Under My Skin

The details of the dream are already slippery. What kind of car? What club? It’s important to remember; I must dig into that place.

Coffee brews in the timed pot that’s set for six, its aroma wafting through the apartment. The city is awake with horns and distant sirens and the hum of traffic. Slowly, breath easing, these mundane details of wakefulness start to wipe away my urgency. The dream, the panic to remember, recede, slinking away with each passing second like a serpent into the tall grass of my wakefulness.

Sleep is the place where your mind organizes, where your subconscious resolves and expresses itself. In times of great stress, dreams can become like a whole other life, Dr. Nash said. A terrifying, disjointed life that I can’t understand.

I reach for my dream journal and start writing, trying to capture what I remember:

Morpheus, a nightclub?

Black-and-white-tile floors, kissing a faceless man?

He takes me somewhere in his car, a BMW maybe. Afraid. But relieved, too? Who was he? Where was he taking me? Why did I go with him?

Red dress?

Powerful desire. Jack. I thought he was Jack, but he wasn’t.

The impressions are disjointed, nonsense really in daylight. As I scribble, the sunlight brightens and begins to fill the room through the tall windows. Too bright. I must be late for work.

Finished writing, I flip back through to the earlier pages, looking to see if there’s any other dream like this one. Reading what I wrote late last night, before I took the pills, it’s the scrawl of a crazy person, loopy, jagged:

Jack, computer, looking at porn? Who is she?

Another sentence that I don’t even remember writing: Was he hiding something from me?

I stare at the black ink bleeding into the eggshell page. There’s a little stutter of fear, as if I discovered a stranger had been writing in my dream journal. But no, the handwriting is unmistakably mine.

I start flipping back through earlier entries. One page is filled with a twisting black spiral. It begins at a single point in the middle of the paper, spins wider and wider until it fills the whole sheet. It’s inked in manically, scribbled at so hard that it leaks through to the page beneath. There’s a tiny black figure that seems to be falling and falling deep into the abyss.

No one tells you about the rage, I’d written. I could fall into my anger and disappear forever. How could he do this to me? How could he leave me like this? Who did this to him? To us? Why can’t they find my husband’s killer?

Again, that feeling—a stranger writing in my dream journal.

But no.

That rage, what a sucking black hole it is, devouring the universe. I remember that there was a terrible, brilliantly real dream about finding the man who took Jack from me. I chased him through the streets, finally gaining on him and taking him down in a lunge. I beat him endlessly, violently, with all my strength. It was so vivid I felt his bones crush beneath my knuckles, tasted his splattering blood on my mouth. It went on and on, my satisfaction only deepening. I confessed this tearfully to Dr. Nash.

Anger, in doses, can be healthy, Poppy, she said. It’s healthy to direct your rage toward your husband’s murderer, to not hold it in. Rage suppressed becomes despair, depression.

How can it be healthy to dream of killing someone, to imagine it so clearly? To—enjoy it?

There’s darkness in all of us, she said serenely. It’s part of life.

I shut the dream journal hard; I don’t want to go back to that place. That rage inside me; it’s frightening. I don’t want to know who I dreamed about last night, where I was. Maybe it’s better to let these things fade. After all, if you’re supposed to remember your dreams, if they mean something—why do they race away? Why do they never make any real sense?

The hot shower washes what’s left of it all away. I can barely cling to even one detail. But there’s a song moving through my head, something twangy and hypnotic.

I’ve seen that face before.

* * *

Images resurface unbidden as I head to the office—I flash on the man at the bar, the blue lights of the car interior. It’s an annoying, unsettling intrusion, these dreams so vivid, so disturbing. And I’m not rested at all; I’m as jumpy and nauseated as if I’d pulled an all-nighter.

I ask myself a question I might be asking too often: How many pills did I take last night? And: How much wine did I have?

Not enough, apparently. Not enough to achieve blankness.

Nervously aware of my surroundings, I scan my environment for the hooded man. Though the day is bright, I see shadows all around me, keep glancing around like a paranoiac. There’s a group of construction workers, all denim-clad, with hoodies pulled over their hard hats. One of them stares, makes a vulgar kissing noise with his mouth. I stride past him, don’t look back.

