The Night Before

by Wendy Walker

  “He was married,” Rosie blurted out. “He had kids.”

  “Oh,” Kathleen said. She was visibly surprised. “I had no idea. But that doesn’t seem like Laura. The few times we spoke about more than the apartment, she was very earnest—maybe that’s not the right word. But that does surprise me. Did she know?”

  “What? About the wife and kids?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How could she not?”

  “If it wasn’t on the Internet. If he was a good liar. I’ve heard a lot of stories.”

  “But after months, wouldn’t she wonder why he hadn’t taken her to his apartment?”

  Kathleen considered this. “Maybe he had another apartment. It just doesn’t seem like Laura, from what I could tell about her. She made some comments about your father, about his affairs—I don’t know the whole story, but wasn’t she estranged from him because of it?”

  Rosie sat on the bed and looked at Kathleen. “She was. I’ve only seen him a few times over the years. He hasn’t even met my son. But honestly, I don’t know if that would be enough to stop her. If he said the right things, told her stories about his unhappy marriage. If he told her he loved her…”

  “Yeah. I suppose that would get to any of us under the right circumstances.” Kathleen looked out the window as though she wanted to fly right out of it, away from this conversation. Away from the trouble of Laura Lochner. Rosie had already delayed her in leaving the city to visit her boyfriend.

  But, like it or not, there was more to tell. “It doesn’t even matter anymore. Something happened to him. To Kevin Brody. He was killed.”

  She waited for the appropriate response. Shock. Silence. Apprehension.

  “It was a robbery outside his gym. Laura never said anything. She said he’d broken it off with one text and then ghosted her—you know? No calls, texts.”

  “My God … when was he killed?”

  Rosie pulled out her phone and found the article from the Post.

  “Mid-August. Early morning.” Then she had a thought. She turned abruptly and looked at Kathleen. “When did you find her here, in the room crying?”

  “I don’t know. It was on a Sunday night, as I said.”

  “He was killed on a Wednesday. I wonder if it was before or after you saw her. If her despair was new or days old.”

  “What are you saying? That Laura might have done something?” Kathleen was stunned.

  Rosie caught hold of herself. “No, of course not. It just means that maybe she didn’t know. Maybe it explains why he stopped returning her calls.”

  “And she thought he’d ghosted her after the breakup! God, how horrible.”

  Yes, Rosie thought. But not nearly as horrible as the alternative.

  Rosie got up and walked to the small desk on the other side of the room. She checked the drawers, felt beneath the surface. She opened the closet and did the same. Then under the bed. There was nothing.

  “Did she have any friends who might know something? I’ve called her office—the woman named Jill she spoke about. But I didn’t know any of her friends here, and even from college.”

  Kathleen shook her head. “I wouldn’t know. But—wait … there was a man. I heard her talking to him when I came home one night. She was cooking and he was on the speaker. She offered to pick it up, but I could see she needed two hands and I was going to my room anyway.…”

  Rosie stopped her search and looked at Kathleen. “A man? Did you hear what they were saying? Was it her boyfriend?”

  “No. I don’t think so. They were talking about the boyfriend. Laura was saying something about him to the man on the phone. Hold on, I’ll remember his name.”

  Rosie stood before her impatiently.

  “And I think he was here, actually. Outside the apartment. I was working from home that day, so she left without her keys, which she couldn’t find. I heard the buzzer and looked out the window. It was Laura. and she was there with a man. He was wearing a suit—he had his jacket draped over his arm. It was hot as hell that day. I was surprised she was home so soon—she never left work early. I don’t think she took one sick day the whole time she was living here.”

  “What did he look like?” Rosie asked.

  “Wait—I remember his name!” Kathleen said, her eyes lit up. “It was Joe.”

  Rosie stared at the woman, unable to speak, or move, her husband’s name now ringing in her ears.

  “Are you all right?” Kathleen asked.

  But Rosie didn’t answer.

