by Neil Gaiman
When Larry pulled up in front of the house, his deputy, Troy Bowen, was sitting behind the wheel of his cruiser by the garage, reading a paperback. Larry flashed his lights, and Bowen got out and ambled over to Larry’s car, hands in his armpits.
Hey Larry, he said. What’s up?
Slow night, Larry said—which was true enough. He said, Go get dinner. I’ll cover until Albie gets here.
That’s not till midnight, Bowen said, but his face was open and grateful.
I might as well be out here. It’s all I’m thinking about anyway.
Yeah, that’s what I thought. But I don’t mind saying it gives me the willies. You’re welcome to it.
When Bowen’s cruiser was gone, Larry stood for a moment on the front stoop, hands in his pockets. Crime-scene tape was strung over the doorway, in a big haphazard X; Bowen had done it after the bodies were removed, sniffling and red-eyed. It had been his first murder scene. The electricity was still on; the little fake lantern hanging over the door was shining. Larry took a couple of breaths and then fumbled out a copy of the house key. He unlocked the door, ducked under the caution tape, and went inside.
He turned on the living-room light and there everything was, as he’d left it this afternoon. His heart thumped. What else had he expected? That it would all be gone? That it hadn’t really happened? It had. Here were the outlines. The bloodstains on the living-room carpet, and on the landing. The light from the living room just shone into the kitchen; he could see the dark swirls on the linoleum, too. Already a smell was in the air. The furnace was still on, and the blood and the smaller pieces of remains were starting to turn. The place would go bad if Wayne’s folks didn’t have the house cleaned up soon. Larry didn’t want to have that talk with them, but he’d call them tomorrow—he knew a service in Indianapolis that took care of things like this. All the same he turned off the thermostat.
He asked himself why he cared. Surely no one would ever live in this place again. What did it matter?
But it did, somehow.
He walked into the family room. The tree was canted sideways, knocked partway out of its base. He went to the wall behind it, stepping over stains, careful not to disturb anything. The lights on the tree were still plugged into the wall outlet. He squatted, straddling a collapsing pile of presents, then leaned forward and pulled the cord. The tree might go up, especially with its trunk out of water.
Larry looked up at the wall and put his hand over his mouth; he’d been trying to avoid looking right at anything, but he’d done it now. Just a few inches in front of him, on the wall, was the spot where Danny had been shot. The bullet had gone right through his head. He’d given Danny a couple of rides in the cruiser, and now here the boy was: matted blood, strands of hair—
He breathed through his fingers and looked down at the presents. He’d seen blood before, he’d seen all kinds of deaths, mostly on the sides of highways, but twice because of bullets to the head. He told himself to pretend it was no different. He tried to focus, made himself pick out words on the presents’ tags.
No help there. Wayne had bought gifts for them all. To Danny, From Daddy. To Mommy, From Daddy. All written in Wayne’s blocky letters. Jesus H.
ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE Larry knew he should go, just go out and sit in his cruiser until midnight, but he couldn’t help himself. He picked up one of Jenny’s presents, a small one that had slid almost completely under the couch, and sat down in the dining room with the box on his lap. He shouldn’t do this, it was wrong, but really—who was left to know that a present was missing? Larry wasn’t family, but he was close enough—he had some rights here. Who, besides him, would ever unwrap them? The presents belonged to Wayne’s parents now. Would they want to see what their son had bought for the family he’d butchered? Not if they had any sense at all.
Larry went into the kitchen, looking down only to step where the rusty smears weren’t. Under the sink he found garbage bags; he took one and shook it open.
He sat back down in the dining room. The gift was only a few inches square, wrapped in gold foil paper. Larry slid a finger under a taped seam, then carefully tore the paper away. Inside was a small, light cardboard box, also taped. He could see Wayne’s fingerprint caught in the tape glue. He slit the tape with his thumbnail, then held the lid lightly between his palms and shook out the container onto his lap.
Wayne had bought Jenny lingerie. A silk camisole and matching panty, in red, folded small.
