Somewhere a dog barks in the near dark, and the barking becomes more insistent.
Scarpetta detects the distant carbureted potato-potato-potato rhythm of Marino’s Roadmaster. She can hear the damn thing blocks away on Meeting Street, heading south. Moments later it roars through the narrow alleyway behind her house. He’s been drinking. She could hear it in his voice when she talked to him on the phone. He’s being obnoxious.
She needs him sober if they’re going to have a productive conversation — perhaps the most important one they’ve ever had. She begins making a pot of coffee as he turns left on King Street, then another left into the narrow driveway she shares with her unpleasant neighbor, Mrs. Grimball. Marino rolls the throttle a few times to announce himself and kills the engine.
“You got something to drink in there?” he says as Scarpetta opens the front door. “A little bourbon would be nice. Wouldn’t it, Mrs. Grimball!” he shouts up at the yellow frame house, and a curtain moves. He locks the bike’s front fork, slips the key in his pocket.
“Inside, now,” Scarpetta says, realizing he’s far more intoxicated than she thought. “For God’s sake, why did you find it necessary to ride down the alley and yell at my neighbor?” she says as he follows her to the kitchen, his booted footsteps loud, his head almost touching the top of each door frame they pass through.
“Security check. I like to make sure nothing’s going on back there, no lost hearses, no homeless people hanging out.”
He pulls out a chair, sits, slumped back. The odor of booze is powerful, his face bright red, his eyes bloodshot. He says, “I can’t stay long. Got to get back to my woman. She thinks I’m at the morgue.”
Scarpetta hands him a coffee, black. “You’re going to stay long enough to sober up, otherwise you’re not going anywhere near your motorcycle. I can’t believe you got on it in your condition. That’s not like you. What’s wrong with you?”
“So I had a few. Big deal. I’m fine.”
“It is a big deal, and you’re not fine. I don’t care how well you supposedly handle alcohol. Every drunk driver thinks he’s fine right before he ends up dead or maimed or in jail.”
“I didn’t come here to be lectured to.”
“I didn’t invite you over to have you show up drunk.”
“Why did you invite me? To rag on me? To find something else wrong with me? Something else not up to your high-horse standards?”
“It’s not like you to talk this way.”
“Maybe you’ve just never listened,” he says.
“I asked you to come over in hopes we could have an open and honest conversation, but it doesn’t appear this is a good time. I have a guest room. Maybe you should go to sleep and we’ll talk in the morning.”
“Seems as good a time as any.” He yawns and stretches, doesn’t touch his coffee. “Talk away. Either that or I’m out of here.”
“Let’s go into the living room and sit in front of the fire.” She gets up from the kitchen table.
“It’s seventy-five friggin’ degrees outside.” He gets up, too.
“Then I’ll make it nice and chilly in here.” She goes to a thermostat and turns on the air-conditioning. “I’ve always found it easier to talk in front of a fire.”
He follows her into her favorite room, a small sitting area with a brick fireplace, heart-of-pine floors, exposed beams, and plaster walls. She places a chemical log on the grate and lights it, and pulls two chairs close and switches off the lamps.
He watches flames burn the paper wrapping off the log and says, “I can’t believe you use those things. Original this, original that, and then you use fake logs.”
Lucious Meddick drives around the block and his resentment festers.
He saw them go inside after that asshole investigator thundered up on his motorcycle drunk and disturbed the neighbors. Daily double, Lucious thinks. He’s blessed because he’s been wronged and God is making it up to him. Setting out to teach her a lesson, Lucious has caught both of them, and he slowly noses his hearse into the unlighted alleyway, worrying about another flat tire, and getting angrier. He snaps the rubber band hard as his frustration spikes. Voices of dispatchers on his police scanner are a distant static he can decipher in his sleep.
They didn’t call him. He drifted past a fatal car crash on William Hilton Highway, saw the body being loaded into a competitor’s hearse — an old one — and again Lucious was ignored. Beaufort County is her turf now, and nobody calls him. She’s blackballed him because he made a mistake about her address. If she thought that was a violation of her privacy, she doesn’t know the meaning.
