part i: a young soul; the thief’s first job; burning lashes
I am everywhere.
People tend to believe that I prefer the night, or maybe dark places. And I certainly walk in the shadows often, but I don’t prefer anywhere. I am everywhere. I see everything. I go where the souls go, a fruit picker of sorts following the fruit trees. Some souls are easy pickings. They come with me with joy, with relief. Those are the souls that are happiest with me. They speak and joke and ask questions.
Some souls are like flies stuck in a spider’s web. They stick to life, clinging to it, and there’s nothing I can do but pry their fingers away and carry them away.
Looking back, I shouldn’t have remembered the little girl. I see a lot of children; they blur together after a while. Yet I am also cursed with memory that reaches far back, so I remember all faces but remember, truly remember, none. Something about this little girl in particular was different, and perhaps that is why she is lodged in my long memory. As I knelt down beside her, she looked at me. She couldn’t have seen me, but she was ten and she looked into my eyes with no fear. She looked into an abyss of blackness openly, and for the first time in a long time, I felt something akin to fear. There was a fire burning in her eyes, anger and rage, and it threatened to spill out and burn everything in the vicinity. Even me.
How absurd. Death itself, frightened of a little girl.
The soul in her arms, pale and battered, sat up easily and left with me without fanfare. The little boy couldn’t have been more than three years old.
(He was three, I know it for a fact, but for the sake of science I shall not speak in absolute terms. He was barely more than three years of age.)
He raced around me with joy, his leg no longer crooked and his eye no longer blind.
“I can see again!” He told me in a whisper, cautious in his joy. “I can run again!”
On the ground, his sister clung to his lifeless body, her eyes staring straight into mine, as if daring me to take her brother away, as if challenging me to fight her. Tears streamed like a broken necklace of fake pearls down her dust-encrusted face, each trail revealing startling pale skin underneath, but she clenched the lifeless body in her arms so hard she must have felt its fractured bones underneath skin.
The soul walking in front of me squeaked in fear when a voice punctured the silence. He threw himself into my arms, as though even Death itself could not be more terrifying than the faceless voice. “Louise. Put the boy down and get back here.”
“Shut up.” The girl lowered her eyes, finally, and burrowed her face in her dead brother’s small tuft of brown hair.
The voice took on a menacing edge. The man walked into my eye-line, and he was tall, burly, and held a coil of brown pain in his hand. “What did you just say to me?”
Louise lifted her eyes and looked straight at him, as though seeing me reflected in his blue eyes. “I said, shut up.”
She didn’t close her eyes, not even when the brown coil unleashed itself on her. She just stared, hard, her arms clenching her brother, the eerie shine of tears boring into my eyes.
It was the first time Louise Miller stole. In the pockets of her broken and dead brother’s jacket, there was a small piece of bread. It was the bread that had gotten her brother killed, and though she would remember it for years to come with guilt and sorrow, she slipped it from the cooling figure that she loved into her own pocket. The bread was cold, smushed from the ground, and eating it was like swallowing the frost on a winter morning.
It’s funny, what kills humans. The piece of bread killed her brother and saved her.
Or perhaps she saved herself. It has never failed to astonish me the way that some humans cling to life. Even when they are at my door, they cling to it. Louise was like that. She was a thief, became one on the brink of her brother’s death, his small and lifeless body the stamp of her new identity.
(It marked her for the rest of her life. Not only had she seen Death, she had stared it down. She hadn’t been able to save her brother, but she saw me, and she didn’t cower. Ironically, it was that mindless bravery that saved her from my clutches multiple times.)
part ii: purple blooming on pale skin; the second big job; soot in her lungs
To be fair to the little thief, it was a good seven more years before she stole anything she would remember again. I watched from afar, visiting often, and she stole many things. But she would look back at her life later on and she would remember stealing only the piece of bread from her brother’s cold pocket and her father’s life in her youth. Nothing else, the bread, the books, the lipstick, the candy, nothing else was noteworthy.
It started like it always did: a whiff of alcohol, a staggering body, a hand posed to strike. But something was different this time. Namely,
“You little fucking cunt. Out there, whoring yourself for women, huh? You fucking devil spawn,” and here he paused for breath. His breath smelled like rotten eggs and dried up hope, “I should’ve killed you when I killed your thieving piece of shit of a brother.”
He punched her, again, small purple flowers blooming on the pale backdrop of skin. I was near, that night. A woman had just died upstairs, her soul smelling of cigarettes and dried vomit. I watched and waited, for it was obvious that in this house too someone would die. There is a smell, a scent, or a small note that sings in the air when someone is about to die. It is easy to see when you know what to look for, and that night the song was ripe in the air.
She didn’t scream. She had long since learned that screaming doesn’t help. ‘Do not scream,’ he used to tell them, because he didn’t want the neighbors to hear. He punched her, hard, in the right eye, like he had to her brother, and her only thought was something along the lines of, ‘At least now I’ll look like him.’
Her next thought, when what he said registered, was, ‘I’ll kill him.’
Note to readers: do not live in a house that is made of wood and leave fire lying alongside oil. Especially if you wish to avoid me.
(But perhaps it wasn’t the oil nor the fire that was really the final blow. It was the girl, the matches in her pocket, and the burning anger that already began its slow consummation of flesh and bone. Anger was familiar to Louise, as familiar as the lash of her father’s hand.)
When the ashes had sunken in and the young girl was standing outside, her face covered in soot and stubborn tears in her eyes, I stepped in. Her father’s soul did not cling to anything. He was easy pickings, ripe to the point of rotting. He looked at me in angered relief.
“Are you here for me?”
I snuffed out my instinct for snark and answered in the affirmative. He sighed, a long sigh that was as gray as the fumes from the flames. “You’re late.”
His was a soul dark as ink pooled on a piece of blank paper, and with each step away from its body became lighter and brighter. He didn’t look back at the daughter that stood in front of the burning flames with a battered face and a limp wrist.
I did.
Louise stared at the burning house, soot still in her eyes, and clenched harder at the box of matches in her hand. It turned out that the neighbors could hear everything, and soon the ambulance came screeching in a flicker of fluorescent lights. She had enough presence of mind to throw the matches into the mud, stomp over them and collapse to the ground. The tears were not fake as they streamed down her face, but her words were little snowballs of lies that hit her in the face with their coolness.
“Please,” she gasped at no one in particular, one eye closed from the bruise that was already starting to blossom there. “My father is in there.”
part iii: white lights; gleaming watches; glistening lips
People seek me out sometimes. Sometimes I come across a soul, and they are waiting for me. They sit up, they stare at me, and they are the souls that see me as much as I am invisible to the rest of the world. ‘Where were you?’ Some of them ask. ‘Thank you for coming.’ Others tell me.
But it is very, very rare that someone calls on me only to take one look at me and say, “I know you.”