Jenny liked red. Her skin took to it, somehow; she was always a little pink. The bust of the camisole was transparent, lacy. She would look impossible in it. That was Jenny, though. She could slip on a T-shirt and look like your best pal. Or she could put on a little lipstick and do her hair and wear a dress, and she’d look like she ought to be up on a movie screen someplace. Larry ran his fingers over the silk. He wondered if Wayne had touched the lingerie this way, too, and what he might have been thinking when he did. Did he know, when he bought it? When had he found out?
Don’t be coy with me, Wayne had said, on the phone. He’d called Larry at his house; Emily would have picked up if her hands weren’t soapy with dishwater. Larry watched her scrub at the roast pan while he listened. I know, Wayne said. I followed you to the motel. I just shot her, Larry. I shot her in the head.
Larry dumped the lingerie and the wrappings into the garbage bag.
He took the bag upstairs with him, turning off the living-room light behind him and turning on the one in the stairwell. He had to cling tight to the banister to get past the spot where Wayne had shot the dog—a big husky named Kodiak, rheumy-eyed and arthritic. Kodiak didn’t care much for the children, who tried to uncurl his tail, so most of the time he slept in a giant basket in the sewing room upstairs. He must have jumped awake at the sound of gunshots. He would have smelled what was wrong right away. Jenny had gotten him as a puppy during high school—Larry had been dating her then; he remembered sitting on the kitchen floor with her at her parents’ house, the dog skidding happily back and forth between them. Kodiak had grown old loving Jenny. He must have stood on the landing and growled and barked at Wayne, before Wayne shot him. Larry had seen dogs driven vicious by bloodshed; it turned on switches in their heads. He hoped Kodiak had at least made a lunge for Wayne, before getting shot.
Larry walked into Wayne and Jenny’s bedroom. He’d been in it before. Just once. Wayne had gone to Chicago on business, and the kids were at a friend’s, and Jenny called Larry—at the station. She told dispatch she thought she saw someone in the woods, maybe a hunter, and would the sheriff swing by and run him off? That was smart of her. That way Larry could go in broad daylight and smoke in the living room and drink a cup of coffee, and no one would say boo.
And, as it turned out, Jenny could set his coffee down on the dining-room table, and then waggle her fingers at him from the foot of the stairs. And he would get hard just at the sight of her doing it, Jenny Sullivan smiling at him in sweatpants and an old T-shirt.
And upstairs she could say, Not the bed.
They’d stood together in front of the mirror over the low bureau, Jenny bent forward, both of them with their pants pulled down mid-thigh, and Larry gritting his teeth just to last a few minutes. Halfway through he took his hat from the bureau top—he’ brought it upstairs with them and couldn’t remember why—and set it on her head, and she’d looked up and met his eyes in the mirror, and both of them were laughing when they started to come. Jenny’s laugh turned into something like a shriek. He said, I never heard you sound like that before, and Jenny said, I’ve never sounded like that before. Not in this room. She said, This house has never heard anything like it. And when she said it, it was like the house was Wayne, like somehow he’d walked in. They both turned serious and sheepish—Jenny’s mouth got small and grim—and they’d separated, pulled their clothes up, pulled themselves together.
Now Larry went through the drawers of the bureau, trying to remember what Jenny wore that day. The blue sweatpants. The Butl
er Bulldogs shirt. Bright pink socks—he remembered her feet, going up the stairs ahead of him. He found a pair that seemed right, rolled tight together. Silk panties, robin’s-egg blue. He found a fluffy red thing that she used to keep her ponytail together. Little fake-ruby earrings in a ceramic seashell. He smelled through the perfumes next to her vanity and found one he liked and remembered, and sprayed it on the clothes, heavily…it would fade over time, and if it was too strong now, in ten years it wouldn’t be.
He packed all of it into the plastic bag from the kitchen.
Then he sat at the foot of the bed, eyes closed, for a long few minutes. He could hear his own breath. His eyes stung. He looked at the backs of his hands and concentrated on keeping steady. He thought about the sound of Wayne’s voice when he called. I left her sexy for you, Larry.
That made him feel like something other than weeping.
