“A wave.” Forty pontificates. “A wave never goes away. Like, what if the ocean just stopped? What then?”
Forty blathers. His words aren’t words anymore, just sounds, as I read the news, the unbelievable news.
The Little Compton Police Department received an anonymous tip regarding local girl and Brown graduate Peach Salinger. Authorities won’t reveal details about the tip but they do confirm that they have reopened the case. They were wrong that it was suicide. Or at least, they think they were wrong. The language is delicate, hesitant, but the message is clear. They think Peach Salinger was murdered. And they have started a brand-new investigation. Oh, fuck. Double thousand triple fuckity fuck. Forty starts slapping the surface to create waves and I have no patience for the whale in the water anymore. I have to get out of here. I have to deal with this.
I put my phone in my pocket and I walk to the hole in the mud. He’s half gone, pupils warbling toward the underside of his skull where that poisoned pink brain slows to a halt. He’s going, but I can’t wait. I can’t sit here, not with an investigation open on the other side of the country.
“Hey, buddy,” I say. And when he swims toward me, I lean over and push Forty Quinn’s head under the water. My hands are on fire. The water is at least ninety degrees and the air is hot and I feel my body become a furnace, the heat rises, curling around my arm like something out of a Dr. Seuss poem. He isn’t like Henderson. He doesn’t struggle. He is weak. Dark yellow piss whispers out of his soft, vile dick. Dehydration. I look up at the sky and I wait for his unconscious body to stop flailing.
Finally it’s over. Monty Baldwin is dead. His fake ID is stuffed into his brick of coke. The condom wrapper is a godsend, more DNA, not mine. I pull my hands out of the water. I catch my breath. At some point the butter knife fell into the water with him and it’s there, glistening at the bottom. I’ve never tried cocaine before. I dip my finger into his bag. I do like he did, one tiny bump. I shake. But maybe that’s just that feeling you get when you’re next to a brand-new corpse.
45
THERE is no way around it. I have to lie to Love. I am on the phone with her while I wait in the JetBlue Terminal at McCarran Airport. They have slot machines here too and I am leaving Las Vegas and I am going to Little Compton but I can’t tell Love that.
I have no explicit plan. It’s probably stupid of me to return to the scene of the crime. But I can’t stay in Vegas and wait for the police to find Forty and I can’t go to LA and sit on the sofa with Love and refresh the search engines for information on Peach Salinger. Because the truth is that I fucked up. I left the mugofurine, my one loose end, and I won’t let it be my undoing.
Besides if I’m going to be caught for murdering that depressive, vicious Salinger, I’d rather it happen there. This is why dads don’t let their kids visit them in prison, why people dying from cancer don’t want their picture taken. This investigation could expose that mug of piss and I don’t want Love to have to see me in handcuffs.
Love is on the phone, silent, sighing every few seconds, a signal that she wants me to stay on. It is never a good thing when a woman is silent. I have to keep asking if she’s there.
“Yes,” she says. “Why?”
“’Cause you’re not saying anything.”
“What do you want me to say?” she asks. “I’m irritated. I’m sick of this. I can’t get anything done and I don’t know if my brother’s dead and it sucks.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m trying.”
“Did you start at Caesars like I said?”
And I say yes and we retrace my steps again and I promise to keep trying. “You know he’ll turn up,” I say.
“Which casino are you at right now?”
“Planet Hollywood,” I lie.
She sighs. “He doesn’t like their tables.”
“I know,” I say. “I remember you said that, Love. But I’m trying everything. Unless you want me to come home . . .”
“No,” she says. “God, no. I’m sorry. I’m just tense.”
“I know, it’s okay,” I say.
I know she wants to stay on the phone and say nothing, but my flight to Providence, Rhode Island, is boarding.
“You there?”
“Yes! Joe! Stop asking me! Are you there?”
“I’m here,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She cries. I tell her it’s okay and now I’m gonna have to wait. I can’t board with Group A. People are real assholes about their suitcases and I’m nervous there won’t be room for mine, but Love comes first. Suddenly she is laughing.
“I’m watching Friends,” she says. “It’s the one where—”
“Shit,” I say. “I think I see him.”
I hang up and rush to the Jetway. It’s a shitty thing to do, but watching Friends while you’re on the phone with your boyfriend is also a shitty thing to do. I text her: Sorry. False alarm. I love you.
She writes back: XOXOXOX
I wish she had said I love you but then again, I have to prepare myself for change. I go online again because I still can’t believe it. I watch a press conference with Peach’s parents and her mother is identified as Florence “Pinky” Salinger. She is an old version of Peach, with fuller lips and broader shoulders. “I repeatedly told the police that while my daughter battled depression, she was not suicidal.” She breathes. “While it is comforting that the authorities are now treating my daughter’s disappearance as a crime, a murder, it is deeply disconcerting that the police declined to investigate until someone called in an anonymous tip.” The woman heaves. The woman has no soul. No wonder Peach was so terrible. “It is a sad state of affairs when a mother’s instinct and knowledge means nothing to a detective. But we are grateful that my daughter’s murderer will at last be brought to justice.”
She straightens her jacket, as if it matters what she looks like, and steps back from the podium. I wonder what it’s like to be a mother and you’re going to give a speech for reporters about your dead daughter and still, you go and get your hair and makeup done.
The broadcaster explains that the Salinger family intends to use all their resources to resolve this homicide case and the video ends.
We take off and it’s strange to be going back to Little Compton, to think of a time when I was so in love with Amy. I haven’t thought about her or our trip in so long, about Noah & Pearl & Harry & Liam, about Charlotte & Charles and all that food and all that sex. I remember the way she tasted and I remember the blueberry-stained sheets and the sound of her voice when she said she would try to learn to trust. If I never took Amy to Little Compton, would we still be together? Is life predestined or do you change it by shoving your way into small, quaint towns because you’re fascinated by how out of place you feel there?
It’s a risk, going back to Little Compton. But I’m doing it for Love; our love can never be safe so long as the mugofurine is out there taunting me. And really, it’s like love itself, like drinking. We all get our hearts broken. We get fucked up and throw up and we cry and listen to sad songs and say we’re never doing that again. But to be alive is to do it again. To love is to risk everything.