Merryn
The loudest sound in the kitchen this morning is the crunch of cereal between my teeth.
Trista and I are eating breakfast. She’s already fed her mom—yoghurt and applesauce and some PharmaChem-brand pills—and now she’s sitting at the kitchen table with me, eating some peanut butter on toast.
We aren’t talking. It’s not like we’re mad at each other or anything. I think we just don’t really know what to say to each other. There isn’t any music playing. Trista’s crunches match my own as she stares off into space.
“Will Silver threatened to poison my mom,” she suddenly says, and I raise my eyebrows. I quickly finish chewing the mouthful of cereal and swallow.
“What?”
She nods. “He broke in here, back when I was still a part of the Bullets. He said he didn’t trust me, and that if he found out I wasn’t who I claimed to be, that he would switch out my mom’s pills with poison.”
“Oh my God,” I say. “That’s horrible.”
She nods but doesn’t say anything. Her eyes never leave my face.
“But … he knows that you were a cop now, doesn’t he?”
She nods again.
“So … did he do it?”
And here she deflates a bit. “No,” she admits. “I guess, maybe he figured it was too much work. Or it was an empty threat. I don’t know.”
“Still,” I say.
A moment passes, and then Trista looks to the wall again, taking another bite of toast.
We finish eating and Trista takes the dishes, even though I offer to clean my own.
“No, that’s fine,” she says. “I’ve got it.”
I push up from the table, giving my calves and ankles a moment to settle in. I walk out into the hallway. Look down it, where there’s only the top of the stairs that lead outside. I glance back into the kitchen. Trista’s got her back to me, cleaning dishes.
“Anything I can do to help?” I ask.
“Nope,” she says, flashing me a quick smile. “I’m good.”
I nod, but she’s already facing the sink again. So I walk back down the hallway to her bedroom, open the door, and walk in.
There isn’t much to do here. Trista’s only got a few books in her room, and they’re all police training manuals. Her window is open so I walk over to it, stick my head out, take in a deep breath of air.
I’ve got to go for a walk or something. I appreciate Trista taking me in like this, but I’m going a little stir-crazy. I pull my head back in, trying to think of where I can go, what I can do.
Grabbing my phone from the bedside table I open up my text messages and see my conversation with Lindsay. Then I remember that I briefly visited her when I went to PharmaChem yesterday. I pull up the keyboard and type in a quick text, asking if she wants to grab a coffee this morning, somewhere away from the office. She replies a few minutes later telling me that she’d love to, suggesting a place.
I slip the phone in my pocket and leave the bedroom to find Trista still in the kitchen. The dishes are done and she’s sitting at the table again, now sipping from a cup of coffee.
“Hey,” I say when I enter. “I’m going to go meet an old coworker for coffee.”
Trista looks up at me.
“Oh,” she says. “And old coworker … from PharmaChem?”
“Yeah.”
Trista gives me a sort of puzzled look. “Um, I don’t want to sound like I’m accusing you of anything, but … it’s not Will Silver, is it?”
“What?” I ask, honestly offended. “No. It’s not.”
“Okay. Good.”
I don’t know what to say. “How could you think I would want to see him again? After what he did?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m sorry if it sounded rude.” Her eyes look distant. “It’s just, you went to see him before. And you were talking last night about how you don’t think he’s capable of being evil and how you … trusted him and stuff.”
“Well,” I say. I feel like I’m being attacked. “I don’t trust him now. But I didn’t say he’s not capable of being evil. Just … that he’s not evil himself.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I … don’t know. They’re just different.” I can feel myself bristling. Trista seems not to notice, based on her expression. “Anyway, I’m going to meet a friend for coffee. I just came to tell you that.”
Trista nods, taking a sip of her own coffee. “How are you getting there?”
“Oh,” I say. I hadn’t thought of that. “I guess …”
“You can take my bike, if you want.”
I blink at her. My own bike is still parked at PharmaChem from yesterday, and there’s no way I’m going to go there to get it anytime soon.
“Are you sure?”
She nods, taking another sip.
“Yeah. I’ll be here.”
“Oh. Okay, sure. Thanks.”
She fishes her keys out and tosses them to me. I almost don’t catch them.
“Thanks,” I say again, but Trista doesn’t respond. She just nods, taking another sip of her coffee.
So I turn and leave the apartment, going down the stairs to the outside. It’s beautiful out, and it honestly feels so good to leave that apartment. I felt trapped up there. I suppose it is Trista’s space and I am encroaching on it, but still.
I walk over to her bike and straddle it. My belly almost reaches the handlebars. Putting the key in the ignition I start it up, feeling the familiar-yet-different rumble of a different bike’s engine in between my legs. Bringing up the kickstand I pull out into the street and start off, not taking long to get used to the handling.
