“Go on. You’ll miss your bus.”
“But Chloe…”
“Get out, Matthew!” she said, turning to him with sudden savagery.
He opened the door, his confusion seeming to migrate to his legs as he climbed out and took his suitcase from the trunk. As he rolled it to the front of the car to say goodbye she pulled forward with an abrupt lurch.
“Chloe!” he called.
She stopped, just as abruptly, a few yards off from him. As he moved toward her he saw she was rummaging in her canvas bag. She thrust something toward him as he reached her window.
“You stole this,” she said. “Didn’t you?”
It was the gold and quartz Montblanc pen he’d found in their sofa.
“I looked in your suitcase,” she said. “Just now when I sent you into town. I had to know if Charlie was lying to me.”
“Oh.” His voice came like a strange sigh.
“It wasn’t all I found.”
He seemed to feel all the strength sluice out of him.
“You were in the house that whole time, weren’t you?” Her face had darkened in blotches, contorted. She seemed barely able to speak. The pen was shaking in her hand like the needle on some dangerously overburdened measuring instrument. “You’d gone there to watch us, hadn’t you?”
“No! That isn’t-”
“And then you killed him.”
“That’s not what happened. Wait, Chloe-” She’d started pulling away again. “I’ll tell you what happened-”
“I was nice to you, is what happened,” Chloe said.
He wanted to tell her everything suddenly. It seemed to him she’d understand. If anyone could understand, it was Chloe. But she’d pressed the window button and the glass was sliding up between them.
“Chloe-”
“I hope you rot in hell, Matthew.”
She’d reached the parking lot exit.
“Chloe!” he called after her, his mind reeling. The window had closed. He watched her ease the car back into the traffic and drive off. For several seconds he was unable to move. Immense forces seemed to be pressing down, immobilizing him. It was as if the moment were too densely freighted with reality to pass through. He heard her words again: I hope you rot in hell… She knew what he had done, and her knowing it seemed to make it real for the first time. He had killed Grollier, taken his life. A feeling of horror surged inside him. The stark fact seemed to lie all around him suddenly, like some vast, untraversable desert. And yet, he thought, trying to steady himself, she’d brought him here, hadn’t she? She’d brought him here to the bus station, and that surely meant something. She could have called the cops to the house, told them what she’d seen, but she’d brought him here instead. So maybe she had understood in some way; seen that he wasn’t to blame for it; that Grollier, no less than himself, had been Charlie’s fall guy, one more surrogate for Charlie’s pain. Or maybe it was just that she was so intent on keeping her affair a secret from Charlie she’d chosen to pretend not to have seen what she’d seen. Either way she’d let him go, hadn’t she? Told him she knew what he’d done, told him to rot in hell, but let him go. Well, then, he thought, moving forward, he owed it to her to make it work.
Buses were lined up on either side of the outdoor shelter, engines throbbing, fumes spewing out into the morning air. He’d be in New York in a few hours, he told himself; on a plane as soon as possible after that. Meanwhile he needed to get a ticket, a bottle of water, something to eat. He passed between the buses, focusing determinedly on his objective as he breathed their acrid stench: Tranqué Bay, the land he was going to buy with Charlie’s “moolah,” the turquoise house on the hill. Dimly, as he came out into the open forecourt, he became aware of something encroaching on him, some vague darkness that seemed more an emanation of the horror still present inside him than anything external. He ignored it, keeping his mind on the vision he’d had the night before, of a new existence, the new person he was going to become. He made himself think of the joy of those sparkling mornings, racing past the old stone ruins to the beach and plunging into the waves with the smell of salt air filling his lungs and the palms along the shoreline tossing in the breeze as if in their own raptures of delight. People were jostling around him: passengers going in and out of the ticket office, taxi drivers looking for fares, officials from the bus company. Again the sense of some encroaching darkness intruded; a shape that was somehow both a solid object entering his field of vision and at the same time a kind of blackly spectral embodiment of what he had done, looming back on a surge of renewed horror. He focused tenaciously on the bright image, as if the sheer glittering intensity of it, pictured with sufficient conviction, might be enough to draw him forward through the many obstacles and difficult passages that lay ahead.
He was still seeing it in his mind’s eye when the black Ford Explorer that had emerged from behind the ticket office and been slowly approaching him all this while came to a halt a few feet off. The doors opened, but even as Detective Fernandez climbed out and strolled calmly toward him, followed by Officer Lombardi, it was some time before he was able to adjust from the glare of that sunlit future, and understand what was happening.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to my editors, Jill Bialosky and Robin Robertson, for their patience and astute advice.
James Lasdun
James Lasdun was born in London and now lives in upstate New York. He has published two collections of short stories and three books of poetry. His story The Siege was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci for his film Beseiged. He co-wrote the screenplay for the film Sunday (based on another of his stories) which won Best Feature and Best Screenplay awards at Sundance, 1997. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, and currently teaches poetry and fiction workshops at Princeton.