Filming women through a window at night is nothing new. Surprising how easy it is and how many of them don’t bother with curtains or blinds, or leave them open just a tiny inch or two, thinking Who’s going to look? Who’s going to get down behind the shrubbery or climb up in a tree to see? Lucious, that’s who. See how the snotty lady doctor likes watching herself in a home movie that people can gawk at for nothing and never know who took it. Better still, he’ll get both of them in the act. Lucious thinks of the hearse — nowhere near as nice as his — and the car wreck, and the unfairness of it is unendurable.
Who was called? Not him. Not Lucious, even after he radioed the dispatcher and said he was in the area, and she came back and told him in her snippy, terse tone that she hadn’t called him and what unit was he? He said he wasn’t a unit and she told him in so many words to stay off the cop channels and, for that matter, off the air. He snaps the rubber band until it stings like a whip. He bumps over pavers, past the iron gate behind the lady doctor’s carriage garden, and spots a white Cadillac blocking his way. It’s dark back here. He snaps the rubber band and swears. He recognizes the oval bumper sticker on the Cadillac’s rear bumper.
HH for Hilton Head.
He’ll just leave his damn hearse right here. Nobody drives through this damn alley anyway, and he has a mind to call in the Cadillac and laugh while the police give the driver a ticket. He gleefully thinks about You Tube and the trouble he’s about to cause. That damn investigator is in that damn bitch’s pants. He saw them walk into the house, sneaking and cheating. He has a girl, that sexy thing he was with in the morgue, and Lucious saw them carrying on when they weren’t paying attention. From what he hears, Dr. Scarpetta has a man up north. Isn’t that something. Lucious makes a fool of himself, promoting his business, telling the rude investigator that he — Lucious Meddick — would appreciate referrals from him and his boss, and their response? To disrespect him. To discriminate. Now they have to pay.
He turns off the engine and the lights and gets out as he glares at the Cadillac. He opens the back of the hearse and an empty stretcher is clamped to the floor, a stack of neatly folded white sheets and white body pouches on top of it. He finds the camcorder, and extra batteries in a utility box he keeps in back, and shuts the tailgate and stares at the Cadillac, walks past it, considering the best way to get close to her house.
Someone moves behind the glass of the driver’s door, just the faintest hint of something dark inside the dark car, shifting. Lucious is happy as he turns on the camcorder to see how much memory is left, and the darkness inside the Cadillac shifts again, and Lucious walks around the back of it and films the license plate.
Probably some couple making out, and he gets excited thinking about it. Then he’s offended. They saw his headlights and didn’t get out of the way. Disrespect. They saw him park his hearse in the dark because he couldn’t get past, and they couldn’t have been more inconsiderate. They’ll be sorry. He raps his knuckles against the glass, about to scare them but good.
“I got your plate number.” He raises his voice. “And I’m calling the damn police.”
The burning log crackles. An English bracket clock on the mantle tick-tocks.
“What’s really going on with you?” Scarpetta says, watching him. “What’s wrong?”
“You’re the one who asked me here. So I assume something’s wrong with you.”
“Something’s wrong with us. How about that? You seem miserable. You’re making me miserable. This past week has been out of control. Do you want to tell me what you’ve done and why?” she says. “Or do you want me to tell you?”
The fire crackles.
“Please, Marino. Talk to me.”
He stares at the fire. For a while, neither of them talk.
“I know about the e-mails,” she says. “But then, you probably already know that, since you asked Lucy to check out the alleged false alarm the other night.”
“So you have her snoop around my computer. So much for trust.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to say anything about trust.”
“I’ll say what I want.”
“The tour you gave your girlfriend. All of it was caught on camera. I’ve seen it. Every minute of it.”
Marino’s face twitches. Of course he knew the cameras and microphones were there, but she can tell it didn’t occur to him that he and Shandy were being watched. Certainly, he would have known their every action and word was being captured, but most likely he assumed that Lucy would have no reason to review the recordings. He was right about that. She wouldn’t have had a reason. He was confident he would get away with it, and that makes what he did even worse.
“There are cameras everywhere,” she says. “Did you really think no one would find out what you did?”
He doesn’t answer.
“I thought you cared. I thought you cared about that murdered little boy. Yet you unzipped his pouch and played show-and-tell with your girlfriend. How could you do such a thing?”
