by L. R. Wright
Inside Eddie’s bedroom was his bed, which was a three-quarter-size bed, and he had a wooden table next to it, with a lamp on top, and an ashtray just in case he felt like having a smoke in the middle of the night. There was a small chest of drawers too, but he had to keep it inside the closet, because there wasn’t room for it anywhere else.
Through the open door of his bedroom, when he lay in his bed waiting to go to sleep, he could see pretty clearly into the living room, because of the light from the streetlamp that fell in through the window out there.
He wished he were home right now. Making himself some dinner, or watching TV, or going through his envelopes, or talking to Sylvia on the phone. His longing to be home was like a big ache. And this ache, in addition to hurting him, made him terribly sad.
Gardiner was slouched against the fender of the Oldsmobile, lighting a cigarette. Eddie watched him wave the match in the air until it went out, and then drop it on the ground. It was still too wet to worry about forest fires.
They were on a deserted stretch of the highway. There was some traffic now and then, but no other sign of life at all. All Eddie could see, north and south, was the highway, narrow and curving, and forest crowding close on both sides.
He figured they were about half an hour from Earls Cove, which the map said was the name of the place where they’d take a ferry over to the other side of Jervis Inlet, where Powell River was, and then Lund.
“So what do you want to do?” said Gardiner. “Hitchhike?” He cackled, and Eddie thought that was probably a good sign: he was getting back to normal. “Or maybe there’s buses come along here,” said Gardiner, and he cackled again.
“No,” said Eddie, who must have been thinking about it, because here he was with an idea. “We’re gonna have to flag somebody down, get him to take us somewhere, to a town somewhere, where we can find a car to take.”
“Take?”
“Take. Borrow.”
“Borrow?” Gardiner was cackling again.
“For a while,” said Eddie. “Just until we get home.”
“Why don’t we just ‘borrow’ the one the guy’s in that we flag down?”
“Because he’ll be looking right at us,” said Eddie patiently. “And as soon as we take off, he’ll call the cops.” He glanced left and right, at the unfriendly woods. “It might take him a while to find a phone, but sooner or later, we’d be dead meat.”
They poised themselves expectantly on the highway side of Gardiner’s Olds and began to wait.
Gardiner finished his cigarette and lit up another one.
A car appeared, a speck in the distance, and got big enough to reveal itself as a station wagon, and Eddie and Gardiner waved vigorously, but the wagon shot by without anybody in it even giving them a glance.
This happened several times.
Finally Eddie took a good look at Gardiner.
“You look like shit,” he said disapprovingly.
Gardiner’s denim overalls were oil-splotched and food-stained. His work boots were scuffed and dusty. The flannel shirt was frayed at the collar. Most of his hair was standing straight up, forced upward when he pulled off the nylon mask, frozen there by dirt and vestiges of mousse. Also, he needed a shave. So did Eddie, of course, but in every other way his appearance was an improvement over Gardiner’s.
“Stand over there,” he ordered Gardiner. “Behind the car.” Gardiner protested, and lit another smoke.
“Can I have one of those?” said Eddie irritably. He shouldn’t have had to ask. Gardiner should have noticed that he’d run out hours before.
52
EMMA, DRIVING, let memory flood unchecked, and examined with scrupulous deliberation the recollection that emerged. It was Charlie, laughing. She couldn’t remember the occasion, but it was a real memory, all right; and there was such love in his eyes, such openness in his face, that she felt an eager surge of hope.
Reminiscence is not a good idea, she thought, driving, driving, her hands tight on the wheel. She was being careful to keep strictly to the speed limit. She couldn’t allow herself to get pulled over with a loaded gun in her pocket.
She’d park at the top of the hill and wait until it got dark, wait until there were no lights burning in the café, or in any of the motel units, and then she’d drive down the hill and park across the highway, and then she’d walk over there, around the café, and back where the motel was, and she’d find Charlie. She was going to scare the hell out of Charlie O’Brea. She had it all planned.
She had to be angry, though, to do it. Where had all her anger gone? Chased away by that image of Charlie, laughing.
She conjured up another.
I’ll bleed all over her sofa, Emma had told him. He believed her too. He’d looked awful, as it sank in. So bug-eyed and sweaty that for a split second she almost changed her mind and let him have his damn divorce.
But she’d kept her mouth shut and just stood there, feeling very strong. Extremely strong. Victorious. Knowing this was a phase, and there would be another one, and another; straining in her mind to see beyond the present and all the intermediate phases to the last one, where there would be peace between them again and they would stretch out their hands to each other, knowing they would get there but wondering how long it would take, and how much pain there would be.
Charlie’s eyes had bugged out more and more. Emma was fascinated. Is it possible, she wondered, is it physiologically possible that they might pop out altogether? And if that happens, what on earth can I do about it? She’d catch them in her hands, she decided, and slap them back into their sockets, and hope for the best.
Then Charlie had whirled around, looking for something, Emma couldn’t imagine what. The vase? The big vase? He was striding to the corner table where it sat, holding branches of bright yellow forsythia, and he picked it up and hurled it. Emma watched, astonished, as it soared across the room and crashed into the mirror above the fireplace.
