“I’ve got a car.”
She hesitated, but he knew she wanted to go with him. He just needed to give her an excuse to ditch her friends.
“I’m…I’m so sad tonight, Eve. You know? Kat and I dated, way back. She was my girlfriend, and I knew Perri from doing theater stuff, and I’m just so sad and lonely. I need someone to talk to.”
“Let me find my friends.”
It had been a long time since Dale had unhooked anyone’s bra one-handed and apparently just as long since anyone had tried this maneuver on Chloe, who was laughing hysterically. That is, she was laughing when she wasn’t letting him kiss her, sloppy and uncoordinated as he was.
He was not sure just when they had ended up on the sofa in the alcove off the kitchen, although he thought it was somewhere between killing the first bottle of wine and starting the second. Yes, that was it. He had followed Chloe into the house when she went to get more wine, and although she had ordered him back to the porch, he realized it was because she knew how susceptible she was to him. But she had started it, being so nice and tender, reminding him of the woman he had fallen in love with so many years ago. It had not been a mistake, after all, loving Chloe, marrying her. Lord, she had given him Kat. The only mistake was in not realizing that the woman he loved had always been here, buried beneath her disappointments and confusion and shame. He didn’t need to award a scholarship to honor his daughter’s memory. All he had to do was love her mother again. They would reconcile, make a new baby. Nothing would have made Kat happier.
“This is crazy,” Chloe kept saying, but if she wasn’t exactly helping him, she wasn’t fighting him either. It was like a test, a quest. He was a knight, and he just had to get past all these barriers-the bra, the yoga pants, which had an unusual side fastening, something with laces. Their history, which was more complicated still. He should have done this four years ago, just planted himself here when Chloe ordered him out of the house and refused to leave.
But it was never too late. Nothing was truly over, as long as you were alive.
“We’ll start when my partner gets here,” Lenhardt said.
“Okay,” Josie said.
“We’re going to record it, on a little microcassette recorder that he’s bringing.”
“Okay.” Her voice was low, but even and sure.
“And you’ll need to read this statement, indicating this is voluntary-”
“It’s not a confession,” her lawyer put in. “I want to be very clear on this. My client is not confessing and is not going to be held liable for any charges.”
“Gloria, if you want to make a deal, make a deal. Tell me what you want up front, and I’ll call an ADA, and we’ll see what we can do. But until then, if your client cops to a felony, I’m not going to promise what charges she’s going to face. She called us, remember?”
“Is it a felony to shoot yourself?” Josie asked.
“Josie!” her lawyer all but yelped.
“Depends,” Lenhardt said.
Her parents, sitting side by side on the sofa, were wide-eyed.
“Because I did, you know. I shot myself in the foot. But you knew that, from the very beginning. How did you know that? Was it because of the angle or because it was my right foot? If I had shot my left foot, would you have been fooled? Or because you couldn’t find my sandals. I took them off, right before, because I didn’t want to ruin them. That was stupid, wasn’t it? But they were brand new.”
“Josie,” her lawyer repeated in that same yelping-warning tone.
“Josie,” her father said sorrowfully. “What have you done?’
“Please,” Lenhardt said. “Let’s wait until my partner gets here with the recorder.”
Several old paths wound through the underbrush along the reservoir, and Peter led Eve by the hand down one of these until they found a small clearing with a felled tree where they could sit and drink their beers. At least, he was drinking. Eve, gulping nervously, had finished hers in a matter of seconds, but she continued to bring the can to her lips. It gave her something to do with her hands. She wished she had a cigarette with her, but they were back in Val’s car. Along with her regular shoes. It was going to be a bitch shimmying barefoot up the drainpipe and back into her room. And she couldn’t throw the shoes up on the roof, because they would make an enormous clatter. She really hadn’t thought this through. But what did you do when Peter Lasko asked you to go for a walk? Even Val, who took a dim view of ditching girls when a boy crooked his little finger-that was Val’s expression, “crooked his little finger”-could not object to such a monumental opportunity.
“So did you know Kat and her friends?”
“I was a grade behind them. But my father’s farm-it’s between the Hartigans’ property and that new development, Sweet-water. So I used to see her sometimes. Around.”
“She was great.”
Eve lifted a shoulder, wanting to be agreeable but not wanting to lie out and out. “Great” was not the word she would use to describe Kat Hartigan.
“I mean, she was such a sweetheart. She never hurt anyone.”
“Not directly.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. Just…well, you don’t have to hurt people if other people will do it for you, right?”
“You mean Perri? The way she used to talk shit? You can’t blame Kat for Perri.”
“Look, it’s not important. She’s dead, and that’s sad, and I don’t want to say anything bad about someone who’s dead.”
“They’re both dead now. So I guess we’ll never know what happened.”
She pressed the can against her mouth again, pretending to drink. It was no longer truly cold, but the metal felt good on her mouth. Above them cars were pulling out of the gravel lot, trying to stay ahead of the patrols. Evading the police was the only real excitement of the night. Eve wondered if the Ramble was always so anticlimactic. So far the best part had been sliding down the roof, running silently down the drive to where Val and Lila waited.
You’re here with Peter Lasko, she reminded herself. An almost movie star. But he didn’t seem particularly interested in her. Abruptly, she dropped her empty can, letting it roll down the hill, and knelt between Peter’s legs, reaching for the fly of his jeans.
“What-?”
“Don’t you want to?” It was amazing, how he moved beneath her hand-not hard yet but already twitching a little. She thought of those gliding airplanes sold from the mall kiosks, the ones that seemed to fly by magic. It was almost as if she had that kind of control over him, as if her lightest touch could make him respond. She could be with him now, and years later, when he was a famous movie star, she would have that memory. Or if she was good enough, if she did it well, maybe he would want to see her again. Maybe he would want her for his girlfriend. That would be worth anything.