“Everyone knows me.” I told her, cryptic because her face was familiar but I did not recognize her.
“But I know you.” The voice insisted, and suddenly I heard it, the sounds of familiarity billowing underneath a deepened voice and a somber tone. Louise must have seen the lines of recognition in my expression, because she turned then to look down at her lifeless body. “I don’t think I’m ready to go yet, you know?”
And I agreed. I wasn’t there for her that night. Death surrounded her even now in her adulthood, much as it did for her as a child. I left her there, standing over her body, and left her behind with another body in my fingers.
She woke up in a blinding sea of white, checked herself out of the hospital, and went straight back to the bar. I wonder if writing now that this is the place where she would meet Deborah Ocean would spoil the rest of the story. I do not write often, and I am unsure if writing this here will impact you, dear reader. But the ending will come, inevitably, and so perhaps the path there is not the most important. So it was at that bar that Louise would meet Deborah Ocean, and it was at that bar that Louise found something else besides anger weighing her down on Earth.
Deborah Ocean took one look at Louise Miller and decided that she was going to be a part of her life. “Debbie Ocean.” Debbie told her, eyes aglow with mirth and wrists full of jewels. She slipped a diamond watch onto Louise’s wrist. “Keep it.”
(Many times later, Louise will regret that she didn’t nod then, nod and answer the unspoken question in Debbie’s eyes that yes, yes she wanted her. Many times later, Louise will regret not surging forward to taste glistening red lips that night, will regret not using the momentum of Debbie leaning in to give her the watch to pull her into her arms and never let her go instead. But Louise then didn’t know.)
Louise played the game the way she had been taught to, with smiles and seductions.
“Lou. And I will.” A wink, placed strategically.
The thief was always alone. A lone wolf, perhaps, a lone traveler of the olden times. She never trusted anyone, never turned her back on anyone, and never wanted to do so. She remembered bread and fire all too well, remembered wearing an eyepatch over her eye at her father’s funeral and wondering if his last gift to her was a souvenir from her brother. But starting from that day in the bar, pale and wavering in the light from a brush with me, the thief was no longer alone.
She was tethered and terrified.
They became quite the duo. Partners, in Debbie’s words. Lieutenant and general, in Lou’s. One day later, Debbie sat on Lou’s legs. It disrupted her thoughts. She groaned, made a sound of protest, pushed Debbie off and asked, “What, Deb?”
“I was thinking.”
“Terrifying.”
“A bank.”
There’s a light that comes on in Debbie’s eyes when she speaks of stealing. It’s interesting. It’s as though Debbie is a hibernating bear, just waiting for the right moment to rear up and terrify the people around her. It is like looking into the sun for the first time after being starved of sunlight for an eternity.
It was terrifying, yes. But Lou flew to it, a moth drawn into lethal flames, or perhaps a moth tethered to the deadly flame, unwilling and unable to draw back.
part iv: a hotel room; black coffee; bingo
The first mistake the thief made was agreeing to one hotel room. To be fair, her mistakes were separated by years, so that each mistake in it of itself didn’t seem like much. But each mistake added, multiplied and subtracted, until the end. What had seemed like the grand finale.
The finale seemed, in the beginning, like a terrifying, faraway dream to Lou. Night stealing Debbie away from her, the arms of another wrapped around a lithe body and her name only a murmur in the back of Debbie’s mind. But this finale was not a faraway dream. It was as inevitable as I am.
Lou studied the people on the floor beneath them and the woman next to her. “Two rooms.”
“Why two?”
“You won’t get me in bed that easily, honey.”
A tantalizing smirk. “One. I’m not conning my way into two rooms. Twice the risk.”
An internal debate: does she read the riot act now, or does she cling to this invisible string that has already tied her against Debbie? “Two.”
A silent staring contest. The thief against the enigma. The thief lost.
“Fine.”
They watched the couple beneath them check out. Debbie chewed her lip. “Twin beds?”
“I’m not playing the giggling blonde on a road trip with her best friend.”
They ended up getting one bed. The argument, it turned out, became the norm for them. The thief against the enigma. Without fail, the thief lost every time. She didn’t know if she did it on purpose, but she did know that as time grew and they grew into one another, it became expected. Debbie would propose an idea, Lou would fight it, and Debbie would win.
“Thai?”
“Chinese.”
“I ordered Thai.”
“Fuck off.”
“I guess you don’t want the orange chicken I got on the way, then?”
She grabbed the orange chicken and rolled her eyes. “Don’t go soft on me now, Ocean.”
One of the things Lou learned about Debbie: sometimes she said things, and she had a million reasons but the only true one was hidden underneath layers and layers of deception and lies. Debbie was alone, too. Debbie learned to pretend not to care so that maybe, she wouldn’t. Humans are contradictory animals.
(Debbie was better at hiding the familiar licks of anger that threatened to consume her. Better than Lou. But life was a poker and the flame Debbie nourished was never allowed to die completely. Kindred flames, Debbie and Lou, Lou and Debbie.)
“Come on.” A tug at Lou’s leather jacket. “We’re going to get you clean.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t need to go, Deb. I don’t know why you keep telling me I need to.”
“Because you can’t be drunk on a job, babe. You know that.”
“I won’t be.”
A skeptical eyebrow. “We would’ve gotten ten thousand more if you hadn’t missed your mark yesterday.”
“Fuck off.”
Debbie just raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. And Lou went. She followed Debbie like metal follows a magnet. She dreamed of me for months afterwards, but she got clean.
They went bowling every year on the anniversary of that argument, and Debbie always bought her a cupcake. “We’re going to get diabetes and die,” Lou would tell her, stuffing her mouth full of the disgustingly sweet things that Debbie insisted on buying. Debbie would stuff another one in her mouth and mumble something.
I usually left around then. Sometimes I felt as though I was intruding, and though I needed my distractions, I let them have those moments to themselves.
Lou's second mistake was buying a dartboard.
Debbie wasn’t drunk often.
(She and Lou can both tell you about the smell of alcohol dampening the air at midnight and the symphony of screams coloring the silence.)
But she told Lou one day, by accident, that it was the anniversary of her mother’s death. So Lou bought a dartboard. Debbie stared down at the board for a long time. “I think you know too much now,” she remarked drily. “I may have to kill you.”
Lou pressed up close to her, disregarding personal space, and let her fingers drift up to tie Debbie’s hair back for her.
“Shut up and play.”
Or maybe the mistake wasn’t the dartboard. Maybe it was the coffee, Americano and thick and with a touch of cream because Debbie would never admit it because it’s not punk rock to add cream to your Americano, but she thinks Americano is too bitter. Maybe it was the silk robe, black and lacy, the exact shape and form that Debbie would have bought for herself.
A coffee, black with a splash of cream, pushed in front of Debbie. “What’s this?”
