Honey

by Brenda Brooks

  My mother, the woman I had wanted to escape since I was a teenager, was now with me always. And especially at night, in dreams. I’d wake on some shadowy side road several dreamland miles from daylight, and thank god Honey would be waiting up ahead. She’d pull me into her arms, her lips next to my ear, and draw me in with those recipes of hers as she had at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen while I lay in bed with the phone pressed against my ear. It was like a recitation of some kind or Honey’s version of a prayer, if she had believed in such things — her voice lulling me with tales of assorted aromas and things being blended and pounded and how they transform each other after coming into contact with heat. She’d be quiet for a while and then start again with tales of ground pepper, bread soaked in milk, chili peppers, paprika, bitter chocolate, and how a sauce would liaise with all sorts of ingredients, without any need of flour, and produce an endless variety of subtle results. I saw the magic of it all. And soon the remorse I felt about my mother would drift out of reach, at least for a while, and my reluctance to sleep was transformed into an inability to stay awake. And then: nothing, which was, at that moment, the equal of yet another form of bliss that Honey had given me.

  * * *

  She died in early November. Honey and I were living together at Havenhurst by then, which was just as well because I couldn’t bring myself to go back to Montague Street. I know it’s a pathetic cliché to say, but the ghosts, you know? Not that a cliched horror trope was necessary. The bloodstain on my mother’s bedroom rug was enough to stop me cold. The vase, those feathers; I could set them back on the window ledge, but I couldn’t make things right. I wanted to go back to that last day sitting across from each other. I’d spill the truth about everything and she’d tell me how to handle it, without seeming to. And then I’d play something she loved, something elegant and difficult, like her. And she’d see how I hadn’t let my chops get ruined by that crass casino of mine.

  I had agreed to fill in at the Crescendo that night — a half-assed attempt to get my mind off things. They called the condo about 11 in the evening and Honey drove out to the casino to break the news to me.

  I had about twenty minutes left and I saw her come in, sit down, order a drink. I tried a Billie Holiday number that night, “You Go to My Head,” but just the piano arrangement. I didn’t have the balls to sing it. Someone had requested “You Send Me” so I made my way through that, preoccupied, and then joined her at the bar.

  She handed me a double shot of scotch. I think I’d known my mother was dead all through my last number. Honey never came to see me work, and if she did, she never would have worn an old windbreaker thrown over a T-shirt and pair of washed-out jeans. Ryan, the bartender, poured the drink into a paper cup, and we drove to the care facility, rode the elevator up to room 416, and said goodbye even though she was already gone, because that’s what you do.

  You might have thought that I’d be incapable of feeling anything but despair that night, that I would yearn for nothing more than the merciful oblivion of sleep. I think Honey thought so too, because she did everything but brew up some hot chocolate and read me a bedtime recipe.

  But that’s not what I wanted. I wanted her, exactly as she’d shown me how to want her every night since that first time, except that now despair blended with desire and I ached to be driven, forcibly if necessary, out of my mind. She understood and took me there.

  10.

  The last Thursday in November I played a double set at the Crescendo, 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. — a list of holiday favorites and pop along with a bit of smooth jazz. I was distracted all evening because Honey had been campaigning for the two of us to get away, fly off on some kind of holiday. Or as she put it, “It’s been a fucking horrible run of bad luck. Let’s go see if we can shake things up in Vegas.” When I asked if she thought all those glittering streets and gambling halls could be an antidote to a fucking horrible run of bad luck she said she didn’t see how it could hurt and went ahead and booked a flight for early December. “Seven long days at a garish, overpriced hotel in the heart of fantasy-land,” she said, and reminded me that we never had to leave the hotel, if that’s what I wanted. Our room had an expansive view of the endless desert — like a big blank screen. We could switch Vegas on or leave it off.

  At intermission that night I noticed that she had called my cell around 8, so I dialed her back. It rang four times and then went to voicemail. I tried her again later during a break, no answer; I figured she’d gone to bed and didn’t want to wake her.

  All the way back to the condo that night I thought about Vegas. I decided she was right. How could it hurt to visit an adult playground for a week? It might be a treat to walk around a casino, the real thing, without working. I started to get into the idea, rather than just go along.

  Havenhurst was the usual black column against the night sky. I didn’t expect any lights because of the late hour, so I was surprised to see an amber square floating on the fifth floor. I pictured her wrapped in the comforter, watching a movie and waiting for me — one of my own all-time favorite “studies” of her, matted and framed and forever hung up in my mind.

  The comforter was the first thing I saw when I came through the door. But Honey wasn’t in it. It lay on the floor in a heap next to the kitchen. She sat a few feet away, on the sofa, dressed as she had been when I left that evening. She stared at the mound with an expectant look and didn’t break her gaze until I sat down, touched her shoulder, and asked what was going on.

  Her eyes went over my face, her mouth struggling to shape a response. I started to get up, thinking to throw the blanket back and reassure her that whatever was under the comforter, whatever she’d broken, could easily be replaced, but she grabbed my arm and pulled me down next to her.

