The car that killed Brent isn’t on the street. I watch Lombardo’s squad car pull away from the curb. When I turn around, the red light on the answering machine is flashing. I pound the PLAYBACK button with a clenched fist.
The first message is silence, then click.
Fuck you! Fuck you! I scream in my head.
The second message is Ned. “Are you out there gallivanting around? Call me. I’m Cooooool.” There’s the sound of mechanical laughter, then click.
It has to be him. It just has to.
He’s trying to mind-fuck you, Brent says.
He’s too cool, Judy says.
Nine times out of ten, it’s an old boyfriend, says Officer Tarrant.
I check my watch. It’s 4 A.M.
I’m going crazy.
I’m going to see Ned.
Watch your step, Mary.
17
I run to Ned’s house without stopping, driven by a force and a strength I can’t control. I reach his door in no time and pound on it with my fist. Boom-boom-boom, right next to the brass house number, 2355. Its jagged edge rips the side of my hand. Boom! Blood runs out, but I don’t feel it.
Open the fucking door, Cool.
Boom-boom-boom! My blood stains the number.
The door opens. It’s him in sweatpants and a T-shirt that says ANDOVER. He rubs his eyes and smiles sleepily. “Mary, this is a pleasant surprise.”
So cool.
I push him back into the house and slam into the middle of his big fat ANDOVER, bloodying it. “Where the fuck were you tonight, Cool?”
He looks astonished, his eyes wide. “Mary?”
I grit my teeth and shove him again. “Where were you tonight?” I advance on him, and he steps backward. “Answer the question, Cool! Why is it you never answer the fucking question?”
“Mary, what is—”
“Tell me!” I smack him across the face. My blood sears a perfect cheekbone. His hand flies to his face, and he edges against the stairwell.
“I… was here!”
“Doing what?” I smack him again, so hard the blood from my hand spatters in a tiny fan across his T-shirt.
“Mary, stop it!”
“You killed Brent! And Mike!” I start to slap him again, but he catches my wrist in midair.
“Mary, no!” He wrenches my arms together.
“You did it! You!” I scream, kicking and clawing at his arms and legs. I can’t believe what’s happening, that I’m struggling in his arms, that I’m raging. He wrestles me to the floor, pinning me there, pressing my wrists back into the rug.
“Stop it now!” he cries out.
“You! You!” I hear myself, shouting over and over, then the huff of my own panting. I can’t seem to catch my breath. I feel I’m coming out of a fit.
“Stop it, Mary!” he shouts.
“You!”
“No!”
“Cool!”
“Ned — my name is Ned! I’m not Cool, I don’t know who that is. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I would never hurt you, you know that!”
“Let go of my wrists!”
“Not until you’re calm.”
I look up at him, on top of me, looking down. His face is barely visible in the half-light. Flecks of blood mingle with his freckles; the two are hard to distinguish. I can make out his eyes, his green eyes, oddly bright and feral. His eyes are full of pain. He’s not the killer, he can’t be. He’s hurting for me, I see it there, in his animal eyes. “Brent’s dead,” I whisper.
“Your secretary?”
“A car hit him. It wasn’t an accident.”
“My God. And you think I did it?” He shakes his head in disbelief. “Never, Mary. Never.” Still straddling me, he releases my wrists.
I don’t move, I can’t. I feel utterly drained, shaken to the core. I want to surrender myself to the force out there that wants to hurt me, wants to punish me for what I’ve done. It should have been me it claimed. Not Brent, and not Mike. “It’s because of me.”
“No, Mary.” He leans down, supporting himself on his arms, and kisses me softly.
Without thinking about it, merely responding, as a child to the breast, I kiss him back. He kisses me again, so carefully, trying to reach me. He strokes my hair as we kiss, and eases himself on top of me. I feel like I want to lose myself in him, to heal somehow this great gaping hole that’s been rent in my heart by losing Mike and now Brent. I want him to love me, to fill me up inside. I don’t want to be alone anymore. I want the pain to stop.
