How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

  “I was expecting you’d get a lot of calls, but I gather your phone was confiscated,” she said.

  “I’d say so. It sank first, so it doesn’t matter either way. Problem is, that’ll be the number Kimberly tries. I need to find her. Need to talk to Howard too.”

  Liz touched him for the first time then, stepping close and clasping her hands together behind his neck.

  “You could’ve died over this,” she said. “Do you actually realize that?”

  He thought of the way it had felt in the car with the water rising up and his blood pouring down, and he nodded. “I got pretty acquainted with the idea.”

  She leaned her face against his, cheek to cheek, like they were dancing. She didn’t speak. He put his hands around her lithe lower back and closed his eyes and felt at home in a way he had not felt in months. His throat was tight, nerves tingling. He’d known her for nearly twenty years and she could still do this to him. Hell, the thought of her could do it to him, let alone actually having her in his arms.

  “Bed rest was prescribed,” she said. “I heard it straight from the doctor’s mouth.”

  She stretched up and kissed him then, and at the touch of her lips, the idea that he’d just been asleep in her presence or ever could be again seemed laughable, every nerve ending awake now, awake and urgent. He was pulling her closer just when she pulled back, shaking her head, and for a terrible moment he thought she was going to say being with him was a mistake that she wasn’t willing to make again. Then she said, “I’m sorry, but you’ve got to take off that stupid hat.”

  He laughed and took off the baseball cap with the moose logo. Her eyes went to his scalp, a tender glance at the ghastly wound.

  “You’re supposed to be taking it easy,” she said. Then she reached for his hand. “So I’ll have to be careful with you.”

  She was. Excruciatingly, exquisitely careful, in graceful erotic motion while telling him to lie still, lie still, lie still—instructions he followed for as long as he could, and when he finally disobeyed, there were no objections until after they were done, her head on his chest and their bodies damp with sweat. Then she said, “You need to work on your patience.”

  “I promise I will. A second chance, maybe?”

  “I suppose that’s only fair.”

  37

  Barrett woke in a state between pain and pleasure. Liz’s body was curled against his, the swell of her hip pressed against him, and the feel of her was wonderful, but in his shoulder and along his neck the clarion tones of pain were rising. His whole sensation was one of rising, in fact, floating up from unconsciousness and the darkness as the room took dim shape around him and awareness and memory joined his surroundings.

  It wasn’t until she groaned and moved that he realized what had woken him—her phone was vibrating facedown on the nightstand. She picked it up, blinked at the display, and then answered.

  “Hello? Yes, he’s fine. Or alive, anyhow.” Pause. “He’s with me, that’s how I know.” Pause. “Why don’t you tell me instead?” Pause. “Okay. Hang on.”

  She turned to him, the sheet slipping off her breasts, her face lit on one side by the blue glow of the phone. “Howard Pelletier wants to talk to you.”

  He took the phone and put it to his ear. “Hello, Howard.”

  “Barrett, I’d have been at the hospital if not for…well, the attention.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re okay, though? You’re gonna be fine?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Ayuh, I hoped so. I’m sorry.”

  “Did you try to kill me?”

  “What? No!”

  “Then don’t apologize.”

  “You know what it means, though. You hit a nerve because you were right. We were right. She wasn’t lying. But now she’s gone. I’m scared for her, Barrett. I can’t get hold of her anywhere, and she won’t call me back. She’s always called me back. I think when she heard what happened to you, she ran.”

  “Any idea where?” Barrett sat up and pulled on his pants, each back muscle feeling tight as piano wire.

  “I don’t know. And I’m not the guy who can get people to talk about her, you know? People…freeze right up when I say her name.”

  When Barrett stood, the pain radiated through his body, as if it were excited by the opportunity to find new pressure points. He left the bedroom and went downstairs to where he’d left the bottles of painkillers. He took two pills with a full glass of water while he listened to Howard list and then dismiss possible locations for Kimberly Crepeaux. He heard them all, but his mind was elsewhere. He’d awoken with the memory that had eluded him in the hospital. It was lurking there in that sense of a rising from someplace down below, someplace dark and lost. He remembered now what he’d imagined as his savior in those moments when he knew he couldn’t make it out alone.

  “I’ll find Kimberly,” he said. “I promise, Howard. But can you put that aside for a minute? I’ve got a technical question for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  Barrett was grateful he did not have to see Howard’s eyes when he said, “I’ve been wondering about a net.”

  “A net?”

  “A trawling net. Don Johansson and Clyde Cohen weren’t wrong when they told me how much trouble it would have been for one man—or even two—to get those bodies back to the shore once they’d been sunk. I was wondering if you thought it would have been possible to toss one out there and…and drag it back in. All the problems that men would have diving and wrestling that weight back to shore, they could fix with a net.”

  He listened to Howard Pelletier breathe as he imagined a man tossing a net into the water to come up with Jackie’s bludgeoned body.

  “Wouldn’t work,” Howard said finally, and the cost of the imagined scenario was evident in those two words. His voice was choked with pain.

  “No?”