Finally, in the office, at my desk, I feel the wash of relief. It’s early still, at least an hour before anyone else comes in. I pick up the phone.

“Hey, there,” answers Layla. “You didn’t call me back last night.”

Her voice. It’s a lifeline. She’s so solid. So real.

“Did you call?” I ask, confused.

“Yeah,” she says. “Just wanted to check on you. I didn’t like how you looked when you left.”

Scrolling through the messages on my phone, I see her call and a text, left after eleven.

“Oh—sorry.” How did I miss that?

“Seriously. What’s going on?”

Layla is the first one to start worrying about me. She was the first to think that maybe something wasn’t right a day or two before my “nervous breakdown” or “psychotic break” or whatever we’re calling it these days. Dr. Nash just refers to it as my “break.” Think of it as a little vacation your psyche takes when it has too much to handle. It’s like a brownout, an overloading of circuits. Grief is a neurological event. And Layla was the one to bring me home.

I tell her about the dream, anyway the snippets I can almost remember.

She’s quiet for a moment too long. I think I’ve lost her.

“Layla?”

“Poppy,” she says. “Maybe you should call Detective Grayson.”

I’m surprised that she would bring up the detective who has been in charge of Jack’s murder investigation. A murder investigation that has petered to almost nothing. It’s been almost a year since Jack was killed and every lead has gone cold. There are no suspects. No new information. But Grayson is still on the job, checking in regularly, always returning my calls to query about progress. I used to crave justice for Jack, for everything we lost. It used to gnaw at me, keep me up nights. But, with Dr. Nash’s help, I’ve let that idea go somewhat. What justice is there for this? No matter what price paid, the clock will not turn back. So this question sits like an undigested stone in my gut. Who killed Jack?

“Why? What does Grayson have to do with this?”

Another moment where she draws in and releases a sharp breath. I can hear the street noise so she’s probably leaning out the bathroom window with her cigarette so that the kids don’t smell it when they get home from school. She’s supposed to have quit; obviously, the nicotine gum isn’t cutting it. I’m not going to hassle her about it. Who am I to get on her case, pill popper that I’ve become?

“I was just thinking,” she says finally, carefully. “The days you can’t remember. Maybe what you dreamed last night. I mean, maybe that wasn’t a dream at all. Maybe it was a memory.”

Her words strike an odd chord, cause an unpleasant tingle on my skin. “Why would you say that?”

“Honey,” she says. A sharp exhale. “When I found you, you were wearing a red dress.”

Ben comes in singing. He has his headphones on, clearly doesn’t see me. He’s belting out Katy Perry, singing about how this is the part of him you’ll never ever take away from him. He reaches into my office to flip on the lights I’ve neglected to turn on and his eyes fall on me. He blushes and gives me a wide smile, takes a bow. I’d laugh if my body didn’t feel like one big nerve ending, sizzling with tension.

“Maybe—you’re remembering things,” says Layla when I stay silent.

“Dr. Nash said I probably wouldn’t, that likely those days are gone forever.”

It was two days after the funeral that I disappeared. Four days after that I woke up in a hospital, remembering nothing. Even the days before Jack’s murder and through the funeral are foggy and disjointed. Part of me thinks that it might be a blessing to forget the worst days of your life; I’m not sure I want them back. Dr. Nash has suggested as much, that my memories haven’t come back because I don’t want them.

I remember the day he was killed in ugly, jagged fragments, sitting in the police station, reeling at Detective Grayson’s million, gently asked questions. Was he having trouble at work? Did he have any enemies? Were there money troubles? Affairs? Were either of you unfaithful? Hours and hours of questions that I struggled to answer, grief-stricken and stunned, trapped in a tilting unreality. There were these long stretchy moments where I pleaded with the Universe to just let me wake up. This had to be a nightmare. Grayson’s grim face, the gray walls, the flickering fluorescent lights, all the stuff of horror movies and crime shows. This wasn’t my life. It couldn’t be. Where was Jack? Why couldn’t he make it all go away?

Finally, my mother showed up with our family attorney and they took me home. I remember stumbling into my apartment—our apartment, falling into the bed we shared. I could still smell him on the sheets. I remember wailing with grief, facedown in my mattress.

