Half Life

by Helen Cothran

Trent’s mind travelled the same road as mine. “If Raul’s not guilty of something, why threaten you for asking questions?”

  I realized then that I had gotten so interested in the toxic waste protest and the Cornwell-Thornton angle that I had been ignoring the obvious. Raul looked guilty as hell. He was trying to scare me off, and it was time to find out why.

  Trent said, “I know I’ve encouraged you to help us, but I’m going to reverse myself on this. Raul is a dangerous individual, you could get hurt, or worse. Not to mention that you might hamper our investigation if you continue to interact with him.”

  Before I considered my words, my mouth flew open as usual and I said, “What investigation? You guys seem to have gotten stuck.”

  Trent’s face turned stony, and he plunked his coffee cup on his desk.

  Oops. “Sorry, that came out wrong. I’m not criticizing the department, really I’m not. It’s just that you all have to follow legal channels and also divide your time with other cases, not to mention patrol the streets and all that. I’m really just offering continued assistance in Pete’s case, that’s all.”

  Trent’s face underwent a succession of expressions. I knew he was peeved at me, but he also liked and respected me, and I had proven helpful to the department in the past. He was also worried about me and obviously felt protective. I watched the feelings change the contours of his face like the hands of a potter molding clay. Finally he said, “I’ll probably lose my job over this. But, okay, keep investigating. I want to find out what happened to Pete. But keep your mouth shut about this, Sam. I don’t want anyone in the department to know I encouraged you. And keep me in the loop. If Raul threatens you again, call me immediately. Also if you find out anything relevant to the case, I’m the first person you tell.” He sat back in his chair with a huge exhalation of breath, fingers of both hands combing through his cropped blond hair. He looked more angry with himself than with me, and though I felt bad about it, I didn’t feel bad enough to back off.

  “Thanks, Trent. You won’t be sorry.”

  He tried to smile, but it deflated before it started.

  I hightailed it out of there before he changed his mind.

  17

  “What the—?”

  As I pulled up to the Desert Community College tennis courts, I spotted Eddie—and Gabby!—hitting the ball around. When Eddie had called yesterday after my visit with Trent, I had eagerly agreed to play with him. Had I known he meant to include Gabby, I would have told him where to shove his racket.

  I screeched into a parking space and turned the ignition off. Did Eddie have no clue at all? Why would he think I would want to play tennis with him and Gabby? I was so mad at him at that moment I couldn’t think straight. On the one hand, I missed him. Since Gabby had come on the scene I had not spent a moment alone with him. I missed our easy banter and comfortable intimacy, our competitive tennis matches and turbo hikes, the billiards and beer at the Hideaway. On the other hand, I was so pissed I wanted to drive the hell out of there and never see him again.

  Eddie finally looked over and saw me. He shot me a huge smile and gestured for me to join him—er, them. I sat another moment, simmering. Should I or shouldn’t I? I wanted to see him, and I never wanted to see him again. I thought I could behave myself, and then I was sure I couldn’t. I glared over at the courts, watched Gabby bend over and pick up a ball. This suggested an opportunity. I was an excellent tennis player—I could get out of this car, grab my racket, then drive a backhand so hard down Gabby’s throat she’d have to have her esophagus reconstructed. I felt myself smile, which I hadn’t done in days. I jumped out of the car, snatched my tennis bag from the trunk, and stalked over to the courts.

  When I arrived at the courtside bench Eddie said, “Hey,” and tapped me on the butt with his racket.

  I was not amused. I grabbed his racket, yanked it out of his hand, and in the flattest voice I could muster, said, “Do that again and you’ll be buying a new one.”

  Eddie looked down at the racket and then at me. He cocked his head, and I could see the wheels turning, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Then a light bulb went off. He glanced over at Gabby. “Sam—”

  From the south end of the court, Gabby called, “Before you get mad at Eddie, I invited myself. I needed to let off some steam.”

  And now I did.