He won’t look at her or respond.
“Marino. How could you do such a thing?” she asks him again.
“It was her idea. The tape should have showed you that,” he says.
“A tour without my permission is bad enough. But how could you let her look at bodies? Especially his.”
“You saw the tape from when Lucy was spying on me.” He glowers at her. “Shandy wouldn’t take no for an answer. She wouldn’t get out of the cooler. I tried.”
“There’s no excuse.”
“Spying. I’m sick of it.”
“Betrayal and disrespect. I’m sick of it,” Scarpetta says.
“I’ve been thinking of quitting anyway,” he goes on in a nasty tone. “If you stuck your nose in my e-mails from Dr. Self, you ought to know I got better opportunities than hanging out here with you for the rest of my life.”
“Quit? Or are you hoping I’ll fire you? Because that’s what you deserve after what you did. We don’t give tours of the morgue and make a spectacle of the poor people who end up there.”
“Jesus, I hate the way women overreact to everything. Get so damn emotional and irrational. Go ahead. Fire me,” he says thickly, over-enunciating, the way people do when they try too hard to sound sober.
“This is exactly what Dr. Self wants to happen.”
“You’re just jealous because she’s a hell of a lot more important than you.”
“This isn’t the Pete Marino I know.”
“You ain’t the Dr. Scarpetta I know. Did you read what else she said about you?”
“She said quite a lot about me.”
“The lie you live. Why don’t you finally admit to it? Maybe that’s where Lucy got it. From you.”
“My sexual preference? Is that what you’re so desperate to know?”
“You’re afraid to admit it.”
“If what Dr. Self implied were true, I certainly wouldn’t be afraid of it. It’s people like her, people like you, who seem to be afraid of it.”
He leans back in his chair, and for an instant, he seems near tears. Then his face turns hard again as he stares at the fire.
“What you did yesterday,” she says, “isn’t the Marino I’ve known all these years.”
“Maybe it is and you just never wanted to see it.”
“I know it isn’t. What’s happened to you?”
“I don’t know how I got here,” he says. “I look back on it and see this guy who did good as a boxer for a while, but I didn’t want to have mush for a brain. Got sick of being a uniform cop in New York. Married Doris, who got sick of me, had a sicko son who’s dead, and I’m still chasing sicko assholes. I’m not sure why. Never have been able to figure out why you do what you do, either. You probably won’t tell me.” Sullenly.
“Maybe because I grew up in a house where nobody talked to me in a way that conveyed anything I needed to hear or made me feel understood or important. Maybe because I watched my father die. Every day, that’s all any of us watched. Maybe I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to understand the thing that defeated me as a child. Death. I don’t think there are simple or even logical reasons for why we’re who we are and do what we do.” She looks over at him, but he doesn’t look at her. “Maybe there’s no simple or even logical answer that explains your behavior. But I wish there were.”
“In the old days, I didn’t work for you. That’s what’s changed.” He gets up. “I’m having a bourbon.”
“More bourbon isn’t what you need,” she says, dismayed.
He isn’t listening, and he knows his way to the bar. She hears him open a cabinet and get out a glass, then another cabinet and a bottle. He walks back into the room with a tumbler of liquor in one hand, the bottle in the other. An uneasiness starts in the pit of her stomach, and she wants him to leave but can’t send him out in the middle of the night drunk.
He sets the bottle on the coffee table and says, “We got along pretty good all those years in Richmond when I was the top detective and you was the chief.” He lifts his glass. Marino doesn’t sip. He takes big swallows. “Then you got fired and I quit. Since then, nothing’s turned out the way I thought. I liked the hell out of Florida. We had a kick-ass training facility. Me in charge of investigations, good pay, even had my own celebrity shrink. Not that I need a shrink, but I lost weight, was in great shape. Was doing really good until I stopped seeing her.”
“Had you continued to see Dr. Self, she would have decimated your life. And I can’t believe you don’t realize that her communicating with you is nothing but manipulation. You know what she’s like. You saw what she was like in court. You heard her.”