I ride through the streets, heading in the direction of PharmaChem where the bakery Lindsay suggested sits close by. People on the sidewalks watch me as I ride past them. I know it’s dangerous for a pregnant woman to ride a bike, but ever since I bought one—and Jake fixed it up for me—it’s been my preferred way to get places. I just feel so comfortable on one. And more free. Definitely more free.
The mammoth obelisk that is PharmaChem practically takes over the skyline. The memories I have of working there seem like they belong to somebody else. It’s hard to match them up to who I am now. I would never work there again. Never under the thumb of Will. Even with Lindsay, I feel like our relationship is somewhat strained. My fault, entirely. I drifted away. Moved on to something else. A different life. One that didn’t go out to clubs anymore, or like to gossip about who was doing what in the office. That’s not to say anything critical about Lindsay, it’s just … I don’t relate to that side of her anymore.
I skirt around PharmaChem, watching it swing past me like a giant island. The bakery comes up and I pull into the lot, parking Trista’s bike, getting off it and feeling that familiar funny ghost vibration still moving down my legs.
When I walk into the bakery I don’t see Lindsay anywhere, so I go up to the counter and order a jelly donut and a coffee, for here. The bored-looking girl puts the donut on a plate for me and then turns to get my coffee. As I’m waiting the bell above the door jingles and Lindsay walks in. She sees me at the counter and her face breaks out into a smile.
“Merryn!”
I smile back as she comes over, giving me a big hug, bending herself forward so she doesn’t push up too hard against my belly.
“Oh my God, it’s so good to see you,” she says.
“Well, I saw you yesterday,” I point out.
“I know, but when I said we should catch up I didn’t think it was going to happen so soon.” The girl behind the counter hands me my coffee and I take it, thanking her. “Oh,” says Lindsay, turning from me to her. “I’ll have a coffee too. Cream and sugar.”
The girl tells her the total and Lindsay fishes some money out of her purse to pay. Then the girl turns to fix another coffee and Lindsay looks at me again.
“Well,” she says. “So what’ve you been up to? Oh, how did your meeting with Will go yesterday?”
“Ah …” I start, but the girl reappears with Lindsay’s coffee, so we both take our things over to a table and sit down. “The meeting was all right,” I decide to lie. Lindsay knows so little—nothing, really—about my current life. I don’t want it to start with “he ended up holding a gun to my head.”
“What did you have to catch up with him on?” she asks, taking the lid off her coffee to let it cool. “I mean, what have you been up to since you left? I feel like I don’t know anything about you!”
Suddenly I feel trapped. Why am I so hesitant to tell Lindsay anything?
Maybe it’s because things are so shit right now, another voice answers. Or maybe it’s because you don’t even know this person, and the only reason you wanted to see her was to feel less lonely.
Lindsay is looking at me, curious, friendly. I can feel the heat building under my clothes, rising up my neck and cheeks. Finally I blurt out, “I’m pregnant!”
She raises her eyebrows.
“I can tell,” she says with a sort of laugh.
“And I have a Social Assistance practice.”
Now her eyebrows really raise up.
“What? Oh my God, Merryn, that’s amazing! I remember you talking about that pretty much on the first day we met!”
“Really?” I ask. I don’t remember that.
Lindsay nods. “I thought it was so cool of you, to want to do something just to help other people. Not a lot of people do that. They’re always looking out for themselves.”
“Oh,” I say, feeling the heat start to diminish. “Yeah, I guess they do.”
“You guess?” Lindsay laughs, and it sounds familiar, friendly. I remember that laugh. “Hon, you are a saint, I swear.”
Now I can feel myself smiling.
“It’s a pretty great practice,” I tell her. “I actually … I used to severance money that Will gave me when I quit. Well, when I ‘quit’.” I do air-quotes. That makes Lindsay laugh again. “Now I’ve got three employees and a couple dozen clients. I’ve been wondering lately if I’ll need to open up a second location.”
Lindsay is shaking her head, looking at me admiringly. “Wow Merryn, that is amazing. Congratulations.”
“What about you?” I ask, picking up my donut. “What’ve you been up to?”
Lindsay rolls her eyes. “Um … nothing? Yeah, pretty much nothing.”
I shake my head, trying to quickly chew my mouthful of donut.
“Mmf,” I get out before swallowing. “I’m sure that’s not true.”
But she shrugs, a cute little thing, looking up and to the side as she does. “Nah, it’s true. I don’t know. I get out sometimes, go dancing. Some of the women in the office started doing yoga so I tried that for a bit, but never really got into it. Mm … I binge-watched, like, all of Orange Is The New Black on Netflix.” She laughs. “But no, not really anything.”
“Maybe you’ve just found your groove,” I suggest. “You’ve found what works for you, so there’s no real impetus to change.”
