Stranger in the Room: A Novel (2 page)

I saw a crowd in the parking lot as I searched for an empty spot for the Impala. Instinct told me Miki was at the heart of it. Miki always seemed to be putting on some kind of show. I’d never been out with her when she didn’t have an entourage, faithful followers to bask in her brilliant light. It was how she kept everyone at arm’s length while soaking up the adoration she craved.

I parked, took a ticket stub from the attendant, and headed that way. The knot of nicely clad humans loosened just enough for me to glimpse my cousin’s wispy figure at its center. As I moved closer, I smelled something burning and saw a small fire of twigs and leaves and something made of fabric. I stopped on the fringe.

“It’s her black gloves,” the woman next to me whispered reverently. Ah, the black gloves. No need to explain. Everyone in Miki’s life
knew about the gloves. They had become a part of Miki’s depression rituals. I think we had all hoped at some point that wearing them would be expression enough of her misery to prevent her from hurting herself again. But the gloves had merely acted as a warning. Someone would find her in the bathtub, on the floor, in the bed, with her veins open and enough barbs in her system to give Keith Richards a run for his money.

I moved through the group and saw Miki standing over the smoldering pile. Someone handed her a champagne flute. She held up the glass dramatically as the last bit of fabric curled into the fire. A cheer went up as she drained her glass.

She spotted me and smiled, raised her voice. “I’ve turned the corner, Keye. The curtain has lifted.” And then she stepped out of the circle and walked away from her fans without so much as a word. She hugged me and whispered: “Be my date tonight. Protect me from the wolves.”

I laced my arm in hers, and we crossed Juniper to Gabe’s, maneuvered our way across the busy patio and went inside. The first whiff of tequila and lime wrapped its arms around me like an old friend. Most of the time now, I don’t even really want a drink. Not when I’m thinking. But when I’m reacting to some trigger—a smell, a certain glass, a social situation—my addict’s brain gets busy romancing the memories—the way that first drink of the day settles in on your stress, the way a good tawny port feels in your mouth and lingers on your lips after a meal. That’s when my sobriety feels fleeting. I felt prickly heat on the back of my neck. I needed to get back to AA. Not surprisingly, I’d made a mess out of that as well.

Miki was wearing a black dress that flared out above her knees, more Judy Jetson than Audrey Hepburn, and over-the-knee boots. She stood near me at the bar, searching my face. We must have looked like lovers, something Miki had already calculated, I was sure. And another way of keeping her flock at bay.

“Are you all right?” she asked, then went on without giving me time to answer. “Oh, right. The alcohol thing. What’s the big deal, anyway? I won’t let you get wasted. Just order a fucking drink.”

“That’s the worst idea I’ve heard all day.”

She reached into her bag and withdrew a tiny glass vial with a black cap. “I’ve got some coke. Would a line help?”

That’s my Miki, always thinking of others. “Probably not,” I answered, with more revulsion than I wanted to show her. We’d all been watching Miki’s self-medicated self-destruction for years. I felt really over it at the moment. I’d been down that road. We are always less tolerant of our own reflections, aren’t we?

I ordered grape juice and got the same smirk I’m usually subjected to when I order grape juice in a bar. They didn’t have it, of course. “Okay, how about a Diet Pepsi?” A couple of heads turned. Ordering Pepsi in a Coca-Cola town was an act of treason.

“We have Diet Coke,” the bartender told me.

I settled on club soda with a twist and Miki ordered an Absolut martini, extra-dirty. We found an empty couch with a coffee table in a back section off the main bar. The room was set up with lacquered cherrywood tables and chessboards. And though our long, hot summer was in full swing, the bar was air-conditioned to frosty cold so the gas fireplaces could warm it back up. I could see the bar from where we sat, mirrored and glimmering in the soft light. I looked at Miki and tried not to notice the marks on both her arms. The thick horizontal streaks of white scar tissue were a reminder of how desperate she’d been, and how utterly incapable she was of loving herself. There must have been eight or ten slashes on each arm. They seemed especially out of place on my porcelain-doll cousin. She’d just burned the long, black gloves that had covered those scars. Perhaps she was ready to look at them. It wasn’t the first time I’d been grateful the DNA that had poisoned Miki’s mental health and her mother’s, and perhaps even flirted with my adoptive mother’s happiness from time to time, was not surging through my own veins. Mother’s family had a history of quiet and hidden gloominess. Depression isn’t something one freely admits to down South. But Florence and Miki had blown the lid off the family secrets vault with their overt and sometimes public illness. Fortunately, someone had always managed to find Miki after she’d sliced herself up or swallowed a mountain of pills—a self-appointed watcher, a groupie, one of the countless men or women who flocked to her like hungry gulls. They couldn’t help themselves.
A radiant, brilliant, dark, and emotionally unavailable woman is irresistible to the demons and obsessions of codependent fixers and masochists. Miki’s illness only sparked theirs.

