Joe Schreiber - Perry's killer playlist

“You mean the epilepsy?”

He stared at me. “Is that what she told you? That she had epilepsy?”

“Yeah. Temporal lobe epilepsy. Like Van Gogh. Why?”

Erich didn’t say anything.

“You’re saying she doesn’t?”

“Epilepsy does not normally cause internal bleeding. Or such intense and prolonged states of dementia.”

“When was she having dementia?”

“When you first brought her here,” he said, “she was very disoriented. She told me that you were her final target. She swore she’d been hired to kill you.”

“What?”

Erich shook his head. “If you ask her now, she claims not to remember. But at the time…”

“So if it’s not epilepsy,” I said, “what’s making her act like this?”

“Did she ever tell you how she got that scar on her throat?”

“No,” I said, following after him. “Why?”

Erich walked through the living room to where the computers were still hooked up to Paula’s iPad and began typing, not looking at me.

“Wait a second, what happened?”

“What happened to who?” Gobi asked behind me. I looked around and saw that she was still dressed in her judogi, sipping a tall glass of water. Her gaze flashed from me to Erich, and back to me again. When neither of us answered her, she set the glass down and took another step toward us, repeating the same question with quiet intensity. “What are you talking about?”

Then the typing sounds continued and I heard a voice coming from across the room, from the computer monitors hooked up to Paula’s iPad.

It was my father’s voice.

“I don’t know where she went,” Dad was saying through the speakers. “I don’t know when she’s coming back.”

I peered over Erich’s shoulder at the monitor. On the screen, Mom, Dad, and Annie were still sitting on the floor of the same dirty white room they’d been photographed in earlier, none of them looking at the camera. Annie was asleep, and Mom was holding her head and shoulders in her arms, cradling her like a baby. If you didn’t know any better, you might have guessed they were three stranded travelers in the United terminal at O’Hare, waiting for the weather to clear. Dad had rolled his shirt sleeves up. The newspaper that he had been holding earlier lay in a rumpled gray pile next to him, along with some empty plates and wrappers and Evian bottles. That made me feel a little better. At least someone was giving them food and water.

Mom glanced at Dad. “Are you going to try to talk to her?” she asked, in a low voice, as if she didn’t want to disturb Annie, but the microphone picked it up clearly.

“I don’t know what you expect me to say,” Dad said.

“You certainly didn’t seem to have any problems with that earlier.”

He looked at my mom. “Really, Julie? We’re really going to get into this now?”

“I should have known,” Mom said tonelessly, staring at the floor, rubbing her temples, a gesture that I associated with a very specific moment in their marriage, two years ago. “I should. Have. Known.”

“Oh, like you’ve been a saint yourself lately,” Dad said, loud enough that Annie stirred on my mom’s lap.

“Keep your voice down. What’s wrong with you?”

Dad didn’t say anything, and that only seemed to make Mom madder.

“Don’t you dare try to make this about me,” she said. “This has nothing to do with that.”

My dad reached up and ran his hands through what was left of his hair. “Julie, we’re locked in a room with no idea who’s doing this or when they’re coming back. I don’t particularly give a shit what old boyfriend you’re flirting with on Facebook.”

“Wait.” I looked at Erich. “Is this live?”

“No,” Erich said. “It is a Quicktime file. An attachment. It came through the iPad just a few minutes ago.”

“Can you get any idea of where it came from?”

“There is more.” Erich clicked on the PLAY triangle again.

I immediately wished that he hadn’t.

“Your son’s girlfriend,” Mom was saying. “Tell me, Phil, just out of curiosity, is there a depth to which you wouldn’t sink?”

Dad took in a breath and let it out. Maybe it was the angle, but he didn’t look like himself at all anymore. “I already told you, nothing happened.”

“And I’m supposed to believe that?”

“Right now, honestly, I don’t care what you believe.”

It was the wrong thing to say on every possible level, and I wanted to reach through the screen and strangle him for it. Meanwhile, Mom’s whole body sort of folded in on itself and she just started crying. It was a terrible sound, hoarse and scratchy, like she was coming down with a cold. In her sleep, Annie shifted a little on her lap, drew her knees up, and tucked in her arms but didn’t wake up. I just hoped she was really asleep.

“Look,” Dad said, “that’s not what I meant.” When he reached over to try to put his arm on my mother’s shoulder, she jerked away.

“Don’t touch me.”

“Julie-”

“Don’t.”

“Okay,” he said, sounding tired. “But I want you to listen to me. I don’t know why this is happening. I don’t know what we’re doing here. Obviously Paula isn’t who she said she was.”

“Obviously.” The bitterness dripping through my mom’s voice at that moment could’ve melted the insulation off the speaker wires.

“That’s not what I meant.”

Mom found some invisible point off-camera and stared at it. “What was she saying about getting out of here tomorrow?”

“I have no idea.”

“You acted like it meant something to you.”

Dad shook his head. “I was trying to get her to tell us something. Anything. Maybe about Perry.”

Mom straightened, looked back at him. “You think they have him somewhere?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would she tell you, if you asked?”

“Probably not.”

“You should try.”

“All right.”

“He doesn’t even have a passport anymore,” my mom said, and she sounded like she was going to start crying again. “He doesn’t have anything.”

“I’ll see what I can find out when she comes back. But you have to believe me, Julie, as God is my witness, there was never anything between me and that woman.”

Mom didn’t say anything for a long time. When she finally did, her voice was cold and distant.

“I agree,” she said.

“You do?”

“About the fact that it doesn’t matter right now,” she clarified. “Right now I just hope Perry’s all right.”

Dad looked at her, but she didn’t say anything else.

The clip ended there.

I stood perfectly still behind Erich, staring at the screen. The funny thing about equilibrium is that you don’t realize how much you rely on it until something comes along and yanks it out from under you. Somewhere in front of me, he was leaning forward, typing on the keyboard, little clicks adding up to something, or nothing, at the moment, I really didn’t care. I barely felt Gobi’s hand on my shoulder.

“I am sorry, Perry. Your father-”

“Yeah.” I turned, or at least my legs decided to, taking the rest of me along for the ride. Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about it. Talking about it meant thinking about it, and it didn’t take too much thought to realize how easily Paula could have used my dad the way she’d used me, as a way of gathering information about Gobi, and earning his trust, until eventually he’d leave himself and his family vulnerable. I tried to imagine my dad resisting Paula’s advances-I wanted to visualize him pushing her away, saying how wrong it was, she was dating his son. How he could never do something like that. There was wrong, and there was wrong, and there was this.