Page 24 of Succubus

“Give me two days,” Grub said. “I’ll have his address.” He also said he’s thinking about meeting up with the Dow in his area sometime. He might be willing to test out my theory that his DP won’t harm one of our kind (like me, for example). She seems nice, he wrote. And then, Be better if she was an asshole obviously. Haha.

And then, just like Sherlock Holmes would, he delivered.

Casually, showing off, no preamble, he texted me the address.

My father’s address.

And now I’m flying to Miami, but my body thinks at first that I’m going back to Arizona. That’s the last place I flew to and away from. I try to read my romance novel—Mountain Rose—but I keep imagining Joel’s ex-fiancée as the titular Rose, whose hair is lustrous and whose complaints are: “My curls were spilling everywhere! Why wouldn’t they be tamed?” and “If anything, my lips seemed too full, giving my face a childlike poutiness.” Have anyone’s lips ever actually been too full?

I obsessively and methodically work through all my interactions with Joel: the conversation from the dinner at his house, after Ella left the table and before he told me he couldn’t be in a relationship.

There I am, babbling about Ella, telling him about the girl at her school who kept calling her a baby because she couldn’t read when she was only five, how she panicked when I asked her to sound things out when we first started at home.

I’m asking Joel what made him choose medicine, trying again to do what I promised Grub I would. He traces his motivation to the heart attack that ended his father’s life when he and Adam were still boys.

His mother died two days after Adam. (I wish I hadn’t asked about her.) A pulmonary embolism. She’d been on a medication that could cause blood clots, but he had a feeling that she’d simply given up. When he asked about my own mother, I ended up telling him too much: Her job at the front desk of the yoga studio that started because she wanted to take a free class and continued because she made friends with everyone there. My impression of her from my childhood, always rushing out the door or in a long “me time” lavender-scented bath, leaving me to make Dee a sandwich with cucumbers in it for dinner because I knew kids need vegetables. How she grew up in rural Ohio and still thinks of all of New Jersey as “the city.” How she tried to get people to call us sisters for a while.

Does he think I’m low-class?

Maybe I am.

I review our bulb-planting date. It wasn’t a date. I relive my flustered feeling, introducing him to my friends in the restaurant, and then I inevitably end up at him leaning toward me, his eyes on my mouth, the molten possibility of that moment. The plane lowers itself toward Miami. The ocean glitters in the afternoon sun—much bigger than I expect it to be. I always forget how big the world is.

I take a cab to South Beach, humid air thick in my nostrils, in my lungs. I feel like I’ve flown back in time, to summer. I realize I’m hugging my backpack on my lap, my now superfluous jacket balled up in it. I text Dee and Grub, checking in.

We bypass the beach, drive by second-tier hotels and apartment buildings in pastel shades—stucco cracking with mold around the edges, sandy patches between buildings, the sidewalks empty. I check my phone again, compulsively, a few minutes later, and Grub has written back, but he sounds distracted. This is how well I know him. I can tell in only a few words, from the pauses in his messages. Sent you something, he writes. Really big. You need to deal with it while you’re in FL.

I check my email. He’s sent me an attachment—a file that looks like one you’re not supposed to open if you don’t know exactly what it is.

Check signal, he writes.

It takes me a bit just to find the Signal app; I never use it. I only got it because Grub wanted it as backup for top secret stuff. Which, let’s be real, we don’t even actually have.

Don’t try to open it, he writes on Signal. I’m gonna send you the decryption thingy in a sec. It needs to run so you have to start it up and let it run for a while. It’s super slow. But worth it for security in case you got hacked or anything.

What are you even talking about? I type. More of his conspiracy theories.

Promise me you’ll run it while you’re there.

Is it about dick face?

No. Just do it Lorelei.

Ok ok but I’m almost there.

He texts me in the regular app again: Good luck. Remember that you don’t need him. Dads are for losers.

I look out the window, and then it’s like time speeds up, ejecting me from the cab, into the chipping art deco lobby of a crappy apartment building, where I press the buzzer of the penthouse. I press it a few times before a deafening buzz sounds, and I yank the door open, and then I’m in the elevator. This is the closest I’ve ever been to finding Dick Face, to meeting him. But I can’t let myself hope that he’ll be useful. If I hope and then he’s nothing, I’ll be worse off than I’ve ever been before—lower than zero. I’ll have no leads at all.

Wrong, I remind myself. Not worse than I’ve ever been. I am stable. I have Ella, Dee, Alice, my doula clients, the homeschool moms. I recite the list like a spell, warding off the dark. And then I’m standing in front of his door, and I ring the bell and hear swearing from inside, and I can’t believe I am here in this moment, I can’t arrange my thoughts. I forget what I decided to say as my opening line, I forget everything.

He opens the door.

He’s mostly bald, only an inch or so taller than me, a curving, shriveled guy of indeterminate age; I can only barely see in him the rock star from the photos online.

“What is this? What do you want?” He sounds like I woke him up, but his voice is oddly melodious and rich. His lips are dry and flaking, his eyes bleary. He’s wearing stained gym shorts and a sagging T-shirt. His eyes are dark brown like mine. The television blares somewhere behind him. A commercial for car insurance.

I’m not exactly breathing, but I get right to the point. “I think you’re my father. We need to talk.” Being direct is something I’ve gotten much better at since taking care of Ella.