“I’m saying that I want to destroy them,” I said, and it felt so sweet to say it, like a hit of a drug that peeled back my inhibitions and let me see parts of myself so ugly and beautiful I’d spent a lifetime hiding them from myself. Even sweeter was seeing that it was true. I did want to destroy them. I could do it, too. I could do anything.
Fuck meth. This feeling was magnificent.
“I will break every law of man and God to do it,” I said.
“That’s a bold statement for someone who ran away from here the first chance he got and never looked back,” she said. “Where’s all this town spirit coming from?”
“I failed my father,” I said. “I abandoned him. All the hate and pain I felt here—I connected it with him. I may be too late to correct the damage that I did, but not to atone for it. And for so long, I was so focused on how much I hated this place that I never saw how much I also loved it. I see it now, though, walking Warren Street, seeing what they’ve done to it. I think we can do this, Attalah. You and me.”
“Me,” she said. “Why me?”
“Because you know this place and all these people. Who has power and who has secrets. And people love you and respect you. They’ll listen to you. But mostly—because you’re as angry as I am. Aren’t you?”
She nodded.
“Between the two of us we could probably come up with a pretty solid plan. Couldn’t we?”
She nodded again.
“Fuck,” Dom said, standing up. “Y’all are serious. You are, aren’t you? I can’t be here for this. Whatever the hell you’re doing, I don’t want to know about it.”
“Then go,” Attalah said, scooting her chair closer to me. “And shut the door behind you.”
Part II
Chapter Eleven
“Hey, A,” Zelda Outterson says, sliding into the well-worn seat across from Attalah’s desk. They went to high school together, but the past ten years weigh like twenty on her face.
“How’ve you been, Zelda?”
“You know. Getting through it.”
“That’s all any of us can do.”
Originally, Attalah had planned to use a client as her proxy. She’d ransacked her files, read deep into sordid stories. Assessing the parents she knows are terrible, versus the ones who ended up under the watchful eye of Child Protective Services only because of a messy divorce or a vengeful ex or a racist neighbor with CPS on speed dial. Attalah has access to so much information. For hundreds of parents, she knows precisely how they had failed their children. All their oversights and errors, whether due to ignorance or malice or addiction or sheer dumb blistering bad luck. And she knows the fault lines of hate and rancor between friends and neighbors—who snitched on who, who phoned in false reports. And she has a lot of leeway in the work she does. A huge amount of power over the outcomes of the cases under her purview.
In the end, she realized there was no ethical way to use a client.
And anyway the perfect person has been right under her nose all along.
Zelda Outterson has worked at CPS for five years. One of five people Attalah supervises. She is quiet, and kind, and hardworking. Attalah remembers hearing that she’d had a bit of a bad reputation back in high school, but who hadn’t? All she needs to know about Zelda is, she loves her town and she’s struggling to make ends meet.
“How’s your downstairs neighbor been treating you?”
Zelda rolls her eyes at the perennially sore subject. “That fucking asshole. Every time I fucking watch TV or have one fucking friend over, he’s banging on the ceiling or knocking on my door, asking, Would I please please make less noise? And he’s some rich city fucker, paying three thousand dollars a month, and my rent is a thousand because I been there so long, so you know damn well which one of us the landlord sides with.”
Shouting, from an adjacent office. Shannon Gallo, probably. One of the hottest of the many hot messes on Attalah’s caseload. Three hours late for her appointment, and pitching a fit because they wouldn’t let her in to see Attalah right away.
“And your sister? Where’s she these days?”
“Philmont, like pretty much everybody else who got pushed the fuck out of downstreet.”
Attalah nods and bites back a smile. She can smell it on Zelda: the hate. The anger. So palpable that she feels comfortable scrapping the long and roundabout map she’d charted, for how to bring the conversation around to the Ask. “What if I told you there was something you could do about them? The people jacking up the rents?”
“I’d say I’m not trying to go to jail for murder, and I’m not sure what the fuck you can do about it other than that.”
“I’m working on something,” Attalah says, and leaves it there.
Zelda looks out the window, onto Long Alley. Kids go by on bikes. Someone has spray-painted SATAN’S GOT YOUR NOSE on the door to Mitch Teator’s garage. Eventually she leans forward and says, “‘Something’ sounds a hell of a lot better than the nothing that we’ve been doing.”
Chapter Twelve
RONAN
The Hudson River had risen.
All the way up Warren Street, to the tippy-top of the hill where our house sat. The whole town was underwater, and little waves lapped at the steps to our front porch. My father sat beside me on the top step, bare feet in the water, looking out at the river-sea that extended to the horizon. We cradled coffee mugs; two cigarettes smoldered in an ashtray between us. We watched whales swim through twilight thunderstorm skies.
He turned to me and opened his mouth to speak. No sounds came out. He kept trying, making heaving noises, gagging sounds. I scooted closer, leaned my head toward his.
A hermit crab scuttled up out of his throat.
My own screaming woke me up. Or anyway—brought me back to the here and now, the safe Hudson whose sloping main street wasn’t underwater. Whose river glimmered safely in the distance. Whose sky was bright with sun coming through gray morning clouds. I was still sitting on the front porch. My father was asleep inside.
I looked in my lap: same mug, but full of water.
I took a sip. Salt. But not sterile like table salt mixed with tap water. Brackish and murky and full of flecks of things, like someone had scooped it out of the sea a moment before. I poured it out into the grass, and a little trail of sand was left along the inside of the cup.
I remembered now. This had been normal, once. This . . . bleed-through. All through my childhood, all through my adolescence. Dream leaking into reality; nightmare seizing hold of you in the middle of the street. Passing people in the high school hallway or the McDonald’s parking lot who maybe weren’t real, or maybe died a long time ago. As soon as I moved away I stopped thinking about it, the way you don’t reflect on a headache when it’s gone, but it occurred to me in that moment that I must have been craving unreality pretty hard. Because right around then was when I started indulging in illicit substances to excess.
I started to text Dom, but what would I even say? We need to talk about whatever fucking supernatural miasma hangs over this city? I finally figured out why I became a drug addict?
I put my phone away. There was too much work to do.