When he was composed he looked through the desks in the bedroom and the drawers of all the bed tables. He glanced at his watch: it was only eight.
He walked down the hall into the sewing room, and sat at Jenny’s sewing table. The room smelled like Kodiak—an old-dog smell, a mixture of the animal and the drops he had to have in his ears. Pictures of the children and Jenny’s parents dotted the walls. Wayne’s bespectacled head peeped out of a few, too—but not very many, when you looked hard.
Larry rooted through a drawer under the table. Then he opened Jenny’s sewing basket.
He hadn’t known what he was looking for, but in the sewing basket he found it. He opened a little pillowed silk box full of spare buttons, and inside, pinned to the lid, was a slip of paper. He knew it right away from the green embossment—it was from a stationery pad he’d found, at the motel he and Jenny had sometimes used in Westover. He unfolded it. His hands shook, and he was crying now—she’d kept it, she’d kept something.
This was from a year ago, on a Thursday afternoon; Wayne had taken the boys to see his folks. Larry met Jenny at the motel after she was done at the school. Jenny wanted to sleep for an hour or two after they made love, but Larry was due home, and it was better for them to come and go separately anyway, so he dressed quietly while she dozed. He’d looked at her asleep for a long time, and then he’d written a note. He remembered thinking at the time: evidence. But he couldn’t help it. Some things needed to be put down in writing; some things you had to sign your name to, if they were going to mean anything at all.
So Larry found the stationery pad, and wrote, My sweet Jenny, and got teary when he did. He sat on the bed next to her, and leaned over and kissed her warm ear. She stirred and murmured without opening her eyes. He finished the note and left it by her hand.
A week later he asked her, Did you get my note?
She said, No. But then she kissed him, and smiled, and put her small hands on his cheeks. Of course I did, you dummy.
He’d been able to remember the words on the note—he’d run them over and over in his head—but now he opened the folded paper and read them again: My sweet Jenny, I have trouble with these things but I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t love you.
And then he read on. He dropped the note onto the tabletop and stared at it, his hand clamped over his mouth.
He’d signed it Yours, Larry—but his name had been crossed out. And over it had been written, in shaky block letters: Wayne.
December 24, 1975
If Jenny ever had to tell someone—a stranger, the sympathetic man she imagined coming to the door sometimes, kind of a traveling psychologist and granter of divorces all wrapped up in one—about what it was like to be married to Wayne Sullivan, she would have told him about tonight. She’d say, Wayne called me at six, after my parents got here for dinner, after I’d gotten the boys into their good clothes for the Christmas picture, to tell me he wouldn’t be home for another couple of hours. He had some last-minute shopping, he said.
Jenny was washing dishes. The leftovers from the turkey had already been sealed in Tupperware and put into the refrigerator. From the living room she could hear Danny with her mother; her father was with Alex in the playroom—she could hear Alex squealing every few minutes, or shouting nonsense in his two-year-old singsong. It was 8:40. Almost three hours later, she told the man in her head, and no sign of him. And that’s Wayne. There’s a living room full of presents. All anyone wants of him now is his presence at the table. And he thinks he hasn’t done enough, and so our dinner is ruined. It couldn’t be more typical.
Her mother was reading to Danny; she was a schoolteacher, too, and Jenny could hear the careful cadences, the little emphases that meant she was acting out the story with her voice. Her mother had been heroic tonight. She was a master of keeping up appearances, and here, by God, was a time when her gifts were needed. Jenny’s father had started to bluster when Jenny announced Wayne was going to be late—Jennifer, I swear to you I think that man does this on purpose—but her mother had gotten up on her cane and gone to her father, and put a hand on his shoulder, and said, He’s being sweet, dear, he’s buying presents. He’s doing the best he knows.
Danny, of course, had asked after his father, and she told him Daddy will be a little late, and he whined, and Alex picked up on it, and then her mother called both of them over to the couch and let them pick the channel on the television, and for the most part they forgot. Just before dinner was served her mother hobbled into the kitchen, and Jenny kissed her on the forehead. Thank you, she said.
He’s an odd man, her mother said.
You’re not telling me anything new.
