Then one night she came home late, very late, and acted strangely when she saw me, as if she didn’t know who I was or what I was doing there. She even gasped when she saw me waiting for her. It was peculiar, and a fear gripped me like a fist around my throat. I figured she was out drinking again, back with that other man again, or maybe someone new. That night she went back to her pills, even pricking the capsules to make them work more quickly. And the next night, when I came home, she was waiting for me.
“There is no kind way to say this,” she said, “so I won’t try to make it kind. It’s over.”
She was lying on the mattress, smoking, glasses on, staring at me as if I were a thief. I’d like to say I took it with a profound stoicism, but that would be a lie. I begged, I cried, I threatened to kill her, I threatened to kill myself, I broke down, I refused to let it be over.
“Oh, it is,” she said. “Believe it. You need to make arrangements to move out as soon as you can.”
No, I told her. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. What about our future? What about Costa Rica? What about the money? The money, damn it. I shouted, I pleaded, I lost control. “There’s someone else, isn’t there?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Tell me who?” I said.
“Someone who fucks like a railroad engineer,” she said, smiling coldly. “It’s all aboard and then on to Abilene.”
That’s when I hit her. I leaned over and smacked her face with the back of my hand, and when I did, something snapped inside me. She just lay there and took it and curled her lips into that hard smile, but something had snapped inside me. I think maybe in that instant when my flesh smashed against hers, I saw, as if from a distance, the whole thing, the scene, the relationship, my folly, saw it all at a distance as if it were someone else hitting her, someone else who loved her, someone else who had given up the world for her.
I stood back in horror at what I had done.
With that smile still in place she rolled away from me and said simply, “Put out the light.”
So I did, without saying another word. I turned out the light and went into the bathroom and filled the tub with scalding water, as if I needed to be cleansed. I put Louis Armstrong into the Walkman and rolled myself a joint. I stripped and lit up and put on the headphones and slipped into the tub, turned on the water jets and thought about what I had seen from the distance as I hit her. I had seen a fool, desperate and lost. I had seen a runner who had run from everything and was still running. I sat in the tub and closed my eyes and thought my way through into a future without Hailey, without my family, without my career, without my money. In front of me was a door I couldn’t open and behind which was a life I couldn’t fathom. I felt a dark desperation overwhelm me, and I thought of dying, the freedom, the peace of death. But there was something about the music, something about the jazz, the brassy trumpet, the joyous spirit marching through hard times. I sat in the tub and smoked the dope and listened to Louis Armstrong, and I thought my way through the blackness, through the blackness, toward the door I couldn’t open. And I imagined myself putting my shoulder to it, pressing against it, breaking through it, crashing through the door like Pepito himself into something approaching equilibrium, and I felt strangely peaceful. And tired. Maybe it was the reefer, maybe it was that I hadn’t slept the night before, maybe it was the release of all those tightly clenched expectations, but I felt strangely peaceful and tired, and with the headphones on and the heat of the water soothing my bones, I fell asleep.
When I awoke, it was into a nightmare of blood.
19
I LISTENED to his story with horror, and when he stopped speaking I shook my head as if shaking myself back into the world. The room was the same as before, still gray, still lit by the fluorescent lights humming in the ceiling. The barred window still looked out upon another block wall. The room was the same, but the universe had shifted.
If life is lived in that normally narrow and disappointing region between expectation and actuality, then those moments that most change our lives play out in the great gaps where expectation and reality veer wildly apart. Listening to Guy Forrest tell his story was for me like falling headfirst into one of those gaps. I had expected the story to be self-serving, and it was that, though not to the degree I had thought, but I had also expected it to be a tale of Guy’s depredations, of Guy’s machinations, of one arrogant step after another that led, inexorably, to Guy’s moral disintegration and his explosion into murder. What I saw instead were the depredations and machinations of another.
It was the bumping of the knees that did it. The innocuous detail that sounded like a siren for me. They are at a bar, he is not sure what they are doing, not sure what he wants or why he is there. Betrayal is the unspoken message that swirls about them like the smoke from her cigarette. Their conversations approach and then veer away from the topic at hand, but as they drink and talk their knees touch, in a gesture both awkward and intimate, their knees touch, and the spark sends a complex wave of emotion through Guy. It is contact charged with meaning and yet maybe no meaning at all. It promises so much and yet it embarrasses him all the same. It is intimate, but is it, really? Or is it instead an accident? The uncertainty raises the level of everything it conveys, lust, confusion, desire, fear, all of it. I know, because the same accidental touching of the knees sent the same wave of emotion through me. The accidental touching that was not so accidental.
She had known about Juan Gonzalez’s prior medical condition from the first. “Don’t mention it,” she must have told the family. “I’ll take care of it,” and she did. The slow seduction, the promises of a future, the whispers of Costa Rica, all of it was the buildup toward the crucial moment when Guy discovered the fatal flaw in her case. It can take years, decades waiting for a case so rich to walk into your office. Negligence without massive damages is penny common and worth about as much. Cases with massive damages and clear negligence usually go to the big names with the big reputations. How does a young solo practitioner get her hands on a case like that? Luck. And if luck is not with you? Then make your own luck. Take a case with a fatal flaw and find a way to make the flaw disappear.
Hailey Prouix.
But what had she wanted from me? She had laid on me the same slow seduction, the same banging of the knees that made it seem it was I doing the seducing. But it wasn’t my doing, was it? She followed the script, for some unknown reason of her own devising. What was it that I could have offered her? Why was I worth using?
The questions came crashing down upon me, along with the realization.
“You didn’t kill her,” I said to Guy, as a statement not as a question, though he took it as the latter.
“No, I told you, no. I didn’t. No.”
I glanced at Beth with a nervous hesitation. I wanted to see if belief was on her face, too, and I wanted to see something else. Had she figured it out, the madness behind my method? Had she matched his chronology about Hailey’s secret lover with the bare bones she knew of my failed relationship? Had she matched the dates when both started and both flamed out, filled in the gaps and taken a guess at my motives? She was staring now at Guy and I could read nothing in her expression.
“Why not?” she asked Guy. “She had stolen your money, taken another lover, left you without your family, your career, without a cent or a future. She had used you like a rented mule. Why didn’t you kill her?”
He looked at her strangely, as if it were a question he never considered before. “Because I loved her?”