“Why not?”
“It’s complicated.”
“I’m smart,” she says.
“I know.”
“You don’t think I can understand?” she asks.
“That’s why I’m here. I need somebody to understand.”
“So you argue that you want my help, then argue against telling me?”
“I’m only arguing against going to the police. You’ll understand soon enough.”
“Understand what?”
“Can I have some of that coffee?” I ask, nodding toward the coffee maker.
“Will it get you out of my house any quicker?”
“Technically it’s still our house,” I tell her.
“If that’s. .”
“But yes,” I say, interrupting her. “It’ll speed things up.”
While she pours me some of the coffee she’s just made I stare at the magnetic poetry on the fridge door. I make a square and a triangle with random words, but I can’t line them up to make sense of the last twenty-four hours. She pours a coffee for herself too, then we walk through to the lounge. It’s warm from the afternoon sun. I sit on the sofa and lean forward. I’m frightened that if I sink back and relax the sofa will swallow me. I look around the room to see if anything has changed, but it’s mostly the same. The only difference is what isn’t here-no photographs of us. Nothing to show I ever existed. All those memories have been packed away. Thankfully there aren’t any photographs of her with anybody else to have replaced them.
“Well?” she asks.
“This is difficult for me.”
“Difficult for me too, Charlie. You think I want to spend my Monday night with you?”
“You have other plans?” I turn to face her and immediately I’m annoyed at the pang of jealousy we both heard.
“That isn’t the point.”
“Okay, okay, just give me a few seconds,” I tell her. I stare down at the coffee table, at the small nicks and scratches that have built up over time. Some of them I remember happening, others had happened well before Jo inherited the table from her grandmother. “I was on my way home,” I say, and I keep staring at the table, wishing that was the whole story just there-that I was on my way home and nothing bad happened. I was steering my Honda around the sweeping bends of the empty highway. The road was dark with half circles of light spilling across from the streetlights. I had my window down to enjoy the summer breeze. The air was warm and dry. The mercury was hovering around the shorts and T-shirt end of the thermometer. The highway was bordered by pastures. Thin wire fences stopped the large willow and oak trees, the poplars, the patches of knee-length grass and the thinning creeks from escaping. Cows and sheep and horses were standing vigil, all unaware that day by day technology was slowly making their homes smaller, that day by day their future as hamburgers and juicy steaks was getting closer. I was coming home from my parents’ house. Mom had been convinced there was a mouse in the house, and equally convinced that my dad wouldn’t be any use in finding it.
“It happened when I turned off the highway toward home. It was so. .” I shrug. “I don’t know. If it wasn’t for the news and the blood. I don’t know. I guess I would think it was all a dream. But I guess it’s more that I’m just wishing it were one.”
Jo leans forward. She looks concerned. I pick my coffee up, but can’t bring myself to take a sip.
“What blood, Charlie?”
“I went around the corner and that was when she stepped out in front of me. I didn’t even see her at first. In fact I almost ran her over.”
“Who did you almost run over?”
“Luciana. Luciana Young.”
Jo’s mouth falls open and she leans back. All the air seems to rush out of the room. She says absolutely nothing. She doesn’t ask if I’m joking, because there’s no way in hell I’d come around here and make something like this up.
“Luciana Young from the news,” she says, and she says it as if there was another possibility, as if I were talking about the Luciana Young who lives a few blocks away who wasn’t murdered during the night.
“Yeah.”
“So. . so you were with her last night? And the other woman too?”
I look down at my coffee cup, unable to look at Jo, but I know she’s staring at me.
“You killed them?” she asks.
Last night as I turned the corner, my headlights washed into the pasture opposite, lighting up the same bank of trees they always light up. The trees looked like large deformed fingers pushing through a farming landscape. Twisted and broken, they were the sort of thing Salvador Dalí would paint, along with some melting clocks and a naked woman.
“Charlie?”
“No,” I answer, “of course not.”
“You ran her over?”
“No.”
“What happened?” she asks, and she sounds scared, scared because I’m crazy and making this up, or I’m crazy because I’m not. She sounded the same way when we finally started talking that night six months ago when we got back home, the night I still think of as Date Night.
The moment I saw Luciana I tugged on the wheel and jumped on the brake, swerving my car around her. In my rearview mirror I saw a woman drowning in the glow of my brake lights. All that red skin, red clothes. . if I ever see that sight again I’ll understand it for what it really is-a premonition.
“No, I didn’t hit her, but I pulled over. It was obvious something was wrong. She climbed into the car. She was panicked. I wanted to go to the police. You would have too if you’d seen her. If you’d heard her.”
“Then why didn’t you? This isn’t making any sense, Charlie.”
“We didn’t go to the police because her friend was in danger.”
“Kathy,” she says.
“Yeah.”
Luciana’s dress was shredded above her chest as if she’d been repeatedly clawed by a big cat. There were several cuts over her chest that looked like tiny canals, and a red sea was welling up over the edges. Her face was smeared with dirt and her eyes were full of desperation. She had to be desperate to jump into the first car that came along. Her blond hair was matted with twigs and leaves, stained with soil and blood that in the weak light of my car looked like oil. There was a line of blood on her leg. She wore a bandanna necklace that had been a gag. When she closed the door the interior light blinked off and we were plunged into darkness. Monday’s darkness.
“You’ve. .” was all she could say before breaking into loud sobs. She collapsed with her forehead pressed to my arm. Her skin felt like wet clay. She was shuddering, choking on her sobs and the beginnings of small words. I was half out of my seat belt when she pulled away and doubled her efforts to speak.
“You’ve. . got. .”
I put my hands on her shoulders and told her to take a deep breath. It worked. I kept staring at the blood on her that was becoming more real by the second. This was actual blood. Like that B negative or O positive stuff that drips out of dead people. It gave her credibility, so when she pointed out my side window with hands that were bleeding and shaking and told me her friend Kathy was out there being held by a crazed lunatic I had no reason not to believe her.
I tell this to Jo.
Jo shakes her head. “Why didn’t you call them on your cell phone?”
“Because I still don’t have one.”
“What? You never replaced it? You’re kidding.”
I shake my head. I’m not kidding. When that guy in the bathroom got his second punch in six months ago into my chest, it actually connected with my cell phone. It didn’t survive the impact, and I didn’t replace it. I was sick of being tied down to a phone. Sick of seeing people everywhere I go spending any free second they have to send a text or check an email.
“There was no time to get the police. I moved the car so I was out of sight of the trees,” I tell Jo. I twisted my body and pocketed my keys then told Luciana to stay where she was. She asked if I had a weapon. All I had was whatever was in the trunk. That turned out to be a car jack, a spare wheel, a bike rack, a tire iron, and no shotgun. I settled for the tire iron. It was cold and heavy and boosted my confidence.