  I shoved Eddie’s racket back in his hand, grabbed my racket, and stomped out to the north end of the court. “Australian doubles?” I said to Eddie, who nodded. Australian doubles involves three players, each of whom rotates clock-wise at the end of each game. This means a player might face the other two alone for the first game, then join player A to battle player B, and then be joined by player B to play against player A. This would allow me plenty of opportunity to take some whacks at Gabby and, why not, at Eddie, too.

  Eddie didn’t follow me out onto the court immediately. Instead, he stared at us, glancing back and forth at Gabby and me like a scared rabbit. Watching him, I devised a test in my mind: If Eddie joins Gabby, he’s the biggest jerk that every walked the planet and I want nothing more to do with him. If he joins me, I’ll give him another chance. Of course, it made no material difference which of us he joined first as we’d be constantly rotating as the match progressed, but I didn’t care, a test was a test. I watched as he twirled his racket in his hands, began stuffing his pockets with balls. Finally, he walked in my direction. Score one for Sam Larkin! I smiled over at Gabby and saw her face scrunched in displeasure. My spirits lifted.

  As it turned out, Gabby was no slouch at tennis, either, which ticked me off. During the first game I quickly realized that my breathing was still compromised even though my nose felt better. I struggled to return her blistering ground strokes and found myself panting after every point. However, as we kept playing games, I discovered that I was wilier, mixing up spins and shot locations to get her running and off-balance. I’d hit a short one to entice her to come to the net, then I’d send a lob just over her head, making her backpedal like mad. Then the next time she was at the net, I’d drive the ball right at her, causing her to defend herself or go see Dr. Singh. Eventually I wore her down, and I discovered her weakness: She was not as well-conditioned as I was. Despite looking more and more like an exhausted Gumby, Gabby seemed to want to beat me as much as I wanted to beat her. She hit the ball harder and harder and started to emit little shrieks of frustration when her shots went wide. Eddie basically took his shots and stayed out of our way. Whether playing with me or with Gabby, he found himself relegated to the outer edge of the court. If he strayed toward the middle, his partner would shove him out of the way to take the shot. It was not pretty.

  We finally quit after three sets. I had won the most points, but instead of feeling triumphant, I felt defeated. We had just played tennis for two hours in the warm sun, and Gabby looked like she just came off a photo shoot. Her matching powder blue tennis skirt and low-cut top did not show a single sweat stain. My ancient black shorts and pink tank top were so saturated they hung from me like elephant skin. Gabby’s hair looked fetchingly damp at the temples, not encrusted with salt half-way down the ponytail like mine. I was certain Eddie noticed this as he sat on the bench drinking Gatorade, looking first at Gabby, then at me. He held the Gatorade out to us, but we both shook our heads. Nobody said a word.

  Finally, Gabby mumbled “thanks for the match” and left. I watched her climb into a silver Audi (on a legal secretary’s salary?) and drive away. Once the car was out of sight, I plunked down on the bench beside Eddie. He took off his cap and toweled down his hair, then his face and arms. I didn’t bother doing anything about my perspiration problem—it felt pointless. Sweat rolled into my eyes and down my temples, but I just sat there, feeling like a human sprinkler. Neither of us said anything for a while, but it was not the companionable silence we were used to. At one point he offered me his Gatorade again, but I shook my head.

  “Sorry about Gabby showing up,” he said finally, voic
e sounding sincere. “She just invited herself.”

  If he expected me to say “that’s alright,” he was sadly mistaken. I said, “If you’re so sorry about it, why did you let her come in the first place?”

  I could feel him stiffen beside me. Eddie knew I could be feisty, but I was usually not bitchy. “I didn’t think it would be a big deal.”

  I groaned. “How could you think it wouldn’t be a big deal? God, Eddie! It was our date, you and me!”

  He turned and stared at me. Maybe he was reacting to the “date” part, wondering what the heck I meant by it. I didn’t know myself. He said, “I’m sorry. You’re right, it was rude of me. I just didn’t want to hurt her feelings—you know.”

  I did. He was really too polite for his own good. “You’re just too nice sometimes,” I conceded, feeling my anger at him ebb. But as I started to let him off the hook, I found myself feeling even angrier at Gabby. “But Gabby isn’t nice at all. She’s damn pushy to invite herself! I don’t know what you see in her!”

