Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

In the window, a movement.

Nicolette.

Of course. She’s inside. She’s been inside the entire time, waiting to explain those words. That first day, she was there, too, watching me through the window.

I squeeze Jules’s hand — then pull her forward into the minefield and wait to explode.

“I’m calling Dan,” Jules says, using a mean woman’s voice. “He’ll pick us up. After he says ‘I told you so.’”

But Nicolette couldn’t come out of the house that first day because the Hasidim arrived.

Two more giant steps.

“Stop,” Jules says. “I said stop.”

I stop and open my eyes. We’ve reached the front door. I grab the knob. It’s locked.

Three kicks to the door. The stone flowerpot beside it hadn’t been there last time. I lean the tube and my bag against the siding and grab the pot. It’s heavier than I thought, the perfect heaviness. A bud is starting to sprout.

Quickly along the perimeter where house meets lawn, to the first window. But she’s no longer in sight. All I can see in the dusty glass is myself. A little-boy version of me.

A running start and I smash the bottom of the pot into the window. The glass doesn’t break and there’s soil all over my chest. I do it again and the window cracks and splinters, and the third time I have to shake Jules off me and the glass sprays everywhere and almost gets her. I knock the rest of the broken window away with my hand. Jules screams at the same time as my fingers start to bleed and her screams are coming out of my wounds. I turn back to Jules to help her up on the sill. She’s crying up a storm. There’s a storm brewing, big clouds on their way, flying over the roof of the house, coming out of the chimney, they’re coming to drown this whole place, to make an ocean, and the Hasidim are on their way to get me. I have to get in, I have to get in the house, and Jules doesn’t understand. They will take her away from me again if I can’t find the words to go back in time before the first time.

A man is standing in front of me on the other side of the broken window. He’s covered in shadow.

“Let me inside,” I demand of him. “Where is she? Werewolf. Give me the words. Words are for babies.”

“They’re on their way, asshole,” he says.

I turn to Jules for help. Her face is wet with sweat and tears and soot and she is made of plastic. She’s going to run away from me now, and that will be the last I see of her.

But there are her hands on my shoulders and she’s shaking me and yelling and she pulls my head onto her shoulder and I’m crying, too, which I didn’t mean to do.

When I pull away, her snot sticks to my shirt and her tears are everywhere.

“The police are on their way,” she says. “They’ll take you to the hospital.”

But the cops are working for the Hasidim. She must know this.

I don’t believe her. She wouldn’t turn me in. “You don’t understand, understand this,” I say. She wouldn’t have done that to me. I don’t believe her.

“What am I supposed to do?” she says.

“Why don’t you let me help you? Help is on its way and the way is flat from here. Now Dan and his people will hurt you. You might die and I can’t stop it and it’s all your fault.”

Doesn’t she see that I can take her back in time so she won’t have a miscarriage?

She digs her face into my hands and cries harder. “Listen to what you’re saying, West. You know it’s not true.”

And there she is — lost to me.

I’ve never blamed her before, but she’s never betrayed me before. You don’t know betrayal like this. Who’s ever left you? Your own sister fouling up your plans to save her, right before you solve everything. Which you should have seen coming. It’s you. It’s your fault.

Or maybe it’s my fault. Or maybe Jules is right. Maybe I want her to be right. That would mean I’m just sick. That would mean she’s not in danger. It would be so much easier if I didn’t have to protect her.

But I know I’m not wrong. I can’t be. Unless I messed up somewhere at the very beginning of the logical argument.

I grab my painting and bag. I can’t force her to let me take care of her forever. She will have to fend for herself. I pat Jules’s dark wig. She doesn’t feel it. “Do you miss your hair, Jules?”

She doesn’t look at me. “No, I don’t miss my hair.”

What do I say after that? Nothing. I will run.

But first I leap at her to scare her away for good.

She really shouldn’t love me.

I am completely alone in the world. Completely and utterly and finally alone except for one man:

Jill is waiting for me on the corner of West 101st Street and Fifth Avenue, like his voicemail said. I’m twenty minutes late but still he waited. He is a giant in his leather jacket.

From the corner, I think he might be make-believe. The words and the landmine house have disappeared, and with it Nicolette’s code-key, and I’m afraid everything else will start disappearing, too, Jill included. Vanished through the ripped seam in the universe.

“You’re late.” He’s real, all right. “Didn’t I tell you I’d find you? And her?” He grins at me. He’s real and safe. Thank goodness for green-level safe. He doesn’t know that after Jules, he and Claire are all I have left.

We walk half a block east. He looks at my wounded hand, which I wrapped in one of the extra T-shirts Dan put in my bag, but he doesn’t ask about it. At a don’t-walk sign, Jill digs into his pocket. “Here, I got something that belongs to you.”

He slips me a half-sized crumpled manila envelope. I let him hold the painting while I open it. Inside are rectangular clippings of naked girls. Not the kind you’re thinking — this man is an art thief, not a pervert. It’s an envelope stuffed with dozens of Renaissance nudey cut-outs.

He leans toward me. “Look closer.”

I look closer. Between the clippings are many twenty-dollar bills.

“Can’t be too careful,” Jill says.

“What’s this for?”

“What do you think? I’m paying you back. I shouldn’t have taken it in the first place.”

I unwrap my hand and drape the bloody T-shirt over my shoulder so I can count it, keeping it in the envelope. “It’s missing three hundred!”

“Four hundred.”

Something else is jiggling around in the bottom of the envelope. “What else is in here?” Peering through, it looks like pills.

“Don’t lose those. She’ll want them. I know she will. Did you bring your meds? You got Xanax?” I nod and pat my messenger bag. Jill leads us to a private-enough alcove by the entrance of a massive stone building I don’t recognize.

“Where are we?” I ask. Gargoyles leer down at us, but the bird poop on their faces make them less threatening. I could kiss them.

“The hospital.”

Has he been talking to Jules? He couldn’t have been. I’ll have to make a run for it again, that’s all there is to it. Goodbye to Jill, goodbye to everything.

“Guess who’s right inside these walls,” Jill says.

“Who?”

“Claire, for Christ’s sake,” he says as if I should have known. “Claire Bishop.”

So I’m going to the hospital after all, just like my Jules wanted. But for another reason.

“What’s wrong with her?”

He lowers his eyes and tosses the painting tube lightly up and down. The birthday paper is torn in places. “We have to act fast. There’s not much time.”

“Why? Did we get caught?”

“No. No one’s getting caught at anything. I know the guards here, if you know what I mean.”

I slip the envelope in my bag and take the painting back from him.

“You don’t know what I mean.” He tells me that the missing four hundred went to the guard he’d paid off, who he told I was Claire’s son, but that I was a bastard kid, and you know how family is, her other kids were always visiting and didn’t want me near, and that’s why we had no choice but to visit at night when everyone else was gone. “I don’t know how long she’s got. Up here,” Jill says tapping his head. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. How long she’s going to be herself. She’s not totally gone yet. But they said she stopped eating. Why would she do that?”