He takes another swallow of bourbon. “For once there’s a woman more powerful than you, and you can’t stand it. Maybe can’t stand my relationship with her. So you got to bad-mouth her because what else can you do. You’re stuck down here in no-man’s-land and about to become a housewife.”
“Don’t insult me. I don’t want to fight with you.”
He drinks, and his meanness is wide awake now. “My relationship with her is maybe why you wanted us to move from Florida. I’m seeing it now.”
“I believe Hurricane Wilma is why we moved from Florida,” she says, as the feeling in her stomach gets worse. “That and my need to have a real office, a real practice, again.”
He drains his glass, pours more.
“You’ve had enough,” she says.
“You got that right.” He lifts his glass, takes another swallow.
“I think it’s time I call a cab to take you home.”
“Maybe you should start a real practice somewhere else and get the hell out of here. You’d be better off.”
“You’re not the judge of where I’d be better off,” she says, watching him carefully, firelight moving on his big face. “Please don’t drink anymore. You’ve had enough.”
“I’ve had enough, all right.”
“Marino, please don’t let Dr. Self drive a wedge between you and me.”
“I don’t need her to do that. You done it on your own.”
“Let’s don’t do this.”
“Let’s do.” Slurring, swaying a bit in his chair, a gleam in his eyes that’s unnerving. “I don’t know how many days I got left. Who the hell knows what’s going to happen. So I don’t intend to waste my time in a place I hate, working for someone who don’t treat me with the respect I deserve. Like you’re better than me. Well, you’re not.”
“What do you mean by how many days you’ve got left? Are you telling me you’re sick?” she says.
“Sick and tired. That’s what I’m telling you.”
She’s never seen him this drunk. He’s swaying on his feet, pouring more bourbon, spilling it. Her impulse is to take the bottle away from him, but the look in his eyes stops her.
“You live alone and it ain’t safe,” he says. “It’s not safe, you’re living here in this little old house alone.”
“I’ve always lived alone, more or less.”
“Yeah. What the fuck’s that say about Benton? Hope you two have a nice life.”
She’s never seen Marino this drunk and hateful, and she doesn’t know what to do.
“I’m in a situation where I got to make choices. So now I’m gonna tell you the truth.” He spits as he talks, the glass of bourbon perilously tilted in his hand. “I’m bored as hell working for you.”
“If that’s how you feel, I’m glad you’re telling me.” But the more she tries to soothe him, the more inflamed he gets.
“Benton the rich snob. Doctor Wesley. So because I ain’t a doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief, I’m not good enough for you. Tell you one goddamn thing, I’m good enough for Shandy, and she’s sure as hell not what you think. From a better family than yours. She didn’t grow up poor in Miami with some blue-collar grocery store worker just off the boat.”
“You’re very drunk. You can sleep in the guest room.”
“Your family’s no better than mine. Just-off-the-boat Italians with nothing but cheap macaroni and tomato sauce to eat five nights a week,” he says.
“Let me get you a cab.”
He slams his glass down on the coffee table. “I think it’s a real good idea for me to get on my horse and ride.” He grabs a chair to steady himself.
“You’re not going anywhere near that motorcycle,” she says.
He starts walking, knocks against the door frame as she holds on to his arm. He almost drags her toward the front door as she tries to stop him, implores him not to go. He digs in a pocket for his motorcycle key and she snatches it out of his hand.
“Give me my key. I’m saying it real polite.”
She clenches it in her fist behind her back, in the small foyer at the front door. “You’re not getting on your bike. You can hardly walk. You’re taking a cab or staying here tonight. I’m not going to let you kill yourself or somebody else. Please listen to me.”
“Give it to me.” He stares at her with flat eyes, and he’s a huge man she no longer knows, a stranger who might physically hurt her. “Give it to me.” He reaches behind her and grabs her wrist and she is shocked by fear.
“Marino, let go of me.” She struggles to free her arm, but it may as well be in a vise. “You’re hurting me.”
He reaches around and grabs her other wrist, and fear turns to terror as he leans into her, his massive body pressing her against the wall. Her mind races with desperate thoughts of how to stop him before he goes any further.
“Marino, let go of me. You’re hurting me. Let’s go sit back down in the living room.” She tries to sound unafraid, her arms painfully pinned behind her. He presses hard against her. “Marino. Stop it. You don’t mean this. You’re very drunk.”
