Once she decided to do it, Justine went to see Kieran where he worked. He’d tweeted about Carlaw’s when he started, but Justine had to come back three times before he was there. He had quickly become everyone’s favorite bartender, for he protected the regulars and treated them as kin. She learned his schedule, and they developed a rapport. He was small and compact, like an oversized rat, but Justine knew he’d been a lightweight champ and could beat someone twice his size.
“We should check out the Music Hall,” she said.
“Yeah?” said Kieran. “And why should we do that?”
Justine shrugged. “Presumably, because we both like music.”
Justine licked the Belgian lace from the inside of her pint and caught her reflection in the window. She looked nothing like Viola, Kieran’s dead wife, but she wondered if she might be his type. Time had thickened her, but she wasn’t yet thirty, and the dye took care of the premature dustings of gray. She had good skin and inviting green eyes. She took another drink and met Kieran’s gaze. His mouth, little more than a slash, curled into a grin.
“All right, then,” he said. “I’m free Monday night.”
The next day was Thursday, and Justine’s students were out of control. She had to fight for their attention.
“Let’s talk about our good friend, phosphorus!” said Justine.
The students were disinclined to listen, but Justine knew how to hook them. Phosphorus, she announced, was discovered because of a mixture of magic, greed, and piss.
“Once upon a time,” she said, “there was a German named Hennig Brand. He loved money so much that he dreamed of turning lead into silver. He found a recipe, but it called for boiling down urine. Urine contains phosphates. When heated, phosphates produce carbon monoxide and emit phosphorus as a gas, which then it condenses and solidifies. It gives off a glow, as phosphorus tends to do. That was the magic, at least to him. He gave it a Greek name that means bearer of light.”
“Are we going to have to repeat the experiment?” asked a student. “I can help with the main ingredient.”
Everyone laughed and Justine smiled. For years she had been giving this lecture and each time, someone made a similar joke. People were chemicals; you could always predict how they’d react.
During second period, she gave the sophomores a pop quiz and dawdled online, tweeting retorts to right-wing rhetoric and battling trolls. She signed an online petition demanding the resignation of a senator accused of sexual misconduct. She wanted to do more than enter her name on a screen, but as she started sharing it with friends, her sister sent a text. Iris was studying music in Montreal and had volunteered to play in the orchestra for a student production of Sweeney Todd.
Save me from actors who can’t learn their lines.
Justine sent a happy face and added, Can I borrow your leather jacket?
The moment she hit send, she wished she hadn’t. Iris would want to know the reason for the request. Sure enough, by the time Justine reached the cemetery later that afternoon, Iris had sent a slew of questions. Justine had been able to ignore the texts while she drove, but they seemed to assault her now as she stepped from the car.
You have a date? Have you and Darcy split?
They put him in solitary. Haven’t talked to him in weeks.
What did he do?
Whole lot of nothing. Just guards acting like gods.
The ellipsis floated as Iris wrote her reply.
It was a blustery day, and the wind clawed at her, wrecking her hair. The cemetery was elegant, the headstones elaborate, large enough to encompass epitaphs that could have been books. Their mother’s grave was far more conservative. She lay in the furthest corner by the fence; it had been all they could afford.
Does Darcy know? wrote Iris. You need be honest. It’s the one rule Anne-Marie has with Dex.
Justine plucked a stone from the path and turned it in her hand. Iris had roomed with Anne-Marie her freshmen year, when her boyfriend was doing time in a Quebec prison (Iris had never told her what Dex had done—it was possible she didn’t know). The story had inspired Justine to sign up for a prison pen pal program. Her mother was gone, and Iris was in Montreal, and Justine had been feeling the ache of solitude that bitching on Twitter hadn’t cured. Justine knew Iris liked that she was dating a man on the inside. She thought it showed character. But her friendship with Anne-Marie meant Iris also thought she was an expert, and she loved to give Justine advice about how to endure.
Anne-Marie says it’s impossible to stay pure, wrote Iris.
