Colette laughed. Her smile hovered above him. It was wild, glowing. Kane could tell by her laugh that he had caught her off guard.
“Look, maybe I’m wrong about Mercer,” she said. “You know him, I don’t. But, like I said, you sit here all night, staring at these walls, and you start to think about all kinds of things. Jorge won’t even let me work my shifts anymore. Some kid came in two nights ago, asked me questions about Larry. After that Jorge told me it was too dangerous to have me behind the bar, that I’d have to sit it out till this all blew over or something was done.”
“What kid?” Kane said.
“He told me his name was Tommy Miller. He was big, not Jolly Green Giant big, but big, you know, bigger than us. He walked with a limp. I just assumed that he was the private investigator you had talked to, or that he worked for him.”
“I haven’t seen anyone with a limp. Not yet, anyway.”
“Yeah, well, you’re pretty close to walking with one yourself. How’s your head feel?”
“It hurts. But it’s been hurting since I woke up today, so at least I’m maintaining a status quo.”
“You should get some sleep. You should rest.”
Kane looked again at the walls, the ceiling, thought of Meg, for some reason, felt—despite his condition, despite where he was, who he was with, what had been said and done—a tugging low in his gut, a yearning, a need for something.
“You know, you’re right about these walls,” he said after a moment.
“Maybe it’s because they’re so blank. We tend to want to fill in the blanks, don’t we? Or cover them over.”
“Melville’s whale,” Kane said.
Colette looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Moby Dick. What we project onto blank spaces tells us everything about who we are.”
Colette said nothing, just watched his face.
“I need to get something from my office,” he announced after a moment.
“What?”
He shrugged. “Just something. I can’t leave it there for anyone to find.”
“We can go back first thing in the morning. Get in before anyone shows up.”
“Maybe I should go alone.”
“No, I’ll go with you.”
“Shouldn’t you stay here, where it’s safe?”
“It’s just to the college and back. It’ll be all right. I need to get out.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. The building will still be locked up that early. Do you have a key?”
“I think maybe they gave me one back when I started. If they had, it’s in my Jeep, in the console between my seats. I’m usually still asleep when the first class starts. Usually asleep when it ends, too.”
“Nice life.”
Kane nodded. “It was, yeah.” He waited a moment, then said, “Are you tired?”
“I’m fucking beat.”
“Maybe you should sleep, too.”
“Is there room there?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Colette got up and turned off the light. In an instant the room was dark, as dark nearly as the chapel had been. Kane lay there and listened as Colette came back and moved in beside him on the narrow bed. He could sense that she was trying to be careful, trying to jostle the worn mattress as little as possible. He waited till she settled in—on her right side, facing him—then relaxed as best as his injuries would allow. It was cold in the room, except for where her warm breath touched the side of his face. She lay her hand on his stomach, low, just above the waistband of his jeans. “Is that okay?” she said. “Does it hurt?” He told her it didn’t, wondered then if maybe she felt the same tug in her stomach that he had felt moments ago in his, if in general she knew the same need in the night as he. He could hear her breathing, and as he listened to it his eyes got used to the weak light that made it in through the dirty rectangle of window across the small room. Canal light. White-blue. He could see her face then, the shape of it anyway, make out her features, some better than others. Her brown eyes caught this ghostly light, reflected it in a liquid kind of way. Kane thought of water, didn’t want to think of that, pushed it out of his mind. Always there, always just a thought away. He reached for something to replace that thought, anything, remembered staring at Colette’s eyes all semester, forcing himself to look away from them again and again and again. Now, though, this close, her face this close to his, and no reason anymore to look away. Who would care now? Who could say anything?
He let himself feel her breathing for a long time, feel it touch his face, disappear, then touch it again—warmth, cool, warmth, cool. Steady, unending. He listened to it, heard only it. Maybe he fell asleep for a while. He had no idea how long. Maybe she had fallen asleep, too. But when he realized again where he was, who this was beside him, how much he needed to forget, he rolled his head to the side and faced her, found her lips in the dark. He felt her mouth open slightly, immediately, felt right away the same hunger, the same need, felt his tongue fall in to meet hers, fall into a dark, cool cave . . .
They kissed like that for a long time. Like two kids. Kane couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten lost like that, the last time he had lost all sense of time in just making out, all sense of anything but where his body touched another in the darkness, where that body touched his. Lips and tongues and hands, small sounds. After a while, though, Colette leaned back and began to undress him. Without a word, without urgency. It was just time now. She took off his shoes, the shoes Gregor had given him to wear, then undid his jeans, never letting her stare, that stare of hers, break for too long. Eyes on his, a quick glance down at her hands as she fussed with a button, then eyes back on him, a soft smile, a knowing smile. She pulled one leg free, then the other, dropped his jeans to the wood floor, where she had just a moment before dropped both shoes. Kane was still on his back, unable to move much, his shirt unbuttoned and spread open. She left it as it was, removed the damp towel that covered his chest, tossed it away, then she sat up on the edge of the bed and pulled her shirt over her head. One smooth, elegant motion. She undid her bra, dropped it to the floor, stood, kicked off her shoes as she unzipped her jeans, let them fall by the weight of the change in her pockets to her ankles. She stepped out of them, first her right foot, then her left, never once coming near to losing her balance. Her legs were long and smooth. Lean. She hooked the straps at the sides of her black lace thong with her thumbs, bent forward and pulled down, stepping out of that, too, with the same assuredness, the same grace. That alone was reason enough to want her. When she stood up again, he could see her tight dancer’s back in the weak light, see the long bands of muscles, the line of her straight spine. Soft skin and dark shadows. He saw her long, elegant neck, wanted to kiss it, wanted to hold the back of it as he pulled her face to his and kissed her lips. He didn’t care at all now about making sense of any of this, of anything. He only cared about his senses, what he could see before him, and the pleasure that was now just a moment away.
