Free Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran Page A

a noncommittal sound:
Uh-huh
or
I-’ont-know.
    “You see Terrell?” I asked.
    “Yeah. Few times,” he said.
    “He doing okay?”
    “Not really.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “But. You know. The only way out is through. That’s what they say.”
    Andray didn’t say anything.
    I thought about Andray and Terrell all the time. I didn’t know if I’d made their lives better or worse when I came to New Orleans on the Case of the Green Parrot. At least I knew that before me, they’d had each other. Now Terrell was locked up and Andray was floating through life alone.
    I wanted to say
I will do anything I can to get you out of this.
I wanted to say
I will pull you out of this black tar pit of death and sorrow and drag you to the shore.
The way someone had dragged me out of that black pit.
    When you love something so much, the thought of doing it but not doing it well hurts almost more than never trying. Almost. You wouldn’t know until you tried it that failing is actually better.
    “Well,” Andray said. “Just lettin’ you know.”
    He hung up. I rummaged around my coffee table, through unpaid bills and unread magazines and cups of undrunk tea until I found what I was looking for: a little bag of cocaine Tabitha had left here a few nights ago. I opened one of the magazines, the
New Journal of Criminology
, ripped out a stiff subscription card, and used it to scoop out a bump of cocaine and snort it.
    I called Mick. He answered, groggy.
    “Hello?”
    “It’s me,” I said.
    “Me? Ellie?”
    He was still high off whatever he’d used to try to end his life. Ellie was his ex-wife, the wife who’d left after the storm.
    “Claire,” I said. “Claire DeWitt.”
    “Oh, hey, Claire,” he said, disappointment audible. “I’m sick.”
    “I know,” I said. “The hospital called. They told me.”
    He didn’t say anything.
    “What the fuck?” I said. Suddenly I felt insulted, as though he had tried to leave this mortal coil only because I was in it. “Seriously?”
    He sighed and didn’t say anything.
    “You want to come out here for a while?” I said. “I could—”
    He sighed again and didn’t say anything. He sighed like I’d said the dumbest thing in the world, like I understood nothing and never would.
    “I have a ticket booked for tomorrow,” I said. “I figured I’d come and see if—”
    “This isn’t a good time for a visit,” he said. “Listen, Claire. I don’t feel. I. I mean.”
    “Okay,” I said. “Can I call you later?”
    “Sure,” he said. But I knew he wouldn’t talk to me later, either.
    “You sure you’re okay?” I said. “I mean, I could come and—”
    “Yeah,” Mick said, clearly not fine and clearly not wanting to talk to me. “I’m fine. I’m totally fine. We’ll talk soon, okay?”
    He sounded like he was talking to a bill collector. We hung up. I called Andray back. His voice mail picked up.
    “Hey,” I said. “It’s Claire. So I just talked to Mick and he doesn’t sound so good. I was thinking maybe you could go see him? See if he’s okay? I think they let him out of the hospital too early and I also think, you know. I don’t know how safe he is.”
    Andray didn’t call me back and neither did Mick.
    I canceled my ticket and didn’t go to New Orleans. Instead I did the rest of the coke and cleaned my apartment, meaning I moved stacks of unpaid bills and unopened mail from one table to another. I put unfiled papers closer to the file cabinets and put all my scraps of paper with very important notes on them (
Nate
DIDN'T HAVE THE LEMONADE .
Fingerprints don’t match, 1952–58. Sylvia DeVille, DOB 12/2/71, not in system, likely not an abortion.
) in a pile on the kitchen counter. I put the dishes in the sink. When the apartment was cleaner it felt empty and alone, like a tomb I might not escape from, and I got dressed and went out as quickly as I could. It was after midnight. I went to a bar in North Beach and ordered a beer and then a scotch and