Page 68 of Succubus

I smile at Ella. “By being friendly.”

The woman looks up at me, her eyes narrowed combatively as I’m guiding Ella past the tempting, forbidden cider donuts. And then, slowly, she smiles, too.

“Oh, that’s funny. That is how you make friends! Gotta be friendly!” She grins at Ella. “Cute kid. Have a nice day.”

I think of the server in the South Beach bar. Of all the people Dick Face interacted with. It seems increasingly possible that he passed along more to me than just the curse.

* * *

I am driving with the windows down, my music up—all insistent, hungry beats. It’s 11:40 at night. I had a random craving for a bear claw, a gooey one coated in drizzly white icing. Gluten and sugar all smushed together in a waxy little slip with translucent grease spots where the sweetness has seeped through. I haven’t let Ella see—she’ll feel insufferably left out—but I am off my vegetable-heavy, low-gluten diet. I am eating everything. And everything is delicious.

I’m coming back from the Wawa by the train station, the one that’s too well designed a building to be a Wawa, with grass growing on the roof in a wispy crew cut. The tired guy behind the counter with the sunken cheeks and the red cap wanted to give me my food for free. I am driving up Faculty Road, and the lake shines to my right for a moment as I cross through the traffic light, where I am the only car. The trees on either side of the road have satisfyingly thick trunks: watchful remnants of an old forest. I whip around the curves, the little car bumping on a ragged patch in the road as I take a vicious bite, tearing the dessert in two. I set it down, smear its paste on the volume knob as I turn up the music. I want more bass than the car can give. I want infinite bass. There is a fat contentedness in my belly that I don’t recognize. There is a turned-on, glossy urge for more, a desire that sits up on powerful haunches like a lioness, lazily alert, movement held thrumming in her muscles.

I trail my left hand out the window, raking my fingers through the cold, decadent air that smells like smoke and pine needles and passionate endings. I ease the volume up a notch just as the music switches to another playlist. “Set Fire to the Rain.”

Oh, come on. This again? But I leave it on for a little, letting Adele sing about how her knees are too weak to stand in some guy’s arms without falling to his feet. And instead of reliving myself singing mockingly at Joel’s door, I slip back to his eyes on me, his bow easy and masterful on the strings, the way I felt, as though I were falling toward him—this golden, perfect man.

“Shut up,” I mutter, and slap my phone, forcing the right playlist on.

Bass pounding like rough sex. Better.

I breathe in hard. I am drinking the fullness of fall, bouncing between Tudor homes that slumber behind their fiery front-yard trees. The town feels prudishly silent, but underneath and in between everything humans put here is the unknowable, alien connectedness of wild things, the web of nature that squirms up between the cracks in the sidewalk and pries apart the slabs set on its head. The whisper of the dying leaves, the foxes at the periphery—an older world with older rules that will outlive all this.

I might just keep driving. I might drive north and north and north. I want to see the bulk of mountains claiming the sky.

But of course there is something I want more than that.

I jam the car into park in front of Joel’s house. A light is on inside, like a candle or the end of a fire in a hearth. I feel like I am making my way through the woods to a cottage, to a secret place.

The door is unlocked and I go inside without knocking. I take off my jacket and my shirt and drop them on the floor in the entry. I breathe in as though I might catch his scent and track him through the house. In the absence of my thudding, smashing music, the quiet is expectant, excited.

He is standing in the kitchen in the dark. The light comes from another room, it’s faint here. There is a glass of water on the counter, but I get the impression he has been here for a while, long after he filled and forgot it. The familiar sweatpants, loose T-shirt, no glasses. He doesn’t look surprised to see me. His eyes narrow slightly.

I come forward in a flash; I take possession of his hands, pull him after me. We are through the back door, into the yard where the pine tree impregnates the air with its aching wilderness scent. We fall to the damp grass, the gossamer wind wraps around us, the bulbs we planted together in another life wait under the surface, biding their time.

Online in my bedroom later, I see some kid has posted a tribute to Grub. Not Nate, who Grub had missed so badly after cutting him off for his own protection—I don’t recognize this boy. There are comments. Not many, but enough to be terrible in their obliviousness, in their performative sympathy.

He kept to himself. Seemed depressed. Its really sad.

Such a loner.

SOOOOO sad I feel terrible for him and wish we could’ve done something!!

Maybe I should have reached out to him more. I am praying for his soul.

We used to be close once but he pulled way back. Don’t know what was eating him but guess it got him in the end. RIP man.

I get angrier and angrier as I read, until my finger is a furious pecking beak, chopping at the screen as I scroll. They are all wrong. They are all strangers. No one knew him. No one got the chance to know him. No one will ever get that chance.

The unspooling thread of his future—that shimmering, fragile string of hope—snipped.

A whole world of a person, gone.

Joel did this.

“Joel did this,” I make myself say out loud.

* * *