“Who is this?” There was a scuffling sound, followed by jagged breathing. “Samantha?” he said. “Is that you?”
“Can you come get me, please?” she said.
He looked at the clock; it was past two. “Tell me where you are.”
She gave him an address in South Bethlehem, not far from Lehigh. Maybe she was at some party with college kids. He got his keys, then paused by Diana’s closed door, wondering if he should tell her; but she wasn’t sleeping well lately, and he didn’t want to ruin her whole night.
Though she’d called from what sounded like a party, the ramshackle duplex he pulled up in front of was quiet. He’d thought she’d be outside waiting for him, but she wasn’t. He sighed. Lauren had never done anything like this. Grudgingly he climbed the splintered wooden stairs and peered in the window. A couple of guys were lying on couches, watching TV, no one else in sight. He knocked, and when he got no reaction, he assumed they were stoned or something worse. Now worried, he opened the door and went in.
“Don’t you knock?” one of them said. The other stayed riveted to the TV. They looked to be in their twenties, one white, one Hispanic, both skinny, slouched on their threadbare couches, their jeans riding down to expose their underwear, their arms sleeved in tattoos.
“I did,” said Mike. “I’m looking for Samantha.”
The guy who’d spoken shrugged, and the other still hadn’t moved.
Giving up, Mike headed to the empty kitchen, then moved upstairs. If the first floor was unadorned, the second was battered, littered with beer cans overflowing with cigarette butts. In one room there was only a bare mattress on the floor. His pulse quick and angry, he opened the next door and saw a fat man in a white tank top ministering to a sick person in a bed. Then his eyes readjusted, and he understood the man was pulling up Sam’s dress. Her eyes were closed, her arms flopped out to the side. A strand of her long blond hair was caught in her mouth, foam flecked on her chin.
“Get off,” Mike said. “Now.”
The man ignored him, his face flushed as he pulled down her underwear.
Mike stepped forward and pushed him off, and he landed hard on the floor, his jeans unbuckled, sprawled there waving his arms and legs languidly, like a turtle on his back.
Turning back to Samantha, Mike pulled her dress down — it barely reached her thighs — and picked her up, draping her arm across his shoulder. “Can you walk?” he said. She didn’t answer. She smelled of puke and beer.
Downstairs, in the living room, there was now only one guy left, the one who’d spoken earlier. He was crouched over a bong, filling his lungs. When he saw them, he let out a stream of smoke and smiled. “Girl had a little too much fun, huh?”
At the sound of his voice, Sam came around, gurgling a little. “Thank you for the party,” she said weakly.
“You’re so welcome,” the guy said. “Dude, need help getting her to the car?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Mike said, propping Samantha against his leg as he opened the screen door.
The guy smiled again. “Whatever,” he said.
After Mike got her buckled up, he started the car. The fat man came running out of the house, shaking his fist. When Mike reached over the girl to lock the door, Sam woke up and smiled vaguely. “Bye,” she said.
Pulling into the Kents’ house, he saw the driveway was empty. Sam was awake, staring listlessly at the window.
“Where are your parents?”
“They took my brother to visit colleges.”
He turned off the ignition and rolled down the windows, a breeze carrying the smell of skunk into the car. Sam sat with her seat belt on, dazed or sick or simply pliant. He knew he should scold her, express concern, or both. Be parental. But it was three in the morning and he was wiped out. A headache pressed its angry iron grip upon him. Leaning back in the driver’s seat, he said the first thing that came to his mind. “Did Lauren know those guys?”
She nodded. “Sure,” she said. “We partied with them sometimes.”
His skin prickled with revulsion. “The night of the accident, were you partying with them?”
She squinted at him. “We never got there,” she said simply.
Nights when Lauren was out, he and Diana told themselves not to wait up, that they knew her friends and where she was. Every time they called her cell she’d answer promptly. She was allergic to hazelnuts and they’d trained her to ask about the food in every restaurant or home, even if it was something that didn’t seem like it would have nuts in it. Once when she was eleven she ate some chocolate cake at a party and went into anaphylactic shock, her throat swelling, and he’d plunged the EpiPen into her skinny thigh as she stared mutely at him, terrified … These memories skittered like marbles across the flat planes of his brain.
“Thanks for picking me up,” her friend said.
The fake politeness of teenagers drove him crazy. He looked at her, not knowing if she remembered what had just happened to her, or if he should remind her. “Are you okay?”
“Absolutely,” she said, then got out and walked slowly, carefully, up to the door. Only when she got to the front door, framed beneath the yellow porch light, did he notice she wasn’t wearing any shoes.
Back home he slid into bed next to Diana, needing her body beside him. He put his palm on her hip, and she nestled back against him. Lying still, he tried to time his breathing with hers. When they were first married, her hair was long, well below her shoulders, and it would get into his eyes and mouth while they were wrapped together in bed. And when she was pregnant, it grew thick and silky, with a heft and shine they both loved; he used to run his hands through it, feeling it slip around his fingers like ribbon. After Lauren was born, she cut it short, because the baby kept pulling on it, and she’d kept it like that. Now the black was spiked with gray. He reached his arm over her stomach and in her sleep she took his hand and put it between her legs, warming it there.
He thought back to when her hair was long. He was twenty-five, waiting for friends in a bar after work, when he noticed this pretty girl sitting alone in a corner. Her friend had flaked out on her; he never met his. They’d been dating three weeks when she invited him over to her parents’ house for Sunday supper. She went to church with her parents every week, and they spent the rest of the day together. At the time he thought she went along just because she was a good daughter, not realizing how tenaciously she believed. It had taken him a while to come to grips with that, but he had. On that first night, he was greeted by her father, a portly, jowly man with skin so saggy it was as if gravity were tugging it downward.
He looked at Mike and said, “You must be the young man I’ve heard so much about.”
“I hope so,” Mike said, and held out his hand, but the other man didn’t take it, just stood there staring at him, his eyes half-hidden by his fleshy lids. Mike heard Diana and her mother talking, and the mysterious clatter of kitchen work. Almost reluctantly, her father gestured for Mike to come into the living room. It was clearly a place they spent little time in, with an uncomfortable-looking, straight-backed couch and side tables riotous with doilies and knickknacks.
“What is it you do for a living?”
“I’m in sales,” Mike said. He had a job at a medical supply company, and hated it, how he had to inflict himself on people, the associations with illness and death.