Lou straightened the newspaper in her hand and didn’t look up as she shrugged. “Do you want to do the crossword puzzle?”
“I can’t find my robe.”
“It’s in the closet. You forgot to steam it.” She looked up, and Debbie was looking at her. The look was colored with something that felt like the roughness of rusted fear.
It was a long beat before Debbie spoke again. “Give me a word.”
“Five letter word for nonsense.”
“Trash. Hooey.”
“Hokum.” She could practically hear Debbie roll her eyes.
Afterwards, Lou often thought it was that look that expedited everything. I tend to disagree. I think it was the way that with Lou, Debbie didn’t need questions to be answered.
The third mistake was at least five years after the second one. It might have been the bingo room, with its musty smell of cats and sweaters into July. Or it might have been the shrill voices day after day, calling out the dreaded word: “Bingo!” But somewhere along the way, Lou made her third mistake.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice, shame on us.
There was a cloud of darkness hanging over Debbie when she walked in that night. They had won, as per usual, but the pickings were small that night and something had been brewing for a long time. Seven years, perhaps. One mistake, leading to another, leading to another, until finally they all fall like dominos, like a house of cards in the wind.
“Do you want Thai?”
No response. The pins from a brunette wig dug into her sensitive scalp. Lou wondered for a moment if she should pull out a pin from where it was massacring her scalp and try to hear it drop. She was certain she would. She could feel something in the air, and she didn’t like the texture of this anticipation.
“Danny called.” Debbie picked up a pair of chopsticks, laid them back down again. Lou’s fingers stilled in her wig. “He’s got a good con running. Art.”
“We work alone, Deb.”
“He promised to give us our share.”
“He said the same thing last time.”
“He promised, Lou. Give him a chance.”
Lou weighed the pros and cons. Better yet, she weighed the anticipation and the ominous scent in the air. There was a feeling of inevitability in the air: nothing good lasts. “No. I’m not working with him again.”
A pause, on the brink of giving birth to something terrible. “I am.”
There it was. The riot act. Bright, strong, true, blaring in the silence. It rang like church bells at night. It stung like stripes laid across bare skin.
Maybe the third mistake was right there, right then. She could’ve gotten on her knees and begged, or retracted and let herself work with the suave brother that she didn’t hate. She could’ve reasoned more with Debbie, trust that even if she ripped herself open and admitted to Debbie that she didn’t trust anyone but her, Debbie would still stay. She could have set her pride down, let herself be ‘the kid sister’s sidekick’, and found another way for Debbie to fall by her side again.
The moth should never fall in love with burning flames. Lou knew that. The riot act still stung like salt being pressed into a wound that had not healed since the first time Lou was left clutching a cooling body in the snow. Lou stayed silent.
“Lou.”
I think I heard a note of pleading in Debbie's voice that day, but Lou didn’t. If she had, she certainly would’ve pounced on it. In fact, she would regret for many days to come that she didn’t, didn’t pounce on the small crack to Debbie’s heart that Debbie pried open for her. Instead, she averted her eyes and pulled the brown wig from her head. “Well. That’s that, then.”
Lou didn’t eat Thai for a long time after that. It burned her esophagus every time she tried.
part v: a phone call; pearly powdery white; blinding fluorescence
“You’re back, huh,” she told me when she saw me again. It’s curious how the times change and yet things stay the same. Her hand still clutched a phone, and a voice was saying something, urgently, fearfully, loud.
“I am.” I told her.
The weight of her soul crunched down on glass bottles underneath and on top of her bed. “Are you here for me this time?” A line of powdery white ran down her face. It hung like little crystals off a Christmas tree. She was a blade of grass trampled underneath the weight of a boulder.
“No.”
Or maybe I described her wrong. Maybe she was a weed, never ending, never stopping, always pushing on. Growing taller even as the boulder rolled over her again and again. She knew it as well as I did. She rolled her eyes. “Well then, fuck off. I have shit to get back to.”
She did that to me more often than any other human in recent memory. She flirted with me sometimes, seduced me and asked me to come closer, other times pushing me away with a cold look and a harsh word. It was addictive. I went back for more and each time, she delivered. The soul that I took from her this time had dyed red hair and dark roots showing.
Sometimes, though, things don’t go as planned. I stumbled on my way out, though I hesitate to write this; it seems embarrassing that I would, but in the name of keeping the truth I write it here and beseech you not to laugh. Debbie entered, hair wind blown and step harried. She stepped over my robes, sweeping past naked bodies and focused on the blonde with little crystals hanging from her lips.
It was the only time I ever heard her swear, and even then it was only a gasp.
(Frank Ocean swore when he raised a whip to Danny Ocean. Frank Ocean swore when he tore off Debbie Ocean's clothes, threw her a small, skimpy dress, and told her, “Go be a fucking distraction.” Frank Ocean swore when her mother died and, “That fucking bitch won’t give me a break even after death.” Frank Ocean had a soul that clung to life the way a dragon greedily hoards its treasures.)
“Fuck.”
When Lou woke up in blinding white again, Debbie sat next to her. Lou turned her head towards the smell of expensive perfume and didn’t bother trying to hide her exaltation. Or her anger. She was torn apart, alone on the bed, and Debbie sat with her face in her hands and barely breathed.
Fighting words spoken like pillow talk: “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Debbie didn’t startle. No one startled her; Danny Ocean had made sure of that when he woke his little sister up on Halloween with a glow-in-the-dark mask and pretended to be me. But her voice was muffled when she replied, “I could say the same.”
Lou tried to shrug, but it hurt so she subsided. “You know why I’m here.”
“I could say the same.”
Lou closed her eyes. “Fine. Play your stupid fucking games. Don’t stay for long, your big brother might come calling.”
“Lou.”
“Don’t mind me. I can damn well check myself out.”
“Lou.”
“Why’d you fucking come back, Debbie?” Her voice broke, but Debbie didn’t make a joke and that was even more humiliating. “You need a partner again? You miss being your own boss? Just run back to good old Lou, because she’ll always be fucking there, won’t she?”
“Lou.”
“Say something else.”
“I pulled out of Danny’s job.”
Silence.
I always found it unsatisfactory when people described silence as empty. Silence is not empty. It is the calm of the sea with turmoil hidden underneath soft waves. It is the battle of life and death deep in blue. It is never empty.
“I need a partner.”
Lou opened her eyes. Debbie had lifted her head and was staring at her.
“I’m tired, Deb.” Lou’s eyes were red-rimmed, and maybe that was what scared Debbie the most. Red-lined blue irises.
It is hard to tell what she meant. Sometimes, looking back, I think she meant she was ready to meet me. But other times, I think, ‘She hadn't tired of life, not yet. She was, maybe, tired of something different.’ I think that was the moment that Debbie realized how very, very close Lou was to slipping out of her fingers, like liquid silver.