  “Don’t,” she said. She tried to say something more, gave up, then took my arm and we walked over together. I reached toward the blanket as if to pull it back but she stopped me. “I’ll do it,” she said. “It should be me.”

  A man lay underneath with what appeared to be — what’s the word for a wound like that? Or was it two wounds? Or three? I couldn’t tell. Blood spread over the parquet floor and pooled along the length his body. He wore a pair of khakis and a brown suede jacket and looked to be about forty or so, heavy-set, shaved head and a close-clipped goatee.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” Honey said, a fact so obvious you could only miss it if you were in a different house on another street in a distant town. I pressed my fingers to his neck. His shocked eyes no longer registered any of the agony he must have felt at the height of . . . whatever happened.

  I covered the body and led her back to the sofa. Blood soaked the left leg of her jeans. She had a stain on her neck as well. And welts above her collarbones. I licked my sleeve and dabbed away at the blood on her neck and then gave up and ran some water through a tea towel in the kitchen and brought it back to her. When I asked her what happened, who this man was, she looked at me, at him, and away.

  She touched her ear. “Gold stud,” she said. “He came by just after you left for work. I thought it was you at the door, you’d forgotten something, so I opened up and in he came.” She stood up, seemed to forget why — and sat back down again.

  “He said he wanted me back and wouldn’t take no. I reminded him of our deal, all the money paid back. He said that was bullshit. He’d only agreed so that he could see me again. The $20,000 couldn’t have hurt either, I reminded him. He ignored that and went on about how much he loved me. He said that if I came back I could have anything I wanted, whatever the terms — as if I was some kind of bank transaction, which, let’s face it, I was.” She pressed her hands to her face. “Jesus, Nic. He must have had someone checking up on me because it was obvious he knew about you. He started right in talking shit. ‘When’s lover-girl expected home? How about we party a little, the three of us — like the old days.’” She looked at me, pained, and apologized, as if her racy past was the worst
thing of all. “When I told him to go fuck himself he cornered me in the kitchen and put his hands around my throat. Like this.” The sight of her hands covering the welts on her own neck was too much. I pulled them away.

  “I felt the throb in my temples,” she said, “and heard myself choking. I thought, This is how I’m going to die: at the hands of this mean bastard. And I just couldn’t allow it. I tried to grab a knife out of the block but knocked it over and they all clattered into the sink. So I let him have it with the block and he let go.”

  That’s when she remembered the gun in the back of the junk drawer, crammed in behind the lightbulbs and screwdrivers. I couldn’t recall seeing it there myself. I wondered if I’d ever seen that gun at all. It was almost like a pistol from a movie, and yes, I’d seen the movie but not all the props. I wished she’d gotten rid of it after her mother’s death, but then I thought about what might have happened if she had.

  “He stood there raving about how if I didn’t pack my bags, he’d wait for you to get home, kill the two of us, and then himself. Ordinarily I would have made some smart-ass comment — you know, would you consider reversing the order? But he was high and drunk. And he started on about how he knew someone was following him, the cops, or somebody with fucked-up intentions, or both. He said he’d bought plane tickets. And then he had a closer look at the gun and started laughing. ‘Not that old piece of shit again,’ he said. Then he opened a few buttons on his shirt and invited me to go ahead and shoot him because if I thought that piece of crap could blow a hole bigger than a BB gun I was crazy. He said I was beginning to remind him of my lunatic mother.”

  She got up and began pacing between Aurbuck’s body and the kitchen, then sat down carefully, as if she wasn’t sure the couch would really be there.

  “And Nic? He looked me straight in the eye, the cold bastard, all the while laughing that stupid jerk laugh of his. And he said, ‘That deranged cunt of a mother of yours must have had to squeeze off three shots just to get the job done.’”

  She stared at the comforter. I stared at her. I’m not sure how much time went by. I could feel her grow calm, or something resembling that, as I got more anxious waiting for her to fill in the blank, which she did in the most quiet, steady way imaginable — almost as if the whole terrible event grew ever-smaller in her mind, a tainted kind of blessing, and it was all she could do to call it up for review.

  “And I told him. I said, ‘Call me anything you want, because god knows I deserve it. But leave my mother out of it.’”

  Four, six, ten seconds passed as I waited for her to state the obvious, as if none of it had really happened unless she said it; as if there was still some chance the guy had suddenly realized what an asshole he was and shot himself — three times.

  “And that’s when I shot him.”

  I dug my cell phone out of my jacket, my hands shaking. She asked what I was doing. “I’m calling the police.”

  She took the phone from my hand and placed it on the coffee table. “We can’t call the police, Nic,” she whispered.

  “But this was self-defense. Or the thing might have gone off on its own. That gun was an accident waiting to happen. And now it’s happened!”

  It was as if she didn’t hear me. She said the cops would find out about their relationship and assume she killed him to ensure that he didn’t drag her into his testimony during whatever investigation he’d been going on about.

  “The kind of stuff I was involved in? I’ll be in jail by Thursday. All the old shit was coming home to roost. He wanted me to run away with him. I told you: I was just as fucking horrible as he was.” She said she knew a thing or two about short-term incarceration and wasn’t going back for the long version.

