ON THE AFTERNOON before Sue was coming over for our second—and final—make-or-break attempt at her portrait, I took Peanut out for his first long walk since he got sick.
We’d been cleared for little walks almost from the beginning. But before Peanut could do his signature long, rambling, sniff-everything-in- sight stroll, we had to make sure his strength was back.
I didn’t mind. It gave me some time to think.
I’d been hoping—so hoping—that the edema would magically resolve before I really got down to the wire and had to paint this portrait for the show. Every morning I woke up and shuffled to the bathroom mirror, squeezing my eyes closed for a silent prayer before finally peeking to see what I could see.
And every morning, of course, my own face was just a jumbled pile of disconnected features.
I missed it. I missed seeing my face.
But I’d been instructed not to give up hope, and I was nothing if not obedient.
It would come back, I kept telling myself. There was a very good chance, at least.
But now I was at the point, with just over two weeks before the portrait deadline, when I had to trudge forward—fusiform face gyrus or no. I mean, even if I magically resolved my face blindness tomorrow, I’d still need time to paint the painting.
It was a make-it-work moment.
And so I’d been researching the brain. I’d been reading up on painting techniques and neuroplasticity, and how creativity worked. I’d been hunting
through different strategies for making lots of different art. My best idea was to try to bypass the fusiform face gyrus altogether, if I could. To use other senses rather than sight. To sneak around my own assumption that I had to see faces the way I’d always seen them before I could paint them.
Maybe there was another way of seeing.
Maybe if Sue described her face to me in words, the words could make a new path for me to follow. Maybe I could capture her face before my fusiform face gyrus figured out what I was up to. Another idea was to try to turn Sue’s face upside down, or maybe sideways, so that my brain didn’t realize it was a face. Maybe if we just thought we were doing shapes and colors and lines, the FFG would never have a reason to cause trouble. And then, if neither of those worked, I’d turn to math. My least appealing option, since I was quite math-challenged. But artist Chuck Close had mapped photographs with faces using a grid. Who’s to say I couldn’t do the same thing on a real face?
If worse came to worse, I might draw an actual grid on Sue’s actual face.
She didn’t know that yet, of course. But these were desperate times.
 |
AND SO THERE they were. Countless late nights of research, distilled down into my best three ideas. Or more accurately, my final three shots in the dark. I knew I couldn’t paint the way I’d always done it. My only remaining chance was to try something new.
And what if none of them worked? Well, I wasn’t going to think about that.
Anyway, that’s what I was planning as Peanut peed on every clover flower between my building and the bayou: all the crazy new portrait techniques I’d try tonight with Sue. I had the canvas all ready and a measuring tape and a projector with a grid. We’d start with words and go from there. Maybe it would work better than I feared. Maybe my fusiform face gyrus would surprise me.
I was giving myself that pep talk when a fat plop of rain hit my nose. Followed by another on my arm.
And then I lost count completely as some dam broke in the sky and Peanut and I had to race-walk the half mile home through what felt like a waterfall of rain.
By the time we made it back to the building lobby, I looked like I’d just climbed out of a swimming pool in all my clothes. My hair was plastered down on my face, and my shoes were squishing like they were full of Jell- O.
Peanut and I slid through the elevator doors just as they were closing— only to look up and see two people already there. Joe in his jacket. And a faceless woman.
Standing next to each other.
“Whoa,” Joe said at the sight of me. “Yeah,” I agreed.
Peanut shook himself out and sprayed them both with rainwater, which made Joe laugh and the woman beside him recoil.
And that’s when I smelled Poison. Ugh. Just my luck.
Joe took a step closer to me. “Can I help you out somehow?”
He started to unzip his jacket, like he was going to give it to me, but the zipper got stuck.
“It’s fine,” I said as he yanked at it. “I’m already drenched.”
But Joe was determined, and when he couldn’t get the zipper to give, he pulled the jacket off over his head.
It really was too little, too late—but I didn’t stop him. Mostly because the sight of him wriggling was so entrancing—as his T-shirt came up, too, revealing the stripes at the waistband of his boxer briefs—that Parker and I both just stood there, enjoying ourselves.
A rare moment of unity.
When he was finally out of it, he brought the jacket over to me. I took it—but then I wrapped it around Peanut.
“Hey,” Joe said. “That was for you.”
