Page 5 of Mistletoe & Mayhem
My fingers clench around the cup until the cardboard sleeve buckles inward. “I want you to start preparing. Quietly, off-grid. Safe location, offshore account, new identity.” The words are heavy, and I dislike their shape. “I’m not ready yet. But I want the option.”
Frida’s response is a perfect North African neutrality. She’s so good at this, better than I’ll ever be. “If I do this, it is not reversible,” she says. “Will you need to take anyone with you?”
A couple clutching rental skates pass near — the woman’s lipstick is smeared, the man’s scarf trailing like a leash. I say, “No. Just me.”
There is a pause. Frida examines my face as if inspecting a bomb casing for hairline cracks. Did she know about the panic attacks, the weeks when breathing was work, the nights I toyed with a bottle of clozapine like a talisman? Possibly. “You’ve never run before,” she says.
“I’ve never had to. Before.” My voice is low, and the words taste like frost.
Frida opens her phone, thumbs rapidly, then slides it into her bag. “The account?”
“The Cayman number you set up for me when I was nineteen. Use what you need, but move in small amounts. I’ll check in weekly, but not from anything traceable.” I hand her a Moleskine with the new passphrase inside, torn from the spine and folded four times. She pockets it without looking.
For a minute, we pretend to watch the skaters. A small boy in a mustard coat keeps falling, skinning his knees on the ice, each time popping up with a face full of astonished joy.
Frida speaks first: “When you’re ready, use this.” She sets a phone on the bench between us — not a burner, but something older, heavy as a stone, the kind I sometimes call a “dumb phone.” “For when the time comes,” she says.
We lapse into silence. The whole landscape seems rehearsed for isolation: the trees sway in the wind, and the pond has gone opaque under a thin film of ice. I catch a memory of Pierce, singular and immediate, the way he’d lace his fingers into mine at this very spot, as if we were playing at being ordinary people. His voice comes back in those old rhythms: You are not what’s written in your blood, Laura. You’re more.
Frida interrupts my thoughts: “Do you want to talk about it?” She is not offering comfort, only a vessel for secrets.
“No.” My nails dig crescents into my palm. “I want to pretend it was somebody else’s life.”
She nods, as if this is mercy. We finish our coffee.
On my way out of Central Park, I pass the Plaza. It’s gaudied up for Christmas, windows bordered in pine and cheap gold, an inflatable bear clutching gifts at the entrance. Once, Pierce and I took the service elevator to a tenth-floor suite to avoid cameras, spent forty-eight hours marooned on starched sheets, soaked in gin, telling each other tall tales about people we would never become.
Now, Fifth Avenue is a river of red and green and white, and every windowpane reflects a better, cleaner version of myself — one who got out, or maybe never existed at all.
Past the St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I remember our first kiss, the way the bells rang so loud it made the ground shudder. It was all so stupid and simple then: we believed our love was moredangerous than my father’s men, more enduring than the city’s rot, more sacred than anything the Church could offer.
I cross myself, not out of faith, but because I promised my mother I’d never enter a church without doing so. Her ghost haunts me quietly than any priest.
When I finally reach home, I crack open the window and let the city’s cold mouth fill my bedroom. I light a cigarette, cupping the ember with fingers that still shake when the wind changes. The phone Frida gave me sits on the kitchen counter, mute and patient as an animal.
I watch the snow filter through the sodium haze, alight on shoulders, soften sirens, hush the traffic. My loneliness feels palpable, and there’s no one left to offer comfort. My mother is gone. Pinky died last year, shattering what little was left of my heart.
I know Pierce is long gone, living somewhere I can’t follow, loving someone easier. But I still speak to him in these dead hours, hoping he hears, hoping I’ll see him again and ask why I wasn’t good enough to fight for.
“All’s well,” I whisper to the glass, and the words fog and vanish, as if they were never true.
Chapter 5
Pierce
A Year Later: London
Ienvy dead men their silence. Adam crashes his Audi into a lamppost in Forest Hills, and an hour later, my phone rings from my bedside table, killing my only hour of honest sleep this week. The first voice is a cop’s, nasal and overeager, with the accent of someone who hasn’t left Queens in twenty years. Adam’s gone, it chirrups. “You’re his brother?” Yes, I say, and the officer explains the logistics of collecting what remains. It floats over me like weather.
I don’t move for a long time after the call. Light from the Thames stutters across the ceiling, a slow, sick pulse. My apartment is a shoebox with a panoramic misery: cheap modern lines, all hard surfaces and sleek indifference, the kind of place designed to erase its tenants. I lounge in my own debris—unpaid bills, yesterday’s mug with the scum ringed like a birthmark, a pair of Adam’s sneakers that never made it to Goodwill. The espresso machine clicks on by itself, old wiring or a ghost. The city outside is still black and wet. Nobody mourns before sunrise.
My coffee tastes like burnt teeth. I sit at the window, feet propped on the radiator, and watch the first boats move through thin fog. The news scrolls across my phone in discrete,pious rectangles: Adam Landon, 26, of Manhattan, lost control at high speed. The photograph beside the obituary is from a sailing regatta our father forced us into the summer before the accident. Adam’s hair is sun-bleached and coarse, his smile a little too broad. I throw the phone into the couch cushions, then immediately retrieve it. My hand is shaking. I Google his name again and again for the rest of the morning, looking for any evidence that his life was not, as I suspect, a slow-motion rehearsal for this very exit.
At half seven, I call my boss at the firm and say, “family emergency.” He sucks his teeth and says he’s sorry, but I can taste his relief echo. I am a terrible associate; they only hired me because my grandfather once played tennis with the founding partner.
After I pack, I write an email to Laura and then delete it. It’s almost Christmas, her favorite time of year, and it doesn’t seem inappropriate to reach out to wish her well. Or maybe it does. I write another with the three words I want to say most–I love you. But I don’t send that one either. The only letter I manage to finish was to the property manager, letting her know I’ve set the thermostat to turn off in three days and will not be returning until further notice or further death.
The airport is a hive of bleakness and fluorescent apology. Heathrow is running on time, but I am not. Security waves me through with zero resistance. At the lounge bar, I swallow whiskey after whiskey, fueled only by the adolescent suspicion that this is how a man faces ruin. The strangers around me are gaunt and glancing at each other, all of them pretending not to be running from something while they push each other aside insearch of their destination. The holidays always bring out the worst in people, and travelers are the nastiest of all.
