You Will Pay

Chelsea Catherine

We’ve all been broke for years by the time she lets me know she’s suing. Everyone is hungry and raging. The whole damn country. People brawl in convenience stores and outside libraries, hitting one another with tree branches, windshield wipers, anything they can get their hands on. It doesn’t surprise me when the notice comes in the mail. You left my front door open, she claims. Someone stole the television. 

    It’s a lie. I left her rental unit ten minutes after arriving, having felt something off. The next day she asked if I had even stayed there at all. (I hadn’t.) Nothing has been touched, she said in her original message. All seemed well, but when I tried to get a refund, the mean in her came out, all sharp and stinging. 

    I read her demands from the sagging porch of my trailer, staring at the horizon. The hills surrounding the Quabbin Reservoir are small and unassuming, painted deep blue from the cold. There’s a bite in the air, the arrival of a long, relentless winter. The animals have scented it, scurrying to collect acorns and fallen leaves for their dens. The earth is shoring itself up, gone quiet in preparation. 

     She wants $3,400 for the television, which is totally unreasonable. The cheapo cost her three hundred max. It was dented on one side, blasting country music so loud upon arrival that I couldn’t hear myself think. 

     You have forty-eight hours to respond, or we will take legal action. 

     Fucking bitch. I’m not paying shit. I crumple the paper and chuck it into the fire pit. 

***

My coworker, Markle, picks me up the next day when my car won’t start. Frost on the windows of my trailer obscures the view. Her fancy sedan puffs exhaust into the air. The front corner is dinged from a recent road rage incident, which are becoming more and more prevalent. Her mother has money and is in the process of buying her another one. “I don’t worry too much about these kinds of things,” Markle told me when it happened. “They always sort themselves out.” She breaks into a smile as I emerge onto the porch, my hand clutching the top of my coat. 

     “That bitch is suing me,” I say. 

     Markle puts her hand on the side of the passenger’s seat and backs out of my yard. She smells like cinnamon and spices, an expensive scent that might turn me off normally, but Markle is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life. She is tall and solid with dark hair and a long, elegant nose. She looks like the rich, middle-aged woman she is, save for her hands, which are working hands, thick with pockmarks from time in the garden, scars from fishing and playing outside as a child. “Who?” she asks. “The rental lady?”

     “It makes me wish I never went down there.”

     “Don’t do that to yourself, Louise,” she says, turning and righting the sedan. We take off towards the main road, the trees rising on either side, pitched over us like a tent. “You deserved a vacation.”

     I needed a vacation, that much is true. But then the rental lady started texting me obsessively—eight, nine messages in a row—before my check-in. My best friend didn’t show even though we planned the whole trip together. “I paid for it, though.”

     “The facts are on your side,” she says. “Stop worrying.” 

     “Facts,” I repeat. “No worrying. Got it.”

     But worrying is second nature, like walking or talking or breathing. At night, I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling of my small trailer, listening to the bugs scream outside, the stink of the pines breathing heavy around me, and wonder if life is ever going to get significantly better. Some days will be decent and bearable, yes. But there will always be a frozen water pipe, a squirrel in the attic, someone to rage and hate me, someone who will not hesitate to ruin my life. There will never be enough money for things to be good the way they are for Markle.  

***

Markle and I work for a mental health firm, one of nearly a hundred that have popped up in our area in the last few years. Our offices are on the fourth floor of a rickety old building; you can hear the brick-and-mortar sighing when the wind picks up. Markle is obsessed with trinkets, little ceramic kittens in white and pink, a handful on every one of her bookshelves. I have my paintings, abstract and large, which I dust compulsively each morning. 

     Markle’s office is next to mine, and the walls are thin enough I can hear the scraping of her chair, the way she stretches after a long meeting or hops on a virtual call or stands to prep her lunch. 

     We can hear the rest of the office, too. Everything is like paper; it’s impossible to find privacy, which is another reason everyone is nuts. All these people and buildings and cars and never any silence. When I bought the trailer, everyone told me I was insane, that I’d regret being out there all by myself. But I like the crowd of the trees, the sharpness of their needles instead of the sharpness of people’s voices, which are always piercing or wounding now. 

