The same sun that had shown through Dr. Koenig’s picture window tapped at the drawn blinds in my office. I sat with the door closed, safely ensconced in familiar surroundings. Outside the mindfuck world of the shrink’s lair, the idea did seem absurd—while it remained theoretically possible that I’d lain knocked out longer than I’d suspected, neither my wife nor my daughter had shown me any indication of trauma over the past six months. I had the mental problems, not them. And while mine and Allie’s sex life had changed, it had changed in a positive way. A very positive way.
“No, none of that.”
“Right. Exactly. Because that shit didn’t happen. You know what? Ask her. Ask both of them. Say, did either one of you get nailed by one or both of those shitbags I popped in the hallway? Allie? Abby? No? Okay, case closed. They’ll probably laugh at you.”
“They probably will,” I agreed.
“Put this behind you and get your eyes back on the prize. I want to know who this crazy man that called into the radio station is. That could be a dangerous son of a bitch. That’s what you need to be worrying about, not this psychobabble.”
“I know, right?”
“Do some of your lawyer-ninja moves to get your hands on the phone records for that place. Trace the phone number to an address, then go over there and say motherfucker, you want to talk that shit to my face?”
He laughed.
“Tell you what, man, you find him for me, I’ll pack three Haji-killing Marines into the car and we’ll ride on up there to his house.”
Despite the stack of pink message slips by my phone and the even larger stack of neglected files towering beside it, I laughed, too. I felt glad I’d called Bobby. He had a way of putting things in perspective for me.
“In all seriousness, now; concentrate on pinning down this asshole. Good to go?”
The blinds seemed to glow with the sun.
“Good to go,” I repeated.
My sex life had indeed changed in the wake of the shooting. Not that I’d had it bad before, not exactly. Just kind of… routine. After eighteen years, I’d learned to read the cues as to when Allie felt like doing it and when she didn’t. If one of these occasions happened to coincide with a moment where Abby wasn’t up and about and I wasn’t dog-tired from shoveling divorce cases around my office all day, we experienced a few moments of fireworks and then either fell asleep or turned on the TV. I didn’t complain about this; it did the job. Dammit, Jim, I’m a man, not a rabbit.
But my first day back at work after shooting Pinnix and Ramseur, I arrived home to the glow of the kitchen light. In the hallway by the stairs, a single lamp in the office threw a puddle of light into the foyer. When I entered the kitchen, I looked down the hallway and saw Allie standing in it, smiling.
“Rough day?” She asked.
“Very,” I said, reaching into the fridge for a Heineken. I popped the top with the bottle opener on my keychain and took a long drink. “Glad it’s over.”
She padded into the kitchen and stood by the empty stool at the island where Abby typically wolfed down breakfast. The red satin pajama bottoms I’d bought her for Christmas two years ago clung to the gentle swell of her hips below the Victoria’s Secret tank top that was just a size too small. An outfit which she hadn’t worn much before I killed somebody. Let’s be honest, she’d said the night after that Christmas, looking down at her breasts pushing against the white fabric of the shirt. You didn’t buy this for me, you bought it for you. She’d humored me and wore it that night, then out came the baggy sweatsuit and all its sexless siblings again.
“I missed you,” she said.
“I missed you, too,” I replied, setting the bottle down and opening my arms. She folded herself into me and for a moment, neither one of us said anything. This, right here, was another thing. I missed you. No icy wind of disapproval borne on baleful stares, no guilt trips, no outright aggression over my failure to come home within shouting distance of five o’clock. Victoria’s Secret and I missed you.
I buried my face in her hair and raised my eyes to look down the hallway.
Let the bodies hit the floor
Let the bodies hit the floor
“Everything okay?” She asked my chest.
“Same as always,” I said.
“Sure?”
“Right now, I feel great.” I dropped my hands to the small of her back, toned and hard from the hours she spent teaching aerobics every week. I relaxed instantly.
“Are you tired?” She murmured.
“A little. Why?”
She reached behind her and moved my hands from her waist to her bottom. I realized then that she wasn’t wearing any underwear.
My heart began to pound.
“Because I missed you,” she said, unbuttoning my pants and unzipping my fly.
We did it on the kitchen table, short, intense and explosive. I didn’t last long. That was okay, though, because she didn’t last long, either. When we finished, I took her hand and led her down into the basement, where we each had a glass of red wine at the bar and did it again—slower this time—on the pool table. She didn’t wince, stiffen up, cry, anything you’d expect the survivor of a brutal rape to do the first time she has consensual sex after being forced.
And this made perfect sense to me, because she hadn’t been forced. Pinnix and Ramseur saw her walking with my daughter at the mall and had devised a plan to do that—to force her—but they’d never got the chance. Because I stopped them.
But Allie was only one of two women who lived in my house. So the next evening, I decided to broach the subject with Abby.
Abby had a soccer game that night, and I took her by myself. Allie had a meeting at the Arts Council, so she couldn’t make it. Normally, this would have meant a phone call to another parent and a little shuck-and-jive routine to get somebody else to take her. Post-shooting, however, I could just get up and walk out the door at a normal time and no one would say anything to me about it. Other attorneys would look at me as I walked past their doors on the way out but they’d quickly look away. Only Craig Montero had the balls to speak to me when I left at five-thirty.
“Run, Forrest, run!” He said.
I could count the number of times I’d taken Abby anywhere by myself on one hand, a natural outgrowth of having a lucrative but demanding job and a wife who didn’t work. And as this life went on, my little pink toddler with her outstretched arms had increased in size to where she stood nearly as tall as her mother. Something had happened to her eyes and ears along the way, and she didn’t see or hear me anymore. As the rest of her form developed, her hands had grown a mobile phone that she used to constantly text-message other afflicted children and update her Facebook status. Her ability to communicate in the English language had deteriorated to the point where she could only express herself with her thumbs.
So after the game, I took her to McDonald’s. There, I made the mistake of letting her stand in line with me while I ordered the food.
“You’re Kevin Swanson, aren’t you?”
The girl behind the register looked no older than Abby, although by law she had to be at least sixteen. Large, blue eyes blinked at me from beneath her Golden Arches cap.
“Uhh… yeah.” My left hand held my wallet, my right the credit card I had removed to pay the total. I felt suddenly conscious of Abby’s observant presence beside me.
“Dude, you’re the man. And I mean it, you are the man.”
The manager stopped behind her, looking from my face to the order screen. He wore the shirt and tie that identified him as a person of authority even though his face identified him as someone who couldn’t legally buy a beer. His name tag identified him as RODNEY. He wore a headset and he adjusted the volume on it as he shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said. “This guy’s not paying.”