  “But you didn’t murder him,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter! I was all heated up, and the gun didn’t just go off. I knew what I was doing. Let’s at least not bullshit ourselves.”

  “He attacked you. It’s self-defense, or manslaughter maybe, that’s all there is to it!”

  “I slaughtered a so-called man, alright. I pulled the trigger three times! Look at him. He’s a fucking mess.” I couldn’t argue there. “And if you help me stand him up,” she added, “I’ll do it again.”

  A comment like that? You’d have to be dead not to feel the horrifying chill. But then I looked again at the way he defiled her neck. I remembered the pearl at her throat that first night we made love, my fingers on the chain’s clasp, her lips against my ear whispering, No, leave it on . . . and how she kissed me with the pearl on her tongue.

  “Here’s what I want you to do,” she said and began moving about the kitchen searching through drawers. “I want you to pack your stuff — as much as you can. Throw everything in your dad’s Chevy and go straight back to Montague Street. Don’t call. Don’t email. Don’t contact me at all, for a long time. I’ll get in touch with you when the time is right. I promise.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I appreciate your loyalty, Nic. But you didn’t sign up for this.”

  “And you did?”

  She grabbed the front of my parka. “I’m telling you to get the hell out.”

  “I’m telling you I’m not going anywhere,” I said and kissed her hard, if only to stop her talking.

  We both sat back down on the couch and stared at the heap. I know this is going to sound crazy but I couldn’t help thinking of Honey and me at the Saturday matinee back in the day; the two of us front row center, our chins tipped up, the light and shadows from the big screen rippling over our big eyes. The only thing missing was the popcorn and the music rising up to the climax and then eventually (and most important) that towering THE END. There had to be an end at some point, didn’t there? A moment when we would stagger out into the afternoon sunlight?

  We sat there in silence for maybe ten minutes. Then we both got up and started collecting the articles required to get rid of a body. And it all seemed so natural in an eerie, dazed and awful way. We might have been setting the table for lunch.

  We rolled him into the comforter and wrapped him round and round with packing tape before Honey realized we’d forgotten to fish the car keys out of his jacket. So we untaped him, rolled him all the way back the other way and started over.

  “Now what?” I asked after we finished, not really wanting to know, just trying to catch my breath. And who knows, maybe she’d changed her mind about calling the police.

  “Now?” she said, tossing the tape and scissors back in the junk drawer. “Now we take a long, blissfully quiet cruise to the lake with my man.”

  * * *

  There were only three cars out in the lot — mine, the Eldorado, and Aurbuck’s — but we loaded him down the stairway rather than risk meeting some guy in the elevator returning home from a late shift out on the highway. I waited by the delivery door while Honey brought his car around, a sports car with a trunk so small we couldn’t get it closed with him in it, so we laid him out on his back seat instead, squeezed the door closed, and then Honey started driving.

  I followed her in the Chevy to a secluded inlet at Fortune Bay, far enough north that a sheet of ice had already formed. Honey drove the car right up to the edge — so close that she couldn’t have backed out if she tried. The two of us slipped around in the snow and mud, heaving from behind while the tiny car clung to shore as if it knew what lay ahead. When it finally let go and rolled onto the lake, the ice fractured into thick puzzle pieces all around its body. The water, a murky slush, lapped its windows — the sound of a good-sized bottle submerged in a massive sink. It floated for a minute or so and disappeared. Silence under the stars.

  I don’t think I realized how much she hated him until she whispered, “Fucking waste of an MG,” and threw the car keys after him.

  They skidded across the ice and stopped about four yards out. We stood there looking at them for a few s
econds as the snow filtered down through the pines, not sure what to do, or if we ought to do anything. Honey threw a few rocks after the keys, which either missed or broke through the ice and disappeared. She’d forgotten her gloves, so took off her toque and wrapped it around her hands to keep them warm. I asked her if she thought the freeze would come before anyone found the body, which I had to think was the strangest question I’d ever ask in my life.

  “Maybe if we found a long enough branch we could sweep the keys back,” I suggested. Because the look of them lying there . . .

  “Fortune Bay’s a hideous backwater that no one in their right mind would bother visiting in a million years,” she said. “And this is the snow belt. There’ll be ten inches on top of those keys, his car, and that asshole by the end of the month.” She yanked her toque back on. “Well, at least now he really is an ex,” she said, and we drove home to Buckthorn in my father’s Chevy.

  Back at the condo we cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, the blood on the floor, and undressed, not a word between us, and got in the shower. I stood with my arms wrapped around myself watching traces of what I imagined was Aurbuck’s blood, along with muck from the bay, slip down her body. And then I closed my eyes and blocked it out. I saw her in the showers at school instead, back in the days when she smelled like cinnamon toast and apples, and the only stain on our hands was grease from a broken bike chain. She reached out, guided me to her, passed the soap over my body. I washed her hair.

  For days afterwards, unless I’d had a drink, I couldn’t stop picturing my fingers on Aurbuck’s neck, no pulse beneath them. I would have sworn I still smelled his awful cologne on my hands.