Mister Tender's Girl Read online

  My answer to the trolls is always the same. I remove one earbud, ask them to repeat the question just to make sure they haven’t said something worth hearing, then tell them I would like to concentrate on my workout. If they press on, I tell them to fuck off.

  This man sharks in a bit closer, eyeing the abductor machine next to me. He’s stocky but not quite muscular, and his pajama-like sweats and T-shirt don’t suggest the image of someone who frequents gyms often. Both of his ears are pierced and full of colored gems, which adds contrast to his smooth white face. He gives me a smile and a nod, which I ignore, and climbs into the machine. The abductor machine consists of two cushions that rest against your knees, and you can choose whether to open your legs out against resistance, or close them together against resistance. Either way, you’re opening and closing your legs a lot, and I can feel him grunting next to me, knowing he set the weight too high but is unwilling to stop and lower it. Perhaps his groin will tear.

  I could move to another area of the gym, but I was here first. It’s not my nature to yield ground.

  I thumb the volume higher on my music.

  Then he says something. Goddamn it.

  I hear his voice but not the words. I ignore him, and as I’m in mid-lunge, he gets out of the machine and stands directly in front of me. My head is level with his waist, so I straighten. Sweat trickles down my forearms toward my hands, each of which is holding a fifteen-pound weight. He gestures for me to remove my earbuds.

  For a moment, I fantasize about beating him senseless. He’s got six inches and sixty pounds on me, but unless he has trained in MMA or boxing as much as I have, I could probably take him. I want him to give me a reason to sweep his legs out from under him.

  I lower one weight to the floor and remove an earbud.

  “What?” I say.

  “You’re Alice, right?”

  I stare at him, unable to answer, because it all suddenly makes sense. It’s my paranoid fantasy becoming reality: that some of the people you meet in the world already know you. Know every last detail about your life. Have been following you.

  This must be Mister Tender from the dating site.

  I drop the other weight and shift into a striking position. He holds up his hands.

  “Hey, take it easy. We have a mutual friend. Jimmy. You remember Jimmy, right?”

  I put my fists up.

  Jimmy.

  Yes, I remember Jimmy.

  Five

  If this guy found me, that means Jimmy knows where I am. I shouldn’t be surprised; I didn’t take great lengths to cover my tracks from my ex-boyfriend. He was never abusive, never threatened me, and there were actually elements of a sweet man in that junkie’s body. I’ve had a total of three romantic relationships in my twenty-eight years, and the one with Jimmy was the longest and most recent. But I had to leave him, and I did so in the middle of the night. In the middle, in fact, of a drug deal gone terribly wrong. There were no goodbyes, and he’s never tried to make contact with me since.

  Back then, Jimmy and I were criminals. He probably still is.

  “I don’t keep in touch with Jimmy,” I say, keeping my stance and fists in place.

  “He didn’t tell me you were this hot,” the gym guy says.

  I stay silent, eyeing his kneecap.

  “No disrespect,” he adds. “I’m just sayin’.”

  I was convinced I’d rid myself forever of Jimmy, but now it appears I was only in remission.

  I put my earbud back in and turn away.

  Then he lightly grabs my left arm to get my attention. Apparently, he thinks our conversation isn’t done.

  I spin and seize his throat with my right hand and grab his testicles with my left hand. I want to slam my heel into his kneecap, but we’re not at that level. Yet. Instead, I squeeze with all ten fingers. He’s immediately disabled, as if struck by lightning. Gasping, arms at his side. He could swing if he wanted to, and I’m prepared for that, willing to release to duck his fist. But he’ll miss, and then he’ll pay for that, too.

  The music thumps in my ear, and I can’t understand his desperate words, which suits me fine. I squeeze harder.

  He collapses to one knee, and I finally release. As he looks up from the floor, his face is flushed, his eyes narrowed in pained rage. His moving lips leave little room for misinterpretation.

  Fucking bitch.

  Movement in my peripheral vision. I glance and see Samuel, one of the owners, rapidly closing in. I pop my earbuds out.