Take this, honey. My mom forced me to sitting, handed me one of her Valium tablets and a glass of water. I didn’t even hesitate before drinking it down. After a while, the blissful black curtain of sleep fell.

For a while, I know Detective Grayson suspected me. After all, I would inherit everything—the life insurance payout, the business, all our assets—when Jack died. But I think at some point he realized that for me it was all ash without my husband. Then he became my ally. If you remember anything, no matter how small, call me.

The case, it bothered him. Always. Still. Stranger crime is an anomaly. A beating death of a jogger—it grabbed headlines. The city parks are Manhattan’s backyard; people wanted answers and so did he. Jack was a big, strong guy, fast and street-smart. He’d traveled the world as a photojournalist, dived the Great Barrier Reef to find great whites, trekked the Inca Trail, embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan, attempted to summit Everest. It never, ever felt right that he’d die, a random victim, during his morning run. He had a phone and five dollars on him. A year later, his case is still unsolved.

“But maybe Dr. Nash is wrong?” suggests Layla. “Maybe it means something.”

Now it’s my turn to go silent.

“Let’s do it tonight,” Layla continues. “Work out, eat, talk it all through. In the meantime, call Dr. Nash and Detective Grayson.”

Layla, queen of plans, of to-do lists, of “pro” and “con” columns, of ideas to turn wrong things right. She corrals chaos into order, and heaven help the person who tries to stop her.

“Okay.” I release a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “That’s a plan.”

I flash on that moment at the bar, that man, again. Who was he? Someone real? Someone I know?

“You’re okay, right?” asks Layla. “You’re like—solid?”

“Yeah,” I lie (again). “I’m okay.”

* * *

Detective Grayson agrees to meet me in Washington Square Park for lunch. So around noon I head out. The coolish autumn morning has burned off into a balmy afternoon as I grab a cab to avoid even worrying about the hooded man.

The normalcy of the morning—emails and the ringing phone, conversations about understandable things like contracts and wire transfers—has washed over the chaos of yesterday and last night, my dreams where they belong, the grainy, disjointed images faded into the forgotten fog of sleep. I don’t have the urge to look over my shoulder every moment as I make my way under the triumphal Washington Square Arch and into the park. My chest loosens and breath comes easier. Grief and trauma, I remind myself, are not linear experiences. There are good days and bad ones, hard dips into despair, moments of light and hope. My new mantra: I’m okay. I’m okay.

Grayson sits on a shady bench near a hot dog vendor, by the old men playing chess. He already has a foot-long drowning in relish, onions, mustard, ketchup and who knows what else. It seems to defy gravity as he lifts it to his mouth. A can of Pepsi sits unapologetically beside him. No one else I know would even dream of drinking a soda, in public no less. It’s one of the things I like about him, his eating habits. It reminds me of Jack. Jack and I would be walking home from a client dinner that had consisted of tiny salads and ahi poke with some slim, fit photographer who turned in early so he could make a 6:00 a.m. yoga class, and Jack would make us stop at Two Guys Pizza, where he’d scarf down two slices.

God, when did people stop eating? he’d complain.

I grab a similarly gooey dog, and take my place beside Grayson. He grunts a greeting, his mouth full. He’s sporting his usual just-rolled-out-of-bed look, dark hair a mop, shadow of stubble. He’s wearing a suit but it needs a trip to the dry cleaners, his tie loose, a shirt that has seen better days. Still, there’s something virile about him, maybe it’s the shoulder holster visible when he raises his arm, the detective’s shield clipped to his belt.

The leaves above us are bold in orange, red, gold, but they’ve started to fall, turn brown. I dread the approaching winter, the holidays where I imagine I’ll drift between Layla’s place and my mother’s, a ghost—people giving me tragic looks and whispering sympathetically behind my back.

Jack and I used to have our whole ritual. We’d put the tree up by ourselves the weekend after Thanksgiving, have a big party for all our friends. On Christmas Eve, we’d go to my mother’s house, where she would show off whatever new man she was dating, drink too much, then try to pick a fight with me—honestly because I think it’s the only way she knows how to connect. We’d spend Christmas Day at our place with Jack’s mother, Sarah. We’d plan the meal for months, then hang around in our pajamas all day—cooking, watching movies, playing Scrabble. It was my favorite day of the year.

