Blue Avenue

by Michael Wiley

  Daniel Turner improved to fair condition after two weeks in intensive care. I visited and we sat together quietly in his room because there was nothing we could say that would do any good, but Charles had wounded us both and we’d wounded each other before saving each other and so sitting together quietly seemed fine. After a month the hospital released him and we promised that we would get together for dinner though the idea turned my stomach and from the sound of his voice I knew it turned his too.

  After I got back from Charles’ house late in the evening of the day that Thomas shot him and after the ringing dulled in my inner ears, Susan came to me in my bedroom. She’d bathed and put on a yellow cotton dress as if insisting furiously that Charles’ attempt to violate her and our family could do nothing to change who she was. I leaned against a pillow on my bed where Charles had stripped and bound her and she sat beside me and kissed me on the forehead as if I were a child. ‘I’ll be leaving you,’ she said.

  ‘I understand,’ I said, though that was a lie. ‘Are you going tonight?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘In the morning.’

  Then she stood and unfastened the dress hooks behind her neck, and her dress slid to the floor.