He kisses her and grabs her, and she turns her head away, tries to push his hands away, struggles and tells him no. The motorcycle key clatters to the floor as he kisses her and she resists him and tries to make him listen. He rips open her blouse. She tells him to stop, tries to stop him as he tears at her clothes. She tries to push away his hands, and tells him he’s hurting her, and then she doesn’t struggle with him anymore because he’s somebody else. He isn’t Marino. He’s a stranger attacking her inside her house. She sees the pistol in the back of his jeans as he drops to his knees, hurting her with his hands and mouth.
“Marino? This is what you want? To rape me? Marino?” She sounds so calm and unafraid, her voice seems to come from outside her body. “Marino? Is this what you want? To rape me? I know you don’t want that. I know you don’t.”
He suddenly stops. He releases her, and the air moves and is cool on her skin, wet from his saliva and chafed and raw from his violence and his beard. He covers his face with his hands and hunches forward on his knees and hugs her around her legs and begins to sob like a child. She slides the pistol out of his waistband as he cries.
“Let go.” She tries to move away from him. “Let me go.”
On his knees, he covers his face with his hands. She drops out the pistol’s magazine and pulls back the slide to make sure there isn’t a round in the chamber. She tucks the gun in the drawer of a table by the door and picks up the motorcycle key. She hides it and the magazine inside the umbrella stand. She helps Marino up, helps him back to the guest bedroom off the kitchen. The bed is small, and he seems to fill every inch of it as she makes him lie down. She pulls off his boots and covers him with a quilt.
“I’ll be right back,” she says, leaving the light on.
In the guest bath, she fills a glass with water and shakes four Advil tablets from the bottle. She covers herself with a robe, her wrists aching, her flesh raw and burning, the memory of his hands and mouth and tongue sickening. She bends over the toilet and gags. She leans against the edge of the sink and takes deep breaths and looks at her red face in the mirror and seems as much a stranger to herself as he is. She splashes herself with cold water, washes out her mouth, washes him away from every place he touched. She washes away tears, and it takes a few minutes to get control of herself. She returns to the guest room where he’s snoring.
“Marino. Wake up. Sit up.” She helps him, plumps pillows behind him. “Here, take these and drink the entire glass of water. You need to drink a lot of water. You’re going to feel like hell in the morning, but this will help.”
He drinks the water and takes the Advil, then turns his face to the wall as she brings him another glass. “Turn off the light,” he says to the wall.
“I need you to stay awake.”
He doesn’t answer her.
“You don’t have to look at me. But you must stay awake.”
He doesn’t look at her. He stinks like whisky and cigarettes and sweat, and the smell of him reminds her and she feels her soreness, feels where he has been and is nauseated again.
“Don’t worry,” he says thickly. “I’ll leave and you won’t ever have to see me. I’ll vanish for good.”
“You’re very, very drunk and don’t know what you’re doing,” she says. “But I want you to remember it. You need to stay awake long enough so you’ll remember this tomorrow. So we can get past it.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I almost shot him. I wanted to so bad. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Who did you almost shoot?” she says.
“At the bar,” he says in his drunken gabble. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Tell me what happened at the bar.”
Silence as he stares at the wall, his breathing heavy again.
“Who did you almost shoot?” she asks loudly.
“He said he’d been sent.”
“Sent?”
“Made threats about you. I almost shot him. Then I come over here and acted just like him. I should kill myself.”
“You’re not going to kill yourself.”
“I should.”
“That will be worse than what you just did. Do you understand me?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t look at her.
“If you kill yourself, I won’t feel sorry for you and I won’t forgive you,” she says. “Killing yourself is selfish, and none of us will forgive you.”
“I’m not good enough for you. I never will be. Go on and say it and get it over with once and for all.” He talks as if he has rags in his mouth.
The phone on the bedside table rings, and she picks it up.
“It’s me,” Benton says. “You saw what I sent? How are you?”
“Yes, and you?”
“Kay? Are you all right?”
“Yes, and you?”
“Christ. Is someone there?” he says, alarmed.
“Everything’s fine.”
“Kay? Is someone there?”