At the grave, Justine bowed her head and murmured the Mourner’s Kaddish. Iris had little more than an echo of their parents’ faith, but Justine often tried to distinguish between the wind and the whisper of their mother’s ghost. When she was done with the prayer, she went to place her stone atop the grave—the mark all Jewish mourners leave to let the spirits know they were there. It was only then she noticed a stone was already there.
Justine sent Iris a picture of it, along with an exclamation mark.
One of her friends? wrote Iris.
Justine doubted it. Dad comes every year.
She picked up the stone. It was sharp and jagged, a piece of shattered bone. She threw it over the fence. Justine had a pitcher’s arm—she’d played softball in her youth. She took a new picture and sent it to Montreal.
It must be exhausting being so angry all the time, wrote Iris. You must take a lot of naps.
Justine sent a GIF of a cartoon woman giving the middle finger. She put her own stone on the grave and walked away, bracing against another harsh gust that swept over her cheeks.
It’s been two years, wrote Iris.
So what?
Again, the ellipsis floated as Iris wrote and re-wrote. Justine was already back in the car by the time the message finally came.
Next time, leave the stone. Spite is a petty thing.
That’s not what this is.
Then what?
An urge. I don’t know. A need to do something.
Justine started driving so she would have a good excuse to ignore Iris. She assumed her sister had forgotten the leather jacket but when she came home there was a message telling her Iris had sent it by special delivery—it would be there Friday afternoon. If you want to “do something”, wrote her sister, try enjoying your date.
The box was on her porch the following day. The jacket was tan and had creasing that gave it a vintage look, with epaulets and gunmetal zippers. She had worn the jacket the first time she and Darcy met; she knew she looked good in it. People were chemicals. The jacket had worked on Darcy. It would work on Kieran too.
Darcy had lost his privileges, but he could still receive mail, and Justine spent Friday night trying to finish a letter. The page, half empty, sat before her like a taunt. It should have been easy—their relationship, after all, had been forged in letters—but lately she’d been blocked. That half-empty paper had been half empty for a week. She chewed her pen and imagined Kieran gliding behind the bar, beads of sweat on the amber stubble that grew when he forgot to shave.
Sunset came, and she lit a Yahrzeit candle and said the required prayer. She ate cold pizza and listened to Kieran and Viola’s band, Food of Love, a reference to Shakespeare she had needed their website to explain. The website hadn’t been updated since their last show, two weeks before Viola was found in the apartment, bleeding from the head. Justine had long ago downloaded their demo. Viola wrote all the songs, and the lyrics had whimsy:
Let’s stay in bed and dream
of roller skates and banana cream
The music was often languorous, minor chords lingering like smoke in air. Justine decided the songs hinted at a pain in the chest, some chasm that the music was trying to cross.
On Saturday morning, she checked the mousetraps, paid some bills, and set up her home laboratory, arranging her flasks and test tubes before digging out the hazardous chemicals she kept under lock and key. Like Hennig Brand, Justine worked from a recipe, though hers came from her mother’s father, who had been assistant to a French apothecary during the Second World War. Justine had salvaged his workbooks, and now she set to work creating one of his fabled mixtures as Viola sang.
Let’s stay in bed and dream . . .
Justine paused when she came upon the phosphorus, which she sometimes used to kill mice. Magic. Greed. Piss. “We want to believe that science comes from virtue,” she told her students. “But scientists are just as human as everyone else.” Or, to quote Anne-Marie via Iris, it was impossible to stay pure. For the next hour, Justine worked with steady calm, mixing chemicals as the music played on a loop. She imagined what she and Darcy might be doing if they were out. A farmer’s market. An amble through an antique store. She tried to picture them arguing over a Queen Anne chair. There was romance in her finding him, and, as in all love stories, the slightest whiff of fate.
