What the fuck now?
She clenched her teeth as she hauled Dodd’s boots off and sat in the dust beside him to pull them on. Not the first time they’d stretched out together in the dirt, him and her. First time with him dead, though. His boots were way too loose on her, but a long stride better than no boots at all. She clomped back into the tavern in them.
Neary was making some pitiable groans as he struggled to get up. Shy kicked him in the face and down onto his back, plucked the rest of the arrows from his quiver, and took his heavy belt knife too. Back out into the sun and she picked up the bow, jammed Dodd’s hat onto her head, also somewhat on the roomy side but at least offering some shade as the sun got up. Then she dragged the three horses together and roped them into a string—quite a ticklish operation, since Jeg’s big stallion was a mean bastard and seemed determined to kick her brains out.
When she’d got it done, she frowned off towards those dust trails. They were headed for the town, all right, and fast. With a better look, she reckoned on about nine or ten, which was two or three better than twelve but still an almighty inconvenience.
Bank agents after the stolen money. Bounty hunters looking to collect her price. Other outlaws who’d got wind of a score. A score that was currently in the bottom of a well, as it happened. Could be anyone. Shy had an uncanny knack for making enemies. She found that she’d looked over at Dodd, facedown in the dust with his bare feet limp behind him. The only thing she had worse luck with was friends.
How had it come to this?
She shook her head, spat through the little gap between her front teeth, and hauled herself up into the saddle of Dodd’s horse. She faced it away from those impending dust clouds, towards which quarter of the compass she knew not.
Shy gave the horse her heels.
Megan Abbott
Megan Abbott was born in the Detroit area, graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in English literature, received her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University, and has taught literature, writing, and film at New York University and the State University of New York at Oswego. She published her first novel, Die a Little, in 2005, and has since come to be regarded as one of the foremost practitioners of modern noir mystery writing, with the San Francisco Chronicle saying that she was poised to “claim the throne as the finest prose stylist in crime fiction since Raymond Chandler.” Her novels include Queenpin, which won the Edgar Award in 2008, The Song Is You, Bury Me Deep, and The End of Everything. Her most recent novel is Dare Me. Her other books include, as editor, the anthology A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir and a nonfiction study, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. She lives in Forest Hills, New York, and maintains a website at meganabbott.com.
In the subtle yet harrowing story that follows, she shows us that there are some things that you just can’t get over, no matter how hard you try—and some insights into the hearts of even those we love the most that you can’t unsee once you see them.
MY HEART IS EITHER BROKEN
He waited in the car. He had parked under one of the big banks of lights. No one else wanted to park there. He could guess why. Three vehicles over, he saw a woman’s back pressed against a window, her hair shaking. Once, she turned her head and he almost saw her face, the blue of her teeth as she smiled.
Fifteen minutes went by before Lorie came stumbling across the parking lot, heels clacking.
He had been working late and didn’t even know she wasn’t home until he got there. When she finally picked up her cell, she told him where she was, a bar he’d never heard of, a part of town he didn’t know.
“I just wanted some noise and people,” she had explained. “I didn’t mean anything.”
He asked if she wanted him to come get her.
“Okay,” she said.
On the ride home, she was doing the laughing-crying thing she’d been doing lately. He wanted to help her but didn’t know how. It reminded him of the kinds of girls he used to date in high school. The ones who wrote in ink all over their hands and cut themselves in the bathroom stalls at school.
“I hadn’t been dancing in so long, and if I shut my eyes no one could see,” she was saying, looking out the window, her head tilted against the window. “No one there knew me until someone did. A woman I didn’t know. She kept shouting at me. Then she followed me into the bathroom stall and said she was glad my little girl couldn’t see me now.”
He knew what people would say. That she was out dancing at a grimy pickup bar. They wouldn’t say she cried all the way home, that she didn’t know what to do with herself, that no one knows how they’ll act when something like this happens to them. Which it probably won’t.
But he also wanted to hide, wanted to find a bathroom stall himself, in another city, another state, and never see anyone he knew again, especially his mother or his sister, who spent all day on the Internet trying to spread the word about Shelby, collecting tips for the police.
Shelby’s hands—well, people always talk about baby’s hands, don’t they?—but they were like tight little flowers and he loved to put his palm over them. He never knew he’d feel like that. Never knew he’d be the kind of guy—that there even were kinds of guys—who would catch the milky scent of his daughter’s baby blanket and feel warm inside. Even, sometimes, press his face against it.
It took him a long time to tug off the dark red cowboy boots she was wearing, ones he did not recognize.
When he pulled off her jeans, he didn’t recognize her underwear either. The front was a black butterfly, its wings fluttering against her thighs with each tug.
He looked at her and a memory came to him of when they first dated, Lorie taking his hand and running it along her belly, her thighs. Telling him she once thought she’d be a dancer, that maybe she could be. And that if she ever had a baby she’d have a C-section, because everyone knew what happened to women’s stomachs after, not to mention what it does down there, she’d said, laughing, and put his hand there next.
He’d forgotten all this, and other things too, but now the things kept coming back and making him crazy.
He poured a tall glass of water for her and made her drink it. Then he refilled it and set it beside her.
She didn’t sleep like a drunk person but like a child, her lids twitching dreamily and a faint smile tugging at her mouth.
The moonlight coming in, it felt like he watched her all night, but at some point he must have fallen asleep.
When he woke, she had her head on his belly, was rubbing him drowsily.
“I was dreaming I was pregnant again,” she murmured. “It was like Shelby all over again. Maybe we could adopt. There are so many babies out there that need love.”
They had met six years ago. He was working for his mother, who owned a small apartment building on the north side of town.
Lorie lived on the first floor, where the window was high and you could see people walking on the sidewalk. His mother called it a “sunken garden apartment.”
She lived with another girl and sometimes they came in very late, laughing and pressing up against each other in the way young girls do, whispering things, their legs bare and shiny in short skirts. He wondered what they said.