She swept a hand through her hair and drew the damp bangs out of her eyes. The empowerment of her own sexuality was still a mostly unknown quality for her. She was trying to be seductive. She didn’t have to put so much effort into it.
“You can fuck me if you want,” she said. “It’s okay. I’m almost seventeen.”
“Don’t talk that way.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay.”
It got her grinning. It was her mother’s knowing smile. She put a hand on my belly and ran it up my chest. She tightened her fist in my chest hair and drew herself even closer. She ground against my groin and got the reaction she was after. She laughed. It was her father’s laugh. Heavy, low, and full of potential violence.
“Come on,” she said. “Take me to bed.”
I could have given her a sharp backhand and probably knocked her out, but her index finger was tight against the trigger and the gun still might fire. The time I’d been shot with a .22 had been from across a poker table. I’d been hit in the thigh, and it had barely bled. Gunrunners like the brotherhood laughed at pipsqueak weapons like this, but, up close, getting hit in the face or the chest would kill you just as dead as a magnum .44.
“You want me,” she said.
She was a kid, but she was a beautiful and alluring one, and she had the added draw of being her mother’s daughter. I heard a strange, moaning lament and realized it was coming from my throat. She laughed at me again. She kissed my throat and placed the gun under my ear. It made me groan louder. I had been helpless in the hands of her mother, and now it was happening all over again. Except this time instead of a crazed, adult carnal bitch I was being manipulated by a lonely, insecure girl. A part of me cared about the difference, and a part of me didn’t. I wasn’t a good man. I’d done a lot of things that I’d one day have to pay for, but I’d never done anything like this. I waited on the edge of the razor to see which half of myself would win.
She made the choice for me. She climbed into bed and laid across the sheets, trying to bewitch me, the laughter in her throat as ugly as her mother’s. I’d made love to Katy in this room, in her and Ronnie’s bed, wasted on coke and wine, with M-16s stacked in the closet. Katy had never brought a gun to bed with her, but she did like knives. She used to dig grooves and half-moon gashes along my ribs. Afterward the sheets would look like someone had been butchered.
Even as my erection grew my stomach tumbled. I laid beside her and pulled her to me. The pistol wavered between us. She kissed my chin and attempted some dirty talk, but I shushed her and held her, and kept holding her, until a wild sob welled inside her and finally broke free. She cried for twenty minutes straight while I rubbed her back. I took the gun away from her and put it in my nightstand drawer.
“Ghosts walk these rooms,” she said.
“That’s true of every house,” I said. “Not just this one.”
“But mine are here. They have been for years. They’re with us now. I can hear my mom.”
“Emily, you—”
“Can you hear her? She’s saying thank you. For helping me. She’s under your bed right now. She says you were always the nicest one of the guys she used to fuck.”
I gripped her by her shoulders and gave her one vicious shake. “Enough of that shit, all right?”
“I need to find who killed my parents,” she said.
It was generally believed that Dell Bishop, the number-two guy of the Brothers of Bedlam, had murdered Emily’s parents in order to take over the club. No one held it against him. Ron and Katy had been branching farther and farther out, making deals with the mob, the pushers, other clubs considered to be enemies of the brotherhood. The feds caught wind of the gunrunning. They were all over town for months, questioning the civilians, but they never found any hard evidence. The chop shops were raided and marijuana crops burned. There was no connection back to the brothers, but it stirred a lot of misery. The townsfolk, who’d once considered the club to be vigilantes protecting their borders, worried that even more problems were bound to come down on them.
A lot of people believed Dell had iced Katy and Ron to ensure the future of both the town and the MC, but I never did. Dell always proclaimed his innocence, even when we were alone and drunk. He’d been loyal, bound by deed and blood. He also said that he believed he was Emily’s biological dad, and I couldn’t see him killing Katy no matter how much trouble she brought the club. I thought he loved her, the way I had, the way we all had.
“Let that go, Emily,” I whispered. “You’ve wasted enough of your life to grief. Give it up. Do whatever the doctors at Sojourner tell you to do. Play the game. Pretend if you have to. But get out. I can help you with that. I did it myself. I can show you how.”
“I can’t go back there,” she said. “Not right now. Please.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, shushing her again. I hummed to her the way I thought I remembered my mother humming to me. I held her, but the way that a friend would. It had been a long time since I’d held anyone that way.
“Can I sleep here?” she asked. “I’m tired.”
“Yes, of course.”
I watched over her for a couple of hours. The sun started to come up. It bathed her face in a rosy golden light that washed away all the distress and anxiety. She curled up under my arm and I shut my eyes.
——
The dead have a way of waking up along with you. I listened to their hisses. The weight of nightmare was still on me. I couldn’t move yet. The whispering grew louder. It might’ve been Katy’s voice. She smiled at me with a mouth full of blood as she flicked open a switchblade. I was snoring. I made an effort to rear off the bed but I couldn’t. I tried to open my eyes but I wasn’t quite there yet. I heard scratching and the ringing chimes of the box spring. I was asleep and I knew it. I snorted and sipped air. Emily spoke to me.
I’m pregnant, she said.
My eyes snapped open.
I asked, “What? What did you say?”
I checked beside me. She wasn’t there. I touched the outline of her body in the blankets. There was no warmth.
“Emily?”
I got out of bed. Her clothes were still on the floor where she’d left them. The bathroom was empty. The pistol was in my nightstand drawer where I’d put it.
I sniffed and gagged. I raised the back of my hand to cover my nose. I knew the smell. It was coming from under my bed.
I crouched down and peered underneath and saw Emily wedged there with her eyes and mouth open. She’d cut her wrists with the pocketknife I kept in an ashtray on my dresser. It hadn’t been very sharp and she’d really had to saw into herself. I counted four vertical slashes on each wrist. She’d had to start over and over as the wounds crusted. Ron and Katy’s shitty shag carpet had soaked her blood up thirstily. She’d bled out beneath me while I’d slept and dreamed of her mother.
I disturbed the scene by reaching for Emily and touching her cheek. She was still warm. She’d been dead no more than an hour.
She’d said she was pregnant. But when had she told me? It felt like she’d woken me with those words. Her lips were drawn back, not so much into a grimace as a real, true smile. She looked much happier than she had while talking with me. She seemed more lively as well. Her eyes hadn’t turned dull and hard yet. Amusement played there.
It took me a minute to get my bearings and find my cell. I called 911. When I was asked for my name it took me three tries before I could say it. I told them what had happened, gave my address, and disconnected.