“He’s wetter,” I said as my clothing audibly dripped on the elevator floor.
Joe settled into place beside me. The move had had a definitive feel to it, as if we were choosing teams in gym … and he’d just chosen mine.
That felt good. Not gonna lie.
But not to Parker.
Acting fast, before we reached the top floor, she put her hand to her forehead and moaned a little, falling back against the elevator wall.
That got Joe’s attention. “Hey—are you okay?” he asked, stepping closer.
“I just suddenly felt dizzy,” Parker said.
And then, with a technique that was neither subtle nor convincing, she angled herself at Joe and then “fainted” into his arms.
He caught her, of course. Joe wasn’t the kind of guy who would just let a random stranger hit the deck without helping.
Once she was caught, she lolled her head back dramatically and exposed her whole neck to him—which he might have found tempting if he were a vampire.
But Joe just looked up at me then, my unconscious evil stepsister in his arms, totally befuddled by what was going on.
Granted, he didn’t know she was my evil stepsister. The elevator door dinged and slid open.
Top floor.
I walked out and held the door for Joe as he carried Parker toward her apartment. At the door, he stopped. “Hey,” he said, shaking her a little. “Wake up.”
I had paused in the hallway, still dripping, to rubberneck the situation and see how it played out.
Joe turned my way. “What should we do?” But I just shrugged, like No idea.
That’s when Parker roused dramatically and said, “I’m so dizzy. Could you help me into my apartment?” And then she gave him the passcode.
With that, they were gone—Parker’s metal door slamming so hard it left a tinny echo behind.
I looked down at Peanut, swaddled in Joe’s jacket. “That was weird.” Peanut licked his wet mustache in agreement.
I was tempted to bang on Parker’s door until Joe came back and then haul him out by the collar to explain that Parker Montgomery was a life- ruiner with a total of zero redeemable qualities—and the next time she fainted in front of him, he should just let her fall.
But I was too cold and too wet for that conversation. So Peanut and I made our way down the hallway toward home.
|
BUT THAT’S WHEN we ran into a problem.
Remember how the dead bolt had been broken the other day—stuck in the out position so the door couldn’t lock?
Today, the dead bolt was stuck again, but inside the latch. So it couldn’t
unlock.
I put my passcode in over and over.
I mean yes, my fingers were cold and trembling—but not that badly.
Peanut, also cold and trembling, waited patiently while I tried again and again.
I found Mr. Kim’s number and texted him.
Mr. and Mrs. Kim had done very well in Houston, developing all kinds of properties, thanks to his business sense and her eye for design. They probably could have lived anywhere, but they lived here in the building. Mostly because Mr. Kim was super hands-on.
When things went wrong, we texted Mr. Kim. Which worked fine—unless he was busy.
I might have experienced a moment of frustration while wet, cold, worried about my dog, and desperate to go home. It’s possible I tried to shake the dead-bolted door open. I might or might not have hit the handle several times with my shoe.
No luck.
Finally, there was no choice but to just wait. There were three steps up to the door to the rooftop, and so I sat down.
A wet, trembling human next to her wet, trembling dog.
Of course, in that situation, I couldn’t help but notice that Joe had not yet come back out of Parker’s apartment. What was he doing in there? What could possibly be taking so long? Was she trying to seduce him? Paying him for his services? Making him unclog her shower drain?
Anything was possible with her.
One thing was clear. I didn’t like it. For his sake.
Nothing with Parker ever, ever ended well.
I wasn’t jealous, I told myself. This was the same courtesy I’d extend to any hapless human who was about to fall victim to something poisonous.
Just run-of-the-mill human kindness.
When Joe finally came out, he saw me at the end of the hall and made his way in my direction.
“What were you doing in there all that time?” I demanded. “She wasn’t feeling well, so I looked after her a little bit.” “She was feeling fine,” I said. “She was faking.”
Joe nodded. “Probably, yeah. But I did get the feeling like she just needed somebody.”
“Well, she can’t have you,” I said. Joe tilted his head. “She can’t?”
“Trust me on this,” I said. “That girl is bad news.”
“Did you wait here, dripping wet, in the hallway to tell me that?” Joe asked.
“I waited here in the hallway,” I answered, glad to have a legitimate no, “because the lock to this door is broken. Again.”
Joe frowned, and then he took it all in—me shivering, Peanut shivering, the door handle with its new shoe-dents.
