Old Flames

by Jack Ketchum

  She knew exactly how to maneuver it so he’d never notice she was faking. You pump with the left foot and list your body a bit to the right, pump with the right and lean to the left. You weren’t a bullet anymore. You were slightly off balance and it slowed you up some.

  She glanced over her shoulder and saw him gaining to her right near the shrubs and the wide expanse of lawn.

  And the car bearing down.

  Bob Bates had been making a living writing books and screenplays since the early 1960s but he later thought that never in a life creating fiction had he ever come up with any damn thing like this.

  He and Nellie were in front of the house working boxes of pansies into the soft newly turned earth—his wife was always partial to the delicacy of pansies—because at this time of day the dusk would be gentler to them than even sunrise, when he heard a girl scream look out! and he turned to see the boy dive off his bike into the Proctors’ shrubs one door down and the bike fly off the car’s front fender and over its hood and the goddamn car kept coming until it kissed the girl’s rear wheel and he shouted hey! goddammit! because he could have sworn on his deathbed it was on purpose.

  The girl fell hard but he thanked the lord they had an ordinance against sidewalks up here so that it was lawn she hit and not concrete and he heard Nellie gasp and knock over the watering can beside her because the way the girl hit was shoulder-and-head first and then over on her back and to her side and then she stayed that way, her arms over her head like a diver.

  Nellie was up before he was arthritis notwithstanding and they saw the hedges shudder and the boy stumble out of them and fall to his knees. They heard the car screech to a halt and a car door slam. The boy was on his feet now his face all bloody from the hedges but the girl didn’t move. The boy was lurching toward her but they got there first as she groaned and tried to get up on one elbow and fell back again. At least she’s alive he thought and Nellie was saying honey? honey? are you all right? bending down to her, her hands all fluttery, the hands not knowing what the hell to do, touch her or not touch her.

  The boy went to his knees and said Laura? Laura? and then he looked up behind him and they saw his face change so they turned and saw this woman glaring down at them.

  What the hell…? he said not knowing why in the world she would possibly look angry and the woman said Shut up, you! You just shut the fuck up!

  My god you might have killed them! Nellie said and the woman said I told you to shut the fuck up! and they did. This was one scary woman here. Something in her eyes he’d never seen before in all his life or dreamt of in all his career and he turned instinctively to the boy who was younger and stronger than they were but the boy was scared too, he could tell. The girl groaned again and tried to get up again and the boy turned his eyes from the woman and helped her and then he had her sitting cradled in his arms. Laura honey are you all right? he said, are you okay? She nodded a weak little off-kilter nod but Bob saw that her eyes were all jittery. Bob didn’t like the look of her. He glanced at Nellie. Nellie didn’t like it either. Call an ambulance, Bob, she said. Hurry.

  You’re not them, said the woman. Said it real low almost like a growl. He saw sudden tears pool in her eyes and spill over. You’re not even them! she said and turned and ran back to the car wiping at her eyes. He heard the car door slam shut. And by the time he got to the door of his house she was pulling a crazy U-turn on that half-blind stretch of road in front of the Proctors’.

  Speeding away. Going far too fast. Going back the way she came.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Ensemble

  It was happening to her again. It already had happened. And it was going to be just the same as this the rest of her life. There was only one way of stopping it and she was thinking hard about that right now.

  She pulled into their driveway. Turned off the ignition. Reached into the glove compartment and took out the gun.

  Exactly when she’d loaded it she really didn’t know.

  He heard the car pull in and saw her through the window running toward the door and registered the gun immediately. His goddamn limp was slowing him down and he thought gun accident gun accident the past mingling with the present and his fingers found the lock just as she slammed through the door. The door hit his forearm and he felt a bright streak of pain and took one step back before going for her but that was all she needed to raise the gun and fire.

  Oh baby, oh Jim she thought but she fired at him anyway trying to aim through the tears, the first shot as her hand rose slamming into his left thigh—his unlucky leg, the leg ending with no toes at all, she’d caressed that strange misshapen foot when they’d made love—the second shot going wild somewhere behind him into the ceiling, the third catching him full in the chest and putting him down.

  She climbed the stairs.

  She fired carefully at the lock on Linda’s door and then pulled the door open and there she was.

  The 911 operator told her to stay on the phone, please stay on the phone when the window absolutely beckoned. And it wasn’t that she was such a good girl that she always bought into whatever some adult told her to do god knows and it wasn’t her fear of falling from the window so much as she was loath to leave a human voice behind even a total stranger’s voice and she thought of her father and was he still alive or not down there and was there anything in the room besides the ceramic bedside lamp she could use against her and that was when the gun went off again and her lock fell spinning across the floor so she figured the lamp would have to do.