And Charlie proceeded to demolish the living room.
Emma had found her voice and shouted at him to stop. She ducked as books and heavy ashtrays flew through the air. She flung up her arms to shield her face from flying glass, and china, and crystal. It seemed to last forever, but finally it stopped. She heard a tinkling sound, window glass falling from its frame. She heard Charlie’s harsh breath coming fast and faster. She stood with her head bowed, waiting; heard Charlie’s feet crunch across the debris and down the hall; heard the front door open and slam shut.
Emma had gone into the kitchen after a while and made a pot of tea. She sat at the table drinking it and wondering what was going to happen next. Her life had been detonated. Its pieces had fallen willy-nilly around her head.
A long time later, Charlie came back. He’d brought an emergency glass person with him. The glass man was chattering cheerfully when he came through the front door with Charlie. “Whoops,” he said when he saw the inside of the house, and that was the last word he spoke, the whole time he was there.
Charlie directed the glass man to the broken windows. Then he got some cardboard cartons from the garage, and some garbage bags from under the kitchen sink, and started working on the mess.
Good, thought Emma. And she went to bed.
She had thought that was the worst of it. But it wasn’t.
Now she realized that waking up and seeing the gun wasn’t the worst of it, either. Nor was involuntarily filling the bed with her own urine. The worst of it came after that. Now, only now, she knew this.
Charlie broke down and began sobbing, and she comforted him. Sitting in her pee, she comforted him. She could smell it, her pee, as she held Charlie’s face tightly to her breasts, and stroked the nape of his neck, and said, “Shhh,” over and over.
He calmed, gradually. She handed him some tissues. He took them and wiped his face. He looked like—well, Emma had heard the phrase “like a beaten dog,” but never having seen a beaten dog, she hadn’t known exactly what it meant, until that moment. Tears came into
her eyes as she looked at him, her husband, the beaten dog.
Charlie looked back at her. And something changed in his face. “I’m sorry,” he said.
At the time, she’d thought the change in his expression was the reemerging of his love for her, the forging of a new resolve to live with her kindly and purposefully.
“I’m sorry,” said Charlie.
Now she knew that he was apologizing not for what he’d done but for what he was going to do. In that moment, Charlie had decided that he would leave, and how he would leave—furtively, stealthily, craftily, like the sneaking sonofabitch he must have been all along.
And all that stuff he was to spew about starting over was nothing but a lie. The whole last perfect year—one big lie. And how had this happened? How had she gotten from calmly deciding upon wifehood as a career to attempted suicide? To threats of public blood-spilling? Is this what devotion is? Emma wondered. What love is? What madness is? Had she let Charlie drive her into madness?
“Sonofabitch!” Emma shouted, pounding on the steering wheel, glancing skyward through the windshield—and she looked down at the road just as a large man appeared from nowhere to leap directly into the path of her car.
Emma wrenched the wheel to the right and trod hard on the brake pedal. The man was at her window before she had come to a complete stop.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry to scare you like that.”
Emma rolled down the window. “What’s the matter with you?” she said, shaking, her voice shaking too. “Don’t you know I could’ve killed you?”
He gestured to a car about fifty feet away, sitting at the side of the road. “My car broke down.”
“I’ll get you some help,” said Emma, starting to roll up the window.
“No, hey, we need a ride.”
“‘We’?”
“Yeah, me and my friend there.”
She saw another man appear from behind the parked car. He was wearing overalls. “It’s out of the question,” she said, watching the man with the overalls loping toward them.
“Hey, no, I’m sorry, but we gotta get to a town, see?”
“I told you,” said Emma, “I’ll call somebody for you, I’ll get you some help.”
“Open the fucking door,” said the man in the overalls.
They were both crowding against the car now. Emma had managed to roll the window up halfway, but the big man had his arm inside and she could smell dirt and sweat and strangeness.
“I will get you help!” she shouted. “Leave me alone! Get your arm out of my car!”
“Fuck this, I’m gettin’ a rock,” said the man in the overalls, and he half turned away.
“No!” shouted Emma, and she pulled the revolver out of her pocket. “No!”
The man wearing overalls glanced back. When he saw the gun, he turned a greenish-white color, his eyeballs rolled up, and he crashed to the ground.
Eddie, watching her, considered taking his arm out of the window. He felt pretty stupid with it stuck in there, anyway. But then a whole lot of stuff went through his head, very fast. And the thing that stuck there, the thing that mattered, was that what he was seeing in the face of this person was his doom.
He gazed at Emma with extraordinary tenderness and thrust his arm farther into the car, his hand, she thought, seeking the lock on the door.
“No,” said Emma. “Please.” And she shut her eyes, averted her face, and fired.
53
THE WINDOW SHATTERED, spraying Emma with hard-edged pieces of glass. The roar made by the firing of the revolver went on and on. Emma sat in the driver’s seat, shaking and weeping, her eyes still tightly closed. The revolver had flown out of her hand. She wiped that hand again and again on her jacket, crying out. She didn’t know what she was saying. She couldn’t hear herself, she couldn’t hear anything but the roar. It was as if a bomb had gone off in the car. Maybe I’m hurt, she thought. Her eyes flew open and she looked quickly down at herself, but saw no sign of injury.