Debbie’s voice belied almost nothing. “So sleep.”
Almost. But it wasn’t entirely nothing, in the end. And Lou caught it, because Debbie was ingrained in her, carved and ripped out of her but still lingering. Caught in the lines of every heartbeat.
She closed her eyes. Debbie didn’t move.
When she opened them again, Debbie was still there. “You’re still here.”
“Will you be my partner, Lou?”
Debbie called, Lou answered. Debbie pulled, Lou tugged, but the dominos always fell and Lou followed anywhere Debbie went. Debbie was the light-tower and Lou was the ship lost at sea. However you put it, Debbie played her hand and Lou didn’t walk away from the game. No matter how deep it dug into her skin.
A groan. “Fuck me.”
“That’s not an answer.”
An eye roll, because everything else hurt. “Fine. Why the fuck not?”
part vi: pink sweater blond; casino chips; the suburbs
If loneliness is what everyone brings and leaves with, is a mandatory course everyone has to take, Lou thought she would get an A plus. It was contradictory: Debbie introduced her to a blonde with dark brown eyes and a pink sweater, ‘Tammy’, Debbie told her; they lived together, the three of them. Still, loneliness hugged her like a cold blanket.
It was in the way that Tammy was so normal, Lou thought.
Tammy smiled when she saw a kid with their parents. Tammy laughed when she drank, was happy to drink at parties. Tammy didn’t flinch whenever the lights became too dark. Tammy didn’t keep her back to the wall no matter where she was because a blow from behind hurts even more coupled with the humiliation of being caught off guard.
Tammy wasn’t damaged. That was the thing. What Lou thought was damaged or not is still a mystery to me, because I knew that Tammy too had known me. The difference was, though, that Tammy hadn’t gone through life with me as her best friend. Tammy chose the life that Lou was forced into, and sometimes Lou thought she would be sick with jealousy.
“Tammy got us the chips.”
“Are you sure about this, Deb? She’s a kid.”
“She’s a kid who got us fake chips that I could cash in right now and have no one blink an eye about.”
“She’s never been on a job.”
“We all start somewhere.”
Lou didn’t say, ‘She could choose something else’ or ‘Why would she choose this life’ or even ‘Why do you trust her.’ Lou just nodded, because she thought she read something in the way Debbie looked at Tammy and lingered just a little closer to her than she needed to.
(Later, Debbie would tell Lou that she saw Tammy as a younger sister that she needed to protect. Lou only believed her once she had seen Tammy with eyeliner running down her cheeks, hugging a bottle, asking Lou why Debbie didn’t see her.)
Debbie’s nearness hit her like high pressure water sometimes, blinding her and cleansing her, reminding her, ‘Debbie left and Debbie will leave again’.
But it was easy. So easy, with Debbie, to fall into her and let her fall all over her. It was so easy to let Debbie inch her way into Lou’s every thought and every heartbeat, so easy to just let Debbie be the disease that Lou could not, would not rid herself of. When did it happen, Lou wondered. When did she become tied so inexplicably to a person who didn’t even want her?
(Debbie wanted her. But Lou and Debbie were really much more similar than they ever gave each other credit for. Debbie knew the lines of my hand as well as Lou, maybe even better. The difference was that Debbie never invited me into her home, never welcomed me with open arms the way Lou did. I think it was because Debbie had Danny, and afterwards, Debbie had Lou.)
They worked job after job. The exhilaration wasn’t exhilarating after a while, and the lullaby of boredom, of repetition, began to pound into Lou’s bones. She knew, Tammy knew, Debbie knew, something had to happen.
One day, it did.
“Hey Debbie. Hey Lou.”
Lou looked up and looked into blue eyes that were distinctly curious and friendly. Debbie looked up and saw change in their lives. “This is John. John, these are my friends, Debbie and Lou.”
Lou whistled, leaned back in her chair. She knew the traces of my touch and my presence, was too familiar with me to not be able to tell that this John had not even a single whisper of me tracing his figure. “John.”
“Hey. It’s nice to meet you.” The boy (because he was a boy to Lou, from the moment Lou saw that he had no wounds for her to sympathize with) said, smiling and friendly and, Lou thought, oh so easy for Debbie to tear into.
Debbie didn’t.
Instead, Debbie introduced herself, played nice, and Lou looked at her weirdly once Tammy had left with her newfound ride home. “Mellowing, Ocean?”
Debbie had a faraway look in her eyes. “He’ll be good to her.”
“He better be.” Lou meant it, and she could see that he would be, just as Debbie could. Because she had in some ways fallen in love with Tammy’s messy hair after a night drinking because they had just pulled off a big job; the way Tammy looked at her in the middle of the night, so tender and kind and simply sweet in a way that Lou had never really been looked at. In another world, she would have fallen in love with Tammy. She would have been happy.
I don’t know if that is true. Time is clumsy for me, fumbling and never quite right. But I think that in most of the universes and times, if there are many, many versions of me, each version would have seen the same thing. Lou would be Debbie’s. Debbie would be Lou’s.
Lou looked over at Debbie. “How long before the suburbs?”
Debbie lost the faraway look and smirked. “Twenty bucks say less than a year.”
“Two.”
They shook on it. “No cheating, Miller.”
“I would never.”
In the end, it was three. They both took Tammy out for ice cream. Tammy got vanilla and was so happy she almost glowed; Lou got mint and winced at the way it tasted like the gum she chewed to get her mind off her cigarettes. Debbie just laughed, joy crinkling the corners of her eyes, and told both of them they would get diabetes and she refused to steal insulin.
part vii: swamp-green eyes; another phone call; blinding rainbow lights
“How was the game tonight?” Lou looked up as Debbie gilded in.
“Fine. I took out twenty for a taxi back.”
There was the smell of deception and men’s cologne in the air. Lou didn’t ask. Debbie didn’t volunteer.
It became a game, a war fought on bloodless battlefields. I struggled to understand it until I understood: Lou already perished in the flames once, and she remembered Debbie’s burn. Fool her once. Fool her twice.
So Lou would come back with outrageous love bites in the most obvious places, lipstick on her collar and smeared over her face. And Debbie? Debbie came back every night smelling of men’s cologne.
The same cologne.
“Who is he?”
“Claude Becker.”
“You’re not pulling your weight in Bingo, Deb.”
Debbie threw a handful of bills into the duffle bag. “Does that make up for it?”
Blood turned to ice in Lou’s veins. “You’re running jobs with him?”
“Small things. He’s an art dealer.”
Two choices, then: stay with Debbie, watch her become someone else’s partner. Or leave, run, the way the running never stopped for Lou anyway.
Lou stayed. Later, she would look back at this moment and hate herself for it. She hated the fact that she learned to stop running for the wrong moment. Still later, she would look back at this moment and be glad that she stayed, even if just so that she had a little more time with Debbie.
