Chapter Thirteen - Tyler
I’m sitting on her bed, reading the letter she wrote me all those years ago for the fiftieth time since she left, when I hear the front door to the house open. I’m staring at the words ‘I love you’ when Caroline, carrying a Christmas tree, walks past the open bedroom door and sees me.
“Tyler?” she asks.
“Hey, Caroline,” I say, pretty fucking mournfully.
“It’s Diane,” she says. (OK. Fine. Diane. Jesus.) Then she asks, “Where’s Maddie?”
“Oh, she had to, uh, go out of town for a few days.”
“Really? Where’d she go?”
Jesus Christ, I haven’t seen Caroline and/or Diane in weeks and this is the day one of them chooses to come home and change their panties?
“Uh… Monaco,” I blurt out.
“Monaco? Really? Why?”
“Parents,” I say.
She looks concerned. And then she looks disgruntled. “Shit,” she says. “She’s not, like, moving there, is she? We already lost one roommate we’re having to cover rent for. When will she be back?”
“Not sure,” I say.
“Well. OK.” Then she says, “Would’ve been nice for her to tell us she was going.”
And suddenly, I find myself getting pissed. Which I don’t want to get, but I don’t think I have any choice in the matter.
“Yeah, Diane, it woulda been nice. A lotta things woulda been nice. Woulda been nice if she didn’t have to live with a bunch of whores, but that didn’t pan out either. We don’t always get what we want in life though, do we? So you know what?” I stand and walk over to her. She takes a step back. “How ’bout this? How ’bout I run to a bank and get you, what, like, fifty grand? A hundred? However much you want. And you can shove that shit in your sock drawer for a rainy day and never have to worry about it again. All your problems will be solved! Everything in your life will be squared away! You’ll never have to worry about shit again! You hear that? You’ll never have to worry about anything ever again! Not Mookie! He’s a rich man! He’s a rich fuckin’ man! He’s a real Rockefeller!”
Without thinking, I’ve been walking her backwards. She’s flat against the hallway wall now, cowering down a bit, the tree acting as a protective shield between the two of us. “Wh-wh-what?” she stammers out. “I don’t understand. What is that? What are you saying?”
I leave my body for a second and see what this looks like from the outside. A massive, angry dude, towering over a scared woman who will clearly be spending Christmas in this small house in Vegas, and who didn’t do anything wrong, and who’s just worried about paying her bills. And I don’t feel massive anymore at all. I feel like the smallest person in the world. And I am disappointed in myself for channeling my anger at Carlos and Logan and fucking everybody else involved in the shit show I find myself in at poor Diane. (Who I’m still not so sure isn’t actually Caroline. But whatever.)
“Sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry. It’s from Do the Right Thing.”
“What?” she asks, still scared.
“The quote. The Mookie stuff. It’s from Do the Right Thing.”
“The movie?” she asks, now scared and confused.
“Yeah, yeah. The Spike Lee joint,” I say. “Sometimes I quote movies when I’m… Fuck. I’m sorry. I’m just having a bad fucking day. Not your fault. I apologize.”
She nods a little. “Is there anything I can do?” she asks. She means it. Shit. And now I feel even worse.
“No, no. You’re great. I’m the asshole. I’m in your house. Know what? Lemme get outta here and… Shit, I’m sorry.”
I duck back into the bedroom to grab my duffel bag and the letter and turn to make my way past her. She steps back, still clearly afraid.
“I really am sorry,” I say. “Listen, I wasn’t kidding. If Maddie… doesn’t come back for any reason—” I take a long pause to keep from going all misty on this kid. The last thing she needs is to take care of my trifling ass. Then I continue, “I got you. OK? I’ll make sure you guys are both covered. Promise.” She nods quickly and slightly. “I’m just… sad. That she’s gone. And I’m, y’know, a dick. So I apologize again. It’s not you. OK? You guys have been good friends to Maddie from what I can tell. You were better friends to her than I was for a long time and I, y’know, I appreciate it.”
She takes a breath and nods a bit more fully. I give her a half smile and turn to leave. I’m almost at the front door when she stops me.
“Tyler?” she asks.
I turn. “Yeah?”
“Is she really visiting her parents?”
It’s an odd thing for her to ask, but then it strikes me that maybe it’s not. God knows what this girl has been through herself. What she’s seen. What she understands. I don’t know her. I don’t know anything about her except that she’s a girl who went to college with Maddie and now she’s a prostitute. That’s it. And I can make lots of assumptions about her based on that limited knowledge, but is that fair?
And I have this sudden urge to ask her lots of things about herself. Connect with her somehow. Open myself up and get to know her and let her know me and tell her what’s happening with Maddie, even though I was told not to, and bring her on the inside. Because who knows? Maybe there’s some unknown, unseen, impossible-to-foretell way that she could help this situation. Maybe she’s been here, hanging in the background all this time, but she’s actually the one person who could fix all of our problems.
Is that possible? Is that crazy? Is it just that when shit gets really, really bad and we feel adrift, we look for any possible, hidden shoreline to cling to? Or is it just that Maddie is alone right now? Maddie is in God knows what kind of situation as we speak. And my imagination is about to start racing toward places that I don’t wanna let it.
“Tyler?” she interrupts my thoughts.
“Yeah? Sorry. What?”
“Is Maddie really visiting her parents?”
I stare at her for another second before saying, “Merry Christmas, Diane,” and turn and walk out the door.
I keep looking at my wrist, but I don’t have my watch. It won’t be night for hours, so I won’t have a chance to even know what’s going on. But if I don’t do something with myself I’m gonna crawl out of my skin.