All I can feel are his kisses, deep and sweet. And his hands, stroking my hair, then cradling me, so gently. His touch feels wonderful, my skin is hungry for it. I haven’t been touched like this in so long, and it feels so good that I go toward it. I feel my body surge to him as he lifts me easily to the couch and strips down my pantyhose and panties. He pulls up my skirt, and I can feel the cool leather of the couch under me and the weight of his hips parting my legs. He keeps kissing me, as I feel him, probing me slowly and purposefully with his fingers.
It’s what I want, and what terrifies me, too.
He enters me gently and I gasp, taking him in all at once. I can’t say anything, though I hear his whispered words in my ear, because he’s moving inside me. I can hardly catch my breath. All I can do is grab his back and hold on. And I do, clinging to him there. Suspended somewhere between heaven and hell.
18
I wake up with my cheek on Ned’s chest and his arms linked loosely around me. His freckled skin feels cool, and his chest, almost hairless, looks smooth and perfect. I move slowly, not wanting to wake him, and let my eyes wander over the four walls of his bedroom, which are almost as familiar by now as my own. The walls are covered with a seemingly endless series of sailing photographs, taken at locales I’ve heard about but never seen. Wellfleet. Bar Harbor. Newport.
I turn over as carefully, and rest my head on the meaty part of Ned’s forearm. It brings me eye level with the desk of a very hard-working lawyer. Legal pads are neatly piled there, as are photocopied cases, highlighted with pink and yellow marker. A coffee can holds a bunch of sharpened pencils. There’s a file box of index cards, with homemade dividers starting with APPEALABILITY and going straight through to ZENITH CASE (EVIDENTIARY ISSUES). Next to the card file is a photo of a boat that Ned sails on weekends on the Schuylkill.
I pull the sheet up to my shoulders and hug it to my breast. I figure it’s midmorning, judging from the bright sun in the window. It must be Sunday. I know it’s not Saturday, because I spent much of Saturday in tears, telling Ned all about Brent. He listened patiently and kindly. He kept me in aspirin and water and even went to my apartment to fetch some clean clothes. I called Jack on Saturday too, but he was too miserable to talk. He gave the phone to a friend, who told me there would be a memorial service for Brent on Sunday night.
Saturday evening Ned and I ate Raisin Bran for dinner and went back to bed. We slept like spoons until the middle of the night, when I felt him stirring. I remember him fumbling gently behind me. I reached for him, but he felt cold and slick.
“It’s a condom,” he whispered. “I’m crazy about you, but I’m not crazy.”
Then I turned over to face him, half asleep and half awake. We made love again, slowly and quietly in the still darkness, and I felt as far away from everything as I’ve ever felt. It was time-out-of-time for us both, I think. Just the two of us, moving there together. Moving into each other.
We slept until dawn, when Ned disappeared downstairs into the kitchen to get us breakfast. He returned with a Hammond’s World Atlas heaped with American cheese, white bread, and a plastic bottle of seltzer water. We talked while we ate. Then I called my mother and told her the news about Brent. She insisted on coming to the memorial service, to pay her respects to Brent’s family. I didn’t tell her Brent had been estranged from his family since the day he told them he was gay. Nor did I tell her I’d been standing next to Brent when he was killed.
&nbs
p; My eyes fall on Ned’s answering machine. There are no messages showing, which means Judy didn’t call back while we were asleep. I called her from the hospital as soon as it happened, but she wasn’t home. It seemed odd, because I remember her telling me that Kurt would be in New York for the weekend and she’d be free. I even tried reaching her up there, with no luck. I left a bunch of messages on her machine at home and also on the voice mail at work. I asked her to call me at Ned’s but didn’t say why.
It feels wrong that Judy doesn’t know yet. I get out of bed to call her from the downstairs phone, so I don’t wake Ned. I look back at him; he’s sound asleep. I ease my bare feet onto a cotton dhurrie rug and tiptoe out of the room. I stop in the bathroom first. The room is immaculate; the man is either compulsively neat or has a lot of penance to do. The sink sparkles, and there’s no toothpaste glommed onto its sides like in my sink. In fact, there’s nothing sitting on the rim of the sink at all — no razor, aftershave, or toothpaste. Where does he keep it all? I look up at the medicine cabinet. Its mirror reflects a very nosy woman.