“You look good tonight.”
Debbie applied a layer of lipstick. “I’m the buyer.”
“What? Debbie, that’s, what, three times the risk. Seriously?”
“It’s five times the pay. See you.”
Debbie Ocean is never taken by surprise. Lou clung to that. So I remember thinking that Lou would call upon me again when the phone call came, bearing Debbie’s name and a sigh of suppressed anger: “Six years. Parole after five.”
Lou was silent. Then, a hiss, anger seeping out from every letter of her words. It crept around the corners, slithered into the phone, and Debbie felt it, tangible enough to touch. “I’ll fucking murder him.”
“He’s not worth it.”
Anger tasted like over-boiled water, like the burnt bottom of a pot that’s burned for too long. Lou’s fingers tightened around the phone. Her nails dug into her palm, but the sharp shots of pain only made her more ready to send Claude Becker straight to my door.
“You are.”
Silence. And then, “Wait for me.”
Lou was too angry to hear the plea disguised as a command. “I won’t call again.” She wouldn’t visit either.
Debbie didn’t miss a beat, “I expected nothing less.”
In the end, though, Lou didn’t call on me. Perhaps she was done courting death. Either way, she locked up her liquor cabinet, threw away the key, and opened a club.
Cathartic, she called it, watching other people succumb to the poison she rid herself of like pulling out a deadened bone. Really, though, I think she was just hurting and not yet ready to accept the fact that this was twice. Twice Debbie had left her.
(Debbie was the one who become more familiar with me over the next half-decade. It wasn’t by choice, of course, because if nothing else, Frank Ocean taught his daughter to respect life and its indefatigability. But it did instill a Lou-like annoyance with me that I viewed with dry amusement.)
part viii: texts; liz-taylor jewels; green sequins
In prison, once, Debbie looked at me, told me, “Lou’s not ready for me to go with you yet, is she?”
I didn’t know then. But I think I know now.
“She loves me, you know,’ Debbie told me, her voice dry and her humor biting. “She might flirt with you every here and now, but she loves me, and you’re not taking her away from me any time soon.”
I very rarely get ultimatums from humans, and I even more rarely enjoy them. This one I did. It even made me laugh a little.
I visited Debbie again when she stepped out of prison, clad in an air of something like confidence and desperation. She stood in front of the marker that spelled out Danny Ocean’s name and gave him an ultimatum, similar to the one she gave me. Danny Ocean sat next to me, smiling.
“That’s my baby sister,” he told me. I told him I knew. I told him she was going to be okay. He nodded. Then he said, snorting, “As if I need you to tell me that.” They are arrogant people, the Oceans. But like their name, their blinding surface hides more than it reveals.
Debbie sent Lou a text.
‘Where’s the cemetery? 12?’
Lou didn’t respond.
If it had been merely a few years ago, there would have been no doubt in whether or not Lou would show up, whether or not she replied to the message. But when Lou saw the message, her first thought was not that Debbie was back. It was not the ecstasy that she thought would wash over her to know that Debbie Ocean breathed free air once again. Instead, it was the sinking feeling of knowing that she no longer needed Debbie.
The last time Debbie left her, Lou hosted me for months, flirted and danced with me, pressed kisses to my cold exterior. Then Debbie came back. The cold feeling of her absence, though, never left. It smoothed itself over Lou like plastic wrap over a meal, sealing in everything.
The thief still remembered the feeling of snarfing down cold bread, the bread her brother bought with his life. She still remembered soot burning her eyes, wondering who would see her brother first, her or her father. (Neither, the answer is. I picked up the souls at different times, and so the likelihood of them meeting again after coming into my care is low.)
Debbie wasn’t the flame anymore. And yet, even then, even now, Lou is still tethered.
So Lou showed up, but there was something distinctly different in the air. Maybe it was the danger and seduction that five years had taught Lou to wear as snugly as a turtleneck. Something changed in their relationship, and for the first time since Lou was lying in the hospital hosting me as a guest, Debbie could feel how slippery Lou was to hold on to.
“Did you get the credit line?”
“No.” Gum popped. “Don’t make that face.”
“That’s my I-just-got-out-of-prison-and-my-partner-lets-me-down face.”
“Hey. Not your partner. Yet.”
“Okay, so can you get the credit line, not-partner?”
“I need to know what it’s for, Deb.”
“You’ll see.”
“Don’t play games.”
Normally, Debbie would. She enjoyed the secrecy of hiding her plan until the curtains pulled back and her game was laid out in all its glory. But she heard a diamond-hard roughness in Lou’s voice, so where she would normally push, this time, she let go.
“It’s jewels. Big, bling-y, Liz Taylor type jewels locked in a vault a billion meters underground.”
“How are we getting them out?”
“They’re going to bring them to us.”
Lou raised an eyebrow. Debbie sighed. “Can I at least get some non-prison food before you grill me on my masterplan?”
And the plan was genius. It was everything Lou expected from Debbie: spectacular, ostentatious, and bordering insanity. And Lou committed to it. She wasn’t sure why, except that the manic glint in Debbie’s eyes was a drug that she drank in, desperately. It was like a cool drink in the summer after stumbling through the Sahara alone.
But the relationship they had was built on a card castle. It stood, yet the slightest wind would blow it down. Or perhaps not the slightest wind. But one wind in particular would, and though Lou hoped it wouldn’t, it blew their way.
Hope is, after all, the thing that murders.
“Claude Becker?” The name tasted like battery acid on her tongue. It ripped through her mouth, leaving only blood behind, leaving the soft skin in her mouth tattered, flowing like ribbons in the wind. She felt the blood coming out of her mouth, the pain that threatened to unleash itself and rear its ugly head on Debbie. She tried to rein it in.
And then Debbie tried to lie to her, tried to reel her in the way she would reel in a fresh catch at the casino, and Lou, for the first time since she met Debbie, read the riot act.
She turned and left, the ground inflamed with each step she took away from the sun she orbited around for more than half her life. Each step was what she imagined the Little Mermaid had felt in the original fairytale, as though she were walking on the edge of a blade.
The air tasted like blood and deep, deep devastation. Loss, for the third time. It should be a familiar texture at this point.
It wasn’t.
“Lou, Lou. Lou!”
She didn’t answer, until Debbie came to her room that night. Debbie knocked, and Lou contemplated turning her away. She was tired. Tired, the way she had been once, the way that she couldn’t seem to outrun. Looking back, Lou could say honestly this was the closest she was ever to completely running away. I tend to agree. The smell of burning heartbeats was vivid in the air that night, and I think Debbie smelt it.
In the end, Lou stood and let her in.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You don’t have to tell me everything.” Crass words, spoken without inflection. A snort. "Anything, actually."
“I’m sorry, Lou. I just-”
Debbie broke off.
