I SPUN THE FORD INTO Jay’s drive, still breathing hard and crying, so that his house was blurry in front of me. It had only been a few days since the last time I was here, when Jay told me he’d never cared about me at all, but now it felt like a lifetime. I’d been hurt and angry when I left then, both at him and at myself for ever believing anything good about him. But I never would’ve thought that he was evil, that murder bubbled up inside his veins, that just a few days later he would kill Myrtle with his car and that he wouldn’t even stop.
Myrtle was dead. Myrtle was really dead. I put my head down on the steering wheel and wept uncontrollably, unable to stop myself. Until I heard the sound of tires on gravel behind me, and I suddenly sat up.
I glanced in the mirror, a white coupe had pulled into Jay’s drive, and unmistakably there she was in the driver’s seat, pale and dewy and red-lipped: goddamned Daisy Buchanan.
I wiped at my tear-streaked face, grabbed my purse, and jumped out of the truck. “What are you doing here?” I shouted at her.
She got out of her car slowly, dropped her cigarette on the ground, and crushed it under her black patent leather heel. “I could ask the same of you?” she said, shaking her hair back behind her shoulders.
“Jay Gatsby killed my sister,” I spat at her. “He ran over her with his car. That’s the man you love. A cold-blooded murderer.”
The color drained from her face, and she was all at once a ghost with bright red lips. “Your… your… sister?”
Before I could respond, suddenly an explosion and a deep scream crackled the air.
“Gunshot,” Daisy gasped softly. It had been years since I’d heard the sound of a gun go off, and it took me a second to realize she was right, and that the scream had been a feral cry, hard to tell if it was a man’s or woman’s or an animal’s.
Daisy looked at me wide-eyed for a second, and then she started running away from the sound of the gun, toward the woods next to Jay’s house. Out of instinct I followed after her. I was running, sweating, crying, breathing hard. What had I been thinking, coming here alone? I knew now that Jay was a murderer, and I hoped to God whatever shot had just rung out from behind his house hadn’t led to him killing anyone else.
But the sound of that feral scream already echoed in my head, haunting me.
* * *
DAISY STOPPED RUNNING once we were loosely sheltered in the woods, the trees some flimsy protection. She was breathing hard, too, and she held her head down to catch her breath. “My cousin Nick lives just down that way,” she said, her voice trembling, as she pointed back toward the direction of Jay’s house. “If we could get back past Jay’s house, we could run to Nick’s and telephone the police.”
I thought about Detective Charles, standing out in the street in Flushing, smoking his cigarette. What would he think if he found me here now with a gun in my purse, after I’d told him I had no idea about the yellow car?
“You’re not going anywhere,” a familiar man’s voice slurred from behind me before I could answer Daisy. I turned, and there was George. Broken, forlorn, horrible, drunken George, with his shirt loosely untucked from his overalls and his hair all askew.
I almost felt a little sorry for him for a brief second, until he raised his arm, and he was holding one of his beloved pistols, aiming it right at Daisy Buchanan’s head.
Jordan August 1922
WEST EGG
DADDY ALWAYS USED TO SAY that justice was an ARC. That it started somewhere dark and awful and spun up and around until it ended rightly with him, just on the other side of a hill, up there on his judge’s bench.
But there was no justice for a woman like me. Or for a woman like Myrtle. Was there?
And I couldn’t think about Daddy, about justice, now. He was gone. Mary Margaret was getting married, and in spite of all my lies, I was no longer a golfer. All I had left was Daisy, and if I lost her, too, I didn’t know what I would do. I couldn’t let her leave with Jay this afternoon, not after what he did yesterday to Myrtle, running over the poor woman with his car, leaving her dead in the road. What would he do to Daisy, when in a matter of days or weeks or months, he’d realize she didn’t love him, that she would never love him?
So I hatched a plan. I heard Daisy running a bath down the hall and I decided I’d go to West Egg myself, scare Jay off, threaten him. He’d been threatening me all summer and now it was my turn.
I snuck into Tom’s study, stole his gun from the top drawer where I’d seen Daisy put it back weeks ago, and then I hopped into my car and raced over to West Egg, knowing only one thing for sure: I needed to get there before Daisy did.
I’d confront Jay, tell him to leave Daisy alone and to stop threatening me, too. I’d wave the gun around, show him that I really and truly meant business. I just wanted to scare him, just wanted him to know I was serious.
I didn’t plan to hurt him. I never really planned to hurt him.
* * *
OR MAYBE I did?
I’d been lying to everyone all summer, and it was almost hard to remember how it felt to tell the truth anymore. Even to myself.
I parked my car at Nick’s house—he didn’t appear to be home. I already had it in my head that I didn’t want anyone to see my car at Jay’s. And then I jogged down the path toward Jay’s property, but I didn’t go up the drive, didn’t ring the doorbell. Instead I walked around back and stood in the bushes behind the pool, branches tangling in my hair.
I could see Jay, inside his house, in his kitchen, walking around, finishing breakfast. And then the back door opened, and he walked out onto the veranda, stood at the edge and inhaled deeply, glancing at the great blue sky with a smile, as if he hadn’t a care in the world, as if he hadn’t just killed a woman the night before.
And God, I hated him so much in that moment, I suddenly understood that I was capable of anything.
Jay walked down the steps of the veranda, toward the pool. My heart pulsed in my chest, and I realized how crazy, how foolish this was. I should run away before Jay noticed me.
“Hello, Jordan,” he said. Too late. He stared at my face, not seeming to notice the gun in my hand. “I suppose Daisy’s talked to you?” His voice sounded calm, self-assured.
“Daisy’s not going anywhere with you,” I said. And then, that red-hot fire coursed through my veins, the same way it had in Atlanta when I’d ruined everything. And in Cannes when I’d been so mad at Tom I could barely see straight and I’d slapped him across the face. And in my bedroom in Louisville, when I’d swung my aluminum putter at Blocks Biloxi’s head.
“All I want is to love her,” Jay said. “To take care of her.”
“I want you to leave Daisy alone.” The fire burned up inside of me, and my words came out searing and angry.