“Oh god, you’re freezing,” he said then, reaching out to touch my cheek.
“You’re just now noticing that? My teeth have been chattering this whole time.”
“Did you call Mr. Kim?”
“Three messages. And three texts.”
“Okay then,” Joe said, crooking his arm around my shoulders and steering me toward his door. “Come on.”
|
JOE’S APARTMENT WAS big. And penthouse-fancy. And top of the line: Viking range. Glass fridge. It made my hovel look even more hovelly.
But also? The place was totally empty.
By empty, I mean there was no furniture. At all.
Except for a couple of barstools at the island and a mattress on the floor in the master bedroom … nothing.
I saw it when Joe steered me into the master bathroom so I could take a hot shower.
“What about Peanut?” I asked.
Joe handed me a towel. “I’ll get him with the blow-dryer.” “Be careful,” I said. “He doesn’t like men.”
“He likes me,” Joe said.
“You don’t have a sofa, but you have a blow-dryer?” I said. That floppy hair of Joe’s definitely couldn’t require much maintenance.
But Joe was already gone.
While I showered—and can I just say that his shower was far, far superior to mine, so I stayed in way too long—Joe accomplished many things. He left a T-shirt, some heather-gray sweatpants, a big plaid bathrobe, and some oversize socks that fit like Christmas stockings folded by the door for me. He blow-dried Peanut, as promised, and then talked him into eating a few pieces of cold rotisserie chicken. He left a note on the rooftop door for Mr. Kim to call me or come by Joe’s place with any info on the lock. And he ordered takeout from an Italian place nearby that I just happened to love.
Pretty impressive, all in all.
When I emerged at last all layered up with my hair wrapped in a fluffy white towel, I was feeling a lot better.
The food had already arrived, and he was unpacking the bag at the island in his empty kitchen.
“Thank you for your help,” I said as I approached.
Joe looked up at the sound of my voice and then stilled at the sight of
me.
Whatever expression he was making that I couldn’t see, I couldn’t read
it, either.
“Don’t laugh,” I said, tightening his robe around me. “I’m not laughing.”
“Don’t stare, either.” “I’m not staring.”
“Yes you are.”
Joe dropped his head to look down.
I couldn’t help but feel annoyed. I bet his last glimpse of Parker’s attire had been a lace teddy. “This is the best I can do with myself right now, okay?”
“No,” he said, like I was misunderstanding. “You look—” “I look what?”
“You look … cozy.”
I felt an unexpected ping of disappointment at that. But what had I been hoping for, exactly? “Lovely”? “Ravishing in a man’s plaid bathrobe”? “So much better than your stepsister”?
The man was serving me linguine fra diavolo right now. Maybe I could cut him a break.
I took the emotional high road. “Thank you for rescuing me.”
“You’re not rescued yet,” Joe said—and at that, I checked my texts for anything from Mr. Kim.
Nothing.
Fine. Eat first, worry later.
I glanced over to see if I should make a plate of linguine for Peanut, but he was fast asleep, a little pile of blow-dried fur.
“So,” I said, settling onto a kitchen stool and gesturing around at this empty warehouse of an apartment. “What’s the story here?”
“What story?”
I looked around again. “You know you don’t have any furniture, right?” “Ah,” Joe said. “That’s true.”
No sense in pretending. “This is the saddest apartment I’ve ever seen,” I said. “It’s worse than my place, and I live in a hovel.”
“A penthouse hovel,” Joe pointed out. “A rooftop hovel,” I corrected.
“But it’s surprisingly nice.”
“It’s much nicer than this sad…”—I looked around—“empty warehouse.” Then I had to ask. “How long has it been like this?”
“A year.”
I choked on a noodle. “A year?”
Joe crunched on his salad and gave me a shrug.
“Do you…” I tried to imagine any kind of reason at all why a grown man would live in an empty apartment for a whole year. “Are you … anti- furniture?”
“Not really,” Joe said, like that was all he was going to say on that.
Then he added, “I just gave it all to Goodwill when my wife left me.” Ah.
Okay.
He went on, “I wanted to burn it in a gasoline-fueled bonfire, but that’s against city regulations. Apparently.”
Wow. Joe had a past. And maybe some anger issues. Why did that suddenly make him sexier? “You checked with the city before torching your ex-wife’s furniture?”
