Abigail pulled her feet up onto the seat and hugged her knees. “I can’t take it anymore, just sitting there staring at him,” she said quietly, almost to herself. “It’s like we’re trying to stare at him till we stop seeing anything there.”
“Yeah,” said Mark, his mind elsewhere. How impassively the stars had witnessed the murder, those stars that night by the river. And I remember those stars, he was thinking, knowing that they had been clinging to that same black sky for eight years unchanged.
Mark are you fucked in the head you fucking killed him
Throw him in the river we have to
Grab his legs
Hurry
He did not understand the science behind the scrolling map of the sky, but he knew that the stars above the hospital now were not the same ones from that night; he did not recognize them. He was thinking, I remember the stars from that night and they are still there only because I remember them. If I forget them they will cease to exist.
He and Abigail sat in the truck, quieted by uncertainty. He knew that when they finished the six-pack there would be no more reason for them to remain; Abigail would leave the truck to go become a widow, and Mark would drive the truck back to the shop, maybe stop by a bar to get drunk, and to him this seemed incomplete, though he could not have explained what he was waiting for. But he made no move to alter this course, only sitting and thinking quietly, And if I exist in the memory of those stars as they exist in mine, if they can remember me only because I remember them. And if I cease to remember them. Finally thinking, Yes, if I cease to remember them then they will have to cease to remember me. Then it will be as if that night never happened. As if I had not killed him.
And then something was quietly activated in him. Wordlessly he shifted the truck into gear and pulled out into the street in a disembodied decision to simply drive. Abigail did not ask where they were going, consenting with reciprocal wordlessness, and when he turned west onto East Carson she gazed out the window as if she had not seen the strip a thousand times before, as if she were new to town, all of that exclusive tangled neon slung low on the buildings, brazen and eye-catching and aloof. For a while the pink light permeated the truck with something sentimental, a soft electric intimation of lapsed time and lapsed memory. Then it seeped away as they cleared the strip, and the night seemed to reemerge all around them. The road angled northward, and soon they were driving parallel to the Monongahela, and when they drove past the confluence, both gazed out at the Point as they always did here and would continue to do for the rest of their lives: the sight of the whole city, at the will of the rivers, converging in a crush of architecture into a single spew of water. And then it passed behind them, the city darkening like a heap of embers dying, and then they were driving along the Ohio River under black sky, the stars fanning, and soon they were separated from the water by only a bare set of railroad tracks.
Abigail spoke, still looking out at the river which ran long and dark beside them. “We were house shopping,” she said, just audible over the truck. “Every weekend we’d go out and look at houses. Once we even bid on one.”
“Where?” asked Mark when she fell quiet.
“Carrick. Of course Carrick. He was actually more into the whole thing than I was. He didn’t want us to get married and then have to come back to the same apartment.” Then she added, “He would have been a good father.”
Mark nodded, though she was not looking at him to see it. The road continued to grow darker, the stars clearer. He remembered that he had seen her with Zacharias on a weekend afternoon not long ago, conferring in front of a house with some woman in a red pantsuit. He had thought nothing of it then, but felt now as though he had stolen a glimpse into an abrogated future, being for a moment privy to the unstomachable processes of fate permanently altering its course.
“I need to move out of Pittsburgh,” she said. “I don’t ever want to see those houses again, and they’re all over Carrick. I can’t keep living here.”
As they crossed the creek into McKees Rocks, a smaller road opened up, following the bend of the river. Mark swerved onto it, rattling across the train tracks, then pulled off the road onto the first gravel yard that sat off the riverbank, one still patched with snow and littered with beached rundown motorboats. He stopped the truck and climbed out into the night, his face turned up to the sky as the gravel crunched under his boots. The wind was sweeping raw and hard across the water but he did not feel cold. Five miles downstream from where he had once deposited Levi Gorski into the water, he was staring at the stars now to see whether he would recognize them, thinking, If they are not the same, then when I die my memory will die and their memory of me will die with it. They shone clearer here than ever, each a vivid puncture in the night, but as he looked and strained to look, they seemed to grow only increasingly ambiguous in arrangement, until he found he could no longer see anything in them, could not recognize whether they were familiar or strange, until they seemed just meaningless points of light spread flat and trivial across the sky.
He had left the headlights on. For a while Abigail sat in the fading warmth of the truck, watching his shape moving then going distant in the dark. He seemed submerged in it, a dimly rendered figure sluggish and incipient in dark liquid. From within the truck she could hear the wind battering the windows with an animal energy, wild and invisible. “What are you doing?” she finally called out to him, rolling the window down a crack, but her voice seemed to fly away in the wrong direction.
And standing in the untamed grass that lined the river, Mark thought he saw something floating silently on the water.
You killed him, didn’t you? he heard Abigail say out of the darkness, her voice almost inaudible in the wind.
He froze, something terrible expanding in his chest.
Did you kill him? she murmured.
When he turned he saw her climbing out of the truck in the distance and walking toward him against the wind with her hair blowing back, clutching a beer in her hand. For a moment she was lit garishly by the headlights. She stepped from the gravel onto the concrete between them, and then he saw her suddenly going down on a patch of ice, falling messily but somehow retaining an impression of lightness, like a bird knocked to the earth by a gust. When he went back to her she was still sitting on the concrete with her hand held to her stomach. Her mouth was skewed and rigid. “Goddamn ice,” she said. She took a stubborn drink from her beer, which she had somehow managed to save, before allowing him to help her up. Her hand remained on her stomach, and her mouth remained rigid.
“You all right?” he said.
She shook her head.
“I can drive you back.”
She shook her head again and walked stiffly ahead of him toward the river. He joined her where she stood on the grass gazing at the sparse black trees of Brunot Island. “I’m fucking pregnant,” she said finally over the wind. The words seemed to race toward some distant point behind them at a hundred miles an hour. “I hadn’t even told him yet,” she added. “Haven’t told anyone.”
The island jutted like some malignant outgrowth from the middle of the river.
“I’m getting rid of it obviously,” she said, then took another swallow of beer as if to drive the point home. As the bottle fell back to her side he reached to take it from her, attempting in the last instant to mask the effort in casualness as if they had been sharing the bottle. She let him take it. But when he raised it to his own lips he found it mostly empty, the last mouthful of beer warmed by her hand. She looked at him strangely, then moved away from him, wandering upstream beside the black water, just beyond the reach of its ragged waves.