Chapter 5: A Contempt for Pettiness
April 18, 2015
"How's Portland?"
Max laughed on her end of the line. "I thought I was a hipster. There's a guy who works at this gallery with, like pig-tails. I mean, I'm not about gendering people, saying who can wear what, but those don't look good on anybody."
Chloe, in the bedroom of the Seattle apartment she shared with Max, couldn't even muster a smile. Max was in Portland, promoting a gallery exhibit of her work.
"Are you there?" Max asked.
"Yeah," Chloe said.
"I thought you'd laugh at the dude in pig-tails."
Under normal circumstances, Chloe would have.
"Are you okay?" Max asked. "You're being kinda… I dunno…"
"I'm not feeling all that well," Chloe said. Which was true, just not for reasons she was willing to admit. Least of all to Max.
"Oh, poor baby," said Max. "Is it your stomach? Did you go back to that pho place? It doesn't agree with you."
"No, I… It's just kind of a general… head… thing."
"Okay," Max said. "I'll be back tomorrow night. I'll take care of you."
"You baby me," Chloe said.
"My nurse game is strong," Max said, and Chloe could hear the smile on her girlfriend's lips.
"I love you," Max said.
"I love you too." For the first time, those words tasted funny on Chloe's tongue.
Chloe hung up and looked around the bedroom. Max Caulfield and Chloe Price came to Seattle in the summer of 2014. Their first two months in the jewel of Washington State were spent in the residence of Ryan and Vanessa Caulfield, who were so appreciative of Chloe's support during Max's coma, and so bewildered by their daughter's stunning display of bravery on that Monday the previous October, that they had no problem letting Chloe stay underneath their roof.
Being that the Caulfields let Chloe sleep in Max's room, both Max and Chloe thought it advantageous not to let Ryan and Vanessa know that they were a couple until after they'd moved out.
The plan was that Max and Chloe would find an apartment in Seattle, with a little help from Mister and Missus Caulfield, where Max would attend the University of Washington, but a funny thing happened on the way to the autumn of 2014: it seemed that when an artist gets press exposure (like, say, a piece on CNN about that artist getting shot in a bathroom by the richest kid in a small town), demand for that artist's work increases. The art world of the Pacific Northwest had learned the name of Max Caulfield, and she negotiated her first gallery showing while she was still in the hospital recovering from her coma. The public received her work warmly. So warmly, in fact, that Max neither needed her parents' help, nor had the necessity for a college education. The eighteen-year-old Caulfield could live off the prints being made of her work, and ply her trade full time as a photographer.
After a tumultuous two days of back and forth between Max and her parents, where the latter insisted upon a college education for their daughter, Ryan and Vanessa finally caved, and Max and Chloe found a small, reasonably-priced apartment in mid-town. Chloe supplemented the couple's income working IT for a small software company, where she learned something about herself that would serve her over the next four years: that she could be nice to anyone, provided they paid for the privilege.
Chloe looked around the bedroom. Their life had been comfortable and warm. Max still had the teddy bear with the missing eye from her childhood, sitting on a small shelf above the bed they shared. Max was the kind of lovably sentimental dork that would frame their senior prom picture: Max in a gray silk dress that showed off her shoulders and the entry wound from the bullet high up on the left side of her chest, as well as the starfish-shaped exit wound in the middle of her shoulder blade (Max said that when people saw her scars she felt braver). Chloe was in a dark blue suit and white shirt that Max helped her buy, because she refused to go to prom in the suit she buried Rachel in.
And that life, that home they had built for each other fit in the two gray suitcases at Chloe's feet. Two suitcases full of things she needed or couldn't part with.
Chloe stared at them for a while and expected an apocalypse, a cataclysm, a bolt from Zeus that told her she was being an idiot and a fool. That told her someone loving you back only comes once if you're lucky, and walking out would destroy her in ways both grand and subtle.
It never came.
Chloe picked up the suitcases and left the apartment.
Left Seattle.
Left Max.
November 3, 2018
"You wear glasses now," Max said.
Chloe snapped out of it. "Yeah," she said. "It, um… it happens."
"It happens?" Chloe thought. Speak English, dumbass.
"Did you see Trevor?" Chloe asked.
"Yeah," Max said, shuffling her feet and looking down the hallway where Trevor would have gone after he'd left. "He said 'good luck.'"
They fell into an awkward pause so deep that there were ugly, glow-in-the-dark fish at the bottom of it.
"Are, uh… are we gonna have our conversation out here?" Max asked. "I mean, I don't mind, if that's how you want to do it, but I really would like to come in."