“We’ll talk tomorrow. I’ve decided to stay home, work in the garden, ask Bull to come over and help.”
“You’re sure? You sure you’re okay with him?”
“I am now,” she says.
Four o’clock in the morning, Hilton Head. Crashing waves spread white foam on the beach as if the heaving sea is frothing at the mouth.
Will Rambo is quiet on the wooden steps, and he walks the length of the boardwalk and climbs over the locked gate. The faux-Italianate villa is stucco with multiple chimneys and archways, and a sharply pitched red barrel-tile roof. In the back are copper lights, and a stone table with a clutter of filthy ashtrays and empty glasses, and not so long ago, her car key. Since then, she has used the spare, although she drives infrequently. Mostly, she goes nowhere, and he is silent as he moves about, and palmetto trees and pines sway in the wind.
Trees waving like wands, casting their spell over Rome, and flower petals blowing like snow along Via D’Monte Tarpeo. Poppies were blood-red, and wisteria draped over ancient brick walls was purple like bruises. Pigeons bobbed along steps, and women fed feral cats Whiskas and eggs from plastic plates among the ruins.
It was a fine day for walking, and the tourist traffic wasn’t heavy, and she was a little drunk but at ease with him, happy with him. He knew she would be.
“I would like you to meet my father,” he said to her as they sat on a wall and looked at feral cats, and she remarked repeatedly that they were pitiful stray cats, inbred and deformed, and someone should save them.
“Not stray but feral. There’s a difference. These feral cats want to be here and would rip you apart if you tried to rescue them. They aren’t something discarded or hurt with nothing to look forward to but darting from garbage can to garbage can and hiding under houses until someone catches them and puts them to sleep.”
“Why would someone put them to sleep?” she asked.
“Because they would. That’s what would happen once they’re removed from their haven and end up in unsafe places where they are hit by cars and chased by dogs and constantly endangered and wounded beyond repair. Unlike these cats. Look at them, all alone, and no one dares go near them unless they allow it. They want to be exactly where they are, down there in the ruins.”
“You’re weird,” she said, nudging him. “I thought so when we met, but you’re cute.”
“Come on,” he said, and he helped her up.
“I’m too warm,” she complained, because he had draped his long, black coat around her and made her wear a cap and his dark glasses, even though the day wasn’t cold or sunny.
“You’re very famous, and people will stare,” he reminded her. “You know they will, and we can’t have people staring.”
“I need to find my friends before they think I’ve been kidnapped.”
“Come on. You must see the apartment. It’s quite spectacular. I’ll drive you there because I can tell you’re tired, and you can call your friends and invite them to join us, if you like. We’ll have some very fine wine and cheeses.”
Then darkness, as if a light went out in his head, and he woke up to scenes in brilliant broken pieces, like brilliant broken pieces of a shattered stained-glass window that once told a story or a truth.
The stairs on the north side of the house haven’t been swept, and the door leading into the laundry room hasn’t been opened since the housekeeper was here last, almost two months ago. On either side of the stairs are hibiscus bushes, and behind them through a pane of glass he can see the alarm panel and its red light. He opens his tackle box and withdraws a saddle-grip glass cutter with a carbide tip. He cuts out a pane of glass and sets it on the sandy dirt behind the bushes as the puppy inside his crate begins to bay, and Will hesitates, quite calm. He reaches inside and unlocks the deadbolt, then opens the door and the alarm begins to beep, and he enters the code to silence it.
He’s inside a house he has watched for many months. He’s imagined this and planned it at such great length that finally, the act of doing it is easy and perhaps a little disappointing. He squats and wiggles his sandy fingers through the spaces in the wire crate and whispers to the basset hound, “It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right.”
The basset hound stops baying, and Will lets the dog lick the back of his hand, where there is no glue and no special sand.
“Good boy,” he whispers. “Don’t worry.”
His sandy feet carry him from the laundry room toward the sound of the movie playing again in the great room. Whenever she smokes outside, she has a bad habit of leaving the door open wide as she sits on the steps and stares at the black-bottom pool that is a gaping wound, and some of the smoke drifts inside as she sits there and smokes and stares at the pool. The smoke has permeated whatever it touches, and he smells the stale stench and it gives a flinty edge to the air, a hard, gray matte finish like her aura. It is sickly. A near-death aura.
