“Pretty much.”
She picks up her jacket, which I had shrugged off at the water’s edge. She puts it around my shoulders again, nudging me forward. Our pace is slower this time, both of us keeping watch for signs of police. We take a different route out of the park.
Few people see us on our way from Central Park West to my building. Those who do probably write us off as two drunk girls stumbling home. My dizzy swaying helps sell the charade.
Once home, I fill the tub in the guest bathroom and peel off my clothes. The amount of blood on them is gut-churning. It’s not as bad as the white-dress-turned-red at Pine Cottage, but close. Bad enough that I start sobbing again as I lower myself into the tub. Tendrils of pink form in the water, swirling slightly before vanishing into nothingness. I close my eyes and tell myself everything about tonight will disappear in the same manner. A flash of color quickly gone. The man in the park will live. Because he was carrying a knife, he won’t mention what I did to him. Everything will be forgotten in a few days, weeks, months.
I examine my knuckles and see that they’ve turned a ghastly bright pink. Pain pulses through them. A similar ache throbs in the foot I had used to kick the man into unconsciousness.
More sensations from earlier in the night come back to me. The pulling of my hair. The blasts of pain to my shoulder. Seeing Him on the floor, the knife slick with blood.
Memories.
No. I tell myself that they can’t be. That almost everything bad about that night has been sliced from my mind. But I know I’m wrong.
I had remembered something.
Rather than sit up, I hunch down further in the tub, hoping the hot water will wash them all away. I don’t want to remember what happened at Pine Cottage. That’s the reason I’ve mentally cut it out of my brain, right? Because it was all too horrible to keep in my head.
Yet like it or not, there’s no denying something has come back to me tonight. Nothing major. Just a brief flash of memory. Like a faded photograph. But it’s enough to make me shiver even while neck-deep in the steaming tub.
There’s a quick knock at the door. A warning from Sam that she’s about to enter. She manages one step before being stopped cold by my bloody clothes on the tiled floor. Wordlessly, she scoops them up.
“What are you going to do with them?” I ask.
“Don’t worry about it. I know what to do,” she says before whisking them out of the bathroom.
Yet I am worried. About the memories that have suddenly scurried back into my consciousness. About the man in the park. About why Sam simply stayed back and watched as I beat him senseless, as if it was simply another one of her unspoken tests.
Suddenly, I’m struck with a thought. A question, really, made hazy and distant by the steam rising off the water and my own exhaustion.
How does Sam know what to do with my bloody clothes?
And another: Why was she so calm as we fled the scene of my crime?
Now that I think about it, she was more than calm. She was utterly thorough in the way she whisked me from the scene, making sure to shield me and the blood from onlookers, finding a water source in which I could be cleansed.
No one could be that efficient in such a situation. Not unless they had done it before.
Those thoughts are quickly followed by another one. Not a question this time. A certainty, screaming into my brain so fast and loud that I bolt upright in the tub, water sloshing over the sides.
The purse.
We left it behind in the park.
CHAPTER 20
“Don’t worry about it, babe.” That’s what Sam tells me after I inform her about the missing purse. “I already know that. If it was important, I would have taken it with us.”
We’re in her room, she smoking by the window, me nervously perched on the edge of the bed.
“And you’re positive there’s nothing incriminating in it?” I ask.
“Positive,” Sam says. “Now get some sleep.”
There’s so much more I should be asking. What did she do with my bloody clothes? Why did she let me snap like that in the park? Was I so violent and unhinged that it summoned that brief glimpse of Him at Pine Cottage? All remain unsaid. Even if I asked, I know Sam wouldn’t answer me.
So I leave, heading to the kitchen for a Xanax and grape soda chaser before lying down on the sofa, ready for another sleepless night. To my surprise, I do manage to drift off. I’m too exhausted to fight it.
Yet my slumber is brief, interrupted by a nightmare of Lisa, of all people. She’s standing in the middle of Pine Cottage, blood gushing from her slit wrists. In her hands is Sam’s purse, getting splashed with gore.
You forgot this, Quincy, she says.
I awake with a start, sitting up on the sofa, limbs flailing. Although the entire apartment is silent, I sense the reverberations of an echo in the living room. A scream, probably, bursting from my mouth. A minute passes in which I wait for someone to inevitably wake up. Surely Jeff and Sam heard it. Or maybe I didn’t scream after all. Maybe it was just in the dream.
Outside the window, the night sky is quickly thinning. Dawn’s on its way. I know I should try to get more sleep, that I’ll collapse soon without it. But my nerves are a sparking jumble. The only way to calm them is to go back to the park and see if the purse is still there.
I tiptoe into the bedroom, relieved to find Jeff fully asleep, snoring lightly. Quickly, I wrap myself in running clothes. I then slip fingerless gloves onto my hands to hide the abrasions that roll over my knuckles, already beginning to scab.
Once outside, I cross the blocks to the park at a dead sprint. I blast over Central Park West, crossing against the light, making an approaching cab slow down to avoid hitting me. The driver honks. I ignore him. In fact, I ignore everything as I fly to the spot where the purse had been knocked from my hands. The same spot where I had beaten a man so much his face resembled a rotting apple.
But now that man is gone. So is the purse. They’ve been replaced by police—a dozen officers milling around a wide square of yellow police tape. It looks like a murder scene. The kind you see on cop shows. Officers search the taped-off area, conferring with each other, sipping coffee from steaming paper cups.
I hang back, jogging in place. Despite the hour, several other onlookers are also there, standing in the blue-gray dawn.
“What happened?” I ask one of them, an older woman with an equally geriatric-looking dog.
“Guy got attacked. Beat real bad.”
“That’s awful,” I say, hoping I sound appropriately sincere. “Will he be okay?”
“One of those cops says he’s in a coma.” She practically whispers the word, putting a scandalous spin on it. “City’s full of sickos.”
Inside, I feel a thorn bush of emotions, tangled and jagged. There’s joy that the man is still alive, that I haven’t killed him after all. Relief that his coma means he can’t talk to the police just yet. Guilt for being so relieved.
And worry. That above all else. Worry about the purse, which could have been found by the police. Or stolen. Or dragged into the thicket by the coyotes that sometimes, inexplicably, find their way to the park. It doesn’t matter what happened to it. As long as it remains out of our possession, that purse has the potential to tie me to the beating. My prints are all over it.
Which is why I come home with my mouth set in a grim scowl. Jeff is awake when I slip through the front door, standing in the kitchen in a T-shirt and boxers.
“Quincy? What are you doing?”
“I went for a jog,” I say.
“At this hour? The sun’s not even up.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
Jeff peers at me through puffy eyes, the lingering fog of sleep hovering around him. He scratches his head. He scratches his crotch. He says, “Is everything okay? This isn’t like you, Quinn.”
“I’m fine,” I say, clearly not. My body feels hollow, as if my insides have been scraped out by the ice cream scooper I use to drop batter into muffin tins. “Just fine.”