  Eddie scrunched up his lips and stared at me. After a beat, he took a deep breath and said, “Sam, I know you don’t like her. But I do, and I don’t want to hear her badmouthed, okay?”

  “Are you sleeping with her?”

  He stared at me. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Well, are you?”

  Eddie said, his voice now sounding more hurt than angry, “Why do you care anyway?”

  I wanted to shout, “I don’t know!” but my mind seemed to go on lockdown, all the neural pathways sealed themselves off one by one until I couldn’t think. I sat trying to fashion some response, explain, apologize, but nothing came.

  Eddie stood up and looked down at me. His face looked sad. “Some people want commitment, Sam. Or at the very least, a warm body.” He picked up his tennis bag and walked off, his shoulders slumped. I watched his figure recede as he moved slowly toward the parking lot. When he got to his truck he threw his bag in the bed and climbed into the cab like an old man. A second later I heard the engine start up, followed by the sound of gravel popping as he drove away. The engine noise died slowly, fading to silence. It was so quiet I could hear the roar inside my ears.

  I looked down at myself as if from a great height, my elbows on my knees, head hanging, body glistening with sweat, a pathetic small figure, negligible, unlikable. Then I was in my body again, my eyes staring at the green asphalt of the tennis court, sweat dripping down my face. Then I realized it wasn’t sweat at all, but tears.

  18

  No one seeing me on the way home from the tennis courts would have confused me with Little Miss Sunshine. People felt the hair on their necks stand up as I drove by as if I were a dangerous electrical storm. Cats fled at my approach, dogs howled. I felt as if my body were filled with toxic gas ready to explode at the tiniest spark.

  Connor turned out to be the unlucky accelerant.

  When I arrived home I threw my tennis bag on the kitchen floor, grabbed an iced tea out of the refrigerator, and gulped it down while glaring through the window at the garden—or what was left of it. Connor had hauled away most of the dead plants and debris and had piled up all the rocks and other useable stuff in one corner. The sand was lined with rake marks. White sprinkler pipes and fittings lay stacked on the patio, ready to feed new life.

  I spotted Connor, who was hunched over, crowbar in hand, wrenching the last desiccated plant from the dry earth. I watched him labor, muscles taut under his ratty black T-shirt, calves covered with dirt, face red and perspiring. He worked at the excavation with persistence and exactitude, a discipline I didn’t know he possessed. He worked around the plant with agonizing slowness, prying back and forth with the crowbar until the dead stump began to loosen its hold on the earth. He pried and wiggled and yanked until the plant finally shot out of the ground, showering dirt all over my brother’s face. Connor held the stump up in triumph, his face aglow. Despite the dirt and sweat, or maybe because of it, he looked vibrant and happy.

  This was too much.

  I had lived in our mother’s house almost a year after she died and had only succeeded in killing all her plants. Every tumbleweed in a five-mile radius had taken up residence in her flowerbeds. I had tried. Sort of. I pulled weeds and raked—for around fifteen minutes before I grew tired and bored. I can play tennis for hours, run a half-marathon, but gardening feels like an expedition to Everest to me. Plants feel my touch and wither. Birds and butterflies do not alight upon my garden but flee to richer pastures. Cats have noticed the yard’s neglect and have appointed it their own personal sand box. I felt increasingly guilty as the desert gradually reclaimed the garden, feeling Mom’s disapproval and sadness fill the house at night when I sat quietly reading.

  Connor obviously had inherited her green thumb. In a couple of days he had accomplished what I couldn’t in a year. Despite his natural inclination to do no work whatsoever, he had toiled relentlessly to put her garden right. Our mother’s presence in the house glowed with pleasure, grateful to have her favorite child back home, the son who would honor and nurture what was important to her. My deficiencies had been laid bare by my ne’er-do-well brother.

  Whatever enjoyment I might have felt at seeing Mom’s garden re-emerging from the dust evaporated like a drop of water in the desert wind.

  I yanked open the sliding glass door.