Lindsay nods. “Yeah, maybe. Ooh, something exciting did happen this morning, at work, actually. Well, I mean, I guess it was exciting. Will Silver just came storming through our office, talking loudly about something, some building we had that burned down last night.”
I raise an eyebrow. “A building burned down?”
“Yeah. Some place in that old textile district. You know, the one that’s all just homeless people and run-down buildings now? I didn’t know we had a building there, but I guess we do. Or did. Anyway, it burned down last night.”
“Do they know what caused it?”
She shakes her head. “Faulty wiring, maybe. But Will was going on about the cops, for some reason. Saying they should have been doing their job. Like they were supposed to know when a building’s wiring is about to set it on fire. Isn’t that a job for the fire department?” She shrugs, then takes another sip of her coffee.
We continue talking, and I finish my donut, Lindsay taking a bite of it after I offer it to her. But soon enough she tilts her cup of coffee up and finishes the last of it. I’ve still got some left in my cup.
“All right,” she says, planting both hands on the armrests of the chair. “I should probably get back.”
Our chairs scrape against the floor as we stand up, and then Lindsay comes around the table and gives me a hug.
“It was so good to see you, Merryn,” she says in my ear. We let go of each other. “We should hang out again.”
I nod, smiling. “Yeah, definitely.”
She turns to walk away, lifting her hand and giving me one last wave. I wave back, then sit back down as I watch her go, the bell above the door jingling as she departs.
I finish the rest of my coffee on my own. That wasn’t that bad of a visit. I guess I don’t feel as close with Lindsay as I did when we worked together—and I never ended up telling her about my life in a gang—but that’s not the end of the world. We can still be acquaintances. Besides, an evil voice whispers in my ear, I may not be in a gang anymore.
Nope. Nope. Stop that. I’m not going to think about that. I pick up my coffee and focus on sipping the cooled-down liquid, on the other customers in the bakery. When I’m finally finished I stand up, taking my garbage to the garbage can and giving the plate back to the bored-looking girl behind the counter, who accepts it from me without a word. Then I go into the bathroom, relieve myself, and leave the bakery.
I climb back onto Trista’s bike, turning it on. I don’t have anywhere else to go, so I start riding back to Trista’s apartment. I take my time, though, going down side streets, detouring here and there. It’s about half an hour before I finally arrive back. I put down the kickstand and get off the bike, then let myself back into the apartment and go upstairs.
I find Trista in her bedroom, grabbing some clothes from the closet. She turns her head when I come in, a guilty look on her face.
“Sorry,” she says. “I was going to have a shower and wanted a change of clothes.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I tell her. “It’s your bedroom. I’m the one taking up space.”
She nods, hesitates, then goes back to rummaging through the clothes. I sit down on her bed.
“How’s your friend?” she asks.
“She’s good,” I tell her. “Her name’s Lindsay. We just caught up, basically.”
“And you knew her from PharmaChem?”
I nod, even though Trista isn’t looking at me. “Yeah. She was my best friend when I was there. But now that we’re not working together … I don’t know. We’ve drifted apart, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Trista says. She pulls down an outfit and turns around, looking at me.
I nod again. “Yeah. Oh, she said something weird happened at work this morning. Will was angry about something.”
Trista’s expression doesn’t change, but her gaze somehow intensifies.
“Angry? About what?”
“Lindsay said he was yelling about some building that burned down that apparently PharmaChem was using. Faulty wiring or something. It burned down last night.”
“Faulty wiring?”
“Yeah,” I give her a look. “That sounds fake, right?” Trista nods. “And get this: the building was over in that abandoned textile district, the one with all those failed dry cleaners and stuff. Isn’t that weird?”
But Trista’s looking at me with a different sort of intensity now.
“In the old textile district?” she asks, and I nod.
“Yeah. That’s what Lindsay said.”
“We gutted one of the buildings to make a manufacturing facility there.”
“What?”
“The Bullets,” Trista explains. “Maddox ordered us to gut a bunch of buildings. For Will to start making drugs. Manufacturing facilities.”
Whoa. “Lindsay also said he was yelling about the cops and how they weren’t doing their jobs.”
Trista nods, her eyes wide. “That must be it. Those places were secure. They had alarms and shit. The Bullets, and I guess the people who work there, are the only ones who know they exist. And it wouldn’t have been the wiring that made it burn down. Will brought in specialist electricians to rig everything up, and Maddox paid them double their wages to keep them quiet.” She shakes her head. “It sounds like somebody torched it.”
I blink. Then I look at Trista. She’s looking back at me.
“You don’t think …” I say, not sure if I should finish the sentence. Trista’s expression doesn’t change.
“What?” she asks, and I give her a sympathetic look.
“It could be,” I say, “that the person who burned it down … was Flynn.”