“So what’s up with the gloves?” I wanted to know. We had leaned back, drinks in hand, legs crossed, facing each other.

“That part of my life is over.”

“You taking your meds?”

Miki shook her head. “I can’t live like that. I can’t do my life numb. I just can’t.”

Yeah sure
. Coke and alcohol wasn’t numbing at all. She was probably on some manic tear with stimulants and booze and no meds. I wondered if the break-in was real, imagined, or outright fabrication. She must have read the concern on my face.

She leaned in close and whispered, “I think I’m following someone. I’m just not sure who.”

I stared at her blankly.

“Oh, come on, Keye. Lighten up. It’s a joke.”

Stress hormones began to jet-ski through my bloodstream. My eyes dropped to the martini. It was cloudy and cold. My saliva glands were working overtime. I didn’t want to be here.
What’s the big deal, anyway?… Just order a fucking drink
.

A busty brunette with an old-fashioned cigarette tray attached to her by a neck strap passed through and headed for the cigar room, where she’d clip ends and refill cognacs. Someone at the bar was licking salt and lemon and shooting tequila. I squeezed lime into my club soda and blinked up at Miki.
Patience
. Something had frightened her. She wanted to be here right now, and I needed to function in the real world, where people drink and want to talk to me in bars. I’m a PI, for Christ’s sake. Half my clients are drunks. The old tapes were playing, telling me this was hard, telling me I wanted a drink. I didn’t. Not ever. I reminded myself it wasn’t real. Just the mind stalking shadowy old corridors. I reeled myself in, knowing that each time I did that, each time I said no, new pathways were burned into me that might help avert the next crisis.

“I hired this trainer who uses alternative treatments as mood stabilizers to get people off meds,” Miki told me. “Exercise and supplements, acupuncture and diet. It’s working. I exercise my ass off. It
releases some kind of chemical that keeps me healthy. You know I’ve been good for a while, right?”

By “good” she meant she hadn’t been institutionalized for cutting or overdosing in a couple of years. She took the vial out of her bag, filled the cap with white powder, glanced around the room before she lifted it to her nostril and inhaled.

“Cocaine and vodka part of the regimen?”

“So judgmental, Keye.” She swirled the martini glass gently, then sipped it. I smelled the olive juice. Her blue eyes lifted to mine. “It’s really disappointing.”

“You’re not the first bipolar patient to argue against meds.”

“I’m not a fucking patient!” Miki exploded. Heads turned. She set her martini down too hard. Liquid sloshed over the rim. “I’m
family
, Keye. I mean, what the fuck?”

“It was a valid question, Miki,” I shot back.

“I was a finalist last year, Keye, for a Pulitzer for feature photography. A goddamned
Pulitzer
. You ever notice how many World Photography Awards I have on my shelves? Some of us can manage our cravings just fine. How about you?”

I felt that knife twist in my gut. “I fought for my addiction too, Miki,” I replied evenly. “For a long time. It didn’t pay off.”

“Someone was in my house when I got home tonight. Can we just focus on that?”

“Tell me what happened,” I said calmly. I wanted the heat to dissipate a little.

She told me about fumbling with her keys at the door, then hearing something and knowing someone was inside the house. The combative demeanor began to peel away. Tears spilled out and ran down pale cheeks. She swiped them away and picked up her martini glass with a shaky hand. “I went to the window off the porch, and I saw him. Inside my house, Keye. He had walked from my front door to the window. And he just stood there looking at me. He made his hand into a pistol like this.” Miki raised her thumb and jutted out her forefinger. “And he squeezed the trigger.” Another tear trickled.

I reached across the table and put my hand on hers. “Was anything taken?”

She shook her head. “Nothing that I could see when I walked
through with the police. I didn’t hang around. It’s too creepy knowing someone was in your house, touching your things. I left and parked down the street and called you.”

“If he’d wanted to hurt you, he wouldn’t have let you know he was there.”