  “Jesus, Alice, what’s going on here?” He pronounces it heyah, more Boston than Manchester.

  “This asshole grabbed me,” I reply.

  Sam glances at the man on the floor, comes very close to smiling, then looks back at me.

  “I’d ask if you’re okay, but maybe he’s the one I should be asking. You want to call the cops?”

  “No,” I say.

  He jerks a thumb at the man and says, “You, out of here, and no coming back.”

  “I was just trying to talk to her,” the man says. “We have a mutual friend, and I wanted to ask her a few things.”

  “I don’t care what you wanted,” Samuel says. “Out.”

  The man doesn’t protest. He rises, smooths his hair and shirt, then winks at me—not in a flirty way, but rather a shared-secret way. As if we’re coconspirators and we’re about to be taken into separate rooms for questioning, and he’s telling me to just go with the story.

  He turns and walks away, and as he does, he says something that gets lost in the clashing of weight plates on the other side of the gym. But if I had to guess, I think he said:

  See you soon.

  Six

  In 2003, we left Old England for New England. We left, in fact, the day after the courts granted my mother sole custody of my twelve-year-old brother and sixteen-year-old me. I was gutted to leave my father; it seemed I was the only person who didn’t blame him for what happened. He didn’t stab me, and he had no idea the character he created was going to be able to twist the minds of two disturbed teen girls.

  His face when we left that day… God, I can still see it. In my whole life, I’d never seen such despair in someone’s eyes. I used to dream of running away in the middle of the night and setting myself adrift on a raft, floating back across the Atlantic toward him.

  We moved to Arlington, a snarky little suburb just outside Boston, all cramped in a flat too small to escape my mother’s constant bouts of self-pity.

  I spent two miserable years completing my high school education in a Massachusetts public school. Friendships had already taken root years before my arrival, and there was little social room for the likes of a pale, scared, and scarred British girl who wore long sleeves on the hottest of September days. I was teased, called a freak. The more I hated school, the more I missed my father and blamed my mother for shoehorning me into a new world. And how I hated the sympathy she craved.

  I don’t like to discuss this much, she would tell anyone she had met for more than five minutes, but poor li’l Alice, she’s the victim of a horrible crime. Stabbed multiple times when she was only fourteen, poor, poor dear. And by two girls possessed by a cartoon character Alice’s own father created. Let me tell you, it’s no easy task raising a child with the issues you can only imagine she has. I never do get a break…

  When I turned eighteen, I was ready to leave. I had been accepted into a university in San Diego, which seemed wonderfully distant and exotic. It was to be my chance for a new start, one that I could do on my own terms. I fantasized about making friends, true friends, ones in whom I could confide. I thought about the beach, the smell of the sea. The sun tanning my pale skin. Of not being so conscious of all the scars I carried.

  A month before I was to move to California, Thomas got sick. His world changed in a day, changing the rest of ours with his. I couldn’t leav
e. I had to stay and help my fourteen-year-old brother. Medication after medication, none of which seemed to work for very long before Thomas would descend deep within his own world, a world of suffocating darkness that he would emerge from screaming and punching. Then he’d be perfectly fine for a spell, sometimes months. And then, not.

  I remained in Arlington with my mother, who seemed constantly hanging on to life by her fingertips, and my brother, who at times frightened me. I studied general business at a community college and discovered fitness, but it wasn’t long before I yearned for a more significant escape.

  When I was twenty-one, I met Jimmy in a Boston bar and began my own descent into darkness.

  As I walk, I scan the streets, wondering if Jimmy’s 1970 charcoal Challenger will rumble and purr down the chilled asphalt, pulling alongside me. But the streets of Manchester are quiet this morning, and for a moment, I only hear the whisking of the fall breeze, which rattles crisp, fallen leaves and straightens the hairs on the back of my exposed neck. It’s a three-block walk from the gym to the Stone Rose, a stroll characterized by a collection of hundred-year-old colonial homes, most of them decorated for Halloween. Shiny pumpkins and plastic bones.