While waiting for her creation to cool, Justine made coffee and checked the mousetraps again. She spent half an hour shouting into the internet. Darcy’s letter sat forlorn on the table, watching her with an orphan’s earnest. “In a minute,” she kept saying, even as she dove deeper down the internet’s black hole. She googled Viola and Kieran. You are what you post, a digital advisor had warned the students at the start of the year. The internet never forgets! It certainly hadn’t forgotten Viola and Kieran. Justine liked to skip through old posts and pictures, the ones that predated Viola’s death. She had used these to piece together their romance, the seven-year story of them.
In her lab, the mixture began to crystalize, and she put it in an ice bath before setting the timer on her phone. If you truly are what you post, then Kieran and Viola were New Yorker cartoons, vegan dishes, a cycling trip through Thailand, comic book conventions, left-wing memes, concert footage, and a looping video of six seconds in a pub featuring Kieran singing while Viola played a Di Giorgio guitar. The instrument had been a gift from Darcy and, indeed, if Justine scrolled long enough, she could find a picture from the day Viola received it. Darcy was in it, sitting in some restaurant, one arm around his sister and the other around Kieran. All three grinned at the camera while Viola was presented with the guitar, which bore an enormous purple bow.
Click! Below the sink, the mousetrap had caught its prey. It was a live trap—today, she had needed the phosphorus for other things—and the mouse scurried in the tiny box, squealing with displeasure and, she imagined, embarrassment at being caught. Justine took the trap into her lab where she released the mouse into a small cage lined with a medley of shredded paper and hay. She might have delivered him to paradise; there was water, food, and a wheel to save him from boredom.
“Kieran,” she said. “Kieran the mouse.”
Justine went back to the lab as Kieran squeaked. She sent her mixture through a Buchner funnel, producing a crude mulch that looked like the slush formed after the city dropped rock salt in the streets. Within a few hours, she had her result: five ochre tablets, each the size of a drop. She crushed one, then mixed it in with the mouse’s water which turned the color of a sunrise. That was unfortunate; she’d been hoped the pills would be colorless when dissolved.
Nonetheless, she proceeded with the test. She filled a bowl with food and waited for Kieran to emerge from his burrow and run for the meal. He ate and drank while she made a note of the time. Later, she fixed dinner – liver and onions – as she studied Viola’s pictures. Viola, who had been dark-haired and magnificent. Viola, who had had the elegance of a nereid rising from the sea.
After she died, Darcy got drunk and stole a car. A terrible mistake and yet its consequences had the whiff of fate. She was dead, and Darcy was put away. Justine would never have thought of the pen pal program if Iris hadn’t met Anne-Marie, but Justine would never have had been able to write to Darcy if Viola hadn’t met Kieran and had married someone else. And didn’t she herself only exist because her father had once caught her poor mother’s gaze? How was it that Iris could be so agnostic about the world? Life was as precise as a chemical formula, with every event measured so things happened exactly as they should.
Fate was a terrible debt. Justine was only what she was because the recipe had ensured so many other people had come together and broken apart.
She found Kieran dead, his stomach distended. She nodded, noting the time, and extinguished her mother’s candle.
She slept with the light on, as she had every night since she was a girl and a night hag had pressed down on her in the dark until she shuddered awake. Bathed in lamplight, Justine dreamed of Darcy’s hands pressed into hers, and later she woke still holding the image, like winter clinging to gray.
II
The Music Hall was a converted movie theatre, and they met beneath the stylish marquee. Justine wore a tight sweater, a crimson handkerchief skirt, and, of course, the leather jacket. Kieran whistled in approval and made a bad joke about teachers gone wild.
“Who’s playing tonight?” he asked.
“It’s open mic.”
“So this will be either heaven or hell.”
“Probably a little of both.”
He was rumpled but not unkempt, and she decided that the faded jeans and untucked shirt were intentional. She’d intended to go to the bar and buy the drinks, affording her a few seconds alone with them, but the server appeared almost as soon as they sat down.
“I heard you and Viola had a band,” said Justine.