  “A net would settle around them. On top of them.” Howard cleared his throat and spoke with effort. “The nets are weighted, so they settle down, and then they bring up what’s above. You see? If what you were after was already on the bottom, then you wouldn’t bring in anything but weeds and maybe a fish. The net would drag right over the top of what was already on the bottom.”

  Barrett saw the clean logic of this now and was embarrassed that he’d forced Howard to explain it to him and, worse, envision it.

  “I’m sorry, Howard. I’m a little out of it. When I was down in the water myself, I got to thinking…to wishing…never mind. It was a dumb question and I’m sorry.”

  “You just need some time on a fishing boat,” Howard said, searching for good humor. “You sure you’re feelin’ okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “And you’ll find Kimberly?”

  “I’ll find her,” Barrett said.

  He hung up after promising that he’d call Howard as soon as he had news, and then he found himself wincing with pain and eyeing the pill bottles speculatively. He hated the need for them, the emotional and mental relief that came before any physiological effect possibly could have, his brain eager for these new chemicals with which it had so rapidly and easily formed a friendship. He thought of Don Johansson’s hollow-cheeked face and purple-ringed eyes. Hurt my back. Maybe he had, once. That was how it started for plenty of people. Then it ended with you sitting alone in a house you’d once shared with your family, beer cans collecting on the living-room floor.

  All the same, Barrett was hurting, and one more pill tonight wouldn’t guarantee he’d take one more tomorrow. As long as he was paying attention, he was in control.

  He was reaching for one of the bottles when Liz spoke from across the room.

  “A net?”

  He stilled his hand just above the pill bottle and turned to face her. She’d pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and was leaning against the door frame, studying him.

  “Crazy idea,” he said. “But when I was down in the water trying to figure out how to get back to the surface,
I was hoping someone up there was already tossing a net down for me. I don’t know why that was the image. Basically, I felt beaten, and I wanted to know someone was up there trying to help me. Or aware of me, at least. That was all. Just aware. I thought I was going to die, and all I wanted to believe was that someone was watching my place in the world when my place in the world ended.” He shrugged. “Like I said, just a crazy thought.”

  She was quiet, arms hugged beneath her breasts, her eyes on the floor.

  “A good friend of my dad’s died on a boat they built together,” she said. “Same storm that took the Andrea Gail, the one they made the movie about? You remember watching that?”

  “Yes.” He remembered it vividly. It was the first time he’d seen her cry, and he’d been stunned that it had been prompted by a George Clooney movie about men on a fishing boat. Later, when her father drowned, he’d recall that moment uncomfortably, as if she’d had a premonition.

  “It hit my dad hard, of course,” she said. “Not just because he’d lost a friend but because he’d built the boat. As if altering the stern line or spending more time on a joint would’ve gotten the boat through the perfect storm, right? But on his worst days, he’d get caught up thinking about what it felt like to be alone in the water like that. One of the things he kept wondering about was how you saw the sky. Whether it looked like it was joined with the water against you, or if it was…I don’t know, friendly.”

  She ran a thumb below her left eye. It would have looked like an insignificant gesture if you didn’t know her.

  “Don’t do it for Kimmy,” she said. “Or for your grandfather, or your father.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Stop asking questions like you don’t understand what I mean!” she shouted, and he was taken aback because she wasn’t a woman given to shouting, or to any display of excess. She was always controlled, always contained.

  “You almost died yesterday,” she said, fighting for a lower voice. “I want to hear you explain why it’s worth that.”

  “To know,” he said.

  “Know what, Rob?”

  “The truth.”

  “Yes, of course, the truth. But why is it worth it?”

  He was embarrassed that he had to think about this for a moment, that an answer wasn’t already teed up, something he could swing at with full conviction. He thought about it and then he said, “It beats wondering, Liz. Trust me. If I can take the wondering away from Howard, from Amy and George? Then it’s worth it.”

  She gave a fatigued nod. “So you’re off to find Kimmy? Is that what I overheard?”

  “I need to find her, yes.”

  She offered him her slim hand but kept her eyes down. “Can it wait until morning?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It can wait until morning.”

  They didn’t make love, and they didn’t talk, but she slept curled tight against him in a way he remembered only dimly.

  After a long time, he slept too. His last conscious thought was that she’d kept him from reaching for the pill bottle an extra time, and he was grateful for that, because he was feeling no pain now.

  38

  Liz was in the shower when he woke again, and the sun was up. He got out of bed and tried to stretch and loosen his battered body, without much success, then sat on the floor with his back against the wall, staring at himself in the full-length mirror she’d mounted on the bathroom door. The mirror had once made him laugh, because she’d mounted it before she’d hung the door and managed to put it on the outside of the door instead of the inside as she’d intended. Rather than take it off or reverse the hinges on the door, though, she’d just shrugged and moved on. It was beautifully symbolic of Liz’s approach. You could spend time fixing things or accept them as they were. She favored the latter.

