A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  DeMarco looked up at him, his eyes wet, as were Ben’s. “That’s never going to happen.”

  Ben nodded. Sniffed. “Vee told her that. We just thought you should know where her head is right now.”

  “I appreciate it,” DeMarco said. He remained still for a few moments, then slid around to face the steering wheel.

  Ben said, “You mind if I follow you guys partway home? Just to make sure you’re keeping it between the lines?”

  “I don’t mind,” DeMarco said, and tried for an appreciative smile, but felt as if he might throw up.

  Ninety-Four

  Twenty-five minutes later, DeMarco and Jayme were alone in his car, heading east. Ben’s car followed to within a mile of DeMarco’s house, then Ben flashed his high beams in DeMarco’s rearview mirror, slowed and made a U-turn, and headed for the interstate and Ohio.

  Both DeMarco and Jayme were wearing sunglasses, the sun bright in their eyes, the glare still sharp and jagged through tinted glass. He thought she had glanced a couple of times at the roll of paper lying up against the windshield behind the instrument panel, but she didn’t ask any questions, so he didn’t volunteer any answers. She held a small pink cloth bag on her lap, the one Vee had carried into the room earlier that morning—held it in a puzzling way, he thought, with both hands cupped beneath it. Originally he had assumed the bag held some kind of gift, a tea mug and bags of chamomile tea, a small box of chocolates, maybe a book full of aphorisms and inspirational verses. But the way she held it, cradling it, suggested something else.

  She saw him looking at the bag, and said, “Vee gave this to me before I left the room.”

  There was such a solemn quality to the tone of her voice, at once full of both sorrow and something else, maybe gratitude, that he took another quick glance at the bag, then into her eyes. His foot, by its own volition, eased off the accelerator. “What is it?” he asked.

  She put out a hand, laid it atop his thigh. “Our baby,” she said.

  A brief, cold shiver seized him. He heard his own sharp inhalation. Then let his right hand fall from the steering wheel to cover hers. Got his breathing under control. And asked, “How does that work?”

  “It doesn’t look like a baby,” she told him. “Just like a tiny seed. You can see it if you want to.”

  He wasn’t sure if he wanted to or not. Wasn’t sure if she should have seen it. “So, what, uh…”

  “Vee said it’s helpful sometimes, you know? To have a little ceremony for it? Just you and me. Though she said they would come if we want them to.”

  “A burial?” he said.

  She nodded. “Vee did it with her first baby. I don’t know if Ben told you or not. That she had a miscarriage too.”

  He shook his head no. Swallowed what felt like a small stone of calcified spit. Felt that stone lodge in the center of his chest, cold and sharp, stealing his breath.

  She said, “I’m so glad Vee was there for me. Otherwise the hospital would have just… I can’t stand the thought of that. I don’t care how small it is. It’s still our baby, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. Swallowed again. “Do you think it will help?” he asked. “If we have a burial for it?”

  She nodded. Slid her left hand away from his and cupped the bottom of the bag again. Protecting it. “I think it would.”

  “Then we should do that,” he told her, and laid his hand on her thigh. “Let’s do that.”

  She lifted the small cloth bag a bit, held it against her belly. He blinked, tried to clear his vision. Tried his best to see the road ahead.

  Coda

  At times I will awaken in the stillness of the night, ensconced in darkness,

  and I will thank the silence for all that I have, and for the gift of another day,

  and I will find myself wrapped in emotions that should not exist together but do,

  and I will know in those moments the very essence of our Creator:

  an insatiable longing; an unassailable grief;

  a profound gratitude; a transcendent joy.

  —from the notebooks of Thomas Huston

  Ninety-Five

  There was always a letdown after a case got solved. After all the congratulations and backslapping. All the figurative applause. But this time was different. After what had happened to Jayme, and what had almost happened to her… There was no letdown this time. There was a crash.