No. It’s none of my business.
I rinse off my face with some warm water, but there’s no soap in sight. I check the shower stall, but there’s none there either. Where is the fucking soap? I decide not to make a Fourth Amendment issue of it and open the medicine cabinet.
What I find inside startles me.
Pills. Lots of pills. In brown plastic bottles and clear ones, too. I recognize none of their names. Imipramine. Nortriptyline. Nardil. I pick up one of the bottles as quietly as possible and read its label quickly.
NED WATERS — ONE TABLET AT BEDTIME — HALCION.
Halcion. It sounds familiar. I remember something about George Bush being on it for jet lag. I replace the bottle and pick up another.
NED WATERS — ONE CAPSULE EVERY MORNING — PROZAC.
Prozac, I’ve heard of. An antidepressant. A controversial antidepressant. Isn’t Prozac the one that makes people do crazy things? As I replace the bottle, the capsules inside it rattle slightly. What is all this stuff? Why is Ned taking Prozac?
“Mary? Where are you?” Ned calls out, from inside the bedroom.
I close the medicine chest hastily and grab an oxford shirt from the doorknob. I slip it on and pad into the bedroom.
“There you are,” he says with a lazy grin. He turns over and extends a hand to me. I walk over, and he pulls me to a sitting position on the bed. I study his face. His eyes are a little puffy from sleep, but he looks like himself. Is he on Prozac now? Is it time for his next dose?
“Do I look that bad?” He sits up and smooths his ruffled hair with a flat hand.
“No. You look fine.”
He flops back down, making a snow angel in the white sheets. “Good. I feel fine. I feel better than fine. I feel happy!” He grabs my hand and kisses the inside of it. “All because of you.”
Yesterday I would have been touched by the sentiment, but now I question it. Why this sudden exuberance? Is it a side effect of the Prozac, or the reason he’s on it in the first place? What are those other pills he’s taking?
“Hey, you’re supposed to say something nice back to me.” He pouts in an exaggerated way.
“Why is it that when handsome men make faces they still look handsome?”
“I don’t know, you’ll have to ask a handsome man. But not dressed like that. Now gimme back my shirt.” He pulls me to him and flips me over with ease. In a flash I’ve tumbled to the messy comforter, and he’s above me.
“Hey! How’d you do that?”
“I wrestled in school.” He kisses me suddenly, with feeling. I find myself responding, though with less ardor than before. I can’t stop thinking about what’s in the medicine chest. Maybe I don’t know him as well as I thought. I pull away.
“I have to call Judy.”
“She hasn’t called?” he asks with a frown.
“No.”
He sits back on his haunches and pulls me up easily by my hand. “If you don’t reach her, we can go down to her house and look around. Doesn’t she live in town?”
“Yes. Olde City.”
“That’s easy enough. My car’s downstairs.”
“You park on the street?”
“No, this house has a garage.”
“Let me try her again.”
Ned rubs his eyes and stretches. “I’m awake. You hungry, sweetheart? You want anything?”
“Maybe. After I call her.”
He touches my cheek, gently. “How are you doing?”
“I feel better today. More normal.”
“Good. It’s gonna be tough telling Judy, isn’t it? You three were pretty close.”
I nod.
“I’ll go take a shower and give you some privacy, okay?”
“Thanks.”
“You want to come with me? Think of all the water we’d save.” He leans over and gives me a kiss. I can feel the urgency behind it, his need for more, but I keep thinking of the row of bottles. I feel myself tense up. Ned feels it too. “Is something the matter?”
I don’t know what to say. I want to be straight with him, but I shouldn’t have gone into the medicine cabinet. None of it is my business, even the fact that he’s taking medication. “Uh, it’s nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing. It doesn’t feel like nothing.” He releases me and looks me in the eye. “You having regrets?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“It’s none of my business.”