(The pain Debbie felt was at least on par with Lou’s, though for different reasons. Debbie’s pain was more like cutting yourself and realizing, when the blood oozes, that you cut too deep. It was coupled with shame, despair, and the certainty that she’d ruined everything. The type of pain that levels cities.)
“Don’t walk away.”
“Claude fucking Becker. You came back for him. You’re using me to get to him. Or maybe you’re using him to get to me. I don’t know, but I do know this: you’re fucking sick, Debbie. You-”
Lou stopped herself. She chose her words the way assassins choose their weapons, chose them knowing they would hurt and with the intent to hurt. But she could see each blow her words inflicted and so she stopped. She wanted to hurt Debbie and she wanted Debbie to never hurt, ever. So she stopped.
“Don’t walk away.”
“How?” Lou sat down on the bed. “Tell me, Debbie. How?”
Debbie just shook her head. Stubborn. “I won’t go back in. I won’t, Lou. And none of you will, either. And once this is over, I swear to you, Claude is gone forever.”
I heard the undertones of her words, the vow colored in violet to Lou, the promise woven around Debbie’s cadences that Lou would be the only one.
Lou didn’t.
“This is the last job.”
The crack that split right down the middle of Debbie’s pounding heart must have been as palatable to everyone as it was to me. But to Lou, it was just another way for Debbie to pretend to want her, to pretend to need her, to leave her.
Debbie didn’t speak. She just sat down, on the floor, and tried to salvage the bits of herself that Lou had scattered and realized that she couldn’t.
That terrified her. That should’ve been the fourth mistake the thief made.
Debbie croaked, when her throat stopped holding her captive, “No.”
“Yes.”
“Lou.”
“I’m going to bed.”
Debbie didn’t move. Even after Lou had changed and closed the lights, Debbie still sat there, because every bone in her body was broken and she was holding herself together through the sheer power of her will.
Lou tried to ignore Debbie. But the tether that tugged her to Debbie kept tugging, and she couldn’t. So after a while, accompanied by the broken breathes of Debbie, she stood in the dark and touched a hand to Debbie’s back. Debbie jumped, flinched, and Lou’s heart lost its footing. Her anger flowed away from her like blood going up an empty IV drip tube.
“Come to bed, Deb.”
Debbie fit in her hands. She was tiny, small, so much smaller than the way she seemed, and Lou’s heart fell from the wall it had built for itself.
“I’m sorry.” Debbie murmured into her skin, still shivering from what seemed like the brush of my fingers against her skin. “I’m sorry, Lou.”
Lou tangled her fingers in thick brown curls. “Go to bed, Deb.”
Tammy was the only one who noticed the change, the way that Debbie began to press as close as she could to Lou any time she could, as though if she pressed close enough Lou would become just another limb of hers and never be able to leave. Only Tammy knew them well enough to see, but Tammy only asked once, while they were looking at the blueprints of the Met.
“Are you guys okay?”
Lou fingered the smooth paper of the blueprints. “The suburbs really got you good, huh, Tim-Tam?”
“I had a Tim-Tam the other day for the first time, you know. It was good. You Australians have good snacks.”
“You should try Vegemite.”
“Gross. So are you guys, you know, okay?”
“We aren’t going to be plopping dead before the job is over, you have my assurances.”
Tammy rolled her eyes. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
Lou looked out. Debbie was out, buying materials with Amita. Rose snipped away in her corner accompanied by the sound of Nine Ball’s tapping, and Constance was nowhere to be found. “I don’t know, Tammy.”
To Tammy’s credit, she was the one who fielded the questions from the rest of the crew when they wanted to know why Debbie and Lou acted as though they were puppets controlled by the same puppeteer, or even the same string.
“They’re married, they have to be.” Constance said.
Nine Ball took a drag from her cigarette. “Debbie was in jail when gay marriage was legalized.”
“So they got hitched the moment she got out.”
Amita knew a little more, so she turned to Tammy with confused eyes. “I thought… Claude Becker?”
“No.” Tammy shut that down, quickly. “And you guys, they’re just them. They’re just Debbie and Lou, Lou and Debbie. They’ve been that way since forever.”
“It’s sweet,” Rose offered, her eyes glazing over.
Tammy wasn’t sure if she agreed.
(Later, Tammy would. But at the time, there was nothing sweet about the way they trod over each other’s hearts and pretended not to hear the cracks underneath the soles of their shoes.)
I rarely visited any of the women at this time. I was considerably busy. There is always conflict, there is always war, and where there is war I lurk in behind the bullets and guns. I am shot through gun barrels and land on souls that come with me whether or not they are ready.
Debbie tried to remedy that, once. She called on me, late at night, staring down at the scissors that she knew would paint blood-red lines across her skin if she just pushed down a little harder.
“Alone,” she told me, though I don’t think she registered my presence at all. “Lou- Danny- I just- Sleep- I don’t-” She broke up, in the way she never did in front of anyone. Each word seemed to cut her deeper, pressing deeper into her skin. She choked on her own words.
“Debbie?”
To this day, I do not think Constance knows how she saved Debbie’s life that night. I like to think that Debbie would have told her one day.
Debbie stood to open the door. “Yeah?”
“Are you sure I can’t get a MetroCard? I mean, honestly, I just think that that would be way more convenient and–”
“Good night, Constance.”
A pause.
Dragged out words in a whiny tone: “Fine. Good night, boss.”
On the day of the job, Lou let herself remember the way needing Debbie felt, and she pulled Debbie to her chest one last time before they parted. If that was the last time she would see Debbie again for years, she wanted it to be a reminder of the way Debbie forced her way into Lou’s heart and carved out a house for herself in there.
Debbie’s heart, on the other hand, was suspended in midair, flying high and teetering on the edges of the Empire State Building, until.
Until Lou showed up, her long legs sauntering towards Debbie from around a food truck in a sequined green jumpsuit that Debbie knew, knew Tammy had chosen carefully and specifically for Lou, knew that Lou would know how stunning she was, knew that her heart would reach for Lou.
She wasn’t wrong.
Her heart leapt off the building. Her heart was in free fall.
part viiii: filled lungs; scratched leather; coconut air
I don’t think I have ever quite scared Lou. I think from the moment she held her brother so hard to her body that her heart beat for both of them Lou lost any and all fear that she might have held for me. Almost.
Almost, because when Lou walked into Debbie’s room a morning a few days after the heist only to find me perched at Debbie’s feet, her fear was the most prominent smell in the room.
“Deb.”
“Debbie?”
“Fuck, Debbie!”
She rushed Debbie to the hospital. It was the first time the blinding white of the place had ever made her nervous. The blankness of the wall seemed to speak to the way that Debbie’s eyes had looked, glazed over from the heat that burned deep inside of her. It burned like white-hot iron against Lou’s thoughts. Debbie was listless. Debbie was breathless. Debbie was in my grasp.
