The More They Disappear (14 page)

“Go ahead.” Audra nodded toward Megan, whose eyes were half-lidded in stupor. “I'll clean up this mess.”

Mark started lecturing her as soon as Mary Jane walked in. He told her this wasn't the plan and that they needed to stick to the plan, which was for her to stay in Marathon until he arranged for them to leave. Didn't she understand? His hands made ridiculous chopping motions in the air while he talked. Mary Jane wished he would shut up and jam his tongue down her throat instead of speaking to her like a child. “And to top it all off you get drunk with my brainless neighbors,” he said. “Telling them Lord knows what.”

Mary Jane rolled her eyes. “I didn't tell them anything and I'm not going anywhere.” She took a seat on the couch and turned on the television but left it mute. An awkward silence filled the air.

Mark crossed and uncrossed his arms. “I'm sorry,” he said. “It's just … I'm a little stunned. That's all.”

“I thought you'd be excited to see me.”

“I am.” He sat beside her on the couch, put a hand on her leg. “Excited and surprised.”

Mary Jane wriggled herself behind Mark, let her legs straddle his hips, massaged his stiff shoulders. “I did it,” she said, softly. “We did it.” She nibbled on his ear and the tension in Mark's body loosened.
Touch me,
she wanted to tell him.
Touch me right here
. She walked her fingers down his back and held his sides, moved her hands to his hips. “Come here,” she said, and brushed her hand over his crotch. Mark fell back into her arms and Mary Jane savored the moment. His bony back against her chest—that's all it took.

“You shouldn't be here,” he said again, softer.

“But I'm here now.” She kissed his cheek. “Okay?” She kissed his lips.

“Okay.” Mark kissed her back and stood up from the couch. All the tension seemed to return to his body. He took a bottle from his backpack and stepped into the kitchenette where he crushed a couple pills on a cutting board with the blade of a chef's knife. “What a weird night,” he said. “Let's get high.” He snorted a line before Mary Jane even responded.

She joined him in the kitchen and together they got high and soon enough Mark was close to comatose on the couch and said he should go to bed. Mary Jane wasn't tired and what she really wanted was for Mark to fuck her but that wasn't in the cards. Before he said good-night, Mark made a big show of taking a handful of pills from his bottle and leaving them on the cutting board. “These are for you,” he said, as if he were offering her diamonds.

Mary Jane nodded and thanked him but she didn't care about the pills. Not really. She wanted Mark inside her, wanted him to treat this night as if it were a wedding night. They were together now. She needed that to mean something.

The lightness in her head—the wine's feelgood—scampered away on a biting wind that snaked through a stuck open window. Mary Jane's veins pulsed like hammer strings and her muscles clenched. She breathed deeply to calm herself but her breath remained ragged until she walked into the kitchenette and snorted another line.

She peered into the bedroom and closed one eye to see better. Streetlight snuck through the busted blinds. After a minute, she could make out Mark's body—wrapped in the sheets and lying diagonal across the bed. No room for her. His chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm and she mirrored it with her own to find some deeper connection. She told herself tomorrow would be better. And all the tomorrows after that.

She scavenged in the kitchen for food but the fridge was mostly condiments and Coke. She settled for a plate of leftover fries, which she ate cold. Then she opened the front door and looked for Audra and Megan but they'd gone inside. She sat in the dark and listened to the wind bend the trees. The cars race the streets. Thoughts slipped from the back of her head on a river of wine and pill dust. The oil from the fries coated her fingers, and she licked them. Then she lay back on the couch and slipped her fingers under her dress. She worked in small circles and imagined Mark on top as her fingers warmed, but the drugs coursed through her and her limbs went heavy and no matter how close she seemed to coming, it escaped her.