“You’re sleeping with me. If it’s about me, it’s your business.” He cocks his head slightly.
“Well, then.” I clear my throat.
“That bad, huh?”
It’s hard to face him. His eyes are so bright, and they smile when he does, showing the barest trace of crow’s feet. I love crow’s feet. On other people. “Okay, here’s my confession. I wanted to wash my face, and I couldn’t find the soap. So I went in the medicine chest. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help seeing.”
His face is a blank. “Seeing what?”
I look at him; he seems so earnest. I don’t want to hurt him. He’s been nothing but good to me.
“My Clearasil?”
“No. The bottles. The pills.”
“Ohhhhh,” he says, with a slow sigh, deflating on the spot.
“It doesn’t matter to me. It’s not that I hold it against you or anything. It’s just that…”
His green eyes flicker with hurt. “Just that what?”
“I was surprised, I guess. You seem so fine to me, Ned, you really do. But then I open up the medicine chest and there’s a Rite-Aid in there. What do you need those pills for? You’re fine. Aren’t you?”
“What if I wasn’t? Then you leave?”
A fair question. I’m not sure I know the answer.
“Forget it, Mary. You want to understand, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, once I did need those meds. All of them. But I don’t need them anymore. I’m better now. Over it. If you look at the bottles, the dates are years old.”
“Okay.” I feel relieved. What I’ve been seeing are his real emotions, not some drug-induced elation.
He draws the comforter around his waist. “You want to hear the whole story?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know where to begin. Wait a minute.” He screws up his face in thought. “Once upon a time, I was very depressed. I didn’t even know it, in the beginning. I’d been depressed for so long, I thought it was my personality. I was never really able to stay close to anyone, especially a woman. That’s why I was so reserved on our first date. I was too busy figuring out how to act.”
“You were kind of quiet.”
“Nicely put,” he says, with a weak smile. “I spent most of my adult life being kind of quiet. All it got me was alone — and gossiped about. Then I hit bottom, a couple of years ago, at work. Nothing interested me. I had no energy for anything, even sailing. I could hardly
get out of bed to start the day. I started missing work. I don’t know if you noticed.” He glances at me.
“Not really.”
“No one did, except my secretary. She thought I was a tomcat.” He laughs, ironically. “I was a mess. I just lost it. Lost my way. A nervous breakdown, my mother called it, but that’s a dumb term. Technically, I had a major depressive episode, according to the DSM. That’s closer to it.”
“DSM?”
“Diagnostic something-or-other Manual. You want to read all about me? I used to know my page number, but I forget now.” He gets up as if to leave the room, but I grab his hand.
“Forget the book. Tell me the story.”
He settles back down. “Where was I? Oh, yes. God, I feel like I’m on Sally Jessy.”
“Sally Jessy?”
“Morning TV. A big hit with depressed people.” He smiles. “Anyway, to make a long story short, it was my mother who got me help. Drove into town, pulled me out of bed, and stuck me in the car. She did the job. She got me to a shrink, Dr. Kate. Little Dr. Kate. You’d like her.” He laughs softly and seems to warm up.
“Yeah?”
“She’s great. Pretty. Tough. Like you.” Suddenly his eyes look strained. “I would have killed myself if it hadn’t been for her, I know it. I thought about it enough. All the time, in fact.” He looks at me, seeming to check my reaction.
I hope my face doesn’t show the shock I feel.
“The first session, I sat there on this IKEA couch she has, and the first thing out of her mouth is, ‘No wonder you’re depressed, you smell like shit.’” He laughs.
“That’s not very nice.”
“I didn’t need very nice. I needed a kick in the pants. I needed to understand myself and my family. I went into therapy with her. Every day. Sometimes twice a day, at lunch and after work. She started me on meds, which ones I don’t remember, but they didn’t help. We tried a few others until we got to Prozac — it was new at the time. It worked well — and Halcion, to help me sleep. I could never sleep. Christ, I was a mess.” A strand of silky hair falls over his face, and he brushes it away quickly.
“It sounds hard.”