  Jayme went straight to bed when they returned home on Saturday. Put on a pair of silky pajamas and swallowed two tablets from the little orange vial that had been in the pink bag, crawled under the sheet and took a small wooden box out of the bag and tucked it against her side. DeMarco lay with her for a while, the small box between them, but he could not sleep. He thought about all the ways he could put himself to sleep, all of his old remedies, but rejected every one of them as a form of cheating. It was fine for Jayme to sleep, but his job was to stand guard against the darkness, even at one in the afternoon.

  Both he and Jayme had turned off their phones in the hospital, so he, after a long shower—first warm in an unsuccessful attempt to wash out the chill beneath his skin, and then cold as an act of defiance against that chill—sat on the edge of the back porch and turned his phone on again. Immediately the notices for missed calls, phone messages and texts beeped in, many from numbers he did not recognize. He listened only to the messages from people he knew, guys from Troop D, from Ben and Olcott and even Fascetti. For some reason Fascetti’s halting, awkward message nearly brought him to tears.

  “Hey, brother. I just wanted to say…you know, you guys did a hell of a job. Above and beyond. I owe you a beer. Couple of beers. When you’re feeling up to it, I’d like to take you and your partner out to dinner. I’ve got a wife who will come too. Bet you didn’t know I’m married, did you? Probably thought nobody could stand me, huh? Anyway, the reason I called. I’m betting if we all put our heads together, we can wrap up the Talarico case too while we’re at it. Our guy in OSP, I know we can make him sing. Track down the girlfriend, make her an offer she can’t refuse. And you’ll see that I was right too. Costa did it. Not a doubt in the world. It’s a thought anyway. We’d be glad to have you and your lady giving us a hand. So anyway… I mean Jesus Christ, man. I’m so freaking sorry about what happened to Jayme. Sheriff thought we needed to know; I hope you don’t mind. Don’t blame him if you do, okay? You know I think she’s a hell of woman. Just don’t tell her I said so. Ha. She’s going to be okay, though, don’t you worry. She’s tough as nails. You probably know that already. Okay, man. That’s all. That’s all I have to say.”

  The rest of the calls were more of the same, equally awkward, equally touching. Only the second message from Ben was matter-of-fact.

  “Listen, I didn’t want to bring this up at the hospital, but I informed the victims’ families that you got the guy. The guy who actually, physically, did it all. And all three families agree. With or without Khatri—who we’re going to get sooner or later, you can take that to the bank—they want you and Jayme to have the reward money. You deserve every penny of it. Three families, Ryan. Three families are going to sleep a little easier tonight because of what you and Jayme did. I just wanted you guys to know that.”

  Hearing that statement—The guy who actually, physically, did it all—DeMarco remembered Ben’s admonition in the hospital parking lot; he remembered the rolled-up papers still in his car. He stood and walked as briskly across the yard as he could, his feet in white socks, no shoes, opened the door and climbed in, unfurled the pages and read. Sweat beaded on his forehead and dripped down his neck. Connor’s description of killing Brenner. Connor’s description of killing Hufford. And the final piece, out of sequence, Connor’s description of Samantha Lewis’s death:

  Okay, I’m going to write about Venus now. Not as an example of True Will, though. Not mine anyway. Just the opposite. But maybe if I make myself write about i
t, I’ll stop remembering it all the time. I have to get it out of my head one way or another. Magus said the best way is to write it all down.

  So Dashwood came across some article a while back about how peak experiences in altered consciousness will actually show decreased brain activity, not more. So we’d been playing around with that idea ever since. We started out with just the mushrooms and sex, then started doing the elevator while on shrooms, and then having sex while we were still spacey from doing the elevator.

  Here DeMarco stopped reading, took out his phone and asked it, “What does it mean to do the elevator?”

