“Things were bad,” Lettie says. “Ossie was really messed up in the head, these past few weeks. Like, hearing voices, dreams she thought were going to come true, that kind of thing. She said she felt . . . threatened. Like someone was trying to kill her.”
Hairs stand along Dom’s spine. “What did she say, exactly?”
“Kept saying they were trying to silence her. Sounds like standard persecution fantasy stuff, right?”
“Yeah,” he says. Dom knows that taking a sick person’s fantasies seriously is a dangerous game—but what if they weren’t fantasies? “Did she ever . . . say anything? About who they might be? Why they were trying to silence her?”
“No, but . . . the reddest red flag of all—she got religion.”
Dom laughs, but doesn’t say, Ossie would never.
“Got a kind of spiritual therapist, over at Grace Abounding. She said Pastor Thirza was the only one who could help her.”
“That’s excellent, Lettie, thanks. I’ll go talk to her. And if someone really was trying to hurt your sister, you can be fucking certain that I’ll make them pay.”
Lettie smiles at first, and then frowns at the curse word.
* * *
SOMETHING’S BEEN BOTHERING ATTALAH ALL DAY, making her jittery and unfocused at work and even afterward, volunteering at UPLIFT Hudson, and it isn’t until she’s home listening to the radio and Ms. Jackson plays “Happy Together” and she gets a vivid memory of Ronan Szepessy back in ninth-grade homeroom saying, “I love this song because it’s got ‘Happy’ in the title but it’s like the saddest song ever,” that she figures out the source. Ms. Jackson is spooky like that, somehow always able to choose a song that pierces straight to the heart of whatever’s perplexing Attalah.
So she hauls out her high school yearbook and looks up Ronan.
His photo is goofy, an idiot smile on his face, but the Ronan she remembers wasn’t goofy. And he never smiled. He’s making fun of the photographer here. Shaved head. Awkward Adam’s apple. Bright eyes and sharp cheekbones, but back then he hadn’t known what to do with them.
He knows now. A short precise beard; professional haircuts. Practiced, skin-deep smile. In magazine pieces and glossy website profiles he looks stunning and sophisticated, in that way only gay men ever seem to be. She’s watched his rise, taken pride in it. When New York magazine named him one of the ten top photographers under forty, she’d posted the link to the ‘You Know You’re From Hudson When’ group on Facebook . . . but then had to delete it when the Hometown boy makes good! comments got drowned out by a hundred variations of Fuck that faggot.
Remembering the slur twists tiny blades between her ribs. So many people she’s loved have had it leveled against them. Katch’s photo still hangs on her fridge: the program from his memorial service. Six months ago, now, but the hurt still so sharp. Such a radiant, special smile. The kind that went all the way to the core of who he was.
Unlike adolescent Ronan, teenage Katch had known exactly what to do with his beauty. He’d taken it to the streets, let it open doors for him, even if some of those doors opened onto exploitation. With his sights set on a modeling career, and a pretty shallow pool of self-esteem to draw on, damaged as he was by growing up trans and of color in a racist transphobic place like Hudson—like America—he’d trusted a whole lot of untrustworthy people and engaged in a whole lot of sketchy activities. Which had led him to heroin, and an overdose.
With difficulty, she snaps her focus away from grief.
Ronan’s return could mean defeat. That’s the most likely scenario. That’s why she’s been anxious all day. He gets hold of his father’s building and sells it to Jark Trowse’s Pequod Arms project.
But Ronan’s return could also mean victory. It all depends on how she plays it.
Hudson had not been kind to Ronan. He’d talked a lot about how much he hated the town back in high school. But so had she. And here she was, still, trying to save it.
Because here’s the thing she learned along the way—hate is a kind of attachment. To hate something is to cleave your soul to it. And sometimes love is the root of hate. Sometimes you say you hate something because you love it, love what it could be, but hate what it is, how flawed and broken. She feels that way about her country. Hates it, because of how much she loves it, and how much awful stuff it does, how far short it falls of its own professed ideals.
She texts Dom for Ronan’s phone number, and when she gets it she texts him: A little bird told me you’re back in town! Want to come catch up over cookies? I remember how much you liked my mom’s peanut butter chocolate—I finally mastered the recipe. Let me know when works for you.—Attalah
She thinks a second, before sending another one:
Dom is so happy you’re home, and so am I
Chapter Ten
RONAN
Pure masochism brought me to the potluck dance party.
Masochism, and Katch. I’d been way up Columbia Street when I saw him in the distance. Tiny in the twilight that smelled like the sea, even though we were a hundred miles upriver from it. Beautiful—proud posture, inked arms, clove smoke clouding the air behind him—but stunted somehow, like the weight of Hudson threatened to break him.
Sunset had made the sky spectacular, deep dark blue in contrast to the amber cast the streetlights gave the city. The Catskill Mountains were black in the distance. Clouds shaped like whales drifted high overhead. My breath caught, the scene was so lovely. Something throbbed through me. A feeling, for this place. This city. This fucking city. Something a lot like love.
How the fuck is that possible?
I took out my camera.
But when I looked through my lens? They weren’t clouds that looked like whales. They were whales. Blue whales and black sperm whales, big as zeppelins, swimming through the sky in hyper-slow motion.
Good news, Ronan! You’re going crazy!
Bile flooded my mouth. I stopped and spat it into the street; tried to shake off the shivers.
According to the internet—where I’d spent entirely too much time that morning—the most dangerous symptoms associated with methamphetamine withdrawal are severe depression and the potential to develop psychosis.
A laugh or a shriek tried to climb my throat, but I bit it back. I had the strangest feeling that if I laughed out loud I’d break every window on Warren Street.
I followed Katch down, too far away to call his name without sounding like a crazy person—but when he turned into the Penelope’s Quilt warehouse I figured I’d have ample time to corner him in there.
And say what? What are you doing in my hometown? Did you show up for the photo shoot I had you scheduled for yesterday? And did you have anything to do with my ending up here? Did you smoke some cigarettes on my father’s porch?
Anyway, the vast place was so packed I couldn’t find him, with the lights down low and the music up high, and strobes and screens turning every person’s face into a dozen different faces. So while I waited for him to emerge from the crowd, I indulged in masochism. The pain of looking at these laughing hipsters. Maggots consuming the corpse of my town. Filthy hyenas savaging the body of a magnificent elephant. Pretty much all I’d been doing, in the days since my arrival. Reveling in agony; hiding from my broken father.