  Dora hated the girl. Despised her. It was as though a fog had drifted away between them finally and she could see clearly now what she’d only glimpsed before, all the promise in her youth and in her future, see herself at that age still almost new to her period and to her breasts and her urge to fuck—no, to make love, not to fuck—it was boys who always wanted to fuck and then of course they fucked you over. She was this little girl who came rushing at her with a blue and white table lamp raised over her head and it was an easy thing to shoot her and save her all that goddamn trouble forever.

  Jimmy cowered.

  He cowered in the closet of course. Crouched down there in the dark with the clothes rack overhead, crouched amid his shoes and sneakers and the tennis racket and fishing pole and boxes and boxes of toys and games he was way too old to play with ever again. He was clutching a baseball bat but she knew he wouldn’t use it.

  Jimmy? she said. I wanted to be your mommy. Did you know that?

  He wouldn’t talk or even look at her but only hunched there amid all these little-boy things that had defined him up till now.

  Your daddy wouldn’t let me. Linda wouldn’t let me. And I think…I don’t think you’d have let me either, would you. Not in the long run. Not really.

  He closed his eyes. Of the three of them Jimmy was the wisest.

  She put the gun a few inches from his eye and fired.

  THIRTY

  Old Flames

  “How you doing, Dora?”

  “Fine. What are you doing here, Matthew? Jesus.”

  “I wanted to see how you were taking it.”

  “Taking what?”

  “How you were taking the news. That Jim’s dead.”

  “My lawyer phoned me.”

  “Of course he did. I know Bob Weber. He’s a very good attorney. My educated guess, for what it’s worth, is that you’ll probably beat Murder One. He’s that good.”

  “There’s no question I’ll beat Murder One. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing back there. I damn near took out two kids on their bikes for god’s sake.”

  “Uh-huh. So how are you taking it, Dora?”

  “I don’t know. For him to hold on for over a week. It just seems…well, unkind.”

  “Unkind?”

  “It should have been faster. It should have been over.”

  “Over for who? Jim or you?”

  “I don’t need this, Matthew.”

  “I’m just asking. I’m curious. O
ver for who?”

  “For both of us I guess.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes, really.”

  “I’m trying to understand you, Dora.”

  “Why? Why the hell would you want to understand me?”

  “Why the hell wouldn’t I? For my own reasons. Those people were my friends.”

  “I know that.”

  “They let you into their lives. I ’d really, really love to know why.”

  “Linda didn’t. Linda never did.”

  “Okay, so Linda didn’t. Jim and Jimmy did, though. And Karen.”

  “Karen. Yes, Karen.”

  “Jim loved you.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes I do.”

  “You think it wasn’t just sex?”

  “No. I think he loved you. I think he’d have to love you to do what he did.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said and looked away from him then. “I’ve never been in love. My cat. Lawrence. Maybe.”

  Right To Life

  Epigraph

  “…endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights…among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”

  —Thomas Jefferson

  “God finds you naked and he leaves you dying. What happens in between is up to you.”

  —Robin Hitchcock and the Egyptians

  The First Day

  ONE

  New York City

  June 8, 1998

  10:20 A.M.

  They drove to the clinic in silence.

  The night before they’d said it all. Now there was nothing left to say.

  It just remained to do it. Get it over with.

  Morning rush hour traffic had ended over an hour ago and traffic was fairly light. The streets of the Upper West Side seemed strangely still and dreamlike, the blue-green Toyota van in front of them drifting from stoplight to stoplight like a guide taking them from nowhere to some other nowhere while they followed to no determinate end.

  Running on empty, Greg thought. Both of us.

  The silence turned him back in time to their bed last night in her apartment, making love through a haze of tears which came and went with the gentle anguished regularity of waves at low tide, their very heartbeats muted, the two of them drawn more closely together than they had ever imagined or wished possible in the grim sad knowledge that pleasure now was also pain and would remain so for a very long time. Her tears cooling on his cheek and mingling with his own, the musky smell of tears and then the feel of them falling to his chest as she sailed astride him like a ship on a windless sea and when it was finished, the long dark night embracing in warm attempted sleep.

  Then stillness too through the loud morning rituals of water, razor and toothbrush, both he and Sara alone now in these things as they would ever be. Then coffee drunk in silence at the table, Greg reaching out to take her hand a moment across the polished pine to feel the warmth of her again, to bind them for a moment before walking out through the door into the cool bright morning air. To the morning errands of New Yorkers along 91st and West End Avenue, the cars and cabs and delivery trucks. And then down to the car parked deep in the cooler echoing basement garage next door, Greg driving them across to Broadway and then downtown. Bringing them forward along the wheel of time to this awful empty place. This quiet, this exhausted drift of feeling.

  “Are you all right?” he said finally.

  She nodded.

  The clinic wasn’t far. 68th and Broadway, only five blocks away. One of only three of them left open on the entire West Side from the Village to the Bronx.

  “It’s a girl,” she said.

  And it was that, he thought and not his question that truly broke the silence.

  “How can you tell?”

  “I just know. I remember the way Daniel felt, even at this stage. This feels…different.”