Colette turned and faced him, so he could see her, stood there in the muted light, not posing, just standing there, hands hanging at her sides. Olive skin, breasts that were surprisingly full for a dancer, nipples hard in the cold.
“Go ahead, drink it in,” she whispered.
Finally she came back to bed and straddled him, moving as carefully as before. She settled above him, leaning over him, resting her hands lightly on his shoulders. He felt her pubic hair brush against his. She asked again if he was okay. He nodded that he was, would have nodded even if he wasn’t, who was he kidding? Not long after this he became aware that she was smiling, suddenly and wildly, at something, a thought, something. He heard the smile more than saw it, heard it above him in the darkness, heard her lips part and a soft, quick half sigh, half laugh. A giggle, girlish, yes, and yet . . .
“What?” he whispered.
“I just can’t help myself,” she whispered back. “I like my men helpless.”
She sounded, of all thi
ngs, happy. She reached between his legs with her hand. He felt her fingers search for him, felt them wrap around him as she aligned herself with him. Then she leaned back and sank down—one smooth, merciful thrust, and there he was, inside her. They gasped together, once. Neither moved for a moment after that. Stunned, like two birds that had flown into a window. There was nothing else in the world but this here, this now, Kane thought. He gave himself over to his overwhelming conviction that the world had fled them both. They lingered, motionless, letting the moment last, the moment that had made them gasp. The rest would come, of course it would, but first this, first this feeling. Finally Colette began to rock back and forth. Gently, searching for more now, more than just that first sensation, that first rush. Kane slipped even more deeply inside her. They both gasped again. Colette smiled, above him. So happy.
He stopped thinking then, stopped thinking in words, anyway. After a moment her hands left his shoulders and she leaned forward, resting her elbows on the mattress. Her face was above his now, her hard breasts—colder even than the air—pinned between them, pressing onto his chest. He felt pain, not a lot but enough that his mouth opened. Immediately Colette sealed her lips around it, before a sound could get out. It stuck in his throat but he didn’t care. She kissed him, deeply, her dark hair falling around his face like a curtain, shrouding out all hint of the canal light.
Her felt her biting his lip, hard, felt the greed building in her, felt them moving together toward the same dark place, the same precious, fevered amnesia.
Kane awoke with a start and turned his head, looked for the small rectangle of window that overlooked the canal. Through it, a dark sky only just beginning to pale. Or was it maybe a pale sky just beginning to darken? He had made that mistake once before. He checked his watch: 6:15 AM. Looking at the window again, he could see that it was definitely the first moments of a slow winter dawn outside. He was relieved; they hadn’t overslept. First real light was maybe a half hour away. Plenty of time to get Meg’s tape from his office and get back here before the sun broke over the horizon.
He woke Colette. There would have been no way not to even if he had tried. Her left leg was over his legs, her arms across his stomach. She opened her eyes. They looked tired but no less intense. She smiled at him, fondly. Not a bad way to start a day. She asked what time it was. A morning whisper, intimate. He told her, then got up and found his clothes and began to dress. He had stiffened up during the night, bad, so dressing wasn’t easy, particularly when he tried put on the black shoes. But he did his best to hide all that from Colette. She moved even more slowly. Not a morning person, not that Kane was, but even less so for her, it seemed. He remembered when he was a bartender, going to bed at dawn, sleeping well past noon, writing in the afternoon, working on his book till his shift. A ghoul’s life, his ex-wife, Patricia, had called it. When he was finally dressed, Kane went to the window and looked down at the canal, to see if the lights had gone out yet. They had. The predawn looked barren, rising gray washing over diminishing black. It seemed somehow colder out there, if that was possible, colder than the day before had been, and the day before that, and the day before that. He wondered if, when they returned here, would they crawl back into her bed, for warmth, for more sleep, for lack of anything else to do? He wondered if he would be here with her tonight, if they would repeat what they had done last night, and then repeat that, too. So much to forget, to push away. For the both of them. And nowhere else to go. But a lot could happen between now and then. Kane had to acknowledge that. The world, his world, was in flux. Nothing was as it should be, no one, it turned out, was as they had once seemed.