 

five

Mark woke in a panic—his legs pumping as if biking uphill and his hands pulled tight to his chest in prayer. The remains of a nightmare lingered. Mary Jane pointing a finger that turned into a pistol. And then a gaping hole in his abdomen but instead of blood, a black sticky tar. He'd touched it, put it to his lips. It tasted like licorice. Booming from the heavens above was his father's voice—amplified and reading the weather report.
Monday: partly cloudy, highs in the sixties, lows in the forties overnight with a thirty percent chance of rain. Tuesday: partly cloudy, highs in the sixties, lows in the …

He dressed in the shadowy half-light of a street lamp and poked his head into the common room. Mary Jane was asleep on the couch. He started to slink by her but reconsidered. It wasn't that he didn't want Mary Jane there; it was just that her arrival complicated things. He hadn't followed through on collecting the money and she wouldn't understand why. She'd expect him to go back to his father and demand what they were owed, as if it were that easy. He rubbed her shoulders and her eyelids fluttered. “MJ, I've got work to do. You should sleep in the bed.” She muttered nonsense as he helped her to the bedroom, pulled the covers over her, and sealed the blinds to turn the room an inky dark. Mary Jane trusted him to get her to Montreal and he'd pretended he could deliver. He was the steady half of their relationship—the planner, the pragmatist—but he wished he could harness Mary Jane's faith. Sometimes he felt like he carried all the doubts and she carried all the dreams. To Mark, Montreal wasn't a place, it was a state of mind, and he wasn't sure how to get there. He kissed Mary Jane softly on the forehead and left a note and his spare key on the coffee table, along with twenty bucks in case she'd come empty-handed. You never knew with Mary Jane.

The sun winched itself up over the suburbs. The sidewalks were empty save a couple of professors carrying leather satchels, and the first students Mark came across were still up from the night before, howling as they took turns posing atop a statue of the university's first president. One girl put a cigarette in the statue's mouth. Another sat in his lap as if telling her desires to Santa Claus. A boy did his best to make it look like the statue was sucking him off, and when the girls called for him to pull it out, he craned his head around to look for witnesses. Mark tried not to draw attention.

Outside the library a maintenance crew blew leaves into piles and crisscrossed the grass with mowers, the din of motors buffeted by a strong wind. Mark ducked into the coffee shop next door, where a pair of basketball players sat drinking smoothies and signing autographs for a blond coed. The town treated its Wildcats like celebrities; it seemed ridiculous that in addition to dunking and posing for photos, they had to attend class and go through the motions of being actual students. Mark supposed the attention could become overwhelming at times.

The black-haired barista treated him with her usual indifference, put his coffee on the counter without a hello and held out her hand to swipe his meal card. On the receipt he noticed his balance was under a hundred. Normally he would phone his dad and ask for money and deal with the lecture that accompanied the funds. Everything came down to money in the end. The money his father kept from him. The money Lew had extorted from his father. The money Mark and Mary Jane needed to start over in Montreal. Everyone carried a balance, was owed or past due. Everyone was greedy for more.

It had started with money, too. And lies. Right around the time he'd learned to drive, Mark started making gas money by pinching drug samples from his father's office and selling them at school. It didn't matter what drugs he stole from his father's supply, because Mark could sell a week's trial of anything for twenty bucks. For nearly three months, the business kept his tank full of premium. Then one night at the diner he was careless and handed codeine cough syrup and hypertension pills under the table to a guy in his biology class named Luker. As he started to pocket Luker's twenty, Lew Mattock's beefy hand came down and pinched the back of Mark's neck. “If it isn't my good buddy, Mr. Gaines?” Lew said. And then, to Luker, “Whatever he gave you, leave it and get gone.”

Luker had glanced at Mark and did as he was told. “What about my bill?” he muttered.

“Get.”

Lew slid into the booth and studied the drugs. “Now the cough syrup I understand. Drink enough and maybe you have visions. But the heart pills. That's a surprise to me. A kid so young shouldn't have coronary problems.” Mark didn't respond. He took the twenty from his pocket and put it on the table, as if that might erase the crime. “Oh you keep that,” Lew said. “You earned it.”

Mark expected to be charged with a crime, but instead Lew sat him on the passenger side and drove him home, talking all the way about how the good doctor wouldn't be happy when he found out his drug samples were making their way around town. Lew never asked Mark to explain himself, didn't seem to much care about the circumstances. When Mark's dad came to the door, Lew suggested he send his son up to his room and let the grown-ups chat.