  Joe. That was all she could hear. The sound of her husband’s name.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Laura. Session Number Fourteen. Seven Weeks Ago. New York City.

  Dr. Brody: This isn’t a good idea, having more sessions. Things have become complicated. We never should have started …

  Laura: No—please. I’m so close. I can feel everything shifting.

  Dr. Brody: Laura … all right. Close your eyes.… Can you see yourself as someone else? Another woman there in the woods with Mitch Adler?

  Laura: I think so.

  Dr. Brody: He pulls her behind a tree, kisses her. She can feel his desire and it makes her believe that she’s finally done it. She’s finally made him feel safe enough to love her. There’s a rush. Euphoria. You know what it’s made of. You’ve told me.

  Laura: Power. It’s the rush of power.…

  Dr. Brody: What do you want to say to her? That girl in the woods?

  Laura: That it’s just an illusion? He’ll never love you?

  Dr. Brody: Don’t ask me. Tell me. You’re the one who has to see it.

  Laura: Okay. Fine. I would tell her that he’ll never love you, so stop trying.

  Dr. Brody: Right. Exactly. He is never going to love her. The power is an illusion.

  Laura: I would tell her to walk away. But I know she won’t. She never will. Why is that?

  Dr. Brody: That’s because you can’t forgive her for trying. And you want her to suffer for it.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Laura. The Night Before. Thursday, 11:30 p.m. Branston, CT.

  I find my purse in the kitchen. I search for my phone.

  “Laura…” Jonathan Fielding stands behind me. I feel his hand on my shoulder. And I stop. I stop looking for my phone. I stop looking for a way to leave.

  My body moves back until it touches his. It is disconnected now. It doesn’t listen as I remind it of the things that are wrong.

  “Shhh…” he whispers. “It’s all right. Catch your breath. Your phone is dead, remember?”

  A chill races through me. His voice is soft, but his words … are they ominous? Is he trying to remind me that I am helpless now, trapped between the counter and his body? The door on the other side. Another hand touches another shoulder and suddenly no part of me is free.

  We have different phones. Different chargers. It’s already been discussed and acknowledged that I can’t do anything until I get back to Rosie’s. The chill morphs into a heat wave.

  And I like the heat.

  “Do you want me to get you home?” he says then, but he might as well ask a child to put down an ice cream cone.

  “It was a black Chevy Impala,” I say. Suddenly I need to finish the story. I need to know why he’s been asking me to tell it, and if he knows the ending, maybe the truth will reveal itself. He’ll have no further need to pull it out of me.

  I have to know what this is. From ignorance comes insanity. And he seems so real to me, this man. I have been observing him. Listening with such care, making my list, those little things that seem wrong. But there are so many things that seem right.

  “I used to tease him about his car because it was an old man’s car. His father gave it to him when he upgraded to a Lexus, so it was, actually just that. An old man’s car.”

  Jonathan’s arms grow tighter around me, locking together in front of my chest. I can feel every inch of him now. The metal buckle of his belt against the small of my back. The front of his thighs pressing i
nto the back of mine. His chest running up my back, so warm and strong.

  He whispers again. “You don’t have to do this.”

  But I don’t stop.

  “I’d been there with him before—in the back of that car. Many times. And many times he had asked me. Many times he’d pulled me just a little closer to that point they warned us about in school.”

  I laugh then, and when I do, I realize I’ve been crying. The tears that come find old tracks down my face.

  “Sex Ed…” he says, laughing as well. “The point of no return.” He says this in a deep, mocking voice and I feel his body move with the laughter that rolls from his belly.

  “Exactly,” I say. I don’t know why I’m laughing as hard as I am. It’s not funny. A few more words and a boy will be dead. But the sadness seeps out of every seam.

  “I remember being scared. And I remember being excited. I was seventeen. Already late to the party. No one would have cared and at least it would have been over, you know? All the anxiety and anticipation … I think the only reason I waited that long was because of him. It was all I had left that I hadn’t given him.”