It wasn’t the first time Lou had hated me. But it was certainly the first time that the hatred was coupled with such a heady dose of fear she was high on it before she could squish it down.
“Is she,” Lou’s voice was gruff, cracking from the inside, “Is she okay?”
The nurse glanced at her, wearing Death on the cuffs of her shirt. “Are you family?”
“Yes.”
The nurse checked the file she held in her hand. “Lou Miller? Emergency contact?”
Lou didn’t have time to think about what being Debbie’s emergency contact meant.
“Yes.”
“She has pneumonia.”
Lou breathed in, breathed out. Choked on the air, the endless possibilities in three words. “Fuck.”
“She’ll be alright. We’re keeping her here for the next day, just to make sure her lungs are stabilized, and then we’ll discharge if all goes well. So far, her lungs are looking fine.”
“Can I see her?”
“She might be contagious.”
“I want to see her.”
The nurse appraised her. “Alright. But she’s going to be a bit woozy right now. She just had some antibiotics, and we’ve hooked her on an IV.”
“I can deal with that.”
When Debbie woke up, the first thing she saw was Lou, sitting next to her, eyes bloodshot and angry.
Lou spoke first. “How are you feeling?”
“Like crap.”
“Yeah. Tough shit.” Words spilled out like chunks of spoiled milk. “You weren’t sleeping? You weren’t eating? Were you trying to fuck up your body?” Another deep breath, the metallic taste of fear being chased down by seeping edges of anger and weeping desperation. “Why the fuck weren’t you eating?”
Debbie tried to shrug. “I couldn’t sleep. Didn’t feel like eating.”
“I swear to fucking God, Debbie,” Lou moved closer. “I swear to God–” She broke off. She denied it to everyone afterwards and Debbie let her have the lie, but I saw the tears that stubbornly refused to dissipate. “I thought you were going to fucking die.”
Debbie coughed. Lou started at the sound and stood immediately to pour her a glass of water. She watched as Debbie drank it down, guilt and fear and relief pouring down her throat the way water poured down Debbie’s.
“You’ve gone off the deep end if you think I’m going to die before I get to spend any of my cut.”
“See to it that you don’t.”
“Aw, Lou, that almost sounded like you cared.”
The fear was receding, the anger soaked up by the sweet relief of Debbie being okay.
“You are going to eat everything I put in front of you once we get back home. And I will fucking tie you to bed and glue your eyelids shut if I have to.”
Debbie felt her heart clench, which made her cough again. Lou wasn’t leaving. Not yet.
I think it was this time, when Debbie was sick, that really made Lou forgive her. Or not forgive her, perhaps, but trust her again. Because while Debbie was sick, Debbie couldn’t leave. And every time Debbie clung a little longer to Lou in the morning seemed to shout to Lou that maybe, maybe, maybe this time Debbie wouldn’t leave.
Maybe, this time, Debbie would stay. Even after she got better.
But old habits die hard, and the thief almost believed she had learned how to stop running. She was wrong.
“I’m going to California.”
“What?”
“I’m going to California.”
Silence. When Debbie spoke again, her voice was slow, deliberate, tumultuous. “For how long?”
Lou shrugged. “We’ll see. Maybe the Californian coast will be too beautiful and I’ll just decide not to come back.”
“You’ll miss the grime of New York.”
“Maybe.” Lou shoveled another mouthful of pancakes in her mouth. She tread carefully, sprinkling her hope like Easter eggs on a hunt. “Will you be here when I get back?”
“Yeah. Yes. I will be.”
It was the first time I ever felt this certainty in Lou. Lou was set in her hope, but she was also carved from determination. She would not wait for Debbie again. If Debbie was not back when she came back, Lou would sever the tether herself. She would do it, with nuclear explosions and knives and it wouldn’t be bloodless, but she would do it.
It was the first time I ever felt this fear radiating off Debbie. Debbie was colored in desperation, her world suddenly tinted with uncertainty. Lou had always been the axis her world turned on, and suddenly, Lou was leaving. Maybe not forever, but Lou was home and home had never felt shaky before.
Debbie smoothed her hands over the old, familiar, worn leather jacket Lou wore. “Come back soon.”
Lou pulled on her helmet. “I’ll send you a coconut.”
(Debbie received a coconut a few months later. Lou didn’t send a card. Debbie still carved out the coconut and ate it. Later, Lou would say, “Jesus, Deb, you didn’t even know that was the coconut I sent! What if it was someone else, trying to poison you or something? At least try to be a good former ex-con.” Debbie just pulled her close and pressed a kiss on her lips and told her, “I knew it was you, babe. The coconut was too ugly to be from anyone else.” Lou acquiesced. She has chosen the ugliest coconut for that very reason.)
Joy: noun. Gaiety, freedom, and a whole lot of cocktails.
But there was something impure about the joy that Lou felt, streaming through the roads with the wind screaming with happiness in her ear. She wasn’t running, she told herself. She had learned how to stop, and she hadn’t ever been the type of person who unlearned lessons.
Now, though, I think she can admit that she was running. Running, because she stayed once, and that carved a Grand Canyon in her chest that thirty-eight million dollars hadn’t filled. But she was running the way the Earth runs from the sun: in circles, and always towards the same fiery destruction.
One midnight, there was a knock on her hotel door. When she didn’t answer, she was asleep, in her defense, the door was opened. The jingling of the lock chain woke her.
“Debbie?”
“What?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. I’m on vacation.”
“It’s almost Valentine’s Day, baby. Can’t I go on vacation, too?”
A thoughtful pause. Then: “You know what, this is too early for me to have to deal with this. Just, I don’t know, come to bed or something.”
And Debbie did.
part x: thundering tears; pyres burning; found family
I was rather absent for the next few years from Debbie and Lou and Lou and Debbie. I had a lot to do, and still do. The world was in turmoil for a long time, and I collected souls like a fruit-picker picks apples during picking season. I didn’t think often of them, but then I came across New York one day, picking up souls of those who hadn’t had to die yet, and decided that surely a visit to them could not depress me anymore.
I’m not sure I was correct.
“Hey, Rusty.”
“Hey, Lou.”
“You look like shit.”
“Thanks. You’ve always got the best compliments.”
Silence. They both felt the storm brewing, both knew that once the words were spoken, they wouldn’t be able to be taken back.
“Boss?” Nine Ball stepped out, her eyes blurry from another sleepless night punching in numbers and codes.
Rusty raised an eyebrow, and nodded at Daphne. “Still into brunettes, then, Miller?”
Lou rolled her eyes. “Rusty, Nine Ball. Nine, Deb’s brother’s annoying asshole of a sidekick.”
Rusty winked, though the motion was more sluggish than it would have been. Nine Ball yawned. “‘Kay. Goin’ back to bed.”
Silence again.
“Where’s Debbie?”
“She went out to get groceries.”
