Mind Games (28 page)

“I’m sorry,” I say. My handsome, charmed-life Cubby. I can’t even look him in the eye anymore, and I can feel my face distorting from the effort not to cry. But on top of all the other shitty things I’ve done to him, goddamn if I’ll cry in front of him. I get up from the computer. Being with me has made him bitter. It has to stop.

“Justine—”

“What?”

“Is that real blood? I’d assumed it was fake, but …” He touches the front of my dress, forehead furrowed. I bite my lip. “Justine, why is there blood on you? Are you hurt?” He asks this so tenderly.

“I’m fine,” I whisper, still looking down.

“But you have blood on you! Something happened.”

I’m not prepared for his concern, and it floods me with comfort, warms my cold edges, makes me want to grab handfuls of his Mr. Beaujolais shirt and have him hold me and say Cubby things to me and let me be in his Cubby world just one more night.

But I step back. I have to let him go. I can’t bring him any more Aggies, any more bitterness. I can’t hurt him anymore. “It’s not real blood. This thing’s just a stupid costume.”

A horrible silence descends between us. The silence crushes my chest.

“You’re telling me it’s not real.”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” I say.

He looks at my eyes, like he’s inspecting them for the first time. Does he know I’m lying? Can he see that it’s real blood?

“Just go,” he says wearily. All the tenderness is gone.

I take a breath—there’s so much I want to say, and nothing more to be said. There’s nothing more than cold edges. I go, grabbing my bag on the way, feeling his eyes on me. I shut the door softly.

          Twenty-four

I
T’S OBVIOUS
from Shelby’s face that she has something grim to say about my outfit, but I give her a look before she can say it. Then I walk in her door and plop down on her swirl-patterned couch. “Thank God you’re here.”

She sits down next to me and rests a hand on my shoulder, and that’s enough for me to start crying. I give her the short version of everything, because all I really want is to get out of the nurse outfit and take a shower. After several assurances that I’m really okay, relatively speaking, she comes to life as a hostess, pulling me to the bathroom, setting the shower to the perfect temperature, and leaving me to drench myself in the hot water until I’m rubbery.

I step out to find she’s laid out fluffy towels, silky pajamas, a silky Chinese robe, and even new underwear, still with the tags on, which is both thoughtful and mysterious. When I wander out to the living room, she has Burgundy poured and things set out for French sandwiches—French bread with soft cheeses and grapes and strawberries. Shelby eats a lot of French sandwiches. I don’t know if she made them up or if the French really do eat them.

Drinking wine and eating a French sandwich make me feel a bit better, and I give her the creepy details
about the Alchemist that I didn’t feel like revealing to Simon. Though she says little, she is with me as only Shelby can be: horrified at specifics of the kidnapping, thrilled at the escape, aghast that I tried Simon’s spelunking trick, and intrigued by our discovery of a skeleton at the gas station. She’s also very sympathetic about Cubby. Shelby is one of those rare listeners who make you feel less alone.

I build myself another French sandwich. “I have got to get out of this,” I say.

“Oh, Justine.” She hates when I talk about leaving the disillusionists.

“There’s got to be a way.”

“There is.” Meaning the Jarvis route.

“Well, that’s not looking so bad right now. I’ve lost my relationship; I’ve lost my autonomy; I’ve lost my moral compass.”

“Relationship and autonomy, yes. Moral compass, no.”

“I wanted to zing Aggie out of pure vengeance.”

“But you did not. You should have, I think. And you helped to take rapist from raping business. We are angels of karma, holding mirror to targets—”

“We’re slaves of Packard.”

“Everybody is slave of something.” She downs the rest of her Burgundy.

“That doesn’t really make me feel better.”

“You Americans. You always want to feel better.”

“Don’t you want to feel better?”

“Feel better,”
she says with contempt, then dispatches the entire conversation with a wave. She agrees, however, that it’s terrible Simon knows about the faces.

“Shelby, we have to find the other faces before he does. We have to go back to the tollbooth.”

“And do what?”

“I don’t know. But we can’t let Simon have leverage over Packard.”

“Yes, Simon is gambler born to lose. He will always go too far.”

“Let’s go back there.”

“I want to see gas station first,” Shelby says.

After a few more glasses of wine, Shelby starts feeling sorry for Packard. “Trapped man you found, he dies alone, to become jumbled skeleton, never to leave. I do not want Packard to become jumbled skeleton.”

“I don’t either.”

“He called here before,” she says. “Very worried, very upset about you and Alchemist. I told him you are fine. That you have gone to Cubby’s.”

“Good.”

By the time the bottle’s finished, we’ve made three plans. The first plan is that I’ll crash on her couch for the night. The second plan entails picking up my car and taking a road trip north so Shelby can personally inspect the gas station. The third plan is a work in progress. It involves bringing a paintball gun to the apartment complex and splattering over the face to hide it from Simon, then inspecting the face on the tollbooth and maybe interviewing the woman inside.

   The next morning, Shelby wears a black-and-red cowboy shirt and bright-green jeans and yellow cowboy boots. I throw on one of the rollerblading outfits from the bag of clothes from Cubby’s—green pants with a white stripe up the side and a white top and jacket. It makes me sad to think of the happy time when I last wore it. I can’t stop thinking about Cubby, and that look on his face when I lied and told him it wasn’t real blood on my dress.