  I think carefully about what to say next. The words that line up are not the ones I want him to hear. It felt like this … just like this.

  There is heat between us. Tension. One hand strays until it reaches my stomach. His lips find my neck.

  I feel him melting.

  “And then we were there, in the car, and everything else—the other girl, the way he’d been all summer, my sister’s warnings—it was all on the outside. All the noise, shut out of our world. I remember the quiet when the door closed. Just the sound of us.”

  I quiet myself then, and listen to the same sound. The sound of us. Breathe in. Breathe out. A hand over silk. Another hand over starched cotton. A sigh.

  “You really don’t have to tell me.…”

  “My intentions were good. I was going to test him—see if he would really go through with it, our first time together in that car, at a party we both wanted to get back to, and with that girl waiting for him. And if he didn’t stop, then I would be the one to pull away, to tell him he was an asshole and end things for good.”

  I rest the back of my head against Jonathan’s chest and close my eyes.

  “I think maybe it was just an excuse. Permission I gave myself to be in that car with him, to let things go too far. Part of me wasn’t ready to let go. Part of me still believed that I could … I don’t know, break through, maybe. It made no sense to me, why he would keep coming back if he really felt nothing.”

  The memories spring from hiding, the months of analyzing his every move, his every word. Rationalizations. Justifications. Advice from my friends. Maybe this, maybe that. I wish I’d met Dr. Brody sooner. I wish someone had told me the truth.

  It’s an illusion. He’s never going to love you.

  But then I also wish I had never met Dr. Brody. I wish I still had my illusions. Nothing has filled the empty space they left behind.

  Jonathan slips his arms away. He takes a step back, leans against the refrigerator door. I turn around to face him.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I don’t want to get carried away. I’m very attracted to you, but we’ve just met.”

  My mind twists with this new information. It would have been so easy. But he’s pulled back.

  “I’m not seventeen anymore,” I say.

  “I know that. I’m just trying to be respectful. It sounds like you’ve had some bad experiences and I don’t want to be one of them.”

  Holy. Shit. Does this man know me. Already—he knows how to get inside.

  “So what happened in that car?” he asks, and I am reminded about the part that comes next. The part about the dead boy.

  “I never got to find out which one of us might have stopped. If he would have done what you just did. Or if I would have followed my plan. Or if I would have stopped caring about anything but getting more from him, any small piece, no matter how destructive.

  “I remember the sound of footsteps outside the car. The road was gravel—the kind with small stones that kick up when you walk over them.”

  “Is that why they didn’t find footprints?” he asks.

  “You really do know a lot about this.” Yes, you do, Jonathan Fielding.

  “It was in one of the articles. That homeless man, Lionel Casey, his lawyer made a big deal about that—the absence of any evidence that he was at the scene.”

  “But then they found him in the car, didn’t they?”

  Jonathan nods. “Yes, they did.”

  “He was crazy, you know. And dangerous. People came forward after they heard. People who’d seen him in the woods and been scared. He chased a girl half a mile, screaming that he would send her to Hell. He used to dress up in a vampire cape.…”

  “Laura—I know. I’m not saying he wasn’t there. But all of these details from the scene, they all played a role in how you were treated. Or mistreated, I should say.”

  Mistreated. That was not a word I had ever thought to use about that night. It was not a word anyone had ever used to describe what had happened to me.

  “I guess I’m still defensive,” I try to explain. “I still feel responsible.”

  “I don’t see why you would.”

  I look at my bare feet. At my naked toes. And I think about the moment I put on the shoes I later took off at his door. It wasn’t more than a few hours ago that I was in Rosie’s attic, getting ready to meet this man. What am I doing?

  “Mitch was there because of me,” I say.

  “No—you were there because of him.”

  “You should have been a lawyer.” And then I think, Maybe he is a lawyer. It’s funny that he could be and I would never know. But then it’s not, really.

  “Seriously—I don’t get how you feel responsible or guilty. He could have killed you as well.”

