and nod. “Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much.” I swallow. “Jacob.”
The locks unclick for me. The night air is warm on my face, a breeze smelling of French fries from the glow of a fast-food restaurant still open at the edge of the parking lot. I’m not sure I’ll ever be hungry again. After fastening Michelle back in and soothing her again as she stirs, I heave myself into the front seat and put my hands on the wheel. I can’t bring myself to start the car, though. I am on fire. I am dizzy. Why would Carrie’s name be inside Maxine? A signature? If she programmed Maxine—if she was responsible for making her—what does that mean?
Can I even trust Maxine?
I squeeze the wheel and glance at the passenger seat, where Maxine still sits in a brown bag. I’m not ready to take her out of it. I have to think this through. Because if Carrie programmed Maxine, and Carrie was fucking my husband, and Carrie knew this machine was going home to be mine … that means she would have had plenty of motivation to program it to fuck with me.
And if she did that, then that means …
I knock my head with my hand, just to feel something. And oh, believe me, the wound is still fresh under the beanie, and I feel more than something: I feel everything. I see stars.
“I can’t,” I say, starting the car, the world a blur. “I can’t.”
I can’t think this thought through to its logical conclusion.
Just like I can’t think back to what happened at the house.
I can’t go backward. I can’t delve into hypotheticals. All I can do now is drive a straight path forward to the next place. Follow the line.