  Today, the mirror brought no laughter. His torso was lined with bruises and superficial cuts, and the area over his liver was so dark it looked more like a birthmark than a bruise. The stitches in the long gash across his freshly shorn scalp made the segmented wound look like a night crawler. Without hair on his head, his blue eyes looked brighter. And colder.

  He touched the wound with grim wonder. Someone had tried to kill him. Someone had nearly succeeded.

  His image pulled away from him as Liz opened the door, and then it disappeared as steam covered the glass.

  “Taking stock?” Liz asked. She stood with a towel knotted loosely over her breasts, running a brush through wet hair, the full script of the tattoo along her collarbone visible: Fair winds & following seas. The old nautical blessing for a sailor’s voyage—a wish for all things visible on the surface to be in harmony with all things unseen, the movement of the water, wind, and tides working together.

  The same phrase was on her father’s tombstone. There was no body below it; when the Coast Guard recovered his capsized boat off the coast of Halifax, it was empty. Liz had been eighteen that year. She and Rob had both lost their fathers in college. There’d been a time when he’d believed that shared grief brought them closer, added a layer of undesired maturity. Later, he wondered if they’d begun to think they’d marked each other somehow, that bad luck stalked them closer when they were together than when they were apart.

  “Not much to take stock of in the mirror,” he said. “The view I’ve got at the moment, on the other hand…”

  “Take a longer look in the mirror, pal. You’re way out of your league now. Always were, but at least you had hair.”

  He smiled and nodded, then said, “So, a few dilemmas have occurred to me. Not insurmountable challenges, but challenges nonetheless.”

  “Oh boy.”

  “I have no car. You, however, have two cars that, when combined, become nearly one functioning automobile.”

  “Just for that remark, you get the Mustang.”

  “Oh, come on.” She had a Jeep that rivaled the Mustang in years but not in noise.

  “I’ve never been convinced you can drive a stick,” she said. “Go prove it.”

  They went downstairs and she gave him the keys to the Mustang and then frowned. “You also have no phone. I don’t like that.”

  “I’ll get a burner and call you.”

  “Okay. Go to U.S. Cellular. They seem to hold a patent on bouncing cell signals off lobster pots or something. Better out here than any other carrier.”

  For a moment they stood awkwardly, not wanting to separate, and then she laid her palm on his chest. “Rob? Be careful today.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be watching the mirrors now.”

  He stood in the yard while she backed the old Jeep out of the garage and drove away, and then he fired up the Mustang and left in a cloud of exhaust fumes in search of Kimberly Crepeaux.

  Kimberly’s grandmother lived in a small but tidy home not far from the concrete plant where her husband had worked for thirty years. He’d died six months into his pension, a victim of a heart attack that came only a few hours after bailing his eighteen-year-old granddaughter out of jail for the third time.

  Jeanette Crepeaux opened the door, looked at Barrett, and then slapped him with an open palm. He stepped back, rubbed his jaw, and said, “Hello, Mrs. Crepeaux.”

  “Think you didn’t deserve that?” she said. She was about her granddaughter’s size, and so she’d had to rise up on her toes to hit him. The fierce set of her face promised that she was ready to do it again too.

  “I’m not sure that I did, but I don’t intend to debate it with you. Is Kimberly here?”

  There was movement behind the older woman, but it wasn’t Kimberly—it was her daughter. The girl was four years old and had her mother’s eyes and freckles.

  Jeanette stepped outside and pulled the door shut.

  “Kimmy will never be right again. Any chance she had, you ruined it, making her tell a story like that. Think that little one in there won’t hear the stories? Think that won’t be hard on a child? Then you have to come back? I guess you didn’t do enough damage the first time, o
r maybe you thought you had to finish the job.”

  Barrett waited her out.

  “And if you think I give a single sweet shit about that new gash on your head, you have me confused with another woman.”

  “Do you know that she’s been in touch with Howard Pelletier?” he asked.

  She nodded. Her lips were a thin, tight line.

  “Then you know why I came back,” he said. “We can stand here and carry on about the things I made her say, or we can deal with the reality that she said them, and now she’s missing, and she’s scared. I think I can help.”

  “You’re going to help!” She laughed bitterly.

  “I intend to, yes.”

  Jeanette Crepeaux kneaded her hands together and glared at him. She was scared, but she covered it up with anger. Barrett’s grandfather had been the same way. It had taken Barrett a lot of years to understand that a fast temper wasn’t the product of confidence but evidence of a lack of it.

  “Where might she have gone?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. She was here when you made the news. We were watching the TV, and somebody called and told her to change the channel. They were showing your car.”

  “Who called?”

  “She didn’t say. She got real scared, though. She was talking nonsense about loading all of us up in my car and going to Florida. I…I got to arguing with her, and then Ava was crying, and I took Ava and went into the bedroom, and I was in there when Kimberly took the keys right out of my purse and drove off in my car.”

  Her anger had tipped to fear. There was a tremble in her thin lips. “She does things like that, you know, but…not for long, usually.”

  “What was the argument about?”

  “None of your business.”

  Barrett studied her and said, “She called a kid from Rockland before I brought her here, looking for drugs. She didn’t get them, but she was trying.”