“Yeah. Only I’m having a bad day tonight.”
Swanny senses danger. She hasn’t forgotten those bloody drag marks on the Chaw Shop floor, hasn’t forgotten what Sharkey is capable of. She keeps her tone light: “Then I am grateful for your restraint on this occasion.”
He glares at the empty banquette next to him. “If you’re so grateful, you sure have a funny way of showing it.”
“Excuse me?” Swanny feels her fear, her caution, slip perilously away. The car is filling up with smoke, bringing back what it took, but Swanny cannot surrender to those mists, not yet. How dare he. She folds her enormous arms with a resolve she doesn’t feel, her voice all at once the voice of the bride negotiating with her father-in-law on her wedding day, the voice of the daughter parrying arguments during homeschool. The voice of a baroness. The voice that exists still in the very core of her, if only to say, with uncommon vehemence: EAT SHIT & DIE. “What—exactly—do I owe you for tonight?”
Sharkey smolders, turns away. But she can’t let it go.
“What is it, Howie? What’s the daily rate for keeping me alive? What about my husband? Is it extra if I don’t want you to beat me? Are you charging for the chaw? You must forgive me, I’m just a simple country girl all alone in the big city. I have no business sense. I didn’t realize we were performing transactions here.”
“Knock it off.”
“But I have every right to know. I balance your books—how am I to balance my own if I don’t know my debts? So answer my question. What do I owe you for tonight?”
Swanny waits for the fireworks, but he drops the subject like a knife in a gun fight: “Nothing.”
* * *
Back at the Chaw Shop, Swanny tells Sharkey that she’s sleeping upstairs—in the attic, alone, not with him on the fold-out couch in his den, where they’ve spent every night together for the last month. She wants to fight now, she’s ready, but he goes into his room and shuts the door without another word.
Swanny lights a candle, carries it upstairs. She’s in the lull between the smoke and the ghosts, the time in the chaw high when the world is most haunted, but before that haunting coalesces into specific presences. She imagines that this is the zone where Sharkey spends most of his days. Aroused but not euphoric. Attuned. In the attic, Sharkey’s treasure hoard—the punch bowl, the presidential bust, the candelabras—throw eldritch shadows on the walls, the branches of a black forest, grasping. She hasn’t been up here since the day she tried to kill him. She locates her diary and, in the flicker of the flame, begins setting down her thoughts.
Dear Diary,
There is so much I have neglected to report. I’ve grown two new teeth, abandoned my life’s one true mission, & fallen into something bottomless and terrible—I wonder if it’s love. And now my husband has returned to me.
Before she can dip her pen again to elaborate, she hears a noise at the windowpane, then another. Tap, tap. Tappity tap. Pebbles.
Swanny goes to the window with the candle, pushes up the sash, feels the icy evening air on her face and neck.
“Grub?” she calls in a low voice to the empty street below. Maybe she’s been mistaken all along. “Morsel?”
She waits a long moment—and then lets out a shriek. A man’s filthy hand reaches up to grasp the windowsill, clutches on for dear life.
“Swanny, help,” Ripple pants, flailing for her with his free arm.
She grabs him by the wrist, pulls him into the room, knocking over a partial suit of armor and a birdcage in the process. Breastplates and gauntlets clatter to the floor. She clamps her hand over his mouth.
“Shhh.”
They wait. “Do you think he heard us?”
“I find it hard to believe that he didn’t.”
“Do you think he’ll…”
“Come up here and kill you? I’d say that’s probable, yes. But I assume you knew that when you decided to invite yourself in. How on earth did you scale the building?”
“I held on to the little spaces between the bricks. It’s something I learned in fireman training.”
“Fireman training?”
“Yeah, I was a fireman there for a little while. Living the dream. Do you seriously think—”
“That he’s lying in wait at the bottom of the stairs with a dagger in his teeth? Just waiting for you to do something stupid, like kiss me?”
“Um…” Ripple doesn’t take the bait, but he doesn’t jump back out the window either. Their faces are close in the candlelight, and again Swanny registers how much he’s changed. Ripple was handsome before, princely or even cherubic, with his long-lashed eyes and sheepish smile, his tousled hair pillow-soft to the touch. But he had the arrogance of an angel too, his eyes always locked on a screen or searching for one. Now he’s bruised and dirty, the last of his feathers molted onto the floor. Entirely at her mercy. His gaze is frank and imploring; his muscles are tensed to survive. She’d be a liar if she didn’t admit she enjoys it.
Swanny rises from where they’ve landed, straightens the bric-a-brac. “So, what else did Osmond tell you about me?”
“A bunch of stuff.”
“Such as?” It’s surreal to be alone with Ripple again, here, after all this time. Even with her back to him, she can feel his presence, more unexpected than any ghost’s.
Ripple says it like a joke: “He said Sharkey spits in your mouth when he comes.”
Swanny whirls around. “How could Osmond possibly know that?”
Ripple reddens. “I kinda thought he was making it up, actually.”
Swanny changes the subject: “How is Osmond?”
“He’s good. He’s in the sewer.”
“You mentioned that.” She pauses, as she always does, before asking a question she doesn’t want the answer to. “Why?”
“Because the torchies burned down our house.”
“And your parents? How are they faring?” Ripple’s silence is enough, but Swanny has to know for certain. “How did they die?”
A cold breeze is blowing into the room. Duncan gets up from the floor, goes to the window, and shuts it. When he speaks, his downcast face reflects in the dark glass. “I guess they saw the fire on the panic-room monitors and figured they couldn’t make it out in time. Osmond made a run for it—a roll for it—but you know my dad. He’s…he was pretty risk averse.”
“So, what did they do?”
“Fuck, Swanny, what do you think?”
“I have no earthly idea.”
“You never had a Dignity Kit at your house?”
“Is that—that’s for suicide, isn’t it? Mother considered them a rip-off. ‘Nothing an ordinary household grenade can’t do louder and faster,’ I remember her saying.” Humphrey and Katya, decked out in glad rags for their son’s wedding day—will they be the next apparitions to visit Swanny in one of her drug-induced stupors? It was difficult enough to make conversation with them when they were alive. “In retrospect, I wish I’d been less unpleasant to your mother.”
“Maybe I could have talked them out of it, if I was there.”