  I wonder if it’s really possible that he is the only person who has ever said this to me. That I was mistreated in the aftermath. That I could have been a victim myself.

  You can’t forgive her.… You want her to suffer.

  “There was no time,” I continue with the story. “The footsteps on the gravel—we both heard them and looked up. They stopped when we did, and we both saw the same thing—a figure looking into the front seat on the driver’s side. He had his hand over his eyes like he was trying to block what little light there was that night. The keys were in the ignition. Mitch had turned on the radio. I was confused; I thought it was someone from the party or a cop, maybe, so I stayed very still. Mitch must have thought the same thing, because he didn’t move either. Then I heard the door handle click, metal on metal. He wasn’t trying to be quiet, to sneak up on us. He just saw us and we were in the way of him and this car. Mitch was lying on top of me, his feet close to the door, and Lionel Casey just grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him out.”

  Silence descends upon Jonathan’s bare kitchen. I can see he’s horrified by this image, but I stay hidden behind my wall. Even as I recall the exact feeling of Mitch’s body being dragged over mine, his hands grabbing hold of anything they could find, instinct taking over. I had scratches down my face and neck, and the sides of my torso because my shirt was pulled up. They found my skin under his nails, and fabric from my jeans. One of my shoes was found on the gravel because that was the last thing his hands found as they tried, desperately, to keep from leaving the safety of the car.

  “I didn’t see him—Lionel Casey. The figure looking through the window was just that, a figure. A shadow. I think he was wearing a hoodie or a jacket with a hood, because I couldn’t make out the shape of his head. But I wouldn’t swear to that. And when Mitch was dragged out of the car, I couldn’t see beyond his face. I was lying on my back, kicking against the seat to move away from the open door. I never saw beyond Mitch as he was pulled outside. And when I felt his hand release from my foot, taking my shoe with him, I kicked myself up and away to the other d
oor, opened it, and ran outside. I ran until I was deep in the bushes that lined the road and then I crouched down, hiding and listening.”

  “My God,” Jonathan says. And I can see that what really surprises him the most is that I can tell this story without flinching. Without crying. Without anything at all.

  “I heard him plead. No! Stop! Please! It was breathless, like the fear had paralyzed his voice. I didn’t hear the bat hit his body. People said I did, but that’s because what I heard were breaks in his pleas, changes to them that anyone would know was from some kind of strike to his body that knocked the wind out. And then they said that I only heard three blows, and yet there were four to his body. Four swings of the bat. But I never said I heard three blows. I said I heard three breaks to his pleading.”

  Jonathan stares now, wide-eyed. “The fourth blow might have come after he was already dead. Or unconscious. That’s why you only heard three breaks.”

  I nod Yes. That might be how it happened.

  “I heard the car door close and the engine rev. The headlights never came on, but I also heard the car peel away on the gravel. I didn’t wait after that. I crept out of the bushes to where I could see. I didn’t know if Mitch had gotten away and left this person in the road, waiting to get me next. Or if this person had stolen Mitch’s car. So I was quiet and cautious. Until I could see.

  “And then I did. I did see—Mitch on the ground. His body still. That’s when I screamed and ran toward him. I stood over his body. Blood was coming from his head and his mouth. It pooled but it also sprayed. I screamed and screamed, spun around in circles, looking for this madman. It wasn’t rational, because the car was gone. But I just felt this wave of panic and fear, so I kept scanning the woods, waiting for someone to come and help. I saw the bat a few yards away, and what went through my mind was that it was a weapon I could use to protect myself. I wasn’t thinking about fingerprints or evidence. I was afraid for my life, even though it doesn’t make sense since I knew the man was gone. The fear had not left with him—it was right there, all around me. I felt like I was prey out in the open, looking everywhere, in front, behind, near, far, frantically. Each time I turned my head, new fear came about what might be jumping from the shadows in the place I turned from. I remember that part so well—the terror and the desperation to be safe.