Chloe stepped aside, and Max entered Chloe's apartment. Chloe saw Max survey the apartment's shabby interior, with its pitted wooden floors, its ugly green rugs, its mismatched furniture, its thin layer of dust. She scanned Max for any sense of pity or derision and found none. She had always seemed to accept Chloe as-is, and Chloe had had her doubts about what that meant from time to time. Like a homeless person accepting whatever donations they were fortunate enough to get.
"I just used up the last of my booze," Chloe said," but I think I have a bottle of water in the fridge…"
"No, I'm fine."
"Alright. Have a seat, Pete."
Max smiled at that. Chloe rifled through her memory to see if that was a private joke between the two of them that she'd made by accident and came up empty. Max sat on the living room recliner. Chloe sat on the couch.
"So you asked Kate Marsh to use some of her pull to get me out of jail," Chloe said.
"Bradford," Max said. "And yeah."
"You sicced Victoria Chase on the Arcadia Bay Police Department," Chloe said. "That's a war crime. The UN's gonna want to have a talk with you."
Max smiled.
"How did you even now I was there? Do you have a Google alert set up? 'Chloe Price' and 'arrested?'"
"Well, I just never know with you."
Chloe smiled before she could tell herself not to. Another lull.
"Justin's dead," Max said.
"Yeah," said Chloe. "Some fucker shot him in the eye. It was…"
Max gave a grim nod, but didn't seem phased by it, which struck Chloe as odd. As though someone getting shot in the head was old hat to her ex-girlfriend. Maybe it was because Max had taken a bullet herself, but…
"Any leads?" Max asked. "Anyone you think did it?"
Chloe was stunned.
"Leads? Max, what the fuck are you talking about?"
Max looked at Chloe as though she were speaking a foreign tongue. "You're going to try to find out who did this, right?"
Chloe couldn't keep herself from letting out an astonished laugh. "No."
"Justin was your friend, and you got arrested for shooting him. Doesn't that… I dunno… piss you off?"
"Yeah, but I'm not gonna run around and start shit with the people who killed him. We have cops for this sort of thing."
"Oh," Max said, "so the cops in Arcadia Bay aren't corrupt and useless anymore?"
If anything, they were even worse, but Chloe wasn't about to tell Max that.
"Look," Chloe said. "Justin dealt. Probably did some shit he wasn't supposed to. It sucks he's dead, but I can't help that. And me getting arrested is just the cost of doing business. I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner."
"What is your business, precisely?
"That's… that's complicated," Chloe said. "The point I'm trying to make is that running around solving the unsolved mysteries of Arcadia Bay isn't me."
"It was you," Max said.
"When?"
Chloe could see that Max had an answer to that, and a damned good one, but stopped herself from saying it. She slumped in the recliner.
"I got here too late," Max said, to herself as much as Chloe.
"What's that supposed to mean?
Max looked Chloe in the eye. "Someone once said that there comes a point where life stops making you angry and starts making you sad," Max said. "I never thought it would happen to you."
Chloe didn't know what to say to that.
Max got up, and Chloe did as well. Max made her way to the apartment door, but Chloe didn't follow. Before she could open the door, Max turned around.
"Why did you leave me?"
The question was so simple, so direct, so desperate, and so… quiet that it gave Chloe pause.
"Why didn't you find me?" Chloe asked.
Max wiped a corner of her eye.
"Chloe, I always find you. I didn't come looking because I thought maybe you'd find me. Y'know… for a change."
Max left the apartment without a backward glance.
Chloe broke one of Lenny Diehl's fifties at the liquor store three blocks from the Blue Cove apartments on another bottle of rum and a six pack of Pepsi. She got home, fixed herself a drink with her newly gained provisions, got down to her t-shirt and a pair of blue boxers, lit up, and sat on her bed, staring out the window at the small, humble stretch of the town below.
Arcadia Bay had been in the business of taking things form Chloe Price. Things like family, and friends, and innocence. Back in the day, the town was like one of those vividly colored poisonous frogs in a jungle with a hard to pronounce name: lovely to behold, but lethal and brutal all the same.
Max had been the only thing she'd given up of her own free will, and that came back to haunt her as well.
But this wasn't back in the day. Then, when someone did wrong, fucked you over, then you knew their name, where they lived. They had the same friends you did, the same connections, the same roots.
But now?
"I worry about this place," Trevor had said earlier that day, and it wasn't until now, stirred by an unrest and curiosity that was both familiar and alien, that Chloe had begun to worry, too. Arcadia Bay wasn't evolving. It was mutating, being acted upon by outside influences that may or may not have anyone's best interests at heart.
Arcadia Bay may be a vile shithole, but it was her vile shithole, and someone running around killing old friends like Justin Williams had, just now, at this moment, become the affront that led to war.
Goddammit, Max, Chloe thought. Look at what you're making me do.
Chloe polished off her drink, put the glass on the nightstand, turned off the lights, and went to bed.
She'd call Trevor about the case in the morning.