“That’s right. She was the heart of the thing. Wrote all the songs and dragged me onto stage. That’s love, am I right? You do things you never thought you would.”
Kieran turned his attention to the stage and Justine caught the time on a nearby clock. In solitary, Darcy was allowed only an hour of exercise. It had likely past; right now, he’d be in the midst of his twenty-three hours of solitude in a room smaller than her bathroom at home. Justine had left her jacket on and she toyed with the gunmetal zipper, the one that led down to her wrist. It had a secret pocket, inside of which she had stored the four ochre tablets. She hadn’t counted on Kieran drinking bottled beer; in all her scenarios, he had ordered something on tap.
“What do you think it takes?” she said. “To get yourself up on stage?”
“Same thing that gets you to stand in front of students.”
“A love of the periodic table?”
“Courage,” he said, and he raised the drink in her direction.
“It doesn’t take courage to teach chemistry.”
“You teach teenagers. That’s like going to war. You’re a tough girl. I can tell.”
The first musician slunk away to sporadic applause. Justine maneuvered the conversation onto her prepared topics. Cycling. Ireland. Kieran wasn’t without charm. She imagined him sitting with Viola on a date like this one, smiling as they argued over the best way to get from Dublin to Cork. They’d been nineteen when they married; Kieran was Viola’s childhood love.
“These musicians aren’t very good,” he said.
“We can do something else.”
“Don’t you teach tomorrow?”
“We dragged ourselves out. Let’s make it worth the effort.”
“There’s something in that, at least.”
Their Uber had a smell tanged with disinfectant that stung her nose. They headed for a pub he liked, away from the areas Justine knew. Kieran and the driver bantered with ease, and Justine sat outside the conversation, frothing in agitation, toying with the zipper and trying to seem tough.
The pub’s name was scrawled in neon lights. She recognized the place as soon as they were inside. There was the stage from the pictures, the one Food of Love performed on in the six second video. People smiled at Kieran when they arrived; some even clapped him on the back.
“Hey-o!”
“The prodigal returns!”
“Like manna from Heaven!”
“Who’s your friend?”
“My chemistry teacher,” said Kieran, grinning. He dragged her toward a booth, chuffed by this tiny fiefdom in which he’d been greeted like a returning king. He signaled the server and soon they received two stouts, dark and rich in pint glasses with gaping mouths.
“Viola and I used to come here,” he said.
“How long ago did she die?” Justine asked, pretending she didn’t know.
“Going on four years now.” He waggled his ring finger and she saw, for the first time, the red line of discoloration from where his wedding band once had been. “The therapist made me take it off. It got kind of stuck.”
“You’re in therapy?”
“I’m not broken or anything.” He drained his drink and called for another.
“I’m all for therapy. I went for years.”
“What for?”
Justine’s hand trembled and her ring clinked against the glass. “My father shot my mother while cleaning his gun.”
“Well, shit,” said Kieran. “Was she all right?”
Justine shook her head. “He was drunk.”
“What happened to him?”
“He paid some lawyer a lot of money. They can do anything. Like magicians.”
She watched Kieran as she said this, this man who had, like her father, also been some lawyer-magician’s great trick. His mouth was pursed as he tried to think of what to say.
“Therapy’s a godsend,” he told her. “I’m glad I decided to go.”
In fact, Justine knew that seeing a therapist had been part of his plea agreement with the court. He had also promised to stop drinking. Now Kieran rose, red-faced and sweaty, and tottered off to the toilet. Justine unzipped the sleeve and two tablets dropped into her hand. Under the pretense of fidgeting, she positioned her hands over the rim of his glass. She thought again of fate, and of her mother’s grave and the stone she had thrown over the fence and then, suddenly, one of the rabbis from her youth and his sermons about God. For years now, it had seemed to Justine that God was everywhere, and she was often seeing signs. Or was this just her imagination, like when people swear they see Jesus in a piece of toast? Pareidolia. A fancy way of saying we make the world in our image. We see what we want. Her hand wavered. She pulled back, heart clenched, and in that pause she lost her chance: Kieran appeared at the other end of the room. He returned bearing another pair of shots.