Miki signaled one of the waitstaff, held up her glass, and said, “Absolut, dirty.”

“Any reason someone would want to scare you?” I asked.

“No. I mean, I don’t know. My neighbors hate me because I don’t spend my time beautifying my yard or having mommy meetings or whatever.”

“Seems a little drastic for the neighborhood association.”

“You don’t believe me, do you? I can tell from your tone. You’re just like those fucking cops.”

Alcohol had thickened her tongue. I wondered how many drinks she’d had before she got to Gabe’s. “Anyone mad? Any breakups lately?”

“I don’t do breakups anymore. It always gets messy. I keep it casual.”

“Tell me about the messy ones,” I said. The server came with Miki’s drink, and I borrowed her ink pen.

“Messy? I had one of those. A big one,” Miki said, sliding the drink and the cocktail napkin in front of her. “I thought I was in love. But he wanted to own me. I don’t go there anymore.” Her tone was as icy cold as the martini on the table. “Soon as they get clingy, I’m gone. It’s not worth the hassle.”

“You mind giving me a name?”

Miki hesitated. “Cash Tilison.”

“What happened?” I jotted his name down on a napkin. I recognized it. Tilison was a Nashville singer and not Miki’s first affair with a famous performer. I couldn’t remember any of Miki’s other boyfriends. But we hadn’t hung out since high school.

“He couldn’t take no for an answer. Lot of phone calls, name-calling, text messages, emails. Didn’t have a clue about how to deal with rejection. He flipped out for a while. He said he’d never had his heart in anything before me. I guess he told himself that gave him some right to talk to me like that.”

“Talk to you how?”

“Called me a bitch a lot. Mean bitch. Cold bitch. Heartless bitch. Really liked the whole bitch theme.” She took a sip of her drink and smiled. “He used to call me that when we were fucking. He’d hold my hair. But I liked it then. What can I say? I’m a bottom. Know what I mean?”

I wasn’t prepared to share with Miki whether I knew the dominant- and submissive-tinged bedroom games people play or how entirely they dissociate from them in life. I thought about my big Homicide lieutenant and how different he was in bed from the tough, real-world cop—so intensely confident in his masculinity that he wasn’t afraid to let go of control.

“How long did this go on?” I asked Miki.

“Ten, fifteen minutes, if I was lucky.” She smiled at me.

I laughed, held up my club soda. Our glasses touched, some tension peeled away.

“He started showing up places. Even when I was traveling. Nobody knows how to date anymore. They always get attached.”

Sure, sure, everyone wants Miki
. “Cash fit the body type for the guy you saw in your window tonight?”

Miki thought about it, started to speak, was silent. I was trying to understand the hesitation, why she wanted to protect him. Was it because she was lying? Or was it because she still had feelings for him? “I guess,” she said, finally. “He was tall with broad shoulders.”

“Police say how he got in?”

“They told me there was no evidence of a break-in. And I said, what about the guy standing inside my living room? Isn’t that considered goddamn evidence?”

“Cash have a key?”

“I don’t think so. I think I got it back. I might have even changed the locks since then.” She ate an olive off a plastic pick in her drink. “I felt like someone was watching me when I got out of the car at the gym today on Ponce. I felt it again on the treadmill.”

“Must be ten sets of eyes on you right now. You’re gorgeous.” I glanced at the sparkling wonderland in the other room. A bottle of Grey Goose was making eyes at me. What’s not to love about vodka made in Cognac?

Miki looked at me. “Funny you think so. I always thought that about you. I wanted to
be
you when we were in high school.”

“God, why? I was just the Chinese chick,” I told her, but I am a product of the American South just as surely as if I’d sprung up out of the dark green leaves of the wild, creeping kudzu carpeting our towering pine forests. Georgia’s simmering sun turned my shoulders golden as my brother and I played in the thick Saint Augustine grass in my parents’ white-fenced backyard. It was my branding iron. You learn this about the South. You don’t merely exist here. You make a blood pact with it the moment the soft, moist air fills your nostrils with the sensual scent of Confederate jasmine and floods your DNA like reproductive seed. This is my South, the one that gave me a home and a community of soft-spoken and well-intentioned people who proudly waved their liberal credentials when my brother and I were the first kids in our neighborhood who didn’t look like everyone else. Jimmy’s South was not as kind. My black-skinned, light-eyed homosexual brother was viewed with suspicion by just about every community within our orbit.