Bystanders

by Tara Laskowski

  ***

  As expected, Dave wanted to eat dinner before the hockey game. “Eight bucks for a hotdog? Don’t think so. Want some leftover steak?” He pulled out a dinner plate, covered tightly with sunken-in plastic wrap, and placed it in the microwave.

  “I told you I’m not eating meat anymore,” she reminded him with a glare.

  “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “That’s this week’s decision.”

  “What do you mean, this week’s decision?” She backed away from him and hit her head on the knob of one of his cabinet drawers.

  “Ah, come here.” Dave hugged her, trapping her arms. He rubbed her head and kissed her hairline. “Do you need ice? I think you’ll live.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I hate it when you patronize me.”

  He shook his head. “You know I like you too much for that.”

  “Yeah, Debbie’s Dave used to say that to her and look what happened.”

  He snorted. She picked the lumps of fat from his meat off the countertop and tossed them in the sink in disgust, flipping on the garbage disposal. It made a dull humming noise, like a sick bird, and she could smell metal burning.

  “Oh, it’s broken,” Dave said over his shoulder.

  She peered down the drain. “Why don’t you fix it?”

  “I don’t know how,” he said, licking his fingers.

  “Wasn’t there a movie where this guy killed his girlfriend, chopped up her body, and fed it to the garbage disposal?” She wanted to irritate him. Had Debbie and her Dave been standing in the kitchen like this? Debbie, fixing a drink, while Dave came up behind her with a kitchen knife? Was it jealousy? Did he think she was sleeping with another man? Sandra remembered Debbie telling her something once about him not liking when she went out with her friends.

  “I think there was the one where he killed her, burned her body in the industrial sized oven, and then vacuumed up her ashes,” Dave said, laughing. He grinned and she felt like flicking his nose, imagining his expression. She wished that they fought, screamed at each other, threw plates or something, anything to chip away at the level landscape of sameness. He leaned over the table and punched her shoulder softly. “Come on, Sandy. What’s going on with you? Are you still upset about that girl at work?”

  ***

  Their seats for the game were two rows from the top. They had to shuffle past two people already seated in the aisle. Sandra and Dave had seats three and four, but Dave shifted over two so that they left a few seats between them and the other couple.

  “But what if these people come?” she asked.

  “Then we’ll move,” he said.

  The national anthem played and the game began. Dave tried to explain it all to her, but she just saw a bunch of men skating around. It was too fast to keep up, and she wasn’t sure where she was supposed to look. A few minutes into the game, a couple came up to their row, held up their tickets, and looked at Sandra.

  “We have seats five and six,” the woman told Sandra coldly, as people around them shuffled in their seats to see the game.

  “That’s fine,” Sandra said weakly, glaring at Dave. The two of them shifted over.

  Sandra sat down glumly next to Dave, who was completely oblivious.

  “Get off yer knees, ref, and stop blowing the game!”

  Sandra felt her cheeks get hot. The couple that had just arrived were quiet and well-dressed, probably coming straight from some important work meeting. And now she was sure they did not like her, thanks to Dave.

  When the team scored, Dave jumped up and pumped his fists. He started singing along to the fight song and clapping his hands in unison with the guy in front of him. The two of them slapped a high five, as if they personally had something to do with the goal. When the other team came back and scored two goals in a matter of seven minutes to pull ahead, Dave began cursing. “Stop playing like a bunch of pansies and make it entertaining for us!”

  Their seats were so high up that if she stood to leave Sandra thought she might pitch forward and fall, banging limbs as she gained momentum. She studied Dave’s profile, his slack chin, the hair behind his ear. His hands were clenched, his eyes focused on the action. It would be easy for him to kill her. He could do it with his bare hands. Snap her neck, like that.

  The guy in front of them stood up suddenly, and then Dave did, and everyone tensed. Sandra watched as one of the players grabbed an opponent by the head. His helmet was off, his hair wild and sticky from sweat, and he punched the other guy in the stomach repeatedly. The crowd was cheering.