But oh, God, what about the big man with the red hair… ?
Her heart was pounding so hard… Maybe that’s what’s making the roaring noise, she thought, maybe it’s my heart.
She scrabbled for the seat belt release, her hands shaking so much she was afraid for a moment she wouldn’t be able to do it, that she’d have to sit there for eternity, in hell or in purgatory, forever unable to flee the scene of her crime. But finally the seat belt popped free. Emma scrambled across the passenger seat, unlocked the door and opened it, and fell out onto the ground.
She lay on the grass that met the shoulder of the road, facing the car. On the other side she could see two inert bodies. It was only right, she thought, that she lie there with them, separated from them only by the width of the car, until somebody came along who knew what to do in situations like this: somebody who could take charge of the bodies, all three of them. And the gun too. She felt her breath on her hand and the wetness of tears that continued to fall. She stared hard at the two bodies on the other side of the car, willing life into them.
And it worked too. One of them started moving. He got himself up on his hands and knees, leaning over the other one. And then through the roaring Emma heard a shriek and saw him try to stand up, and fall, and try again—and this time he made it, and she saw him stagger away, moving unsteadily as if he was drunk. But the other man kept on lying there, still as a stone.
Finally Emma pushed herself to her feet. She made herself go around the car and look down at the red-haired man. Then she started walking shakily along the edge of the highway.
It took her twenty minutes to get to the Ruby Lake café.
She pushed the door open and stood there with her back to the sun, and for a minute she couldn’t see anything. She blinked several times, and shapes began to emerge: a long counter, several small tables, each with four chairs, linoleum on the floor, a blackboard menu behind the counter.
And Charlie, standing very still and looking at her. He was the only person there. Emma was glad of that.
She saw that his mouth was open and he was saying something.
“I can’t hear you,” she said. Her voice sounded small and distant. “I can’t hear you,” she said loudly. “There’s a big roaring; I can’t hear anything.” She started to move toward him. He slipped around the corner of the counter, so that he was behind it. Oh, damn, I didn’t bring the gun, Emma thought. She sat on one of the counter stools. Why had she wanted to bring the gun, anyway? She looked long and hard at Charlie and placed both hands on the countertop in front of her. She saw for the first time that there was blood on them. She took a napkin from the metal container in front of her and started brushing at her hands.
Charlie took one, too, and dampened it at the sink behind him. He reached out and put his hand against the nape of Emma’s neck. She hoped very much that he wasn’t planning to kiss her.
“I don’t want you to kiss me, Charlie. I never liked being kissed by you, I’m afraid.”
She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. With his right hand he started wiping her face, very gently, and she saw blood stain the napkin, saw tiny chunks of glass falling as he wiped.
“I wouldn’t have done it, Charlie, I think,” she said. “I don’t think I would have done that to Helena.” She spoke loudly, pushing each word separately through the world of noise in which she was trapped. She didn’t say anything more. She lived in the roar of noise, and felt flicks of pain ripple across her face, and looked into Charlie’s eyes and didn’t know him.
When he was finished, he leaned very close and said, “What happened?”
“I shot somebody.” She started to shake again. “Dead.” She pulled her jacket closely around her, causing her hands to sting. “It was an accident. You better call the police.”
After he made the call, Charlie poured her some coffee, and poured some for himself too. He came around the counter to sit next to her. He put his left hand over her right hand, and Emma looked curiously at thi
s, her small pale hand covered almost completely by Charlie’s larger brown one. She gazed into his face. She could ask him about her picture now. She was pretty sure he’d tell her just about anything she wanted to know. She could ask him why he’d put the gun in the night table drawer.
“I wonder if this roaring in my head will ever go away,” she said. She withdrew her hand from under Charlie’s, and took off her wedding ring, and her jade ring, and her silver bracelet. She put them down in front of her. After a while she slid them along the countertop to Charlie. “I don’t want these anymore.”
Charlie started to protest, then he turned quickly to look out the window, and Emma did, too, and saw the police car. They stood up.
“Charlie,” she said, and he turned back to her. “Please come to the house at your earliest convenience. And pack up all your things.”
54
“I’LL DO IT FOR you,” said Sanducci.
“What?” said Kathy, amazed. They were sitting in the hospital waiting room. Kathy was wearing clothes brought to her by Norah Gibbons—shorts and a T-shirt and a pair of thongs.
“Yeah,” said Sanducci, who was keeping her company until her parents arrived. “I’ll do it. I mean, somebody has to. It might as well be me.”
“I thought…my mom and dad and I would… ”
“Come on, Miss Schofield. You don’t want to go back in that house.”
“No, I don’t want to… ”
“So let me do it. I’m off duty in a couple of hours. I’ll take care of it then.” He watched her push her hair away from the side of her face. He was very relieved that she was no longer in danger.