     “Get the fuck out of my face!” my boss screams at someone. It sounds like he’s right outside his office, maybe in the doorway. His voice is hoarse and gravelly, that rasping sound of someone who is dehydrated. It’s unclear which practitioner he’s talking to. “Your career is over!”

     Our boss ends someone’s career at least once a week, even though there are plenty of other mental health agencies to work for around here. The therapist yells back, “You can’t fucking do this!” And then there are scuffling sounds – a huffing, the muted oof of someone being punched. 

     The rest of us stay in our offices, let them hash it out. We are all highly trained and educated, and we know this is just how things are now. “People are nothing but rage nowadays,” Markle told me a while back. There is so much hatred and fear and struggle in us. The only way we can get it out is by fighting, and when we can’t hit or punch, we charge. We create debt. We ruin. I worry about it daily, about someone latching onto me and dragging me down, down, down until I can’t possibly find my way up again. 

     Who is it this time? Markle texts. 

     Probably Shannon, I write back. He always has powdered donut on his shirt. Sam hates that. 

     Fucking Sam, the prick. He ruined my life. He hired me, I met Markle here, and that ruined any chance I could’ve had to love someone who isn’t her. Her perfect brown hair, worn harshly to the side, an extreme part for a soft face, soft lips, soft cheeks, the softness we all need and can never seem to hold onto. I’m soiled for anyone else. 

***

When I return to the trailer that afternoon, another notification letter sits in my mailbox, crusted over by a recent snow and so cold, it burns to the touch. The rental owner has increased her demands. She wants me to pay for a new table and chairs. The front door is also scraped. She’ll need a new one. 

     We can’t identify the length of time you were in the rental, her lawyer has written. For that reason, we can deduce that you were responsible for the bedraggled state of things when she re-entered the unit. 

     Bedraggled? I rip up the notice and fling it across the room. Heat branches across my chest. My friends were with me the entire time. A waitress could probably confirm I was at a restaurant across town. The other rental I booked had a camera and I can prove I stayed there. What kind of lawyer talks like that? 

     I call the Massachusetts Bar hotline to see if I can get someone pro bono and a consumer law attorney rings me the next morning while I’m brewing tea. Outside, the Quabbin is motionless save for an errant heron, who was too stupid to fly south for the winter. Instead, he hops across the ice, desperate for food, pecking at frozen sticks and clumps of grass. 

     The lawyer says I have a good case, but that Florida almost always takes the side of the rental owner. “Why did you even go down there? Florida’s a nuthouse.” 

     “Massachusetts is a nuthouse,” I say. “I have friends in Florida.”

    The lawyer seems irritated, even though it’s barely eight-thirty. His voice sounds scratchy, like my boss’s did yesterday, the way so many people sound nowadays. It is the voice of someone who is constantly arguing. Someone who yells frequently, maybe even screams. We are all frayed chords, flat notes, a tiny bit off. It started after the pandemic and recession and just kept getting worse. I came to Massachusetts believing the politicians here would never allow this kind of suffering. But this state is no different from any other state. The people here are the people everywhere. There is nowhere to hide anymore. 

    “Why did you decide not to stay at the rental?” the attorney finally asks me. 

    “Her messages were so angry,” I say. “And they just kept coming.”

    “You could’ve ignored them.”

    I tell him this kind of anger is impossible to ignore. 

***

I worry I’ll have to sell a kidney to pay my lawyer. Or maybe my liver, just a sliver. A portion of healthy liver can go for upwards of two thousand dollars now, and some people sell pieces every couple of years, knowing the organ can repair itself. I consider it when I receive the bill, and then sit down on the freezing cold porch and scream.  

    The rental owner now wants ten thousand to renovate the entire space. She’s left six voicemail messages on my phone, each one more unhinged than the last. You MUST tell me what happened, she begs. Why did you leave? What was wrong with the place? I can’t make all of this stop until you TELL me.