But loving. He is loving.
Her mother stirred the gravy, a firm smile on her face.
They’d eaten slowly, eyes on the clock—Jenny waited a long time to announce dessert—and at eight she gave up and cleared the dishes. She put a plate of turkey and potatoes—Wayne wouldn’t eat anything else—into the oven.
Jenny scrubbed at the dishes—the same china they’d had since their wedding, even the plates they’d glued together after their first anniversary dinner. She thought, for the hundredth time, what her life would be like if she was in Larry’s kitchen now, instead of Wayne’s.
Larry and Emily had bought a new house the previous spring, on the other side of the county, to celebrate Larry’s election as sheriff. Of course Jenny had gone to see it with Wayne and the boys, but she’d been by on her own a couple of times, too—Emily saw her grandmother twice a month, at a nursing home in Michigan, staying away for the weekends. Jenny had made her visits in summer, when she didn’t teach, while Wayne was at work. She dropped the boys at her folks’, and parked her car out of sight from the road. It was a nice house, big and bright, with beautiful bay windows that let in the evening sun, filtering it through the leaves of two huge maples in the front yard. Larry wouldn’t use his and Emily’s bed—God, it wouldn’t be right, even if I don’t love her—so they made love on the guest bed, narrow and squeaky. It was the same bed Larry had slept on in high school, which gave things a nice nostalgic feel; this was the bed in which Larry had first touched her breasts, way back in the mists of time, when she was sixteen. Now she and Larry lay in the guest room all afternoon. They laughed and chattered; when Larry came (with a bellow she would have found funny, if it didn’t turn her on so much), it was like a cork popped out from his throat, and he’d talk for hours about the misadventures of the citizens of Kinslow. All the while he’d touch her with his big hands.
I should have slept with you in high school, she told him, during one of those afternoons. I would never have gone on to anyone else.
Well, I told you so.
She laughed. But sometimes this was because she was trying very hard not to cry—not in front of Larry, not when they had so few hours together. He worried after her constantly, and she wanted him to think as many good thoughts about her as he could.
I married the wrong guy, was what she wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t. They had just, in a shy way, admitted they were in love, but neither one had been brave enough to
bring up what they were going to do about it. Larry had just been elected; even though he was doing what his father had done, he was the youngest sheriff anyone had ever heard of, and a scandal and a divorce would probably torpedo future terms. And being sheriff was a job Larry wanted—the only job he’d wanted, why he’d gone into the police force instead of off to college, like her and Wayne. If only he had! She and Wayne had never been friends in high school, but in college they got to know each other because they had Larry in common—because she pined for Larry, and Wayne was good at making her laugh, at making her feel not so lonely. At being gentle and kind—not like every other boozed-up asshole trying for a grope.
And, back home, Larry met Emily at church—he called Jenny one night during her sophomore year, to tell her he was in love, that he was happy, and he hoped Jenny would be happy for him, too.
I’m seeing Wayne, she said, blurting it out, relieved she could finally say it. Really? Larry had paused. Our Wayne?
But as much as Jenny now daydreamed about being Larry’s wife (which, these days, was a lot) she knew such a thing was unlikely at best. She could only stand here waiting for the husband she did have—who might as well be a third son—to figure out it was family time, and think of Larry sitting in his living room with Emily. They probably weren’t talking, either—Emily would be watching television, with Larry sitting in his den, his nose buried in a Civil War book. Or thinking of her. Jenny’s stomach thrilled.
But what was she thinking? It was Christmas Eve at the Thompkins’s house, too, and Larry’s parents were over; Jenny’s mother was good friends with Mrs. Thompkins and had said something about it earlier. Larry’s house would be a lot like hers was, except maybe even happier. Larry and his father and brother would be knocking back a special eggnog recipe, and Emily and Mrs. Thompkins got along better than Emily and Larry did; they’d be gossiping over cookie dough in the kitchen. The thought of all that activity and noise made Jenny’s throat tighten. It was better, somehow, to think of Larry’s house as unhappy; better to think of it as an empty place, too big for Larry, needing her and the children—