Kane thought about Mercer, tried to put it out of his head. Too early, too confusing. What if Colette was right? Anything was possible, even the impossible. What then? What then? His mind went to Meg, had known it would sooner or later. He thought about her waking up beside her husband in the next hour, walking around her kitchen naked, looking out at her tranquil bay, getting ready for her day’s work. Kane could barely remember the last time he was there with her. How many days had it been? Or would it be better to ask how few days? No, not better, Kane thought. However long it had or hadn’t been, Meg may as well have been in another country, there may as well have been countless guarded borders between them, no easy way back, if any at all. The one thing she didn’t want was trouble. She’d made that clear, had everything to lose. Kane now had nothing but troubles. He’d have to stay away, regardless of what he had done last night, and might do again tonight. For her sake, for the sake of whatever future there still might be for them, he needed to stay clear of her.
But whatever he felt about her at that moment, whatever feelings were still strong, whatever feelings were maybe slipping, whatever trouble he was in, he had promised her that the tape would not come back to haunt her. He wanted to keep his word, to rest easy about that when he could rest, and face whatever it was ahead of him knowing he had at least done that much right, done that for her.
Kane looked back at Colette. She was dressed, had her shoes on, her coat across her lap. But by the way she was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring off, Kane knew something was on her mind. Her expression was complex, a direct contrast to the smile and look of pleasure he had seen in the dark above him last night.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
She looked up at him. “I was thinking about something,” she said softly.
“What?”
“Larry.”
Kane said nothing. He watched her, watched the expression on her face. She looked pained now, as if she was on the verge of some kind of realization, one she’d really rather not have.
“What do you think they did to him?”
“I don’t know,” Kane said. “I don’t really want to think about it, though.”
She waited a moment, nodding absently, then said, “You know, maybe I should make an anonymous call to the cops, like you said. Let them know where Dean lives, what I know.”
“What about talking to a lawyer?”
“I told you, I don’t have the money for that.”
“Maybe we can find one who’ll do it for free. Or at least for cheap.”
“Who?”
Kane shrugged. “I don’t know.” The only lawyer he knew was Meg’s husband. That wasn’t exactly promising, though, was it?
“Anyway, I can’t imagine the DA just letting me walk away from this. I mean not even with everything I could tell him. I think legally I’m as guilty of murder as Dean and the Professor are. The DA would offer me a plea maybe, but not straight-out immunity. Certainly not with any lawyer who works for free trying to make the deal.”
“You can’t be guilty of murder if you didn’t know they were going to kill the boys.”
“I should have known, though. That’s what they’ll say. Especially after Brian.”
“He was the second boy you chose.”
“Yeah.”
Kane wondered how she knew him, how she came to choose him, to lure him. He wondered, too, to what lengths he would go if someone had something on him, had him by the balls.
“Dean was blackmailing you,” he said. “That should make a difference.”
“When the cops realize who I really am, it won’t matter.”
“What do you mean, who you really are?”
She was too deep in thought to answer. Or maybe that was her way of avoiding the question. She seemed to have a real gift for that.
“If they arrest him,” Colette said finally, “they will come looking for me. There’s no doubt about that. If they do arrest him but he ends up for some reason walking free, he’ll be looking for me. Either way, I’ll have to leave here.”
Kane couldn’t help himself any longer. “What exactly is it you’ve done that’s so horrible, Colette?”
“Just trouble in my past.”
“With drugs.”
She nodded. “Among other things.”
“What other things?”
“Does
it matter?”
“It might.”
“We’ve got all day to talk about this.” She nodded toward the window and stood. “We should get going before it gets too light out.”
“Maybe I should go to the campus alone. Maybe you should stay here.”
“No, I want to do this. If I sit around and stare at the walls and think, I’ll go out of my mind. I’ll just think more and more about poor Larry and what they did to him.”
She looked at Kane as she put her coat on. Her eyes were soft with sorrow, glassy, tired. Kane remembered seeing her eyes in the dark a few hours before, how, reflecting the canal light, they had looked watery, and what seeing them like that had reminded him of. His son’s death wasn’t his fault, and still he could barely live with it, could barely hang on to anything good, even now, four years later. He could not imagine what his life would be if he had been to blame, even in the smallest way. Colette was facing something close to that now, facing having to imagine the unimaginable, a life of knowing someone—two people—were dead because of you, had suffered because of you. A life of guilt and regret, a life of nights in the dark, trying to forget.
“Where would you go?” Kane said. “If you left, where would you go?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I’d have to leave here, I know that much. I couldn’t just move to a different town. I’d need to go somewhere far away.”
Kane let himself imagine that, imagine a place far away, a room or an apartment in some small town or unknown city, a life away from all this, away from everything, good and bad, that he’d ever known. He wondered then what would have happened had he found a teaching job elsewhere—upstate New York, Iowa, New Mexico, Kansas. Anywhere but back here, where he had started, where his onetime hero had blazed a trail of infamous self-destruction. Worn paths are so easy to follow. Too easy. Mercer had been right about that much.
“Why do you ask?” Colette said.
“Just curious.”
She waited a moment, studying him, then said, “You could come with me, if you wanted. We could be two writers living in exile together. We could get jobs, write, read. We could tell people whatever we wanted to tell them about ourselves. Nothing more, nothing less than what we wanted to tell them.”
The Darkest Place Page 21