  He scrolled through several irrelevant responses before happening upon a bit of conversation in a forum on erotic asphyxiation: “I had to ask myself the same thing, bro. But once you do it, you’ll want to every time. It’s not as intense as being choked but tons safer. I hear it’s not particularly good for the brain cells, but what is? I mean, we’ve all heard stories about people dying from it, but who knows if they’re true or not? Anyway, you just pull everybody into a huddle, then you all squat down and stand up again, squat and stand, squat and stand in a steady rhythm, hyperventilating the whole time, everybody all synced up. Eventually the huddle will fall apart and you’ll be laying there on the floor feeling like you’re floating through deep space.”

  DeMarco’s face got twisted. He blew out a breath, shook his head back and forth. “What the hell is wrong with people?” he muttered, and then went back to reading Connor’s entry:

  Then a couple of us, actually everybody except Becca, tried using plastic bags over our heads during sex. Dashwood kept ramping things up, coming up with new things to try. He never forced anybody to do something they didn’t want to do, but he’d let you know you were falling short if you didn’t at least try it a couple of times. Venus would do anything he wanted.

  So one night I get a call from Dashwood to bring him over a bag of shrooms, just enough for him and Venus. I get there and he has her laid out on the sofa bed, naked and spread-eagled. Usually I give him the shrooms and he tells me to hit the road, but this night he says hang around, he’s going to need an extra set of hands. Which tells me he’s ramping things up again. What he wants is for me to hold a bag closed around his throat while he’s holding one closed around hers.

  I hated watching his big ugly body having sex with her. I wanted to be the one giving her pleasure. Maybe that’s why I started squeezing a little too hard, because of the wanting and the hating, and maybe that caused him to squeeze harder too. It kills me to think I might be responsible for what he did to her. All I know is that as soon as he went over on his side, I ripped off his bag and then went for hers. But she was too still. I mean her chest wasn’t moving at all, whereas Dashwood was laying there moaning and pulling his dick trying to make himself cum. It was one of the ugliest things I’d ever seen. Cutting up Brenner didn’t even compare to how ugly this was. Pretty soon I’m screaming at him and punching him and he gets up on his feet eventually and knocks me against the wall. And then I don’t know how many minutes passed with us just breathing and not moving a muscle, just trying to wrap our heads around what had happened and what we were going to do about it.

  He had me help carry her upstairs and put her in the shower. He soaped her up from head to toe, washed every inch of her clean. Didn’t want any trace of himself left on her. When he had her out and on the bathroom floor and getting her dried, he told me to bring her clothes up from the basement so we could dress her. His plan was to drive her car somewhere, and put her in it with the bag over her head as if she’d done it to herself. But while I was down in the basement I called Magus and told him what happened. I just wanted him to tell me to get the hell out of there and never go back. But he surprised me. He said I had to clean up my own messes. He said to make it look like the job I did on Brenner. To get some hair or something of Dashwood’s and plant it with the plastic bag on her body after laying Venus out and cutting her up where somebody would find her. I didn’t want to do any of it. Not to her. But Magus said it was the only way. Two murders, both pointing to Dashwood. Magus had always planned on at least two anyway, and then he’d tip off the police to Dashwood’s little cult, and get him sent away forever.

  It didn’t take much to convince Dashwood that making it look just like Brenner’s was the way to go. Anything to keep himself out of the picture, or so he thought. He even said he was proud of me for thinking it up. He asked if I could get hold of a saw somewhere, and said if I had to buy one he would pay me back whatever it cost. I just wanted to spit in his ugly face. I had to settle for pulling some hairs out of his brush in the bathroom.

  Thing is, when push came to shove, I couldn’t dishonor Venus by stripping her naked and ripping her apart. I started, I tried, but I couldn’t go through with it. I just couldn’t. And when I went back to Magus’s place that night and told him, I was ready to take a beating if I had to. Anything would have been easier than cutting her up. He just looked at me, those dark eyes of his full of disgust, and said I owed him another body. I had to do it all again, and soon, if I had any hope of earning back his trust. And that’s why I did Hufford. Cutting him up was the easiest thing in the world. I didn’t want to stop.