“Groceries? God, Miller, did you really manage to domesticate an Ocean?”
Lou got him a bottle of beer and herself a Coke. “Not yet. We’re getting there. Proceed with caution and all that.”
Rusty’s smile was crooked. It was the smile of a building with one or two of its foundation blocks yanked from it.
“Just tell me, Rusty. Is he…”
“He’s gone.”
The rushing of blood suddenly made Lou’s head spin. Her heart squeezed in itself, each palpitation like a trampoline bouncing up and down. “Fuck.” She managed.
“Yeah.”
She looked into blue eyes from a ragged face and saw a version of herself, reflected. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
When Debbie came back, she took the news in stride. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
Silence. Debbie’s snort was forced, tilted the same way Rusty’s smile was. “The bastard really didn’t want to see me win, did he?”
Rusty’s eyes were red-rimmed and blood-shot. The blue of his irises were all the more prominent because of the sea of blood they swam in.
“Come over for Christmas, Rusty.” Debbie ordered.
Rusty hung his head and nodded. Hope is the thing that murders.
Afterwards, Debbie choked on her dreams. They crept up her throat until she was kneeling in front of the toilet, ridding her body of anything and everything because Danny was dead. Danny was dead. The brother who scared her so bad she was never scared anymore, the brother who leapt in front of Frank Ocean and punched him in the face when he got too touchy, the brother who let Debbie steal his watch because he would steal it back again, was dead.
She had never hated me as much as she did then.
It was a strange feeling. Where Lou had always hated me with a ferocity that seared away any fear she had for me, Debbie had always respected me, even loved me, just a little. Because I may have taken her mother, but I also took away Frank Ocean. That was a debt to me she carried with her always.
But right at that moment? Right then, Debbie considered her debt to me paid in full.
In fact, she hated me. She hated me with every single molecule in her body. I took her brother from her, not once, but twice.
“Deb?”
She didn’t answer. She was too busy burning pyres with my body tied on them.
“Deb, babe, can I come in?”
Lou came in. She knelt down next to Debbie. In that moment, they were so similar that they could have been twins. A blonde, a brunette, bent over a pale, ceramic toilet because losing a brother is a defining moment, and if life is made of defining moments than their definitions would be synonyms.
“I’m so sorry, Debbie.”
Grief is like the texture of hair against bare shoulders. It is nearly unrecognizable sometimes, unfelt and unseen. Other times, the wind blows, and it brushes against bare skin, reminding and reprimanding. It doesn’t disappear. It becomes something that one become so used to it nearly disappears, but then the wind will blow some way it never did before, and suddenly grief is there, lurking, ready to strike.
“He should be here.”
“Yeah.”
“He should be here.”
Lou reached out and let her heartbeat be the thing that slowly brought Debbie back to a cruel world where she no longer has a brother. It was only then that the tears, so resistant and stringent, fell.
Lou held Debbie until she fell asleep. The tracks of her tears were imprinted on her cheeks, and Lou kissed them away as she carried Debbie to bed. There was an infinite pool of tenderness in Lou’s blue eyes as she laid Debbie gently on her bed. All the rough edges, cracks, dangerous blades, none of them mattered because it was Debbie in Lou’s bed.
Surely you can see where this story is going, dear reader. You would have to blind not to.
I think Lou knew from the moment she pulled a brunette wig off of herself and couldn’t slow down away from the car crash she saw herself speeding into. Debbie knew later. Debbie knew from the moment she saw Lou, pale, thin, eyes rolled back and foaming at the mouth on the floor.
I wondered what it was, the thing that convinced both of them, the thief and the enigma, to stop running, stop thieving, stop hiding. I’m still unsure. But perhaps you have read this story and you know better than I, for Death is both everything human and yet not human at all.
“Lou?” Daphne knocked softly on the door.
Lou stepped outside, closing the door behind her so Debbie was hidden. “Yeah?”
Daphne chewed her lip, her eyes darting around before she stepped a little closer and said, in a rush, “I know she’s tough so don’t give me a whole lecture about this, but I heard crying so… Is Debbie okay?”
Warmth flooded Lou, all the way down to her fingertips.
“She will be.”
“Do you want me to hire someone to murder the dude who just left? ‘Cause Nine Ball could probably find someone who could do that.”
Lou could almost chuckle at that. “Rusty’s a friend. Thanks for offering, though. ‘Night, Daph.”
“Okay. Good night.”
When Rusty came back to the loft, the soft, slippery texture of grief had become familiar to him, just as it became second nature for Debbie to staunch it the moment it threatened to wiggle itself into existence.
“How are you, Debs?”
Debbie looked over at the kitchen. Lou was making pancakes as loudly as she could, as subtle as an elephant stomping in church.
“I’m good, Rusty. You?”
Rusty glared down at the wooden table. “God, I fucking miss him.”
“Me too.” Debbie cleared her throat. “Oh. By the way, have you met everyone yet?”
“No. You’ve got a whole fucking choir group together, Debs.”
Debbie’s laugh was still stilted, but at least it was there. “You’ll meet them at dinner.”
“Okay. Oh, and Debs?”
“Yeah?”
“When are you and Lou going to get your shit together?”
Debbie fell silent. Lou was still clapping metal with ceramic together in the kitchen, and it was loud, obnoxious, and Debbie wanted to bottle it to wear on her skin forever. She decided Rusty was right.
“Hey, Lou,” Debbie called. “C’mere.”
Lou came. Something fragile, delicate, broken and mended was shining in her eyes.
“I didn’t mean now,” Rusty protested. But they didn’t hear him. Debbie reached out. Lou stepped closer so that Debbie could reach up, pull Lou’s lapels, pause right before their lips touched.
“May I?” She whispered, a hair away from Lou’s lips.
Lou kissed her.
“Awww.”
Lou pulled away to tell the women who had gathered in the room at some point, “Shut up, Amita.”
“Let’s give them some space, shall we?” Rose murmured, and there was the sound of the rest of the girls filing out.
(There was also murmurs of bets and money being exchanged. Tammy, in particular, lost quite a bit of money. Nine Ball won big.)
Lou didn’t hear any of it. Lou was drawing constellations from the stars in Debbie’s eyes.
part xi: mistletoe
“Deb? Have you seen the mistletoe?”
“It’s somewhere over… Lou.”
“What?”
“You did not call me over just to get me under the mistletoe.”
“Didn’t I?”
“Lou.”
“C’mon, babe. You know the rules.”
Rose tapped them gingerly. “I’ve a gat to fill. Do yous mind?”
They moved apart to let Rose into the kitchen.
(I noticed a little girl named Louise because of the fire in her eyes that threatened to cremate everything that it came across. I stayed, because of her disregard for me. This, though, was the place were I left her. This time, it was because she has learned to fear what I can take away from her. The thief was no longer alone.)