“He is running away,” she said. “His wife of twelve years left the marriage with his best man from their wedding. Andy is hurting, and he is running. But it’s his way of handling it, so maybe lay off a bit.”
*
“It was brokenalready.” He stared down at the phone in his hand. “Honest,” he said. “I don’t know how the hell it happened, but it’s broken already.”
“Already?” his sister cried out in alarm, her thin high-pitched voice rose as it came through the phone.
“I think something was wrong with this one,” he said hurriedly.
“No, no, no,” she said, “you can’t take the sick ones.”
“I didn’t think it was,” he said, bewildered. “It’s broken.”
“How broken?”
Silence.
“Oh, God, did you kill him?”
“Her,” he said absentmindedly. “Her.”
“Jesus Christ,” his sister said. “Bro, we’ve talked about this. You need to let up. Before you get caught.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I was lonely.” His voice cracked, as he stared out the window. “There’s what? Two-and-a-half-million people in and around this city?” he asked. “And nobody even knows I’m alive.”
“A lot of people know you’re alive,” she said earnestly. Then she added, “And, if you don’t watch it, a lot more people will know, and that’s not what you want.”
“Why not?” he asked. “I mean,lonelyornotorious. Is there a difference?”
“Well, they are two sides of the same coin maybe,” she said, puzzled. “But the more people know about you,” she said, “the more people will know what you’re doing, and you could wind up in jail again.”
“Well, I’m not spending the rest of my life in prison,” he said in that matter-of-fact tone of voice he used all the time. “You know that.”
“And I don’t want to lose my brother,” she said. “So please be careful.”
“I was so careful,” he said, hating that he’d changed to that childish singsong voice again, as he stared down at the little girl on the couch. He’d only had her a few hours. But she was dead,… broken. “But it’s broken.”
“Damn,” she said. “Can you just wait a bit before you dispose of her?”
“Well, I can’t dispose of her the same way as the others anyway,” he said. “You know that.”
He could almost hear his sister swearing in the background. She didn’t really understand what he was doing and why he was doing it, but she was always here to help him deal with it.
“Look,” she said. “It’s too many, too fast.”
“Well, I didn’t mean it to be,” he said, “but it’s broken.”
“What are you doing about it?” she said after a moment. Her tone was calm, and she was trying to be reasonable.
He didn’t like the reasonableness either. “I’m not sure,” he said, “but it’s broken. What do you do with things that are broken?”
“Don’t throw it in the trash,” she warned.
“Of course not,” he said. “What do you think I am?”
“You’re my brother, and I love you,” she said softly. “But you’ve got to stop doing this. You’ve been caught once. You can’t a second time. It’s different now.”
“That’s the first time you’ve ever said that to me. You’ve always partaken, like a voyeur,” he said. “I’d give you all the details, and you’d always be right there with me. Why are you separating from me now?” He hated that. It made his world feel even smaller.