Listen to Me

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Notes

  Thanks

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Hannah Pittard

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pittard, Hannah.

  Listen to me / Hannah Pittard.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-0-544-71444-1 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-544-71523-3 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS 3616. I 8845 L 58 2016

  813'.6—dc23

  2015020513

  Cover design and lettering by Catherine Casalino

  Cover photograph © Elna Burgers / Getty Images

  v1.0616

  For Andrew, without whom this story wouldn’t exist

  Listen to me and I will speak: but first swear, by word and hand, that you will keep me safe with all your heart.

  —HOMER, THE ILIAD

  auto |

  informal

  n. a motor car.

  ORIGIN late 19th cent.: abbreviation of AUTOMOBILE.

  auto- |

  comb. form

  self: autoanalysis

  • one’s own: autobiography

  • by oneself: automatic

  • by itself: automaton

  ORIGIN from Greek: autos ‘self.’

  1

  They were on the road later than they intended. They’d wanted to make Indianapolis by noon, but they overslept. Mark offered to walk the dog while Maggie packed up the car. He’d wanted her to pack up the car the night before, but Maggie said it was nuts to leave a car full of luggage on a side street in Chicago.

  “Every time,” she’d said. “We go through this every time.”

  “You worry too much,” he said.

  “Maybe you don’t worry enough.”

  It was dark by the time they’d had this argument and late, which meant Maggie had already won.

  And so, in the morning, it was Mark—as promised—who took the dog out so that Maggie could arrange the car. But downstairs, in the private entrance to their apartment (Private entrance! It had taken forever, but three years ago they’d finally found the perfect apartment with its own perfectly private entrance, which they didn’t have to share with a single other person, a fact that, to this day, continued to bring Maggie sharp, if fleeting, joy) was the week’s recycling, just sitting there at the bottom of the stairs. Mark swore he’d taken it out.

  Clearly, he hadn’t.

  She put down the luggage and was about to pick up the bin to do the job herself when she saw it: a pink-gold length of foil peeking up from beneath a newspaper. She pushed the paper aside.

  Her heart sank—exactly what she thought: the foil was attached to an empty bottle of champagne. Her bottle of champagne. Hers and Mark’s, from their last anniversary. She’d been saving it. For what, she didn’t know. But she’d liked looking at it every now and then where she’d stashed it above the refrigerator next to the cookbooks. True, it had been a while since she’d taken any real note of the thing. Even so. It made her sad to think he’d thrown it out without ceremony, which was an overly sentimental concern—did an empty bottle truly merit ceremony?—but what was she going to do? Suddenly become a different person?

  According to the Enneagram, which she’d taken on the recommendation of her therapist—former therapist, Maggie had stopped seeing her three weeks ago—everyone emerged from childhood with a basic personality type. Maggie’s was Loyalist. Think: committed, hard-working, reliable. Also according to the Enneagram (she’d done some recent reading on her own), people didn’t change from their basic type. Instead, throughout their lives, they vacillated between nine different levels within their type, the healthiest being a One.

  Lately, Maggie was about an Eight. Think: paranoia, hysteria, irrational behavior. Her goal, by the end of the summer, was to be back at her usual Three or Four. There wasn’t an overnight solution.

  She picked up the bottle. Even empty, its weight was significant. Mark had splurged because they could. Because life was good and on what else were they going to spend their money? “There are no luggage racks on hearses,” they sometimes said to one another. “Spend it if you’ve got it.” Mostly they were joking—they never spent beyond their means. But it was only just the two of them. They had no children’s educations to consider, and so why not enjoy an extravagance every once in a while?

  She tore off a sliver of the pink foil—the tiniest of keepsakes!—then slipped it into her back pocket. Perhaps Mark was testing her, measuring her steadiness by relieving her of an ultimately trivial trinket. Yet he’d been so patient these last nine months, so generous with his affection—kissing her shoulder before clearing the table, squeezing her hand before falling asleep. Sure, they’d quarreled about the luggage and maybe the last three weeks had been more strained than usual, but quarrels, as Maggie and her former therapist had discussed, were the latticework of relationships. They were the branches—interlacing the pattern, strengthening the structure—that sheltered them and kept them together.

  She put the bottle back in the bin, right at the very top. She didn’t need to say a thing about it. She would pass his test with flying colors.

  Mark and Gerome were crossing the street when she emerged from the front door.

  “What are you doing?” said Mark.

  “The recycling,” she said. She held up the bin. “You didn’t take it out.”

  She watched his eyes; they didn’t acknowledge the bottle.

  “Gerome didn’t do anything,” Mark said.

  Maggie looked down at Gerome, who was looking up at her and wagging his tail. He sneezed.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “He didn’t go.”

  “He always goes.”

  Gerome was still wagging his tail.

  “You’re driving him crazy with the recycling.” Mark held out his hands to take it.

