“You’ll stay right here,” Rosemary’s mother said. “You’ll call right before bedtime, and if there’s still no answer, well, if they’re not home, they won’t miss you, will they?”
Rosemary had twin beds, and fell asleep instantly in her own. Kit, a few feet away, had this thought that Rosemary’s father would let himself into the room, and into her bed, but of course this didn’t happen, and the next thing she knew she was asleep.
In the morning she went home, and the first thing she did was call Rosemary’s house, hysterical. Rosemary’s mother calmed her down, and then she was able to call 911 to report the deaths of her parents. Rosemary’s mother came over to be with her, and shortly after that the police came, and it became pretty clear what had happened. Her father had killed her mother and then turned the gun on himself.
“You sensed that something was wrong,” Rosemary’s mother said. “That’s why it was so easy to get you to stay for dinner, and why you wanted to sleep over.”
“They were fighting,” she said, “and there was something different about it. Not just a normal argument. God, it’s my fault, isn’t it? I should have been able to do something. The least I could have done was to say something.”
Everybody told her that was nonsense.
After she’d left Lucas’s brand-new high-floor apartment, she returned to her own older, less imposing sublet, where she brewed a pot of coffee and sat up at the kitchen table with a pad and paper. She wrote down the numbers one though five in descending order, and after each she wrote a name, or as much of the name as she knew. Sometimes she added an identifying phrase or two. The list began with 5, and the first entry read as follows:
Said his name was Sid. Pasty complexion, gap between top incisors. Met in Philadelphia at bar on Race Street (?), went to his hotel, don’t remember name of it. Gone when I woke up.
Hmmm. Sid might be hard to find. How would she even know where to start looking for him?
At the bottom of the list, her entry was simpler and more specific. Douglas Pratter. Last known address Bowling Green. Lawyer? Google him?
She booted up her laptop.
Their room in the Detroit Avenue Holiday Inn was on the third floor in the rear. With the drapes drawn and the door locked, with their clothes hastily discarded and the bedclothes as hastily tossed aside, it seemed to her for at least a few minutes that she was fifteen years old again, and in bed with her first boyfriend. She tasted a familiar sweetness in his kisses, a familiar raw urgency in his ardor.
But the illusion didn’t last. And then it was just lovemaking, at which each of them had a commendable proficiency. He went down on her this time, which was something he’d never done when they were teenage sweethearts, and the first thought that came to her was that he had turned into her father, because her father had done that all the time.
Afterward, after a fairly long shared silence, he said, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered.”
“What it would be like to be together again?”
“Well, sure, but more than that. What life would have been like if I’d never moved away in the first place. What would have become of the two of us, if we’d had the chance to let things find their way.”
“Probably the same as most high school lovers. We’d have stayed together for a while, and then we’d have broken up and gone separate ways.”
“Maybe.”
“Or I’d have gotten pregnant, and you’d have married me, and we’d be divorced by now.”
“Maybe.”
“Or we’d still be together, and bored to death with each other, and you’d be in a motel fucking somebody new.”
“God, how’d you get so cynical?”
“You’re right, I got off on the wrong foot there. How about this? If your father hadn’t moved you all to Bowling Green, you and I would have stayed together, and our feeling for each other would have grown from teenage hormonal infatuation to the profound mature love it was always destined to be. You’d have gone off to college, and as soon as I finished high school I’d have enrolled there myself, and when you finished law school I’d have my undergraduate degree, and I’d be your secretary and office manager when you set up your own law practice. By then we’d have gotten married, and by now we’d have one child with a second on the way, and we would remain unwavering in our love for one another, and as passionate as ever.” She gazed wide-eyed at him. “Better?”
His expression was hard to read, and he appeared to be on the point of saying something, but she turned toward him and ran a hand over his flank, and the prospect of a further adventure in adultery trumped whatever he might have wanted to say. Whatever it was, she thought, it would keep.
“I’d better get going,” he said, and rose from the bed, and rummaged through the clothes he’d tossed on the chair.
She said, “Doug? Don’t you think you might want to take a shower first?”
“Oh, Jesus. Yeah, I guess I better, huh?”
He’d known where to take her to lunch, knew to make a room reservation ahead of time, but he evidently didn’t know enough to shower away her spoor before returning to home and hearth. So perhaps this sort of adventure was not the usual thing for him. Oh, she was fairly certain he tried to get lucky on business trips — those oh-so-lonely New York visits he’d mentioned, for instance — but you didn’t have to shower after that sort of interlude, because you were going back to your own hotel room, not to your unsuspecting wife.
She started to get dressed. There was no one waiting for her, and her own shower could wait until she was back at her own motel. But she changed her mind about dressing, and was still naked when he emerged from the shower, a towel wrapped around his middle.
“Here,” she said, handing him a glass of water. “Drink this.”
“What is it?”
“Water.”
“I’m not thirsty.”
“Just drink it, will you?”
He shrugged, drank it. He went and picked up his undershorts, and kept losing his balance when he tried stepping into them. She took his arm and led him over to the bed, and he sat down and told her he didn’t feel so good. She took the undershorts away from him and got him to lie down on the bed, and she watched him struggling to keep a grip on consciousness.
She put a pillow over his face, and she sat on it. She felt him trying to move beneath her, and she watched his hands make feeble clawing motions at the bedsheet, and observed the muscles working in his lower legs. Then he was still, and she stayed where she was for a few minutes, and an involuntary tremor, a very subtle one, went through her hindquarters.
And what was that, pray tell? Could have been her coming, could have been him going. Hard to tell, and did it really matter?
When she got up, well, duh, he was dead. No surprise there. She put her clothes on, cleaned up all traces of her presence, and transferred all of the cash from his wallet to her purse. A few hundred dollars in tens and twenties, plus an emergency hundred-dollar bill tucked away behind his driver’s license. She might have missed it, but she’d learned years ago that you had to give a man’s wallet a thorough search.
Not that the money was ever the point. But they couldn’t take it with them and it had to go somewhere, so it might as well go to her. Right?
How it happened: That final morning, shortly after she left for school, her father and mother had argued, and her father had gone for the handgun he kept in a locked desk drawer and shot her mother dead. He left the house and went to his office, saying nothing to anyone, although a coworker did say that he’d seemed troubled. And sometime during the afternoon he returned home, where his wife’s body remained undiscovered. The gun was still there (unless he’d been carrying it around with him during the intervening hours) and he put the barrel in his mouth and blew his brains out.