  Ninety-Six

  Jayme awoke early in the evening. He opened a can of chicken noodle soup, sat with her while she ate a third of it, and filled her in on all the good wishes from the phone messages. “Ben said he had to make a statement to the press, asked if we wanted to be there for it. I sent him a text, told him to count us out. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  “There will probably be something on the news tonight if you want to watch it.”

  She shook her head no. Swallowed a spoonful of cloudy broth. Then asked, “How are you feeling? Are you in pain?”

  He shrugged. “What’s a human being doing with a tailbone anyway? I mean we’ve been standing upright for how long now? Two, three million years? And we’re still part animal?”

  She smiled, said nothing, swallowed another spoonful of broth.

  He considered asking if she wanted to know how the case was playing out, but she seemed to have little interest in anything at all, every smile and blink and movement slowed. It could wait, he decided. Everything could wait.

  Later she slept with her head in his lap as he sat on the sofa watching an old movie on TCM. Bogart was holding Bette Davis and Leslie Howard hostage in a diner in the Petrified Forest. Howard is a penniless, disillusioned writer; Bette’s a lonely waitress. Bogart is a ruthless killer, of course, and all of them are stuck in the desert during the Great Depression. There are other characters too, there are always other characters, but the story is about those three. In the end, Howard orchestrates his own death at the hands of Bogart so that Bette can join her negligent mother in France. DeMarco thought it an overly talky story, noir existentialism stirred up with sappy romanticism. All the loose ends tied up with a bow. Final justice for the bad guys, and happiness for those who deserve it.

  DeMarco didn’t buy it. He found the movie as entertaining as a bruised tailbone.

  But even after he turned the TV off, even after he half carried a half-sleeping Jayme back to the bed, he remembered a couple of lines he liked, spoken by the disillusioned writer. “Any woman’s worth everything that any man has to give…that’s the whole excuse for our existence. It’s what makes the whole thing possible and tolerable.”

  DeMarco lay in bed and felt Jayme’s warmth beside him, and mumbled the lines over and over again, repeating them like a mantra that might eventually lull him to sleep.

  Ninety-Seven

  Sunday morning. DeMarco lay in bed, uncovered, sweating despite the air conditioner. The sunlight coming through the curtains was bright and too warm, as if that wasn’t morning light on the other side of the glass but a raging fire, the entire world combusting, and now the flames were about to break through and engulf t
hem too.

  He knew she was awake. He could feel it. Knew she was lying there with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling, feeling what she must be feeling. He knew that emptiness, the one that comes after too much sedation, and the one that comes after loss. The first kind was a good one to know, he supposed, so that you could learn to avoid it. But the second one… He would never wish it on anybody, least of all on her. He didn’t want it to change her, but knew that it would. Knew there was nothing he could do to erase it from her. And that helplessness, that knowledge—it felt like a hundred extra pounds of misery in his bones.

  Get up, he told himself, but could not move.

  You’re worthless, he told himself. Get up!

  And managed to roll onto his side, face the curtains, dare the fire to incinerate him.

  He sat up finally. Set his bare feet on the floor.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  The hoarseness of her voice stabbed his heart. And the fact that her first thought was for him. God, he just wanted to fall onto the floor. Crawl under the bed and never come out.

  The curtains shimmered behind a veil of water, but his tears did nothing to extinguish the fire. Without turning, he reached a hand backward, touched her arm. She took his hand and gripped it hard. “I’ll make us some coffee,” he said.

  She held tight to his hand. “Don’t go yet, babe.”

  And now he turned, and slid off the bed to kneel facing her, and leaned forward across the bed, pressed his mouth to her hand still holding his.

  Then he lifted his eyes to hers. Her eyes were red, inflamed, and shimmering. Yet she smiled. And in so doing, she weakened and emptied and strengthened and filled him with that smile.

  “We need to move,” he told her. “We need to get out of here as soon as we can. Out of this house, out of this state.”