  I enter through the back of the Rose, the coffee and sweets shop I purchased two years ago with insurance and estate proceeds I received after my father died. I love my coffee shop. There is a good energy here, and within its walls, I have a community of employees and customers that makes me feel normal. In the end, I suppose feeling normal is the best anyone can hope for.

  There are three knives in the Rose, because we sell pastries and some things that need cutting. My employees don’t know my history, and I couldn’t figure a logical explanation for not having knives in the shop, so I tolerate the few we have. But I never use them. I haven’t picked up a knife in over a decade.

  It’s just after ten in the morning, and I spy a dozen or so customers, most of them regulars. I come in for about six hours most days, though I rarely open or close the shop myself. I leave that to my staff, who I try to keep as happy as possible so they stay. There’s one thing about a coffeehouse: people come for the faces as much as they come for the coffee. So I try to keep the same faces around.

  The aroma of espresso calms me from my encounter at the gym, and as I walk behind the counter, I find myself steadied. Three years ago, fleeing Boston for Manchester, I never would have imagined myself trading heroin for coffee beans. If I look hard enough, I can still see track marks on my arms, like the faintest of ancient, dried riverbeds on a satellite photo of the desert. Funny, with all my fear of blades, I had no issue sticking myself repeatedly with needles. That’s the power of the drug. The irony is that one of the reasons I left Boston was to get away from heroin, only to find Manchester steeped in it. But I’ll never use again.

  “Morning,” Brenda says as she steams milk. She’s been with me for the two years since I opened the Rose. She’s a favorite with the customers and has called in sick only once.

  “Good morning. Busy today?”

  She shrugs and smiles. “Manageable.” Brenda is two years younger than me and could pass for a modern version of Audrey Hepburn (if Hepburn were a crunchy liberal). It took me some time to pinpoint what makes Brenda so likable. It’s the eyes. When she looks at you, you feel there’s no one else she could possibly be more interested in talking to. Fixed, focused, unwavering gaze.

  I tie on my purple apron and walk into the seating area, clearing cups and greeting my customers. Most of them know me, and I spend a few minutes of the usual talk with them. The weather is a favorite, especially as we crawl through the last months of the year. Charlie tells me the Farmers’ Almanac calls for a hard winter. Charlie is a thousand years old and quotes the Farmers’ Almanac like the New Testament. I don’t have the heart to tell him I haven’t the faintest clue what the Farmers’ Almanac even is.

  Maggie is nose-deep in her laptop, working on her book. It’s either her second or third, and she writes cozy mysteries. I read her first one. I learned a cozy mystery involves a pleasant little murder framed around a lot of cooking and eating. Sometimes the book even gives you recipes. Kyle, armed with his computer and Bluetooth headset, is busy conquering the world of Manchester residential real estate. He greedily guzzles the free Wi-Fi and uses the Rose as his office three hours a day for the price of a large Americano. Jim and Linda sit next to each other and read their books in silence, which, I would suspect, is what most of their relationship consists of. Carla cradles a mocha and tells me her twin boys are dressing up as some Star Wars characters for Halloween. Some names with an abundance of vowels.

  Then there’s the man, the one from yesterday. John. Cappuccino. He sits in the best chair in the house, a tall-backed, velvet-lined beauty rescued from Craigslist and lovingly restored. It stands like a throne, giving those occupying it a full view of the Rose, small as my place is. He smiles at me, and I reply with a tight-lipped nod, and after a moment, he returns to his book. I push away the nervous edge I get from him, the sense he’s watching me, but my paranoia at least seems justified given the events of the past day.

  As I make my rounds of the room, John is the only customer I choose not to talk to.

  My thoughts snap back to Jimmy. What he wants. I wonder if Jimmy is Mister Tender, trying to provoke me. If so, he’s smarter than I ever would have credited him. Jimmy doesn’t even know the real reason I have the scars, doesn’t know anything about my father and his famous creation. I haven’t told a single person the truth about my past since we moved to the States.