  “You don’t do it right,” she said.

  “If I chuck it all at once or put it in piece by piece doesn’t matter. It all goes to the same place, whether it’s broken or not.”

  Maggie shrugged. He was right. She knew he was right. She wasn’t an idiot, but there was something so gloomy about Mark carelessly hurling it all away. Just as there was something equally gloomy about watching the homeless man who walked their alley take off his gloves one finger at a time before searching the recycling for refundable bottles. It was silly to think their bottles and cans contributed anything significant to the man’s well-being, but she couldn’t help it. The thought of him fingering broken bits of glass made her heart ache. Of course, she hadn’t actually seen anyone going through the trash since autumn, as she hadn’t taken out the recycling since her mugging, and yet here she was still thinking about it, and here it was filling her afresh with sadness,
a condition both new and not new.

  For nine months, the sadness had been constant—a heavy, dull fog lingering greedily about the nape of her neck. She was aware of it in the morning when she woke, in the afternoon when she worked, in the evening when she scoured the Internet, seeking out the most miserable stories of human woe.

  When Mark came home from teaching, he’d sometimes find her in front of the computer. He would ask, “What are you doing?” And she’d say, “Reading the Internet. Reading about this girl who just died. Reading about this boy who was killed. Reading about this teenager who kidnapped a jogger and took her body apart limb by limb.” He had been so devoted the first few months after the incident in the alley, when the sadness was pushing down around her. He would close the computer, take her hand, lead her to the living room, and read aloud to her. He had a magnificent reading voice. Sometimes he chose a bit of poetry. Sometimes history or philosophy. They both liked Augustine and stories of war. Yeats was also a favorite. Mark would occasionally ask about her therapy. The sadness had begun to lift. The appointments had been helping. She stopped seeking out those awful news articles and started reading about other Loyalists online, about their own struggles with fear and personal insecurity. Maggie had felt herself returning. She’d felt the fog lightening, her levels stabilizing. Things with Mark were as good as ever.

  But then, just three weeks ago—out of nowhere and with no warning whatsoever—the police appeared. They showed up at the front door of the apartment with pictures of a body, a coed who lived just down the street. They presented them to Maggie. Why had they let her see them? She hadn’t understood then and still didn’t now. They also presented photos of a man, the one responsible for the coed. Was it the same man? they wanted to know. Was it the man who’d struck Maggie with the butt of a gun and left her for dead not two blocks from where she lived?

  For several hours, they pored over the photographs together and sifted through the evidence. What they discovered was that it was not the same man. Maggie had been as disappointed and relieved as the police by this revelation. But the coed was someone she knew. Not as a friend, of course. Not even by name—at least not before the news coverage. But she’d known the girl’s dog, a Chihuahua mix called Ginger. She’d said hello countless times as they crossed paths on the sidewalk—Maggie heading toward the dog park, Ginger and the coed coming from.

  By the time Mark got home from work on the night of the cops’ visit, the damage was done. The photos had already been taken out of the manila envelope, already placed one by one on the kitchen table in front of Maggie, who was sitting—when Mark walked in—across from the detectives, her hand to her mouth, unable and unwilling to look away.

  The next day, Maggie indefinitely suspended sessions with her therapist. She cut back on hours at the veterinary clinic, giving many of her regular and favorite pets to her colleagues. It was her clinic, she reasoned, and she could do as she pleased. Mark had been trying so hard—those kisses, those hand squeezes—to be patient. But Maggie, freshly fanatic and disturbed beyond language at the pictures of the coed, dedicated herself anew to her sadness, to the Internet, to any story that might confirm her suspicions of the world, of the turbulent state of humanity.

  Consequently, for the past three weeks, when Mark came home from work and found Maggie sitting at the kitchen table—the overhead lights turned off, the white hue of the computer screen illuminating her face—instead of taking her hand and shutting the laptop, he turned away and walked into any other room in the apartment than the one she was in.

  What Mark didn’t understand—what the Enneagram did, however, and what her therapist might have if Maggie had been as forthcoming as expected—was that even if the Internet had been taken away, she’d still have had her imagination. Just then, for instance, looking at the champagne that the two of them had opened with such relish in honor of their anniversary, she couldn’t help also thinking of the homeless man taking off his gloves, going through the recycling, and discovering the bottle that would have broken upon impact—if she were to let Mark take it to the back, where he would dump the bin without any further consideration—into shards.

  “I can do it,” said Maggie. “I can empty the bin by myself.”

  “Fine.”

  Mark started toward the front door.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “Going inside. Eating breakfast.”

  “What about Gerome?”

  Mark widened his eyes like he had no clue what she was talking about.

  “He has to do something,” Maggie said. “Or we’ll be stopping in Gary.”