He nodded. “It’s all on the municipal website.” Then he tilted his head like he was noticing my point. “I’m very law-abiding.”
“Fair enough.”
“She must have done something really horrible to you,” I said then, all casual, hoping he’d spill it all.
“Yep.”
“For you to want to burn everything.” “Yep.”
“And then for you to just … live in a mausoleum.”
Joe stopped chewing and assessed me. Then he made a decision. “She cheated on me. With a guy from work. And then she left me and moved in with him. And now they’re getting married.”
I squeezed my whole face up like that really smarted. “Oh god.” “Yeah.”
“How did you find out?” I asked.
“I surprised her on a work trip and found them together at her hotel.
Naked. In her private hot tub.” “Oof.”
“She got home from the trip, packed a suitcase without a word, and went to a hotel. She came back a few days later to get the rest of her stuff … and brought him with her. She brought him with her. To our apartment. She kept saying, ‘I thought you’d be at work,’ like that made it better. And then—long story short—I wound up beating the crap out of him.”
He paused, like I might think that was a bad idea.
“Good,” I said, holding up my hand for a high five.
“Yeah, well. I’m not normally violent. Just so you know.”
I looked at his forkful of linguine, resting lukewarm and forgotten in his hand.
Why had I pushed to talk about this? Poor Joe. Now I’d made him lose his appetite.
“Hot tubs,” I declared, like this might make him feel better, “are just crawling with bacteria.”
He went on. “It’s pretty cliché stuff when you think about it,” he said. “Happens every day.”
“But not to you.”
“No…” he said quietly. “That was a new one for me.”
But suddenly I was feeling mad for him. “What’s wrong with her, anyway? What could she be thinking?”
With that, I could feel myself signing up for Team Joe. If he was the terrible person I’d originally thought, he was hiding it really, really well.
Maybe there was a good explanation.
Whatever I’d heard in the elevator, it just couldn’t have been what it sounded like.
“You’re very handsome and nice!” I declared then, going all in. “She should’ve been thanking her lucky stars!”
“You don’t have to say that,” Joe said.
I mean, did I know for sure he was handsome? No. But who cared? Sue said he was—and she was picky. “It’s true,” I insisted. “She squandered you.”
“I’ll bounce back eventually,” Joe said. “I just … haven’t found a good reason to.”
I pointed at him. “Yet.” He sighed.
“Come on. Say it with me. You haven’t found a good reason to—yet.”
His shoulders sank as he resisted—like my forcing this optimism was just insulting. “Yet,” he finally said. And then he stuffed that whole forkful of cold linguine in his mouth, made himself chew it, and swallowed it down.
Then, like a man who’d just accomplished something, he said, “And what’s your deal?”
“My deal?”
“With that woman,” Joe said, gesturing with his now-empty fork. “Across the hall.”
That woman. Across the hall. Actually, Parker might come in handy as a distraction. I sat up straighter, ready to shift our focus from his misery to mine. His life might start looking better by comparison.
“She’s my evil stepsister,” I said.
Joe wasn’t the only person here with a past.
“Wow,” Joe said. “Okay. They still make those?”
I gave a little shrug. “Not just for fairy tales anymore.” Then Joe said, “Can you define evil here?”
I thought about it a second. Being vague was always an option in times like these. But why not just tell the truth? If she was going to keep fainting herself into his arms, he should know what he was dealing with.
I took a breath.
“After my mom died, my father married her mother—like, six months later, by the way—and Parker moved into my house, started attending my school, framed me for some vicious bullying that she herself was doing … and then got me kicked out.”
Joe took that in. “Kicked out of school? Or out of the house?” “Both.”
“Wow.”
I nodded. “The girl she bullied was this sweet kid named Augusta Ross. We’d been friends since we were little. She used to bake sugar cookies with me and my mom. Parker left menacing typed anonymous notes in her locker every morning. Stacks of them. She told Augusta that she was ugly
—going into great detail about what was wrong with every feature on her face and every part of her body. She made up lies about how much individual people hated Augusta—and fabricated terrible things they’d supposedly said about her. She was relentless.
“And here’s the clincher: She told Augusta that if she ever told anybody about the notes, she would poison her cat, Cupcake. And then she printed off pictures of cats and cut their eyes out—and started leaving those in Augusta’s locker, too.”
Well. We certainly had changed topics.