The walls and ceiling are washed with ocher and umber, the colors of the earth, and the stone floor is the color of the sea. Every doorway is an arch, and there are huge pots of acanthus that are limp and brown because she hasn’t been watering them properly, and there is dark hair on the stone floor. Head hair, pubic hair, from when she paces about, sometimes nude, ripping at her hair. She’s asleep on the couch, her back to him, the bald spot on the top of her head pale like a full moon.
His bare, sandy feet are quiet, and the movie plays. Michael Douglas and Glenn Close are drinking wine to an aria from Madama Butterfly playing on the hi-fi. Will stands in the arch and watches Fatal Attraction, knows all of it, has seen it many, many times, has watched it with her through the window without her knowing. He hears the dialogue in his head before the characters are saying it, and then Michael Douglas is leaving, and Glenn Close is angry and rips off his shirt.
Ripping, tearing, desperate to get at what was underneath. He had so much blood on his hands he couldn’t see the color of his skin as he tried to tuck Roger’s intestines in, and the wind and sand blasted both of them and they could barely see or hear each other.
She sleeps on the couch, too drunk and drugged to hear him come in. She doesn’t feel his specter floating near her, waiting to carry her away. She will thank him.
“Will! Help me! Please help me! Oh, please, God!” Screaming. “It hurts so bad! Please don’t let me die!”
“You’re not going to die.” Holding him. “I’m here. I’m here. I’m right here.”
“I can’t stand it!”
“God will never give you more than you can bear.” His father always saying that, ever since Will was a boy.
“It isn’t true.”
“What isn’t true?” His father asked him in Rome as they drank wine in the dining room and Will was holding the stone foot of antiquity.
“It was all over my hands and my face, and I tasted it, tasted him. I tasted as much of him as I could to keep him alive in me because I promised he wouldn’t die.”
“We should go outside. Let’s go have a coffee.”
Will turns a knob on the wall, turns up the surround sound until the movie is blaring, and then she’s sitting up, and then she’s screaming, and he can barely hear her screams over the movie as he leans close to her, puts a sandy finger to her lips, shaking his head, slowly, to hush her. He refills her glass with vodka, hands it to her, and nods for her to drink. He sets the tackle box, flashlight, and camera on the rug and sits next to her on the couch and looks deeply into her bleary, bloodshot, panicky eyes. She has no eyelashes, has pulled all of them out. She doesn’t try to get up and run. He nods for her to drink, and she does. Already she’s accepting what must happen. She will thank him.
The movie vibrates the house and her lips say, “Please don’t hurt me.”
She was pretty once.
“Shhhhh.” He shakes his head, hushing her again with his sandy finger, touching her lips, pressing them hard against her teeth. His sandy fingers open the tackle box. Inside are more bottles of glue and glue remover, and the bag of sand, and a black-handled six-inch double-edged wallboard saw and reciprocating saw blade, and various hobby knives.
Then the voice in his head. Roger crying, screaming, bloody froth bubbling from his mouth. Only it isn’t Roger crying out, it’s the woman begging with bloody lips, “Please don’t hurt me!”
As Glenn Close tells Michael Douglas to fuck off, and the volume vibrates the great room.
She panics and sobs, shaking like someone having a seizure. He pulls his legs up on the couch, sits cross-legged. She stares at his sandpaper hands and sandpaper bottoms of mangled bare feet and the tackle box, the camera on the floor, and the realization of the inevitable seizes her blotchy, puffy face. He notices how unkempt her nails are and is overwhelmed by that same feeling he gets when he spiritually embraces people who are suffering unbearably and he releases them from their pain.
He can feel the subwoofer in his bones.
Her raw, bloody lips move. “Please don’t hurt me, please, please don’t,” and she cries and her nose runs and she wets her bloody lips with her tongue. “What do you want? Money? Please don’t hurt me.” Her bloody lips move.
He takes off his shirt and khaki pants, neatly folds them, places them on the coffee table. He takes off his underwear, places it on top of his other clothes. He feels the power. It spikes through his brain like an electric shock, and he grabs her hard around the wrists.