Last year, just months after losing him, I couldn’t even get out of bed. The holidays passed in a grief-stricken blur with the phone ringing and ringing. Layla, Mac, my mother coming by to try to coax me out of bed.

It was Mac who finally got me up, convinced me to come to join them for Christmas dinner. “We’re your family,” he said, pulling open the blinds. “You belong with us. I know it hurts but there’s no way out of this but through. Show the kids that you’re not going to let this crush you. Show them that they’re not going to lose you, too.”

Guilt. It works every time. He offered his hand, which I took and let him pull me from bed and push me toward the bathroom. As I ran the shower, I heard him call Layla, his voice heavy with relief. “I got our girl. She’s coming.”

It seems like yesterday and a hundred years ago.

“Funny you called,” says Grayson now. He’s prone to manspreading so I leave a lot of space between us.

“Oh?” I take a big messy bite of the hot dog, and try not to spill anything on my shirt. Yellow mustard and white silk are not friends. Actually, white silk is no one’s friend. Wearing it is like a dare to the universe: go ahead, bring it on—coffee, ketchup, ink—I can take you.

“I’ve got something maybe.” He does this thing, a kind of bobblehead nod. “Maybe. Might be nothing.”

There’s a file under his Pepsi can.

“They brought some punk in this weekend for armed robbery,” he says when I stay silent. I wait while he devours that dog in three big bites. It’s impressive. He wipes his mouth with gusto, maybe building suspense.

“Perp was caught in the act, more or less. A couple of uniforms brought him down as he exited the bodega in the East Village. I think he got like two hundred bucks if that. Anyway, he tells the arresting officers that he knows something about a murder in Riverside Park last year, so they call me in.”

My whole body goes stiff; my appetite withers. Putting the hot dog in its paper tub beside me, I try not to think about that dark day, not let the barrage of images come sweeping in. But it’s a flood, the uniformed officers in my lobby, the cold marble as I sank to the floor, the gray interrogation room. Weird details like a ringing phone that no one picked up, the scent of burned popcorn somewhere in the station.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He rubs at the stubble on his jaw. “I knew this was going to be hard.”

He’s watching me with a kind of curious squint. It’s warm, but it’s knowing. Dark brown eyes, soft at the edges, heavily lashed like a girl’s. He’s taking it all in, filing it away—the moments, the details, the gestures, things said and unsaid. There’s something sad in that gaze, and something steely. I wonder if I could get it. If I had a camera in my hand, could I capture everything his eyes say. Sometimes there’s not enough light; sometimes there’s too much. Some people you just can’t get. They won’t let you.

“I’m okay,” I lie (again). It’s the easiest lie to tell because it’s the one people want to hear the most. That you can take care of yourself, that they don’t have to worry. Because in a very real sense, they can’t help. Most of the time, we’re on our own.

He tosses the tub, the napkins, into the nearby trash can and lifts the file. It looks small in his thick hands. He picks at the edge with his thumbnail, opens it.

“Anyway, this mope says he knows a guy who claims to be a killer for hire. For a thousand bucks, he’ll kill anyone with his bare hands.”

The words sound so odd, so ridiculous. I nearly laugh, like people laugh at funerals, the tension too much.

“My guy, the armed robber, let’s call him Johnny for the sake of clarity, was on a bit of a bender, so his memory—it’s cloudy. Johnny says he met this killer for hire at a bar, and the guy got to bragging. I brought a healthy skepticism to the situation, naturally. But I gotta admit some of the details fit. Like, he knew Jack only had five bucks on him, that the assailant smashed Jack’s phone to a pulp. Little things that weren’t out there in the news.”

“So,” I say, feeling shaky and strange. Those few bites of hot dog are not agreeing with me. “You got a name? He’s in the system? Saw if the DNA matched?”

Detective Grayson shakes his head, leans forward.

“No name. Johnny didn’t know the guy’s name, street-smart enough not to ask. But he gave the sketch artist a description. It matches accounts of a man witnesses saw fleeing the park the morning Jack was killed.”