  Mark threw up his hands, unintentionally yanking Gerome’s neck. “Why would it be Gary?” he said. Gerome grunted. “Why wouldn’t it be Hyde Park? Or Indianapolis?”

  “Give me his leash,” she said. “You’re hurting him.”

  “If he doesn’t go now, then we’ll die in Gary? Is that what you’re imagining?”

  In fact, that was what she was imagining. But she hated the way he made it sound. He made it sound so ridiculous, like it was a complete impossibility. And, yes, obviously it was incredibly unlikely that Gerome would suddenly have to go just as they were passing Gary and even more unlikely that they’d pull off at some abandoned exit. But if it did happen that way—if it did, which it technically could, because it wasn’t like they were talking about actually unfeasible things here (like time travel or pigs flying)—if it did happen, then Maggie would definitely be the one to walk him since Mark would be sulking and because Gerome never went to the bathroom with Mark when he was sulking because he, Gerome, could sense frustration and it made him nervous. So it would be Maggie walking the dog on some street lined with tenements, and there would be no witnesses, and it would, quite matter-of-factly, be the ideal set of circumstances if, for instance, there were a carjacker lurking or a murderer or a rapist or one of those misfits in a ski mask. And, yes, obviously all this sounded crazy—especially the way Mark had suggested it—but it’s not like it wasn’t possible. It’s not like there weren’t carjackers and murderers and rapists and masked nut jobs lurking at all those quiet exits off the tollway. Maggie had been reading the articles. Four women last month. The month before, five. And just three weeks ago, the coed, practically a neighbor. It was an epidemic. That’s what troubled her. There wasn’t simply one man out there. There were hundreds. Thousands. And they were waiting, just waiting for the right opportunity. All she had to do was open her laptop and there was another story.

  “Here,” Mark said. “Fine.” He held out his hand. She juggled the recycling and took the leash.

  Gerome looked back and forth between them.

  “Will you at least put the bags in the trunk?” Maggie said. “I’ll arrange them. You don’t need to arrange them. Just put them in the trunk.”

  She started toward the back of the building, where the dumpsters were. But then she stopped. Goose bumps traveled the length of both arms. She turned back. Mark was standing there, as she knew he would be, watching her with a blank expression. If only he would smile; give a wink or a shrug even, as if to say, “We’re okay. This is a blip. A dwarf-sized blip. Just another branch, another piece of the lattice ever strengthening our shelter.” But he didn’t.

  Who was he thinking about? Was it one of his students? Was it a colleague? Maggie couldn’t be sure, but recently—only very recently—she’d begun to suspect he might be thinking of someone else.

  “So you know,” she said. “I want him to go now so we don’t have to stop until we need gas or lunch. I don’t want to lose any more time than we already have.”

  Mark shook his head.

  Their apartment—perfect apartment!—was above a coffee shop, which meant there were four people watching them at that exact moment. There were always at least four people sitting at the counter, drinking their drinks, staring out at the world, watching.

  “I don’t care, Maggie.” His tone was unfamiliar, and she disliked the way he’d s
aid her name—as if she were a child who’d forgotten something important, as if she were clueless and ought, therefore, to be pitied.

  “It’s not that big a deal,” he said. Then he turned around and walked inside.

  2

  Things hadn’t always been this way between Mark and Maggie. A decade ago, when they were still in DC, still finishing up with grad school, they’d been the envy of their friends. They were never anything so drab as picture-perfect: there were fights—certainly, certainly—and disappointments. But they’d found in each other a wave, a vibe, a shared view of their interconnection with the universe.

  It was early autumn when they met, at a party hosted by Georgetown’s History Department and held—of all places—on a Potomac riverboat cruise. Mark had only agreed to attend because he knew the boat would remain docked. He could leave whenever he wanted. Six years into his graduate program, he was listless. In the company of other academics, he found himself bored by their inanities and the way they tended to speak more than listen. His plan that night had been to stay only for a beer or two, maybe a shake of hands with the incoming grad students—enough to show he wasn’t aloof—then head off to the Tabard Inn, where he would have a late dinner and continue a recent flirtation with a bartender from Poland. She couldn’t mix a drink, but she could pour gin over ice and she spoke with an accent that had caused Mark more than once to clutch his chest in sweet agony and say, “Hand to god. Your voice hurts me to my heart.”

  Georgetown hadn’t secured the entirety of the boat—already budgets were tightening—and so a second party was also being hosted that night by a different school, which was how it happened that Mark caught Maggie’s eye. Complete serendipity. She was in her final year of the veterinary program at Howard University. She was remarkably tall and, that night, dressed in a sort of Annie Hall get-up that was several decades too late, but what initially attracted Mark to Maggie—what caused him to introduce himself in the first place—was an off-kilter gap between her two front teeth, which she exposed—seemingly without embarrassment—whenever she laughed. He assumed she’d been raised either in extreme poverty or extreme wealth.