It’s a few minutes before his response comes in. I stare at the phone the entire time.
You GUESS? he finally asks. Do you want me to call you? I’ve got an appointment in five, but I can try to talk you down first.
My fingers skitter across the keys. No, I’m fine now. I just panicked because the memoir says the witness was a girl and I had this dream and I’ve been seeing a man’s arm around Astrid’s waist. It turns out the witness was someone named Lily, though, so I guess the dream was just a dream and the man’s arm is… part of the spiral.
I reread the last two sentences, and even I can see how ridiculous they sound. I press the backspace button, send only No, I’m fine now. Then I add, Let’s talk later. Love you!
When the door to Rusty’s jingles behind me, I turn around expecting to see Ted, but it’s somebody else. I spin back to face the street, but a hand touches my arm. I stiffen against it, right as the person says my maiden name.
“Brierley?”
I look at the man beside me and take an instinctive step back.
“Cooper,” I say. Cooper Kelley. The brother of my childhood best friend, Kyla.
He’s bulked up since the last time I saw him, five years ago at Kyla’s wedding. His biceps stretch the sleeves of his T-shirt, and I can see the outline of his chest beneath the cotton. But the tattoo on his forearm—that hasn’t changed at all.
Cooper leans forward to hug me, a move I couldn’t have predicted, and I stand taut in his embrace, arms pinned to my sides, heart already racing. My knees go rubbery, instantly unstable, and I can’t catch my breath in his constricting grip. When he finally releases me, his grin crinkles the skin around his eyes.
“Wow, it’s good to see you, Brierley.”
I can’t bring myself to meet his gaze, so I look at his teeth instead. The bottom ones are still crooked, pointing toward and away from each other like old gravestones in a cemetery. They’re yellow, too, and his voice is raspier than I remember. He’s still a smoker.
“It’s Douglas now,” I correct him.
He cocks his head for a moment, then nods. “Right,” he says. “Kyla told me you got married. Congrats.”
“Thanks.” I shrug. “It’s been a few years, but—”
“Have you seen Kyla’s kids lately? Thomas is only two months, so he’s still, like, a sack of potatoes. But Leland? The three-year-old? She’s fuckin’ reading already.” He takes a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket, taps it against his palm. “But you probably know all that. I’m sure you visit all the time.”
I nod, even though he’s wrong. I’ve seen pictures of Leland, but that’s it. I only know about Thomas through Facebook. Kyla told me she was pregnant with Leland at my wedding, and I tried so hard to give her the reaction she deserved—a squeal of delight, a promise to visit her in Maine for baby clothes shopping—but panic shot through me. Kyla and Jeff had only been married for a year. Would I, too, be expected to start having babies so soon? I wanted to pull her aside, yell over the DJ’s music to ask if she knew what she was doing. I wanted to tell her how fragile children are, how easily broken and bruised. I wanted to crouch down on the floor in my wedding dress, rocking back and forth like a kid myself.
That’s why I’ve distanced myself from Kyla, whose childhood home I used to sleep at more often than my own. I haven’t trusted myself to be as warm about her new family as I should be. I don’t want to seem indifferent to the children she loves more than anyone. Mostly, though, I’ve been afraid of the anxiety that swirls in my stomach whenever I see photos of her kids. Last week, right after sex with Eric, I unfollowed her on Facebook. I muted her stories on Instagram.
Cooper lights his cigarette and blows the smoke away from my face. I’m grateful for this. When Kyla and I were kids, he’d exhale so close to us that our throats often burned—secondhand smoke, lung cancer that lurks in cells and bides its time—and when he drove us around in the summer, he’d ash on our bare legs. He was always trying to torture us. Me, especially. He locked me in a linen closet once. He slipped a dead snake into my backpack. He messed with the brakes on my bike. In a lot of ways, I was an easy target. Ted had taught me to wear my fear like perfume, and Cooper was an animal who could pick up a scent.
One time, when Cooper was eighteen, Kyla and I ten, he was supposed to be watching us at the Kelleys’ house while their parents were out. Instead, he drove us to a tattoo parlor, had us sit beside him and watch as a needle pricked him over and over. When it was done, he presented his forearm to us as if it were a masterpiece in a museum.
A section of honeycomb, looking like holes in his skin.
Bees crawling around, seeming almost 3-D.
And then the stingers: exaggerated, talon-sharp, big as syringes.
Cooper smelled my reaction right away. It didn’t matter that I covered my arms, concealing the goose bumps that swelled there in an instant. He knew. And for years after that, he used his tattoo as a weapon. How many times did he wrestle me to the ground, pressing the bees, the honeycomb, the stingers against my screaming mouth? I lost count after the seventh attack. Every time he held me down, the bees on his skin squirming as he flexed with anticipation, his arm shoving my lips so far apart my jaw ached, he laughed hysterically. Kyla would always try to yank him off, and his parents, whose house he still lived in well into his twenties, would threaten to take his car keys. But it didn’t matter. Even as a teenager, I could never enter my best friend’s house without my eyes peeled for her brother, my heart knocking against my ribs.
“I saw Ted,” he says now.
I wrench my eyes away from his tattoo, and he smiles. He knows I was looking.
“Yeah, I’m waiting for him,” I say, careful to keep my voice steady. “He’s been inside for a while.” I click my phone, look at the time. “A long while,” I mumble.
Cooper taps his cigarette, ashes on the sidewalk next to my feet. I look at my shoes—flip-flops. Such a vulnerable choice.
“No,” he says, “I mean I saw him leaving when I got here.”
“Just now?”
Cooper nods. “A few minutes ago. I tried to say hi, but he had that look in his eye. You know the one I’m talking about. Then he peeled on out of here.”
I look at the space where Ted had parked. It holds a tan Prius—not a green Subaru. My heart clenches with a familiar pain. He left me at the store again. When I was a kid, he sometimes abandoned me in unfamiliar places as Experiments. Worse, there were other times when he flat-out forgot about me. For a moment, I wonder which it is now. Then I remember his voice full of fervor, his live-wire mind, his need for the typewriter ribbon the second I arrived, and I know it’s the latter. He was in and out at Rusty’s while I was still grabbing boxes or staring at Astrid’s face. And now he’s back in his office, without a single thought of me, type-type-typing away.
Through a new surge of nausea, I call the house phone. I wait twelve rings before I finally hang up. I can feel Cooper’s eyes on me the entire time.
“You want a ride home?” he asks. He stamps out his cigarette with a paint-streaked boot.
“No. Thanks.”
“You sure? It’s pretty brutal out here. And last I checked, your house was a couple miles away.”