STELLA
I let myself into Nick’s apartment and maneuvered a stack of flattened moving boxes through the door. It was the first time I had been back to his place. I remembered being here with him so vividly—the smell, the light, his things, his life—that I had to take a second to gather my thoughts. In the months since that awful day, I had taken care of his rent through his attorney and kept an eye on his bike from afar. Though I’d seen in news articles online that the cops had some fuzzy footage from the Ritz lobby of me in disguise, they hadn’t found any prints. Nobody had come asking me any questions. I was in the clear. And now I’d finally gotten the courage to come pack up his things.
The end of the month was coming up quick, and I knew there was no reason for me to pay another month’s rent on the place. I’d done it through the holidays, but I couldn’t afford to do it anymore. I still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to cleave the stone. And so what money we had, we needed. For the lawyer, for Mr. Bozeman’s debt. For medical bills. For so many things that added up and up.
I opened the silverware drawer and placed the forks and knives, only four of each, into a plastic bag. I wondered when he’d bought all this stuff, and I had a little flutter in my heart imagining if I’d met him in a different time and a different place. At Target, maybe, in the housewares aisle. How different our lives would have been if we’d bonded over a shower curtain instead of over a jewel.
But we were what we were, and that was why being with him had been all fireworks from the start. I told myself for the thousandth time that all fireworks shows came to an end; magic like that couldn’t have lasted long. That’s what I was going to have to keep telling myself, even if I knew in my heart it wasn’t true at all.
Reluctantly, I gathered up the teaspoons and the tablespoons and added those to the bag. Opening the next drawer, I found the wine opener he’d used that first night. I turned it over in my palm. It felt like both yesterday and a whole lifetime ago at once. But just as I was about to put it in the bag with the flatware, I was interrupted by a firm, big-fisted knock on the door.
My heart soared and plummeted just as quickly. It was probably just the building manager, reminding me it was time to get out or pay up. Except as I looked out the peephole, I saw it wasn’t the building manager—not unless the building manager had grown eight inches, developed an enormous beer gut, and become addicted to cheese curls.
It was the Texan.
He looked extra chubby and extra sinister through the fish-eye peephole. Again he pounded on the door, so hard that the wood veneer vibrated against my cheek. I drew my face back and held still. For a moment, I considered just pretending I wasn’t there. Surely he’d run out of cheese curls eventually. But then he said, “Open up! I can hear you banging around in there.”
Straightening my shoulders, I opened the door. It was the first time I’d actually come face-to-face with him, and it wasn’t pleasant. “Hello,” I said, trying to look at him as politely as I could, trying to pretend I didn’t detest him and his stupid cheese snacks and his stupid Cadillac with its ridiculous horns that I saw in the parking lot behind him.
“Been watching this place to see if anybody came around. I got debts to collect from Norton,” he said, leaning past me to see if he was inside the apartment. I mirrored his lean to and fro to block his beady eyes from looking at any of Nick’s stuff. “And I always get what I’m owed.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I answered. Again, he leaned to his left, and again I leaned to my right. We might as well have been in a mime class. I palmed the wine opener behind my back and very slowly opened the corkscrew portion, placing it between my middle and ring fingers, like Ruth had insisted I learn to do with my keys when I walked to my car at night. “I need to get back to what I was doing.”
He thrust a handful of cheese curls into his mouth and chewed them without really closing his lips. Flecks of whatever they were made of floated in the air like Styrofoam, and I leaned back slightly. “Listen, honey buns. I don’t give two shits where he is. I just want my goddamned money.”
“I really think you should leave,” I said. And gripped the corkscrew a little more tightly behind me.
He laughed, a fatty-sounding cackle from the back of his throat. “Be as tough as you want. But I’ll get my hundred large.” He leaned in and slid his cheesy finger down my cheek. “Don’t matter who I get it from. I’ll have it. Nobody messes with Texas.”
Resisting the impulse to smash his fat, cheese-crusted fingers in the door repeatedly, I wiped off my cheek with the back of my hand, and he turned around. I closed the door behind him and locked it, then watched through the peephole as he waddled off. Cheese curls made a trail behind him, like enormous orange mouse turds.
Playing on the concrete steps was a chubby little boy I’d passed on the way up. He was making a toy car drive up the metal railing. Next to him, sitting on the concrete, was a pair of small, bright-blue glasses. The Texan waddled down the steps and hip-checked the sweet little boy.
That cheese puff–eating son of a bitch stepped on the little boy’s glasses.
It was Gus all over again. It was the injustice, the anger, the unfairness of life itself. A torrent of emotion overtook me—I felt like one of those Icelandic lava fields I’d seen on the Discovery Channel. One second I was strong and solid. The next second I was churning and bubbling and boiling.
The magenta mist was gone. And all I saw was red.
I was sick to death of all of this. Of the worry, of the loss, of the anger, the uncertainty, and the heartbreak. Of a life that had to be lived in secret. I was sick of pretending I was fine. Because it wasn’t fine. None of this was fine. And I wasn’t going to do it anymore.
I wasn’t just going to bite the stars. I was going to rip those sparkly little suckers right out of the sky.