  “Hey, Sam!” Connor greeted, still clutching the dead bush. “What do you think?”

  I glared at the yard. “It looks empty.” My voice dripped with disapproval. I should have sounded grateful and impressed.

  He dropped the bush on the ground, his smile fading. He searched my face for what was wrong. He said with more uncertainty than enthusiasm, “This is just the first stage. Tomorrow I’ll start building the flowerbeds, and then I’ll plant. It’ll be amazing, you’ll see.”

  I looked around, my face feeling like one of the rocks he’d pried from the ground. I knew I was being an ass but I couldn’t shake myself out of it. “You going to put it back the way Mom had it?” I presented it as a kind of test, suggesting that there was a right answer and he better deliver it given my current mood.

  I saw his mouth screw up as he pondered the trap. Say “yes” and maybe get criticized for presuming to have their mother’s talent. But say “no” and maybe get slammed for not honoring their mother’s vision. Connor could not guess what I wanted to hear so answered honestly. “I’m going to put it back the way she had it. The yard wouldn’t look right any other way.”

  I could have lived with either answer, but it bugged me how passionate he felt about the whole project. It was just a yard, for God’s sake. “Well, don’t take forever,” I snapped. “I don’t want you dawdling just so you can hang out here eating my food.” This was both unfair—after all, he had already gotten half of the work done in just a couple of days—and uncharitable. I knew I was behaving horribly, and this realization only made me more petulant.

  By now Connor looked like one of the lifeless plants he had dug from the ground. “Is everything okay?”

  I swallowed the last of my iced tea, snatched the cap off my head, and shook out my damp ponytail. “Have you had a chance to talk to Eddie about Gabby?” I sounded like an FBI agent interrogating a suspect.

  His eyes narrowed, sensing trouble. Men are very good at recognizing the traps that women lay. They are less good at getting out of them. I could see Connor’s body tensing as if ready for flight. “Why?” he asked, clearly not wanting to.

  “I want to know if they’re sleeping together.”

  “Sam! God!” He grabbed a shovel and began filling in the hole the plant left when he pulled it out. Dust swirled out of the cavity as the dirt went in.

  “You’re not five, Connor. You can talk about sex like an adult.”

  “Not with you, I can’t. Or about Eddie. No way.”

  “Did he tell you not to tell me?”

  “No.”

  “Ah ha! So he did talk to you about it. He told you
he and Gabby were sleeping together, right? That’s all guys talk about anyway.”

  Connor shoveled so hard and fast he had filled in the hole and then some. A foot-high mound now replaced the hole. “That is not all guys talk about, for your information. We’re not Neanderthals.”

  “Good redirect, Mr. Larkin, but it won’t work. Answer the original question. Is Eddie sleeping with Gabby?”

  Connor stopped shoveling, turned to face me, his lips pursed. “Okay, if it will get you to go away, yes, they slept together. All right? Are you happy?”

  No, I was most certainly not happy. Not by a long shot. The hot gas that seemed to fill my chest expanded, pressing out from within so I thought my ribs would crack. My trachea felt ready to explode. “How could Eddie be so stupid!”

  “Hey, now, cut it out. He’s your friend.”

  “Well, if he’s my friend, why is he—how could he—“

  “What? What is it you want from him? I don’t see why you care about this. It’s not like you and Eddie ever dated.”

  I felt the gas expand again, the electrons vibrating at high speed. “That’s not the point! I just don’t like Gabby, she’s not good for him.”

  Connor stood quite still and looked at me. He shuffled his feet in the dirt, moved his legs farther apart as though adjusting his center of gravity before a fight. “So maybe Gabby doesn’t treat him so hot. It’s not like you do, either.”

  “What?” An internal explosion was imminent.

  He lowered his stance even further. “I’m just saying that you want him to always be around for you, but what do you give him? Don’t forget, you left Eddie, too, when you went off to college. Then when you came back you expected him to be here waiting for you as if nothing changed. You expect to have him all to yourself without giving him anything in return.”

  I growled, “That’s unfair. I’m not sure what you think I owe him. We’re just friends.”