“Do you think I planned it?”
“So you were driving along, headed for my house, figuring we should finally see each other, and he just happened to die?”
Sally has never met Jimmy, and she can’t say she’s ever really spoken to him. Once he answered the phone when she called Gillian in Tucson, but he certainly wasn’t talkative. As soon as he’d heard Sally’s voice, he shouted for Gillian to come pick up.
“Get over here, girl.” That’s what he’d said. “It’s your goddamn sister on the phone.”
All Sally can remember Gillian telling her about him is that he served some time in the penitentiary for a crime he didn’t commit, and that he was so handsome and so smooth he could get into any woman simply by looking at her the right way. Or the wrong way, depending on how you wanted to evaluate the consequences, and whether or not you happened to be married to this woman when Jimmy came along and stole her before you had an inkling of what was going on.
“It happened in a rest area in New Jersey.” Gillian is trying to quit smoking, so she takes out a stick of gum and pushes it into her mouth. She has a pouty mouth that’s rosy and sweet, but tonight her lips are parched. “He was such a shit,” she says thoughtfully. “God. You wouldn’t believe the things he did. Once we were house-sitting for some people in Phoenix, and they had a cat that was bothering him—I think it peed on the floor. He put it in the refrigerator.”
Sally sits down. She’s a little woozy hearing all this information about her sister’s life, and the concrete stoop is cool and makes her feel better. Gillian always has the ability to draw her in, even when she tries to fight against the pull. Gillian sits down beside her, knee to knee. Her skin is even cooler than the concrete.
“Even I couldn’t believe he’d actually go and do something like that,” Gillian says. “I had to get out of bed in the middle of the night and let it out of the fridge or the thing would have frozen to death. It had ice crystals in its fur.”
“Why did you have to come here?” Sally says mournfully. “Why now? You’re going to ruin everything. I’ve really worked hard for all this.”
Gillian eyes the house, unimpressed. She truly hates being on the East Coast. All this humidity and greenery. She’d do almost anything to avoid the past. Most probably, she’ll find herself dreaming about the aunts tonight. That old house on Magnolia Street, with its woodwork and its cats, will come back to her, and she’ll start to get fidgety, maybe even panicky to get the hell away, which is how she ended up in the Southwest in the first place. She got on a bus as soon as she left the Toyota mechanic she’d left her first husband for. She had to have heat and sun to counteract her moldy childhood, with its dark afternoons filled with long green shadows and its even darker midnights. She had to be very, very far away.
If she’d had the cash, Gillian would have run out of that rest area in New Jersey and she would have kept running until she got to the airport in Newark, then flown someplace hot. New Orleans, maybe, or Los Angeles. Unfortunately, right before they left Tucson, Jimmy informed her they were penniless. He’d spent every cent she’d earned in the past five years, easy enough to do when you’re investing in drugs and alcohol and any jewelry you took a fancy to, including the silver ring he always wore—which had cost nearly a week of Gillian’s salary. The only thing they had after he was done spending was the car, and that was in his name. Where else could she have gone on a night as black as this? Who else would take her in, no questions asked—or, at least, none she can’t think up an answer for—until she gets back on her feet?
Gillian sighs and surrenders her fight against nicotine, at least temporarily. She takes one of Jimmy’s Lucky Strikes out of her shirt pocket, then lights up and inhales as deeply as she can. She’ll quit tomorrow.
“We were about to start a new life, that’s why we were heading for Manhattan. I was going to call you once we were settled. You were the first person I planned to have visit our apartment.”
“Sure,” Sally says, but she doesn’t believe a word. When Gillian got rid of her past, she got rid of Sally as well. The last time they were supposed to get together was right before Jimmy and the move to Tucson. Sally had already bought the tickets for herself and the girls to fly to Austin, where Gillian was working as a concierge-in-training at the Hilton. The plan had been to spend Thanksgiving together—which would have been a first—but Gillian called Sally two days before she and the girls were set to take off, and she told Sally to just forget it. In two days, she wouldn’t even be in Austin anymore. Gillian never did care to explain what went wrong, whether it was the Hilton, or Austin, or simply some compelling need to move on. When dealing with Gillian, Sally has gotten used to disappointment. She would have worried if there hadn’t been a hitch.
“Well, I was planning to call you,” Gillian says. “Believe it or not. But we had to get out of Tucson really fast because Jimmy was selling jimsonweed to the kids at the university, telling them it was peyote or LSD, and there was sort of a problem with people dying, which I had no idea about until he said, ‘Get packed, pronto.’ I would have called before I arrived on your doorstep. I just got freaked out when he collapsed at that rest area. I didn’t know where to go.”
“You could have taken him to a hospital. Or what about the police? You could have called them.” Sally can see in the dark that the azaleas she recently planted are already wilting, their leaves turning brown. In her opinion, everything goes wrong if you give it enough time. Close your eyes, count to three, and chances are you’ll have some sort of disaster creeping up on you.
“Yeah, right. Like I could go to the police.” Gillian exhales in little, staccato puffs. “They’d give me ten to twenty. Maybe even life, considering it happened in New Jersey.” Gillian stares at the stars, her eyes open wide. “If I could just get enough money together, I’d take off for California. I’d be gone before they ever came after me.”
It’s not just the azaleas Sally could lose. It’s eleven years of work and sacrifice. The rings around the moon are now so bright Sally’s convinced everyone in the neighborhood will be awake before long. She grabs her sister’s arm and digs her fingernails into Gillian’s skin. She’s got two kids who are dependent on her asleep in the house. She’s got an apple tart she has to take to the Fourth of July block party next weekend.
“Why would they come after you?”
Gillian winces and tries to pull away, but Sally won’t let go. Finally, Gillian shrugs and lowers her eyes, and as far as Sally’s concerned that’s not a very comforting way to answer a question.
“Are you trying to tell me that you’re responsible for Jimmy’s death?”
“It was an accident,” Gillian insists. “More or less,” she adds when Sally digs her nails in deeper. “All right,” she admits when Sally begins to draw blood. “I killed him.” Gillian is getting pretty shaky, as if her pressure had started to drop a degree a second. “Now you know. Okay? As usual, everything’s my fault.”