A half-hour later, Mark learned Lew had agreed to keep him out of trouble (and keep his dad out of trouble, by proxy) in exchange for “fair” compensation—a deal he was willing to make because they were family of a sort. His father explained this to Mark in an even tone, but Mark could tell he was roiling inside and that it was only a matter of time before he blew. It happened when he finally got around to asking Mark what he was thinking? What
the fuck
was he thinking? Trip raised his hand as if to strike and Mark cowered into a corner, blubbering an apology. His father, disgusted or fed up or unsure what should happen next, lowered his hand and slammed the door.

For a couple of silent but tense days Mark barely left his room. Then Lew showed back up with a different proposal for his father. Mark eavesdropped on the conversation. Lew explained it like this: Trip would supply Mark with pills and drive up demand by prescribing pain meds without refilling them, Mark would sell the pills to dealers at the dirt track whenever Lew told him to, and Lew would provide protection from the law, along with a measure of comfort that it would all work out. To Mark's surprise, his father said he'd heard worse ideas. And when Lew revealed how much they could make on just one bottle of painkillers, a measure of excitement entered his dad's voice. When he explained the deal to Mark, his father claimed it was in everyone's best interest. Back then Mark hadn't questioned this. He'd already been dealing drugs and now he was promised protection from the law.

In another way he felt like his father had opened up to him because of what happened with Lew, had trusted in him. Maybe Trip didn't have any other choice but the end result was that dealing drugs brought them closer together than anything they'd ever done. Within a month, it became apparent the arrangement was successful beyond what they could have imagined. And a lot more complicated. Lew introduced Mark to a world he didn't know existed. Instead of handshake deals for gas money, he was selling entire prescriptions for nearly a thousand dollars. His father had to start finding ways to make the profits look legitimate.

A few times Mark expressed concern over what they were doing, but his dad had a way of making the drug trade seem normal. After all, weren't prescription drugs safer than illegal drugs? And did Mark know that more people died taking Advil than OxyContin? And didn't Mark want to help him rebuild the life they'd lost in Ohio? And Mark did, so he continued doing what was asked of him and his father kept treating him more and more like an equal. They started eating dinner together and Trip leased a Mercedes for himself and a yellow Mustang for Mark. He even talked about buying a piece of riverside property where he could build a dream house, the sort of place that could be passed on when the time came. A legacy.

Mark thought the drug dealing would stop when he left for college, but neither Lew nor his father would let it end. Paying Mark's tuition became contingent on his enrolling in the pharmacy program. Trip had big visions of opening a drugstore alongside the clinic and making a fortune. Mark came to realize he wasn't a partner but a pawn.

His father and Lew both possessed voracious appetites, and in the end, that drove them apart. Lew kept demanding a bigger share of the profit and his father started calling Lew a liability. Mark couldn't pinpoint the exact moment a switch flipped and his father turned from a desperate man into an evil one but it was around the time he started talking about Lew as if he weren't a flesh-and-blood person. Lew increased their “exposure”; he was an “encumbrance,” and there was little “residual benefit” to keeping him around. The relationship became, in his father's words, “untenable.” That was the cloying word that led to murder. Untenable.

Mark had gone along with it all. Out of fear, mainly. But also because it sounded logical in its way. He too stopped seeing Lew as a person, started viewing him as an obstacle. When he finally came clean and told Mary Jane the full extent of what was going on—because he couldn't keep it inside any longer—she helped him see the situation as an opportunity. He could demand the sort of money from his father that would allow them to start new lives. Otherwise his option was to stick around Kentucky until his father or Lew screwed him and he ended up in jail.

Mark's sneakers squeaked along the library's marble floor and echoed through the atrium. He passed a handful of students coming down off all-nighters, each of them curled up in a leather armchair, and took the elevator to the fifth floor, where a large skylight let through the watery morning sun. He spread his books on a long table. It was a Monday. Normally he would have popped an Adderall and made precise outlines of the week's reading. Getting B's in college had given Mark a greater sense of accomplishment than anything else in life; he'd never felt particularly smart or talented but he'd earned those grades.