Joe seemed to have forgotten all about his ex-wife. He slurped a forkful of linguine.
I went on. “Her bullying got so bad and was so relentless for so long that Augusta one night tried to swallow a whole bottle of Tylenol—which really will kill you, by the way.”
Joe nodded. “Liver damage.”
“Luckily, she was terrible at taking pills. When her parents walked in on her in front of a giant pile of capsules, the whole story came tumbling out. The school got involved. An investigation happened. And Parker, who had apparently been typing those notes in a hidden file on my laptop, went to the administration and handed it over.”
“You got blamed,” Joe said, astonished.
“I got kicked out,” I said. “They sent me away after that. To a thing they called ‘boarding school,’ but it had distinct ‘correctional facility’ vibes.”
“Nobody stood up for you? Nobody helped you?” “Everybody sided with Parker. Including my own father.” “How could he do that?”
I shrugged. “He said the evidence was incontrovertible.” I took a sip of water. “That’s actually how I learned the word incontrovertible.”
“Wow,” Joe said. “Yeah.”
“She sounds like a psychopath.”
I nodded. “She basically stole my life. By the end of high school, she was living in my room, wearing my clothes, hanging with my friends, and sleeping with the boyfriend who dumped me after the scandal.”
Joe shook his head in protest.
“But the worst part,” I said, in conclusion, “was Peanut. I couldn’t take him with me. He had to spend two years living with those monsters. The day after I graduated, I made Lucinda bring him out to me on the front walk, and I never looked back.”
Finally Joe said, “Holy shit.” I nodded. “Yeah.”
“And now she’s moved into our building?” “Yep.”
“Not by accident, I’m guessing.” “Agreed.”
“But why?”
“I don’t really know,” I said. “But it’s not because she’s suddenly changed her entire personality, I can promise you that.”
“Do you think she’s here to mess with you?” “I guarantee it.”
“But…” Joe asked again, looking befuddled. “Why?”
I thought for a second. “You know those children who try to trap ground squirrels so they can torture them?”
“I guess so?”
“That’s her. And I’m the ground squirrel.” Joe took that in.
“Anyway,” I went on, “now she’s set her sights on you, so be warned.” “What makes you think that?”
I looked into his puzzle-piece face. “She told me.”
Joe paused like that was completely nuts—which, in fairness, it was. “Why would she tell you that?”
I saw this coming. I could so easily have shrugged and said I didn’t know—and left it at that. But I was going to have to do a little bit of leveling with him to get him oriented. It was my civic duty to inform him what he was dealing with.
So I said, “Because she thinks I like you.”
It was a hell of a thing to just … put out there. What was I doing? What was I thinking?
Sure—I was trying to be accurate.
But I miscalculated. I thought that if I rolled my eyes a little in the delivery, he’d dismiss the underlying truth of it out of hand while still grasping the essentials: that Parker was out to get me—and he could become collateral damage.
But I far overestimated my acting skills.
An eye roll is a complex thing to manufacture. It’s not just eyes. Eye rolls also require a slight shrug, an imperceptible tilt of the head, a microscopic retraction of the neck. Plus impeccable timing. An eye roll, when you really think about it, requires a whole ballet of delicate and precise muscular choreography timed to the millisecond. It’s not for amateurs.
All to say: I flubbed it.
I came off like a kid actor in a bad sitcom.
And I realized I was overdoing it as I overdid it—and so then I grimaced involuntarily and gave myself one thousand percent away.
But—and I’ll always be grateful to him for this—Joe didn’t call me on it. He didn’t put me on the spot. He didn’t lean in all curious and say, Is she right? Do you like me?
He just graciously focused on the thing I clearly wanted us all to focus on: how incomprehensibly terrible Parker absolutely was. “Is that why she fainted in the elevator?”
“Pretended to faint,” I pointed out. “Was she—making a move?”
“She was.” “By fainting?”
“It got her into your arms, didn’t it? And it got you into her apartment.” “I mean—sure. In a medical way.”
“Baby steps,” I said. “Give her time.”
Joe nodded like this was all really fascinating. “Anyway, I thought you should be warned.”
“Thanks for the warning. Though I didn’t need it.” How very cocky of him. “And why not?” I asked.
Joe leaned forward, swiped the garlic bread off my plate, shrugged charmingly, and then said, “Because she’s not my type.”
