Sylvie started crying and leaned against the furnace, her head bowed.
This again, thought Don, too tired now to be sympathetic.
"I'm going, OK? I'll be fine."
"I know you'll be fine," she said, trying to control her crying. "My roommate's down there, all right? Lissy's down there."
If there was one thing Don didn't expect, it was that. And yet it fit. Why she couldn't leave. Why she hated the tunnel. "I don't think you mean she's living there."
"She was cheating," said Sylvie. "She spent all her time that last semester with her stupid boyfriend, she was going to flunk out. So she started stealing my work and copying it to write papers for her own classes. If she got caught we'd both be kicked out! Nobody would believe I wasn't helping her cheat."
"You killed her for cheating?"
"I didn't mean to!" Sylvie turned to face him. "You think I'd plan something like that? She was always in the tunnel. Our apartment was the only one with access to the basement. So she did keep her stash there, her stash, I never used that stuff. But she had pot, sometimes coke, and she and her boyfriend would go down there to get high and... so I knew where she was. I was just going to talk to her. Lay it on the line. She had to stop or I was going to the dean with it."
Sylvie didn't like to go down the tunnel when she knew Lissy was there, mostly because she could never be sure Lanny wasn't there too. He often came up the tunnel the other way to join Lissy there, so Sylvie had no way of knowing if they were together or not. That was a scene she didn't want to walk in on. Sex didn't bother her, or even the idea of seeing people doing it—you don't go to college for this many years without getting an eyeful now and then. What she didn't like was to see Lanny and Lissy doing it. She'd heard it often enough in the next bedroom. Lissy was a squealer and Lanny was a grunter. It sounded like a pig farm and it nauseated her. She couldn't shake the memory of Grandpa's pig farm, back when she still had family. She stood on the second rail from the top, with her daddy holding her up to make sure she didn't fall into or out of the sty. She must have been all of four years old. The pigs were all bigger than her. Like elephants, that's how they seemed. Huge fat muddy pink backs lurching and trotting around in the mud, muzzling the trough, making hideous noises, grunts and squeals. And there was Papaw, teasing her by telling her not to fall in, those pigs would be just as happy to eat little girl as slops. In memory she knew he meant well enough. He'd forgotten the terrors of childhood, the credulity. But at the time she had no perspective. She believed in the danger, and for weeks after that she had nightmares about the pigs looming and grunting over her. They'd be trotting past, back and forth, and then all of a sudden one would notice her and start to squeal. Mud sharks, that's what pigs seemed like to her. So the sounds she heard from Lissy and Lanny, they weren't erotic, they were disgusting and, when she admitted it to herself, terrifying.
But tonight was the last straw. Lissy wasn't even bothering to paraphrase now. She had taken Sylvie's old paper on the system of filing active documents during World War II—her senior thesis, for heaven's sake—and turned it in for a history class. She probably thought it was safe because Sylvie was in library science, not history, but there was a history professor on her evaluating committee and the paper was on an eccentric enough topic that it would be remembered. She had to find out if Lissy had already turned the paper in. If she had, then she had to withdraw it. If she hadn't, then she could take the incomplete and write another. That was it. There would be no compromise, no sweet-talking, no tears that could soften the hardest heart. It's not my heart that's hard, anyway, thought Sylvie. It's hers. Having no concern for what she's doing to me, the risks she's making me take against my will. My whole future down the toilet. She can marry Lanny, but my career is all I've got. My education and my career.
Midway down the tunnel, in the level stretch, Lissy had her candles lit, four of them, perched up on the two stone walls that lined the tunnel. She was alone, lying on a dirty old mattress, wearing only a t-shirt. Hadn't she worn more than this to come down here? But there were no other clothes visible. The things Lissy did when she was high.
"You missed the party," said Lissy. She started to laugh.
Don listened to the story, liking Lissy less and less—but how else could Sylvie tell the story? Turn the girl into a saint or something? Still, he believed her. Believed her, but also hated hearing the tale. He didn't need another dark story wrenched out of somebody's humid conscience.
"I confronted her about cheating," Sylvie said. "About how she had no right to put my whole life at risk, everything I worked for... I got emotional. That never worked with her, but I couldn't help it."
"Lighten up, Sylvie," Lissy said lazily. "You take it all too seriously." She settled back down on the mattress as if she meant to go to sleep.
Sylvie was used to Lissy's selfishness. It used to be that was part of her charm. Her unconcern, her childlike innocence of the complicated moral questions that plagued more responsible people—Sylvie used to admire it, back before they lived together. Used to laugh with Lissy about some fretful teacher or heartbroken ex-boyfriend. "Why do they have to get so intense?" Lissy would always ask.
Well, now Sylvie knew. They got intense because Lissy was so destructive. She wasn't childlike, she was devilish. Because she knew exactly what she was doing. She enjoyed it. Sylvie understood that now. Lissy had used Sylvie's senior thesis, not because she didn't know the harm it could cause, but because she did know. She liked the risk. She loved dragging Sylvie into it.
"You've got to live more on the edge," that's what Lissy always said. But Lissy herself, she never seemed to get near the edge. She lived on other people's edges. And when they fell off, she'd admire how pretty they looked as they fell.
So Sylvie lost it. She'd spent her life being quiet and well-mannered. She had to, with no parents to look out for her. If she pushed people, they slapped her down. But if she was quiet and endured all things patiently, yes, they took advantage of her, but they also tolerated her. Didn't throw her out. Let her stay in places where they didn't really want her. That strategy had suited her fine, for many years, until Lissy. Quiet endurance was over.
Sylvie had slid down the furnace and was sitting on the floor, her toes pressed against the basement wall. She didn't look at Don as she told her story.
"I screamed at her and finally she sobered up enough to scream back at me and one thing came to another."
"It always does," said Don. But the truth was it didn't always. As Sylvie talked about reaching the end of her rope, Don wondered: Why hadn't he ever reached the end of his? Sure, yesterday he had broken down and cried, but when did he ever just lose it and start screaming? Maybe if he'd gone a little crazy, he could have broken through the barriers that kept him from justice.
Of course, look what "losing it" did for Sylvie.
"She accused me of the most terrible things," said Sylvie. "She called me everything, she said no wonder my mother died, no wonder my father died, anything was better than living with me. She wasn't my friend anymore, you know? She wasn't even human. Her face all twisted up, screwed up, her mouth open, her teeth like—it was like the monkey island at the zoo. An animal. She didn't justify herself, she didn't argue, she just went on the attack, saying I was worthless and boring and nobody liked me till she took me on as a project, to try to prove that there was nobody so lame and hopeless that she couldn't bring them out and give them a life. I tried to scream back at her about how she wasn't giving me a life, she was taking it away, but she never heard me. She wouldn't shut up and listen at all, and I admit it, I was an animal too. We were both animals right then. And there was a loose stone. Lots of loose stones. I just wanted to shut her up, to hurt her. But I'd never hit anyone before. In my whole life, Don. Never hit anybody. And I'm not very strong. So I didn't know how hard to hit. I just swung with all my might. The rock hit her in the side of her head."