The Herd(89)

Falling, falling, downward, downward, down. My tongue and lips and teeth collaborated, just for a moment: “Fuck you.”

“It was an instinct, it was like in krav maga. Like I was trying to block a blow. I shot my hand forward and it wasn’t until—I didn’t realize until…”

Another sunburst as I crashed to the floor, wooden slats bouncing against my skull. A momentary humming noise, and then, finally, blackness.





CHAPTER 25





Hana


TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 10:10 P.M.

Mannheim Steamroller blasted through the taxi’s speakers, each synthesized note like a personal jackhammer to my brain. It’d been four or five years since Cameron came out of rehab, a posh treatment center in Arizona, and as far as we knew, he hadn’t touched an opioid since. The news wobbled through my torso, prickling with pressure.

Had Daniel heard the news? I reread his email to me, the one with Mikki’s pathetic cease-and-desist letter. How hugely, devastatingly sad. Overlooked by her group of friends, betrayed by her best friend, and now abandoned by her secret lover, who crossed a border to try to kill himself in peace.

I spotted a new email from a publicist friend, one I’d worked with years before: “So sorry to hear the news about your friend Eleanor. Let us know when the memorial service will be. You’ve probably already seen this, but I just saw it on Twitter—thought you’d want a heads-up.”

She’d linked to a trashy gossip site that made The Gaze look like the Times. I followed the link, then felt a blast of heady nausea: EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: SEE THE EXACT MOMENT ELEANOR WALSH’S BODY WAS FOUND.

It started automatically—a cell-phone video, shaky and pulsing in and out of focus. Three figures in a bright window. Us. That Friday night, as a drum corps chopped the air on the street below, someone in a nearby building had lifted his lens and focused on the three women—Katie, Mikki, me—silhouetted across the way. The video zoomed in and I watched, rapt, as this small outline of me lifted her phone and pressed it against the glass, then said something, then tapped at the phone. Katie responded, and then the miniature me whirled around and disappeared into the light.

I’m gonna see if I can get it from the roof, I’d said, clomping toward the staircase. And that was where my perspective, my eyes on the two women in the window, faded out.

But now, on my phone’s greasy screen, I could see it all. I could see how Mikki’s hand shot to her mouth, how her shoulders tensed before she turned around and took a few furtive steps after me. How Katie had kept her forehead near the window’s coolness, delighted, enchanted, distracted, while Mikki shifted on the balls of her feet, staring toward the staircase, both hands clenched near her mouth.

And then the camera canted upward, dizzily, too zoomed-in for a huge maneuver, and found me picking my way across the roof.

Fingers shaking, I closed the video and called Mikki. Straight to voicemail. To the right, a sign rolled past the window: LAST EXIT BEFORE TOLL.

“Take the exit!” I yelled, so loud it spooked even me. “We’re going back to Greenpoint.”



* * *



—

I thrust a fistful of bills at the driver and hurtled up Mikki’s stoop. I leaned on the buzzer the way a bored cabbie leans on the horn: absurdly, forlornly, relentlessly.

“Jesus! Who is it?”

“It’s Hana. Let me up.”

“I was sleeping. Did you forget something too?”

“Let me up.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Mikki, I know you knew Eleanor was on the roof.” I leaned into the speaker, listened to her Darth Vader breath. “Why are you covering for Cameron?”

Sobs, splintered and crackly through the intercom. “Just let me go to sleep, Hana. Just let me be.”

“Let me up or I’m calling Ratliff.”

More crying, and then next to me, so loudly I jumped, the screeeeeeh of the door unlocking.

Mikki peeled the door open gingerly. A dim lamp cast shadows into the corners, and everything else—the hallway, the TV, the air around us—was waiting and dark. She had a hoodie on over her pajamas, and her eyes were swollen and squinty, two pale pieces of puffed rice.

“Mikki, it’s okay.”

She stuffed her hands into the front pocket of her sweatshirt and flopped onto the couch. On the coffee table, a lighter, pipe, and small mess of weed sat in a jumbled pile.

I perched on the sofa. “Just talk to me! I don’t want to get you in trouble. I wanna help you.”

She took a long, unsteady breath. “How did you know?”

I held out my phone. “This video. I saw how you didn’t want me up on the roof.”

Wind yanked at the windows as she watched it. Finally she pressed the screen against her knee and closed her eyes. “I didn’t do it.”

“But you knew she was there.”

“Can we talk about this tomorrow?”

“Mikki.”

She swiped at a tear. “I don’t know why I helped him.”

I waited. Her heater clanged, as if it, too, were growing impatient.

“He called and told me what he’d done.” She dragged her sleeve against her nose. “He said he was going to turn off the lights and lock all the doors. And that he’d go into the janitor’s closet and get out all the cleaning supplies, not let the blood get onto anything it could stain. I said I’d be right there.”