When he came, it all returned: the hard give of the Toyota’s hood at his back, the stickiness of their sweat, the bugs flying in and out of his ears and nostrils, mistaking these warm, wet places for home.
She lay back on the hood for a moment, touched herself. She gathered his semen onto two fingers and then tasted it the way she had when they were young.
They dressed in silence. Then they were back sitting on the hood, watching the night again. Hailey sat cross-legged. Her jeans had a smear of dirt on the knee from when she’d kicked them to the ground. She held his palm in both of hers, and her thumb absently caressed the back of his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She looked at him like he was stupid. “Why? I’m not.”
“Your family.”
“Is still my family. This doesn’t change that.” She traced a finger along his palm. “If you had any idea how much I’ve missed you…You have to understand that, right? I just don’t see how you couldn’t.”
“You gotta walk on with it.” He thought of how to say this. “Every mistake. There’s no doubt in my mind that if you knew. If you knew what I’ve seen and done…” She closed her eyes. A tear crawled to the corner of her nose, where it hung. “You wouldn’t be here right now. And you wouldn’t have just done that with me.”
“Stop. Just. Please stop.” She gripped his hand in both of hers, wedding band and engagement ring grinding into his knuckle. “You don’t think we all carry something that makes us less than we were? That we’d do anything to take back?”
“No. I don’t.” He pulled his hand away, hugged his own knees in, and thought of those he’d killed, the ones who’d deserved it and the ones who hadn’t.
He thought of the sudden pressure in his eardrums when the bomb went off beneath the wheels. The screaming pain in his skull and how the world abruptly went half-dark. Three tours. He gave his youth to the dust of those theaters. An eye, some skin, blood, and hair, and his ability to walk more than a few miles without a crippling pain in his knees and an ache in his spine that made him feel seventy years old. On tour #3, the day before the incident on Highway 1, he was reading about Ohio’s place in the Civil War and came across a quote about a Union generaclass="underline" At the sight of these dead men whom other men had killed, something went out of him, the habit of a lifetime, that never came back again: the sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it.
“You hold the goddamned war over my head just like you did when you came home the first time,” said Hailey. “You hold it over my head like I’m a child. Like I don’t know what it’s like to have ruined something. You’re not the only one.”
“Please.” He felt the heat rise to his cheeks and forehead; an angry sweat bloomed from the pores. For some reason wanting to scream at her about Curtis Moretti, some dead pillhead who would never stop making him feel like a fourteen-year-old bed wetter. How the hell could all this still be so fresh and painful? They were children when any of it last mattered.
“Fuck you, Danny. I’ll tell you something.” She looked away from him. Back toward the Cattawa. A lock of dirty blond had escaped and now hung over the high expanse of her forehead. “What I said about not seeing Kaylyn. That’s not true. I’ve seen her plenty.”
He waited. She bit into a fingernail, and then began peeling it off. She’d always had the nails of a boy, chewed and ragged. When he watched her come out of the game in the brief minutes her coach could afford, her backup would turn the ball over and clank shots while she took apart the cuticle of every finger.
“She’s been a mess lately. Like more of a mess than ever before. I took her to a rehab clinic in Columbus a while back, but who knows if that’ll take. It’s not all I’ve done for her.”
“Okay. So she didn’t keep the baby?” he guessed. Thinking Hailey’s big secret was that she’d driven Kaylyn to an abortion clinic. Hailey looked at him like he was an imbecile.
“Everyone keeps it here. How do you think half our friends got to the world?” She pulled the nail all the way off and looked for another one. He could still feel her body on him, all the flab she’d added, from stress, pregnancy, age. It didn’t make her any less attractive, but more human, more herself. “Kay just keeps getting into trouble, just stupid, terrible trouble. So she cut deals with Amos Flood and Kirk Strothers and all those redneck nuts they hang out with.”
“Who?”
“You know, Fallen Farms. We called them the Flood brothers in high school.”
“Right, okay.” He stammered, tried again. “What does that have to do with anything?”
She looked at him, annoyed. I’m getting there. “She was buying them guns and other things their parole officers wouldn’t be happy about. I told her she was going to end up in prison over it, but they paid her. She’s never thought five minutes ahead.” She used a forearm to swipe at her cheeks, hot and bright with sex and pain. “She’s just always been my friend, and I’ve always done things for her or because of her. She’s always had this power over me, and I know you don’t want to hear this, but that’s part of the reason I ended up going out with Curtis and doing everything I did with him…”
Dan shook his head. “You’re right, I don’t want to hear this.”
“But you should.” She swallowed. “I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to… to do what I did when I did. And so Kaylyn did her part. At this party, she got me drunker than I’d ever been in my life and took me to the bathroom with him… I barely even remember it.”
He had the urge to clamp a hand over her mouth or dig up Curtis Moretti’s bones and use a hammer to smash them to dust.
“And I didn’t blame her,” Hailey went on. “Never occurred to me to blame her. I always did what she wanted. You think you had it bad? Girls, man—teenage girls can be so… fucked up. It’s like they suddenly understand that boys think they’re hot, and they just go insane with power. Kay used to call herself my older sister, and I believed her even though she was just a user. A manipulator. She was this agent of chaos I could never get away from. And still can’t.”
“Why?” A bitter tear crept into his eye, and he blinked it away. “Why would you tell me this now? And you want to blame Kaylyn for—”
He shut his mouth. With the anger, with the frustration, came a dark adrenaline.
“It was more than that. Kaylyn—I felt responsible for her.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Before her parents lost their house and moved off Rainrock, there was… She got attacked. When she was eight and I was seven, she got attacked by her cousin. Her sixteen-year-old cousin.”
“Attacked how?”
“How do you think.”
He chewed on the inside of his cheek, scraped away the flesh with little pinches of his incisors. Through the trees in the distant hills, homes glittered, practically as tiny and gone as the stars. He could hear the mournful low of a far-away cow. He dreamt of walking through the woods to that farm and then he could just keep walking. Over the fields and barbed wire fencing, over the county highways and the old bridges and creeks. Just keep walking until he didn’t remember or care about anything.