“Marla, sit down.”
She didn’t move.
“Marla.”
She spoke tiredly then, without looking up. “Let’s just get it over with.”
“Get what over with?”
From the couch Gareth said matter-of-factly, “Marla has a very good idea of the way things are supposed to operate. And what I’m hoping is, that she’ll be able to convey some of that to you, Johnny. Take your top off, Marla.”
“You fucker!” I charged across the room, grabbed Gareth by the front of his shirt, and hauled him upright. Before I could hit him, though, I felt Marla’s hands on my shoulders, pulling me away.
“Johnny, stop. Stop it!” She jammed herself between me and Gareth and pushed me back a few paces. “I told you he wouldn’t stop.”
She kept her hands on me until she was satisfied I wasn’t going to move, then she turned around to face Gareth and pulled the T-shirt she was wearing quickly up over her head and dropped it on the floor.
She wasn’t wearing a bra and her small breasts looked pale and vulnerable. I could feel how much she wanted to cross her arms over them. Gareth looked levelly at me and shook his head like I had let him down.
“You two brought this on yourselves, you know. Take off the pants.”
“I don’t have anything on underneath.”
“We’ll be finished quicker then, won’t we? Take them off.”
Marla undid her sweat pants angrily and stepped out of them. “Are we done?”
“Lie on your back and spread your legs.”
“What?” There was a small tremor in Marla’s voice.
I took a step toward her, but she held up her hand. I turned my attention to Gareth. “You fucking prick. Why are you doing this?”
“You ask too many questions and Marla talks too much.”
“This is about Bill? About the video? Jesus, I found the disk-what do you think, I’m not going to ask her if she knows anything about it?”
“What I think, Johnny, is that she can make her own choices.”
Marla started to cry, but there was anger under the tears. “You pig. You fucking pig!”
She lay down on the floor and spread her legs in front of him. For a moment he stared at her and something like sadness passed over his face, then he crossed the room and left the cabin and a moment later I heard his Jeep start and drive away. On the floor Marla had her hands over her face. I picked her up and carried her into our bedroom and put her on the bed with the covers over her. She held both my hands to her face and rubbed at her tears with my knuckles. The burn on her forearm was beginning to flake.
“You won’t leave me, Johnny, will you?”
“Why would I do that?”
“I’m so disgusting. There’s nothing good left in me.”
“Why did you let him do that to you?”
“You know why.”
“Because of your job? Because of your fucking job?”
“They’ll fire me if they know I’ve been a whore.”
“This is crazy. He completely degraded you. You do admin work for a bunch of small-town politicians, for Christ’s sake. It’s not worth it! How long is this going to go on, this random fucking exploitation?”
“It wasn’t random. It was because you hassled him about Pat and because he figured out I told you about setting up Bill. It was a warning.”
“I get that. But we can’t live life endlessly being his victims.”
Marla shuddered and took a breath and said quietly, “I know…” Her crying had stopped but her face was still wet and her hands were trembling. “I know we can’t.”
“Well let’s fucking do something about it. Let’s hit back. We’ve got the weapon. All we have to do is tell Jeremy Tripp about him making the video. It’s got to stop, Marla.”
She nodded and reached for a tissue on the nightstand and blew her nose. “All right… all right.”
A few minutes later Stan came home with Rosie in tow. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom beaming at us, holding her hand.
“Hey, Johnny, look, my hair’s wet.”
They were wearing only their towels and their skin still shone from the water of the river. Stan stepped forward and put his arms around me and pressed the side of his damp head against my chest.
“You know what, Johnny? I feel like if I wasn’t holding on to you I’d float away. Come on.”
He took my hand and led me out of the cabin and he and I and Rosie walked down the meadow to the river.
At the edge of the water Stan didn’t waste any time. He positioned me carefully on the bank and told me not to move. Then he walked out onto the rock. Rosie made to follow him but he stopped her, so she stood near me and the two of us watched as he dropped his towel and started swinging his arms out in front of him, bending his knees as though he was preparing to dive.
“You watching, Johnny?”
“I’m watching, man.”
“You know how long it is?”
“Since you went swimming? Twelve years.”
“You think I’m going to do it?”
“I think you’re going to do it.”
“You bet I am. And you know what it means, don’t you?”
“You’re the bravest guy in the world.”
“It means you can’t feel sad about me anymore. You have to be happy. All the time.”
And then he whooped and launched himself out over the water and plunged feet-first into it through a shining crown that rose above him and came apart high in the air so that he surfaced in a rain of droplets that caught the sun and broke it into rainbows.
As I watched him I understood a little better what Marla meant about deserving punishment.
CHAPTER 25
Jeremy Tripp opened the front door of his house holding a magazine about sports cars. He motioned Marla and me inside without speaking and led us through to the deck at the back.
The sky was a high clear blue and there were small clouds in a line to the east. The archery target still stood at the end of the property but I could see no sign of the rabbit.
Jeremy Tripp sat down at a large round table and drank from a glass of sparkling water. He didn’t offer us a seat, but after standing uncertainly for a moment I took one anyway and Marla followed and held my hand under the table. Jeremy Tripp put his glass down and scanned the sky.
“You can feel autumn in the air. I can, anyway-a slight edge. Easier to notice here in the mountains.”
“You’re Patricia Prentice’s brother.”
“Until she killed herself.”
“And you think we had something to do with it.”
“I think you had everything to do with it.”
“Because of the video.”
Jeremy Tripp frowned. “I would have denied knowledge of that if I were you. That way you could have done the whole ‘It wasn’t us, we didn’t know anything about it’ routine. But yes, because of the video. You made it, Patty watched it, and then she killed herself.”
“We didn’t even know there was a video until two weeks ago.”
“And then it came to you in a dream?”
“I broke into Bill’s cabin. I wanted to see if he was planning to sell our warehouse. I saw the disk. I’d seen it in Patricia’s room the day she died-”
“Killed herself.”
“We watched it. Before that we didn’t know it existed.”
“I thought your brother was the retarded one.”
“He’s not retarded. And we didn’t know, I promise you. We didn’t know anything about the camera. We were just… performing for Bill.”
“And you’re telling me this… because?”
“Because you’re attacking us. You broke in and bleached all my plants-”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be silly enough to do something like that.”
“-you’ve set up your own company to compete against us, and you kicked Marla out of her house. And we’re not the right people. We didn’t do anything.”
“Please don’t tell me Bill made the video. He’s a degenerate but he loved his wife, in his own way. And he’s not stupid enough to put himself on film.”