I appreciate how he often uses Jack’s name, doesn’t call him “your husband” or “the victim.” I feel like he knew Jack, that they might have been friends. The detective is exactly the kind of guy that Jack liked—smart, no bullshit, down-to-earth.

Grayson hands me the file and I open it. The black-and-white pencil drawing stares back at me, full of menace. Head shaved, wide deep-set eyes, thick nose, heavy brow. There’s something about it, something my brain reaches for, but then it slips away. It’s like when I try to force myself to remember those missing days. There’s truly nothing there, just a painful, sucking dark.

“Anything?”

I shake my head. “Nothing. I don’t know him.”

“Johnny says he was a big guy, maybe 6 feet, well over 200 pounds. Ripped, thick neck, big hands.”

There’s that familiar tightness in my chest, that feeling that my airways have shrunk when I think about him out there. I imagine Jack lying on the path. I see wet leaves and blood, the curl of his hand on the pavement. I’m sorry. I should have been with you.

“He’d have to be big, right?” My voice catches. “To overpower Jack.”

Detective Grayson puts a hand on my forearm, easy, stabilizing.

“It’s something,” he says softly. “The first something in a while.”

“A killer for hire.” The words don’t feel right in my mouth. “A thousand dollars. To kill someone.”

“The random mugging,” he says. “It never sat right.”

“But who would hire someone to kill Jack?”

He takes a swig of his Pepsi. “You tell me.”

“No one,” I say. It sticks in my throat and I cough a little. “Everyone loved Jack.”

Grayson pulls himself out of his constant slouch, twists a little like he’s trying to work out a kink. I notice he’s saved a bit of his hot dog bun, has it clutched in his hand. He tosses it, and a kit of pigeons clamor, their pink-green-gray feathers glinting in the sun.

“I’m going to go over all my files again tonight,” he says. “See if this new information sheds light on anything old. We’ll find this guy. And when we do, maybe he can answer that question.”

We’ll find this guy. “How are you going to find him?”

“I went to the place where Johnny says they met,” says Grayson. “They’ve got the sketch up behind the bar. Patrol in that area is on the lookout.”

It seems impossible that you could find someone that way, just hoping they come back to a place they’ve been. And anyway, there’s that part of me that thinks: What does it matter if we catch him? Jack is not coming back. Not even if the guy, whoever he is, gets caught and goes to the electric chair. What does it fix? Nothing changes.

I imagine a trial that drags on, a conviction, or not. Years and years of appeals, tied up in more rage, misery, grief. Jack wouldn’t like it. Let it go, he’d surely say. Everyone dies, somehow, someday. Don’t let this eat whatever’s left of your life.

“You called me, though,” says Grayson. He takes the file that sits open in my lap and closes it, tucks it under his leg. I’m glad that face is gone. “So...what’s up?”

I almost tell him about my dream, the one in the nightclub, that maybe—maybe—could be a memory. It’s why I called him, because of Layla’s suggestion that it might be a memory. But he’s so pragmatic and the images seem so strange and nonsensical now, especially in light of what he’s told me. And I don’t want to recount the part where I kiss some strange man. Even in a dream, it’s shameful, sordid, isn’t it? There’s shame, too, about those missing days. I imagined myself stronger than that, not the person who shatters in the face of tragedy.

But I am that person; I did shatter.

Instead, I just tell him about the hooded man, how I think I’m being followed.

He digs his hands into the pockets of his pants, listens as I tell him about the encounter on the train.

“Big guy?” he says, looking down to open the file again. “Six feet, heavy?”

“I think so.” Bigger than Grayson, taller, broader.

“You’re sure?” He pauses and looks up at the sky, which is a bright blue through the red, gold, orange, of the leaves above, the gray of the buildings. “Of what you saw.”

He knows my history.

“Not completely,” I admit. “No.”

“You couldn’t see his face?”

“The hood.”

“Yeah,” he says, drawing out the word. He dips his head from side to side, runs a hand through his hair, considering. “But his face was completely obscured by the hood? That doesn’t seem right. You can usually see something.”

I shake my head, pushing into my memory. “No.”

Then I remember the pictures on my phone, scroll through the shots and show him the clearest one, which isn’t clear at all. He takes the device and squints at it.