“Maisie,” I said. “Do you know who I am?”
She did not react.
“Maisie, do you remember ever seeing me before?” Again, nothing. It was better than getting an answer, but it didn’t put my fears to rest. Ryan said it all came out during sex, and I knew I was procrastinating. I was looking for some other way to find out what I wanted to know, but I didn’t see it. Taking in a long, deep breath, I told her to take off her G-string and lie on the bed. She did that.
I took off my clothes. I’d been afraid I was not going to be able to perform, but I think her nudity and mine were enough to get things going. Her body was strangely warm, almost hot, but it didn’t feel like body heat. It was more like there was a chemical reaction happening just below her skin. And the texture was all wrong. It didn’t feel like skin, and her flesh didn’t feel like flesh. Lying on top of her felt like lying on top of a water balloon. I didn’t want to lick or suck or bite or even run my hands over her. I just wanted to do what I had to do and see what happened.
It was like Ryan had said: She was into it. Really into it. She bucked wildly, grabbed onto me, she grunted, groaned, and murmured. And in the middle, she began to speak. “God damn it,” she said, “you killed me. I’m fucking you, and you killed me. Walter Molson, you killed me.”
I pushed myself off her and staggered backward to the wall. It was worse than I thought. Far worse. By arranging to have sex with her, by putting her in a position where she could learn my name, I had made it worse. I was going to have to do something about this, and I was going to have to do it soon.
The real beginning of the story was two years before all this. Tori’s sister was going through a bad patch with her husband, was maybe thinking of getting divorced, and Tori wanted to go out to California to be with her for a few days. We hadn’t been married all that long, and this was going to be my first time alone in the new house. I loved my wife, and I loved living with her, but I was also excited for the solitude, which I missed sometimes. You get to thinking about it and you realize you can’t remember the last time you spent more than an hour or two without someone else around.
The first night she was gone I was exhausted from work, and basically fell asleep right away. The second night, a Saturday, was something else. I thought about calling up a couple of friends and going out, but somehow it seemed a waste of an empty house to leave it. I was in it for the quiet, for the privacy, and I didn’t want to waste it with socializing. I ordered a pizza, turned on a baseball game, and prepared to enjoy a night of not picking up after myself, of leaving the pizza box on the coffee table until morning.
I took out my bottle of Old Charter, and I swear I only planned to do one shot. Two at the most. I wasn’t interested in getting drunk, and I was sure that drinking too much would put me right to sleep.
But somehow I didn’t stop. The game on TV was exciting, and one shot followed the next with an unremarked ferocity. Come eleven o’clock, I was good and drunk.
Come one o’clock, it seemed to me like a crime against humanity that there was no ice cream in the house, like the UN Office on Desserts was going to come gunning for me if I didn’t take care of things.
I understood that I was drunk, very drunk, and that driving under those conditions was somewhere between ill advised and fucking moronic. I also understood that there was a convenience store not half a mile from my house. A straight shot out of my driveway, past four stop signs, and there you are. No need even to turn the wheel. I might have walked. The air would have done me good, but since the idea didn’t occur to me, it saved me the trouble of deciding I was too lazy to walk. Something else never occurred to me—turning on my headlights.
That was bad enough, but running that second stop sign was worse. I wasn’t fiddling with the radio or distracted by anything. I just didn’t see it, and I didn’t remember it. With no headlights to reflect against it, the sign was invisible. I had a vague sense that I ought to be slowing down somewhere around there, which was when I felt my car hit something. Sometime thereafter, I knew I had to stop, and after spending a little bit of time trying to find the brake pedal, I did in fact stop. I was a drunk moron, no doubt about it, and I realized I ought to have turned on my headlights before, but I knew enough not to turn on my headlights now.
I grabbed the emergency flashlight from the glove compartment, spent a little while trying to remember how to turn it on, but soon enough everything was under control. I got out of the car and stumbled the hundred or so feet since I hit the thing. My worst fear, I swear it, was that I had hit a garbage can, maybe a dog or cat, but when I approached the stop sign I saw her lying on the side of the road, her eyes open, blood pooling out of her mouth. There was a terrible rattling in her breath, and her upper body twitched violently.
And then I saw the damage to her skull. I saw blood and hair and exposed brain. She raised one limp hand in my direction and parted her lips as if to speak. I looked away.
You never know who you are until you are tested. I’d always thought of myself as the guy who does the right thing, but it turned out I wasn’t that guy at all. In that moment I understood that I was drunk, I’d been driving without headlights, and this girl was going to die. I could see her brain, and I could hear her death rattle. Nothing I was going to do could save her, and that was a good thing too, because if I’d thought I could save her, I can’t say for sure I would have. Even so, I ought to have called 911—I had my cell phone on me—but if I had, my life would have been over. I would have been looking at jail and disgrace. Everything I was and wanted to be would have been done.
All around me it was dark. No lights were on. No dogs barked.
No one knew I was there. In an instant both clear and decisive, I got back into the car, turned around, drove past the girl I had broken, and managed to navigate my way into the garage. Amazingly, I could find no sign of damage on the car. I was drunk as hell, and I knew it, which meant I could not trust my judgment, but to my foggy eyes, everything looked good. So with nothing else to think about, I went upstairs, got undressed, made a vague gesture toward brushing my teeth, and went to bed.
In the morning, hungover and panicked, I went out and looked at my car. Nothing. No blood, no scratches, no dents. To be certain, I took my car to an automated car wash. Then I began to relax.
The murder, as they called it, of Maisie Harper was a big story for about a day, but then there was that category-4 hurricane that started heading our way, and no one much cared about Maisie Harper anymore. The hurricane missed us, but it hit about two hundred miles north of here, and that generated enough media attention to keep Maisie’s name, if not her body, pretty well buried.
Of course, the cops kept working it, and the story made the paper, though only small stories in the back. At first they had no clue who would kill the twenty-one-year-old college student, home for the summer, out for a late-night stroll because she could not sleep. Then the police began to suspect it was her boyfriend. They arrested him, and it looked like I’d caught a break and this guy would take the fall. I cheered the cops on. I didn’t bother to think that he hadn’t done it, that he was mourning for this girl he possibly loved and very probably liked. All I could think about was that if they nailed him, I could exhale. But they didn’t nail him. They let him go, and they made some noise about pursuing more leads. Every day I would look out the window expecting to see cop cars pulling up, waiting to cart me off in shame. The cars never came. They never suspected me, never came to talk to me. There were no witnesses. No one had seen or heard a thing, and eventually the story blew over. In the process, I learned a very important thing about myself. I could do something terrible and live with it, and when the going got tough, I could keep my cool.