were on boats, and the blond, tanned inhabitants were all holding gin and tonics and wearing the half-amused expressions of people so rich that they could hardly be bothered to smile completely for a picture.
After looking at the pictures, Henry searched the bedroom for signs of Kate; she’d barely unpacked. Her toiletries were spread around the bathroom, but a large duffel on the carpeted floor was still filled with clothes, some spilling out. The bed had been slept in, then half made again, the sheets and duvet pulled up, but not tucked in or smoothed. Henry pressed his face against the sheets and breathed in deeply through his nostrils. They smelled of detergent and not much else. He dropped to the floor to look under the bed; there was only about a foot and a half of space, enough to get under if he needed to, but not very comfortably.
There was a book under the bed with a black faux-leather cover. Henry opened it. There was a charcoal sketch of a man’s face, a perfect rendering of the man that Henry had nearly bumped into on Bury Street earlier. Who was that man, and why had Kate—this had to be Kate’s sketchbook—drawn him? He flipped over a page and there was a sketch of Kate herself, stunningly real, her wary eyes staring out at Henry as though she could see him. On the next page was Henry’s own face, his name under it—jack ludovico (she’d spelled it right)—and today’s date. It wasn’t a bad drawing, and Henry found himself mesmerized, as though he was looking at himself through someone else’s eyes. She’d drawn him with his head angled down, his eyes with a touch of sadness behind the lenses of his glasses. It was exactly what he’d been trying to convey, and she’d gotten it perfectly. He felt proud of himself, as he always did when someone entirely believed the mask that he was wearing.
He wondered if Kate tried to sketch everyone she met or just those people that she was interested in, people who affected her in some way. If that was the case, then who was this neighbor on the first page—alan cherney, she’d written—and why was he walking behind her this evening? Had he been following her?
Almost unconsciously, Henry touched his tongue to the tip of his index finger and brought it down within an inch of the charcoal sketch. He very badly wanted to smudge the man’s eyes, alter him somehow, maybe just enough to freak Kate out when she looked back at the sketchbook. What he really wanted to do was smudge the eyes entirely. He thought back to his sister’s Tiger Beat magazines and how he used to meticulously go through them, whiting out the eyes of all her favorite boy bands, making the Hanson brothers look like eyeless zombies. Sometimes he’d get a red pen and draw blood coming from their eyes and mouths. After he’d done it to his sister’s middle school yearbook, his mother made him go see a therapist—the only therapist in Stark, New York, a fat middle-aged woman who was so stupid that Henry was able to convince her that his sister had been the one tormenting him, and that he was only defending himself. He was eight years old at the time. His sister was twelve. The therapist must have gone to his mother and suggested that Mary was the problem, because all Henry knew was that he didn’t have to go see Nancy the therapist anymore, and that his sister had started to go. Henry stopped mutilating Mary’s things, but he did find ways to torture her that were never tracked back to him. Easy ways. He started rumors about her that wrecked her friendships. He got her fired from her first job at the pharmacy by making it look like she was stealing. For a time he added tiny amounts of antifreeze to her Gatorade, till she was hospitalized for over a week. She dropped out of high school junior year and left town with the local drug dealer. They had one postcard from Mary five years later—Greetings from San Diego—and that had been it.
It had been so long since he’d thought of his family, and as always, it filled him with a combination of amusement and shame in their mediocrity. His parents were still together, living in the same ranch house in Stark. On the few occasions when he spoke with them, he sometimes lied