    It is all so much. I sit on the porch, which tilts slightly downwards, a dead spot in the middle. A faint scent of decay seeps upwards, and I think about all the work hanging over me. The windows in the trailer have frosted over and cannot be unstuck unless I take a hair dryer to them. A floorboard wobbles loose in my living room, where frigid air scuttles through at night in gusts and shrill screams. I want to go for drinks in downtown Northampton with Markle one night, but it’s twenty-five dollars for a single cocktail.

    Let’s go for tea this week, I write Markle. And maybe a scone. 

    Tea will cost four dollars. A scone costs seven. That is eleven dollars for a meal, the most I can afford for her right now, the most I can offer for her attention. I do love a good scone, Markle replies. Or maybe a muffin.

    Beyond the trailer, the heron still pecks for food. His feathers have grown disheveled over the days, dingey. The light blue has faded. I imagine him hungry and alone. I imagine him frantic, stabbing with his talon, overturning every rock, digging through any piece of earth unfrozen, as scared and rotten and desperate as the rest of us. 

***

The virtual court date comes on an afternoon when the birds are quiet, and the wind has gone still. I take the call in a suit jacket over Zoom, sitting at my kitchen table. The rental owner talks about her beloved television and the mental anguish she’s been suffering without it. “I need to know WHY,” she says to the judge, who doesn’t appear interested. “You owe me an explanation for your actions.”

    She doesn’t need to know WHY. She wants to engage. She wants a fight. She wants the satisfaction that arguing provides, the connection, the humanity. We are all so mad and lonely, so desperate for one another. That desperation shows itself as an all-consuming rage present in each of my clients, the man at the drugstore, the mail carrier, even the dogs scouting the streets of downtown Amherst, desperate for someone to love them.  

    So, like we both want, I give into her. I bare my teeth, show her my mean. I tell her she has probably done this to other renters before. Does the court wish to investigate? Can we trust her word? “Her things were useless,” I relay. Nobody would want any of it. “You have no proof that I left the door open,” I say. “The facts are not on your side.” 

    The judge eventually rules in my favor, leaving the rental owner fuming in her little box, her face creased, her eyes screaming at me for one more go, one more round. When I click the little red button to exit the call, I almost feel sorry for her. 

***

Markle comes over that evening to eat popcorn on my couch. I’ve turned the heat up as high as it will go and everything feels staticky, my clothes and hair sticking to me. A cheap autumn-scented candle burns on the kitchen table, and I think of the rental owner. How far she went for an audience, the price she paid for some attention. 

    “So, that’s it?” Markle curls her legs under her. A twenty-dollar bottle of wine sits open on the coffee table, balanced in one corner by a piece of two-by-four. The trailer is patchwork— drywall filler near the television, a splotch of paint over the window. “It’s all dealt with?”

    “I had to be mean,” I say. “Is the wine okay?” 

    “It’s perfect,” Markle says. She tells me that just because everyone else is mad nowadays doesn’t mean I have to be. She likes my softness. It’s what first drew her to me, she says. “If everyone were kind, things like that wouldn’t happen.”

    “If everything were affordable, people would be kind.”

    She tsks. What drew me to Markle was the calm in her that didn’t exist in the rest of the world. The way she could brew up a lily or a lupine within a matter of days. She nurtures things just by looking at them, a gentle type that just doesn’t exist anywhere else anymore because she grew up with money. It has buffered her, kept her distant from me. There is no hate in her, like there is in me, and in this way, neither of us will ever really understand the other.  

    “What would I have to give for you to love me?” I ask. 

    “You have my love already,” she says, glancing over the two-by-four.  

     My cheeks heat. I stand, brush popcorn crumbs to the floor, and look out the window. It’s near dusk now. Hard to see much other than the hazy tree line, the mountains hidden by the angle of the sun. 

     “How’s the heron?” she asks. 

     “He’s gone.”

     “Flown south to be with his friends?”

     I found the heron two days ago. His body was covered in ice, a deflated mass of feathers, legs stuck out thin as yarn. Nothing was feasting on him, so I knew he died starving. The poor thing looked so brittle and lonely there, all the wild bled from his body, a pile of bones not even good enough for scavenging. “Yes, flown south,” I tell her. My sweet Markle, so far removed from the rest of us. “He is gone.”

© Variant Literature Inc 2023