  He was aware of something thick and heavy inside him again. He’d heard the story many times in the six years he’d known her. Her perceptions of the thing varying slightly over time and distance and depth of understanding. Daniel, her son, dead in a frozen lake in upstate New York at the age of six. Even his body lost to her beneath the ice and never found.

  If there was ever a woman he would have wished to have a child with, to have raised his child, especially a girl-child, it was this one.

  His hands were sweating on the wheel.

  Because of course it was impossible.

  “Why don’t you drop me off in front,” she said. “Find a place to park. I’ll go in and register. Less time waiting.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “The front will be fine.”

  “What about those people with their goddamn picket lines. They’ll probably be out again.”

  “They don’t bother me. Except to piss me off. They’ll let me by, don’t worry.”

  He supposed that no, she was not about to be intimidated. Last week going in for her examination there had been seven of them on the sidewalk by the entrance to the Jamaica Savings Bank, the building which housed the clinic and held its tenuous lease, seven men and women standing behind blue police barricades, carrying cardboard signs saying HE’S A CHILD, NOT A CHOICE and ABORTION IS LEGALIZED GENOCIDE and waving pamphlets and holding out tiny plastic twelve-week foetuses cupped in the palms of their hands.

  One of them, a surprisingly handsome fortyish man, shoved his own little specimen at Sara’s face and Sara turned on Greg’s arm and said you stupid shit and walked on by past the three policemen lounging at the door who were guarding these creeps on his and her tax dollars thank you very much, and into the building.

  Then this other one, this ordinary-looking woman about the same age as the man, who followed them to the elevator and up and sat there with a magazine across from them in the waiting room staring until Sara’s name was called and then got up and left. A more subtle form of harassment. Were they even allowed to do that? They’d never said a word to her though he’d wanted to. And she’d evidently known what he was thinking. To hell with her, she’d whispered, she’s not worth the effort.

  She could deal with them.

  Still he’d feel better if he was with her.

  “What’s another minute or two?” he said. “Let me just park this thing and we’ll go in together.”

  She shook her head. “Please, Greg. I want to get this over with as soon as possible. You know?”

  “Okay. Sure. I understand.”

  But he didn’t. Not really. How could he? For all the talk last night it was impossible to gauge how she felt at just this moment. Not now in the light of day, far beyond the familiar comfort of home and bed and the comfort of lying in his arms and even the comfort of tears. He wanted to know suddenly, needed to know, that she didn’t hate him, didn’t blame him fundamentally—though twice last night she’d said she didn’t and he’d believed her. But now it was different. He wanted to know she forgave him. For everything. For his marriage. For his son. Even for his sex. For being born a man so that he didn’t have to carry—couldn’t possibly carry—the full weight of this. He’d have done it in a minute if it were possible.

  Her diaphragm had failed them. It happened sometimes. They were adults and they knew that. It was her diaphragm. It didn’t matter. He’d never felt so guilty in his life.

  Do no harm, his mother had told him when he was a boy. The physician’s rule. Her personal golden rule. And here he was, doing harm to the woman he loved.

  Still more harm.

  He could see it in the distance on the corner of 68th Street a block and a half away, an undistinguished grey highrise that was probably built back during the midsixties, the bank on the first floor and offices above. Across Broadway a Food Emporium and the huge Sony movie complex. And yes, there were the long blue saw horses and the two cops standing at the door and people carrying signs walking back and forth along the curb.

  “Pull up behind them,” she said. “I don’t feel like getting out right in the m
iddle of that.”

  He glided to a stop. She opened the door.

  He put his hand on her arm and stopped her and then he didn’t know what to say. He just sat there moving his hand slowly over the warm smooth flesh of her arm and then she smiled a little. He saw the worry and sleeplessness that ambushed her just behind the smile. The eyes couldn’t lie to him. They never had.

  “I’ll just be a minute,” he said. “I can probably find something on 67th or over on Amsterdam.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  She got out and shut the door and he watched her walk away toward the dozen or so people ahead of her moving in circles curbside at the other end of the block and then he pulled out slowly past her and she glanced at him but didn’t smile this time, only hitched her purse up on her shoulder. He passed the stern-faced, holier-than-thou types milling across the sidewalk like flies on a carcass and then he turned the corner.

  Go on, she thought. You have to do this. You’ve got no choice.

  He’s got a wife and he’s got a son. You knew that going into this and in your heart you never did believe he was going to leave them. Not until his son was grown. Despite what you wanted to believe and despite what he said he wished to do. Greg was faithful as hell in his own peculiar way. It was part of what she loved about him.

  In a way it was a shame just how good they were together. In a way it was almost cruelty. If only it had been just an affair. If there hadn’t been love, caring, tenderness, sharing. All of it, the whole ball of wax.

  You had it all, she thought. And couldn’t really have anything.

  She realized she’d been thinking about them in the past tense.