  “Fuckin’ A! Yeah! Yeah!” Dave yelled. The referee came to break up the fight, but not before the helmetless guy spit on his opponent’s face. He skated into the penalty box and the crowd booed.

  She turned to Dave to ask him if they could leave, but he grabbed some popcorn and winked at her. “Now we’re ready for some hockey, right, babe?” He pumped his fist.

  The woman next to her looked over, smiling tensely. “Your boyfriend’s funny,” she said. “He really gets into it, doesn’t he?”

  ***

  They went most of the way home in silence. Amy was awake, watching television in the dark, her glasses reflecting the late night dating show. She clutched her pillow, eating Doritos from the bag between her legs. They walked past her and into Sandra’s room, shutting the door.

  Dave threw himself on her bed, making the wall shake. “Come here, sweetheart.”

  She curled next to him and faced the wall. He snaked his arm around her and under her shirt. He would go for the nipple immediately—ah, yes, there it was. His breathing got heavy. She wiggled away.

  “Dave, I…”

  He kissed her, hard. She could taste the beer and the salt from the popcorn as his tongue explored her mouth. He pressed harder and slid on top of her, covering her body. He was tall, his weight smothered her, and she tried to push him off. But he grabbed her arms, pulling them above her head, and smiled at her. She thought she saw something cold behind his eyes. She felt her heart beating as she stared into his face, this man she didn’t really know at all.

  “Oh, baby,” he moaned, nipping at her ear. It amazed her that two people could be in the same room and have completely different ideas about what was going on. She couldn’t breathe and she struggled against him. He grabbed her arms tighter, held both of her wrists with his one hand, his other moving south, tugging on the button of her jeans. She thought about Debbie. She wondered if it was worse to be dead or completely alone, or if the two were even all that different.

  “No,” she said again, louder. She twisted, pulling her knee upwards into his crotch. He screeched and rolled over.

  “Sandy, what the hell?” She pushed herself off the bed and stood up, breathing heavily. He looked at her, still doubled over, his eyes confused. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I said I didn’t want to.”

  “Yeah. Painfully.”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just still thinking about what happened at work.” She couldn’t look at him. “I think you should leave.”

  He reached for her and she recoiled. She saw him flinch. “I don’t understand what just happened,” he said, holding out his hands, palms up, like a peace offering.

  He followed her out into the living room, where Amy still sat pinching her lower lip. Dave put his coat on. “I’ll call you,” he said tersely, and left, slamming the door.

  Amy looked up from the show, a slight smile on her face. “Everything all right?”

  ***

  Eventually they hired someone else to sit at Debbie’s old desk—a blonde woman, tall and lean, who had a little maple leaf pin on her coat and always wore dark brown lipstick. Her name was Nelly and Sandra made sure to introduce herself the first day. Nelly was married with three children and her husban
d’s name was Frank. She had pictures of her kids tacked on the walls of her cubicle, and she covered the “I’m a Vegetarian!” sticker with a laminated copy of the poem “Footprints.”

  At lunch, Beth and Sandra still obsessed over Debbie’s murder trial. Beth remembered things she hadn’t thought of before—how one time he told her he’d stolen a pack of cigarettes, how she thought she might have seen him once on America’s Most Wanted. “Should I say something to the police? Do you think they’d want to know?”

  Sandra watched Debbie’s Dave on television while Amy cooked in the kitchen. If the reception was fuzzy, he looked almost exactly like her Dave, only now with a beard. She used to dream about him sometimes, before Debbie had been killed. She used to think maybe she could take him away from Debbie and have him all to herself.

  ***

  Sandra stopped calling her Dave and made excuses when he asked her to go out. Sometimes they ran into each other in the city, and she would feel a stab of guilt and have lunch with him. She spent the nights she would’ve been out with him watching Debbie’s Dave’s trial on television, sometimes even sharing a bowl of popcorn with Amy, who was convinced he was going to get the death penalty. Spring turned into summer. Her Dave put his profile back up on the dating site. Hockey season ended.