A band walked on stage. They were a pop-folk quartet with a spunky singer who played a Di Giorgio guitar. Kieran kept drinking as he talked about the instrument, but Justine wasn’t listening. She was stunned by her moment of doubt; she had accounted for everything except for the possibility that, when she came to the precipice, she wouldn’t be able to jump. A rage swelled through her, the something she had told Iris about, the feeling she woke with every day, and, beneath the table, she beat her fist against her thigh. Justine tried to smile at Kieran, show that she’d been listening, but he didn’t seem to notice she had ever been gone. He was still talking, his beer fueling a rant about music and art and poetry and love.
At last, he leaned forward, drawling as if his mouth were full of honey. “You should know, I don’t usually date customers.”
“All right.”
“I don’t usually date at all.”
“I get it.”
“I suppose you need to go home.”
“I don’t have to.”
“Thank God. I don’t sleep good. You’re better than sitting up alone.”
He thought he had complimented her. Later, when it came time to leave, he didn’t seem to care she had hardly touched her beers. He drained her untouched shots and leaned into her as they headed into the street.
Kieran still lived in the apartment he and Viola had shared, but it appeared this was about to change. Everything was in boxes, and there were pale patches on the wall where pictures had been taken down. A familiar Di Giorgio guitar hung in the corner. There was a vague discoloration on the floor—the spot, she knew, where Viola had been found. Justine stepped over the stain.
“Moving soon,” said Kieran. “You can help clean out the wine.”
He opened a bottle and served it in two ornate glasses. They sat on the couch and, at last, he showed her the webpage for Food of Love. He played the song clips she already knew. His face took on the look that men get when they’re ready to make their move. It was the look of wolves, she thought, just as they descended on their prey. She asked to use the toilet and fled as Kieran sighed and played another track.
The bathroom was oppressive. Justine splashed water on her face and the chill rattled her to the bone. Only four pills and she couldn’t give him water—he might notice the color change. Of course, it didn’t have to be tonight, but she choked at the thought of enduring another evening like this.
Justine felt the prick of inspiration. “I don’t sleep so well,” Kieran had said outside the pub, and inside the medicine cabinet she found the proof. The bottle of sleeping pills was almost empty. They weren’t quite the same as her ochre tablets but that couldn’t be helped. Perhaps he’d be too drunk to notice; her father had once been so far gone he poured himself a glass of bleach.
In the other room, Kieran had turned up the music and was standing by the couch, blocking the path to the door, guitar in hand. He was snotty and red, and his expression was sour as he watched her, sucking at the inside of his cheeks.
“Siddown,” he said. “I wanna play you one more.”
“It’s gotten really late.”
“What happened to making the effort?”
“I teach in the morning.”
“You’re the one who wanted to do this.”
He pulled her back to the couch and planted her at the far end, turning himself into a roadblock as soon as he sat down. She thought he might be too drunk to play but the serenade was note-perfect and his voice was strong. He sang Viola’s words. Let’s stay in bed and dream / of roller skates and banana cream… Despite herself, Justine was moved. This, she realized, was how he had won Viola once upon a time. A ballad and a voice. She could almost see the man beneath, the good person he might have been. She was so distracted that she didn’t notice that the song had ended, and the look of wolves had returned. Then he was coming for her, pinning her against the armrest. At the last moment, the end of the guitar struck her wine glass; it rolled across the table and broke on the floor.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Let’s clean it up.”
“Leave it.” His voice was a growl; here was the wolf at last.
She tried to scramble away. “It won’t take a minute.”
“Don’t use your hands. You’ll cut yourself.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“You’ll cut yourself. Don’t be so fucking dumb.”