“We must make small stop first,” she announces once we’re on the road.

The stop turns out to be a cluster of one-story office-park-type buildings with tinted windows and plenty of
parking. We creep up the walk and peer into a door labeled
SPINAL RESOURCES FUNDRAISING CENTER
and see a woman with close-cropped gray hair and big hoop earrings sitting behind a receptionist’s desk.

Shelby pulls me away. “No one must see us. Come.” We sneak around the side, down a slim drive between two buildings, and peer in a window. A woman with a headset working at a computer.

“What is this?”

“You will see. You will like it very much.”

“Unless we get arrested.”

The next few windows yield similar scenes, with about half the workers in wheelchairs. Then we get to window five, where yet another man with a headset peers into yet another computer. Big forehead, tiny nose.

“Oh my God!” I slide down under the window. “What’s Foley doing in there?”

“He has become fundraiser for this charity. Do you see?”

“A fundraiser?”

“Yes,” she says. “He is force for good now. He raises funds to build large and sophisticated new facility for those who are injured. Like Mandler boy he caused injuries to.”

“I don’t get it. It seems like he was a bum in a coffee shop two seconds ago.”

“No, it is what … perhaps a month ago he was fully disillusioned. He was crashed and now reboots. He had change of heart. Is force for good now, Foley.”

“But Shelby, do they at least know about Foley’s past? How do we know he won’t turn bad again?”

“Justine, did you not see him disillusioned?”

“You don’t know how evil he was.”

“It does not matter. He was disillusioned. You do not come back same after such a thing.”

“I think these people should at least know about his past, don’t you think?” I get up and head for the front.

She rushes after me. “You cannot go in!” She looks around furtively. “Foley must not see me.”

I toss her the keys. “Then wait in the car. Because I’m going in. Wait—is that the name he’s using? Foley?”

“Yes.” She heads toward the parking lot and I go in.

The gray-haired woman at the front desk tells me Foley is head of fundraising. She raises her eyebrows. “Do you want to speak with Mr. Foley?”

“No, I want to speak
about
Mr. Foley,” I say. “I have personal experience with him, and I want you to be aware of his history.” The woman frowns as I continue. “I just want you to know—Foley has a track record of scamming people and …” I trail off here, because she’s vigorously shaking her head. “It’s true, I swear.”

“I know, I know.” She hits a few computer keys, then rolls her wheelchair nearer to where I stand. “Several people have warned us about his past,” she says. “It’s not necessary.” She points to a colorful brochure with a line drawing of some sort of recreational-therapeutic-residential complex. “The foundation for that center will soon be poured, thanks to Ben Foley. This fundraising operation wouldn’t exist if not for Ben Foley. Believe me, every dime is tracked. We all know about his past, but important friends of the project vouched for him, and he’s gone on to raise more corporate and private money in a few weeks than whole teams have managed to raise over the course of years. Years! His talent …” She glances sideways as if to ensure he’s not listening. “You might say his talent translates. People skills. Negotiation skills. We do have one worry with Ben Foley, certainly,” she says. “It’s that he will leave us.”

“Important friends of the project vouched for him?”

She doesn’t give a name. She doesn’t have to. It’s the
Mandlers. Their son was paralyzed. Spinal resources. It all adds up.

   Back out in the parking lot I start up the car and pull out, conscious of Shelby watching me, waiting for my reaction.

“Well, there’s a shocker,” I say finally. And then I laugh. I don’t even know why.

“He contacted Helmut for donation,” she says. “That is how we found out.”

“You must feel pretty good. You were on the team that disillusioned Foley.”

She does one of her weary waves. “Too much butterflies and sunshine. But I am glad you saw.”

   You can hardly make out the face on the gas station wall in the daytime. Shelby runs her hand over the pebbly surface. “Henji,” she whispers. After that I show her the interior, which looks extra sad with sunlight streaming in the door. Shelby kneels by the skeleton, motionless for a long time, almost like she’s communing with it. Then she pulls a tightly rolled-up cloth out of her purse and spreads it over the remains. I’m touched that she’d thought to bring it. “I hope soul is not trapped here,” she says.

“Me too,” I say.

We continue Simon’s search for a diary of some sort. Shelby thinks that there might be a hidden compartment somewhere, but we find nothing. We also discuss the paintball idea, though it doesn’t seem quite as brilliant as it did last night when we were drunk.

On our way out we stop to gaze at the trees, and the meadow stretching out behind the gas station. It’s full of yellow flowers under a candy-blue sky, all so pretty it almost looks fake.

I wonder what’s worse—having this view and not being able to reach it, or the gray concrete and glass that Packard sees.

          Twenty-five

I
PLUG IN
my phone to charge next to Cubby’s favorite blue water glass, still half-full from when he stopped by last week. Everything in my apartment reminds me of Cubby and the future I once pictured for us. If I weren’t a disillusionist, I think bitterly, I’d still be with him and he would come back and drink out of this glass, and we might still have that future. I grab the glass and hurl it at a wall, and it shatters.

It’s been only twenty-four hours since the Alchemist followed me out to my car, but it seems like weeks. I’m still not as traumatized as I think I ought to be. I suppose it helped to be laughing the whole time. Or maybe what Simon said is true—maybe I zinged all the trauma out. Or the other thing, that the darkness of human nature is my territory.