  One night, several months after Debbie’s Dave was convicted, Sandra came home from being out with Beth and couldn’t sleep. She heard an ambulance siren and sat up to peer out of her window at the parking lot. The young woman with short red hair was walking her dog, headed for the wooded path that snaked behind the complex. She disappeared behind the trees alone. It was so late at night.

  She began writing a letter on yellow legal paper. She wrote about the young woman and her dog, about fear, about how it was odd that something so small could seem so horrifying. She wrote about the way Beth danced with strangers in bars, her hips pressed forward, lips against their necks. She was writing to Debbie’s Dave. She could picture him opening the letter in his cell, running his hand through his hair like she remembered. The thought was like biting into chalk. She told him about Amy, how she ordered chocolate milk in restaurants and sprayed Lysol on the phone after she used it. She told him about her Dave, how he had never seemed to understand what it was she was feeling, how their relationship would’ve been a long, sturdy rectangle with no bumps or grooves. She filled five pages with her handwriting, feeling reckless.

  When she was finished, she folded the letter into thirds, sealed it in an envelope without re-reading it, and went online to find the address of the prison. She thought again of the young woman walking her dog as she put on her sneakers and robe and grabbed her keys off the dresser, feeling slightly crazy as she quietly closed the apartment door. She knew if she thought about it too long she would lose her nerve. The mailbox was at the end of the parking lot. The night was sticky, the cicadas loud in their unrelenting buzzing, and Sandra ran, her heart thumping, imagining she was going to be grabbed from behind at any point. The mailbox pulled open with a creak, and she fed it the letter. Racing back to the apartment, robe billowing behind her, Sandra wondered, briefly, elatedly, how she must look, and hoped there was someone watching her run.

  Acknowledgments

  This manuscript wouldn’t exist without the help of some very lovely people. Thank you to all the editors of all the fine journals that first took a chance on some of these stories. Thanks to my MFA writing group and professors at George Mason University, who read a few of these stories in early draft and helped make them better. I especially want to note my professor and friend Alan Cheuse, who introduced me to some of my most favorite books and stories and encouraged my love for words. He is and will continue to be dearly missed. Cheers to Dotty Martin, who lived through The Times Leader newspaper strike and graciously shared her stories with me. A special shout-out to Laura Ellen Scott, Brandon Wicks, Katie Rawson, Isaac Boone Davis, Ann Laskowski, and Beth Posniak Fiencke for giving me invaluable comments on the manuscript and catching some silly mistakes. I also want to thank my family for all their support, especially my husband Art Taylor, whose writing advice, wisdom, and encouragement keeps me going every single day.

  The following stories were previously published in slightly different versions in these publications:

  “The Witness,” Santa Fe Writers Project Journal, November 2010

  “There’s Someone Behind You,” So to Speak, Winter/Spring 2009

  “The Monitor,” Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, April 2014

  “Happy and Humpy,” Lake Effect, January 2013

  “Half the Distance to the Goal Line,” Hot Metal Bridge, December 2011

  “The Oregon Trail,” The Hawaii Review, Spring 2014

  “Every Now and Then,” Amazing Graces: More Fiction by Washington Area Women, January 2012

  “Death Wish,” Phoebe, Spring 2005

  About the Author

  Evan Cantwell

  Tara Laskowski is the author of Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons. She was awarded the Kathy Fish Fellowship from SmokeLong Quarterly in 2009, and won the grand prize for the 2010 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards Series. Her fiction has been published in the Norton anthology Flash Fiction International, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mid-American Review, and numerous other journals, magazines, and anthologies. She has been the editor of SmokeLong Quarterly since 2010 and lives in Virginia with her husband, toddler, and two whiny cats.

  www.taralaskowski.com