He pulled her back, yanking her by the shoulder till she fell into him and the guitar made an unhappy sound as it was caught between them. Something cracked and Kieran cried out and shoved her to the ground. Justine watched from the floor as he inspected the instrument, then placed it out on the couch as if it were a sleeping child. He grabbed a magazine and hunched over the glass, sweeping the shards onto the paper with his bare hands. He tore out pages and attacked the wine puddle on his hands and knees. His cheeks were red and sweat dripped into the lines of his cheeks. “Dumb, dumb!” he muttered. With each word, he smacked the pages against the floor. “Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!”
She stood up. “It’s just a glass.”
“It was a wedding gift!” he snapped. For the first time, it occurred to Justine that he might be as drunk as her father had been the night he’d been cleaning his gun; he was definitely as drunk as he had been the night Viola died.
“Is the guitar all right?”
“No. Something broke.” He looked up at her, as if she was entirely to blame. “I just wanted a kiss. What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know anything? You know what? I don’t want your dumb ass sitting at my bar anymore. I can’t stop you from coming in, but from now on, you sit at a table. You get me?”
“If that’s what you want.”
The threat had been an idle one. “C’mon,” he said. “Don’t embarrass me like this. Why don’t you stick around?” In his pleading, he reminded her of her freshmen on the first day of class, tiny and new, terrified of the world. Despite everything, she had the urge to go to him; she felt a maternal swell, as if he really was a student coming to her in grief. But, when he saw her hesitation, he threw the second wine glass and it smashed against the wall with such force that it didn’t just shatter, it screamed. She fled into the hall and clawed toward the elevator like a character in a horror film. “Chemistry!” he roared from the door, and the word had such malice that she believed the slasher was her, that he was onto her, that he knew what she had done.
III
Justine thought she would sleep well, but her dreams were erratic. Snap! went the mousetraps in the night. Each time, she woke with a start. Justine called in sick the next day and, as it turned out, the rest of the week. Iris kept calling but Justine brushed her off, calling in sick with her too. She didn’t leave the apartment. Stayed offline. Finished the letter to Darcy. Kieran died this week . . . She could not be more detailed because of the prison censors. She had long imagined that writing the words would bring satisfaction, the sort that comes at the end of any great experiment when the hypothesis has been proved. QED. It is done. The volcanic surge, the unknowable something that had plagued her, seemed to quiet, and she decided the poison that had built up inside of her had only needed to worm its way free.
She finally left the apartment to mail the letter. She decided she would never tell Darcy her role in what had occurred. He would never approve. It would be better if he thought Kieran had died of natural causes. Together, they would forget him. She was certain until she reached the mailbox when, at the last moment, a cautious spirit prevailed. No. She shouldn’t send the letter until she was sure.
At Carlaw’s, Justine sat at a table in the corner with a good view of the bar. It only took a moment for to see that Kieran was not at his post. True, they might have changed his schedule, but to Justine this was the smoking gun, the final proof of her success. She excused herself and ran to the bathroom where, in the stall, she vomited as if at the end of a binge. When there was nothing left, she stood in the mirror and splashed water into her mouth. It was done, she thought. She could be the old Justine now, the one she once had been.
She pinched her cheeks in an effort to give them color before stepping back into the hall, this time to the bar.
“Is Kieran sick tonight?” she asked the new bartender.
“Kieran quit. He’s leaving town.”
The world seemed to pale around him as if the color had been bled away. “Did he say when?”
“He’s already gone, I think. He’s been planning it for weeks.”
Another magic trick, she thought. Men learn so much from their lawyers. This time, it was how to disappear.
After that, things went back to how they had been. She watched Kieran online, waiting for some clue about his fate. She didn’t know what she wanted to find, if the something that had her would ever be expelled. Snap! went the traps beneath the sink; and each time, she sprang awake with a rage in her fists.
Joel Fishbane is the author of The Thunder of Giants, now available from St. Martin’s Press. His short fiction has been published in a variety of magazines, including Ploughshares, Witness, New England Review, and Saturday Evening Post. For more information, visit www.joelfishbane.net.