Totally by accident, I drive by Pete’s. Or what used to be Pete’s. They’ve started to do the clean-up. There are a couple of dump trucks filled with the detritus, and it dawns on me that Pete is probably in one of them. Pete and Carolina. Mixed and mingled and together forever. Flesh into fire into ash into eternity.
Maybe some of their shared ashes will get blown into the wind and carried someplace nice. Someplace exotic. Fiji. Bora-Bora. Maybe they’ll settle into the earth and become part of the soil there. Maybe a tree will grow from the place where they land, and maybe that tree will produce coconuts or bananas or some shit, and maybe one of the coconuts or bananas or whatever will then feed and nourish a kid who will eventually grow up to become a doctor who cures cancer.
Maybe.
I don’t know if I believe in reincarnation, but if we never cease to be and our energy, our life force, just goes on and on and on, then that means that everyone who has ever lived is in us and we are a part of everyone else, and all of us are coconuts and all of us have the power to cure cancer.
And all of us are strippers. And all of us are sitting outside of Raven’s house right now without being completely sure how we got here.
What?
Did I drive here? I must have. Fuck. Wasn’t I just outside Pete’s? Did I lose time? Like I was doing a while ago? Like I was a few… weeks? Ago? Or was it months? Or— Shit! Losing time is something I really thought that I was done with now.
I wish my watch was here.
Regardless, I’m sitting in front of Raven’s house. I should go ring the bell, I suppose. She looks like she’s home. There’s a car in the driveway. What am I going to say if I ring the bell and she answers?
I decide to find out.
The cathedral chime finishes ding-donging, and no one comes to the door. I wonder whether I should be one of those assholes who peeks through windows and wanders around outside someone’s house looking to see if they’re inside. Or if I should be one of those assholes who rings a doorbell repeatedly even though it’s a loud doorbell and if someone was inside, they clearly would’ve heard it. At the end of the day, I decide to just be the asshole I am naturally, and go.
I turn to leave, but only make it two steps down the walkway when the door opens behind me. “I swear to God, if you fuckin’ carolers—” Raven is standing there in a short kimono thing, not dissimilar to the one she was wearing the night she came out to talk to me in the parking lot of Pete’s. It may, in fact, be the same one.
“Tyler,” she says. “Where’s Maddie?”
Something about that makes me very happy. No. Not something. Everything. Because it implies that Maddie should be with me. It implies that Maddie and I are a package deal. And it also probably implies what the fuck are you, a dude I don’t really know, doing at my house without your lady friend? Which you gotta respect.
“She’s…” I start. “She had to leave town for a couple days.”
“Yeah?” asks Raven, pulling her kimono tighter around her. “K. Whattayou need?”
“I… dunno,” I admit. “Honestly, I didn’t even really know I was coming here. Just sorta happened.”
She squints at me and nods her head. “K. So, now that you’re here, what’s up?”
“Nothin’,” I tell her. “Seriously, nothin’. I’m just… bored. Or something and thought—” And that’s when I see a figure moving behind her in the open doorway. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know you were… I’ll get going.” And once again, I turn to start off down the walkway, and once again I’m stopped by someone calling out my name.
“Tyler?”
And when I turn around, I see…
Brandon.
“Uh, hey, dude,” I sort of stutter out.
“You good?” he asks. “What’re you doing here?”
Questions and information collide in my brain. Unless Brandon has been talking to the other guys at the station—and I know that isn’t happening—he doesn’t actually know about Maddie and the DEA. And also, why isn’t Brandon wearing a shirt? And also, what the fuck is happening right now?
That question makes its way out of my mouth in the form of, “I didn’t know you guys, uh… knew… each other.”
Raven answers, “We met the night you guys came to the club the first time. You remember. It was the night Maddie sucked your cock.”
That’s so Raven.
“Oh,” I say as nonchalantly as I can. “Yeah, well…”
“We exchanged numbers then,” she says matter-of-factly.
“You did?” I’m shocked for like three reasons.
“Yeah,” she says. “But shy boy here didn’t do shit with it until I showed up the morning of the fire.”
I look at Brandon, who shrugs.
Raven continues with, “I was surprised to see him. I didn’t know he was a firefighter. But whattayou know? He is, and then, yadda, yadda, yadda. And now we’re… friends.”
I look at Brandon again and he shrugs again. Nobody knows anybody. Not really. That’s what he said to me in the park. Well. That’s clearly true, as it turns out.
“So, what do you need?” she asks. “You seriously just bored? What do you want? Come in and play Parcheesi or some shit?”
“No, no,” I tell her. “No. I’m good. I’ll amuse myself some other way.”
“Yeah? Because we’ve got the board all set up!”
Ha. I really, really like Raven. And a huge part of me does want to come in and be a massive imposition, but not really. And I don’t even wanna begin to try and imagine what exactly I’m interrupting. Because I have a wee bit of a glimpse into Brandon finally, but I know I’m still a long way from getting the whole story. And I don’t wanna jump straight to whatever kinda freaky sex he and a ball-buster like Raven might be having.
“No. Thanks, I’m good. I’m just making the rounds, as it were.” And suddenly, I’m overtaken with the urge to smile huge. And so I do.
“Fuck are you grinnin’ at, shit-eater?” she snaps.
I shake my head. “Nothin’. You guys have a good Christmas.”
“OK!” she says sarcastically. “You too!” And as she turns to head back inside, leaving Brandon there looking at me, he gives me a small half-wave/half-salute and for a second, I can almost swear the hint of a smile creeps onto his lips before he shuts the door.
I laugh to myself all the way back to the car. Until I sit in the driver’s seat, close the door, and glance up to see the setting sun. The day is almost over. And from here on out the only thing I’m going to be able to think about until I get word that she’s OK is what might be happening, at every second, to Maddie.