  I head into my office, which is small but has a window looking out onto the street, giving the space a cozy light on all but the most dismal of New Hampshire days. Some prior tenant lined the walls in the office with dark wood paneling, and despite its ugliness, there’s a tree-fort feel in here. It makes me feel safe. Protected.

  I sit at my desk among the clutter of bills paid but not filed, free samples of coffee beans, a stray case of sugar packets, and a scattering of pens, paper, and notes to myself.

  An envelope atop my desk catches my attention.

  This wasn’t here yesterday. White, thin, with International Air Mail blazoned in a red font on the side. My instinct tells me it’s some kind of literature from a European purveyor of coffee beans looking to expand overseas. Sometimes I get these. The small wholesalers representing boutique coffee plantations are too expensive for the big boys—Starbucks, Peet’s, Dunkin’—so they target the higher-rated independents, like the Stone Rose.

  But I’ve never received a parcel from a purveyor where my name and address are handwritten in exquisite calligraphy. I look at the return address. No company or personal name. Just the words London, England.

  England.

  I pick it up, suddenly not having a good feeling about this at all. Last night, Mister Tender came to me, and today, Jimmy resurfaced in my life via a creepy proxy. Now I have a mysterious envelope from the city I limped away from years ago. At least the name on it is my new one.

  I take a pair of dulled scissors and tear along the top of it. The envelope has the weight and shape of a children’s book: hard, square, thin. As I pull out the contents, I realize my guess is right. It is a book, and I see colors emerge as I slide it out from the envelope.

  There is no correspondence. There is only the book.

  I drop it immediately on the top of the desk as if it bit me. In a way, I suppose it did.

  The cover shows the bartender who destroyed me throwing back a shot of what looks like blood. He laughs as he tilts his head back, and some of the shot misses his mouth and streaks the side of his face. He looks like a fucking jackal.

  The title is simple.

  Mister Tender: Last Call

  Seven

  This is a book that does not exist.

  After my attack, my father put away all the inks and pens that went into the bartender’s journey
to fame and never created another panel with Mister Tender in it. The carnivorous graphic-novel fan community screamed for more, wanting to know how the artist would treat the story line when life not only imitated his art, but nearly killed his daughter in the process. Reporters from around the world clamored for the exclusive interview, but my father never spoke of what happened to me. Thousands of pounds were thrown at him to create one last book where Mister Tender could be held accountable for his crimes, but my father refused. Mister Tender simply ceased to exist.

  As I reach out to touch the book, I have the sense I’m being watched, as if someone wants to see my reaction to this exact moment. I look out the window of my small office. All I see is an empty street. Red and orange leaves litter the sidewalk beneath bony, barren trees.

  I leave the book on my desk and go out to Brenda.

  “The envelope in my office. Did you put it in there?”

  She looks up at me and squints in confusion. “Envelope? The one with the nice writing?”

  “Yes. That one.”

  “Came in yesterday’s mail. About an hour after you left. Why, what’s wrong?”

  “Did you have to sign for it? Was there anything else with it?”

  “No, it just came with the rest of the mail. Just catalogs, mostly. It’s all on your desk. Was I not supposed to put it in there?”

  “It’s fine,” I say. “I’m just trying to figure out who sent it, is all.”

  “Alice, you look shaken up. What was in the envelope?”

  It’s just a book that shouldn’t exist and probably came from Hell. That’s all.

  “It’s nothing.” Then, I amend the answer. “Well, it’s actually something bothersome, to be truthful. But I don’t really want to discuss it.”

  “Okay,” she says, giving me my space.

  Damn it. I want to tell someone about my past, about what happened when I was fourteen. About the things I did when I was with Jimmy. About my sleepless nights, or trying to cook dinner without a knife. But I shove everything down, cramming it smaller and denser, deep within my chest, and now it’s all but collapsed into itself, creating a black hole so strong, the truth can never escape. I tell no one, and the worst part is I don’t even understand why.