Dare Me

32



MONDAY NIGHT

I’m sitting in the hospital’s east corridor, a waiting room behind a wall of glass bricks.

Beth’s mom appears in the doorway just past nine, flinging her camel Coach bag onto the sofa and bursting into inky tears that seem to come in gaping spurts for hours.

She talks mournfully of her failures, her weaknesses, and most of all the harshness of life for pretty girls who never know how good they have it.

Finally, she cries herself to sleep, sinking into her coat like a slumbering bat.

I move three seats away.

The TV, pitched high in a corner, scrolls footage of Beth being wheeled out on the gurney, one arm dangling limply.

Then the on-camera interviews, and there’s Tacy Slaussen’s rabbit face.

“I just want everyone to know that our stunts usually hit,” she says, tightening her ponytail and showing all her teeth. “But let’s face it. Cheer can be dangerous. I got injured just the other day. It was supposed to be me out there.”

Behind her, Emily sobbing in the background. “I didn’t mess up the count, I didn’t.”

I reach up and switch the channel, but Tacy’s on that one too.

“But Beth always told us, life is about taking risks, and you can die at any moment,” she says, with those pointy teeth of hers, forehead shining.

“It’s what we sign up for.”

And then Brinnie Cox, crying just as she cried a few hours before when she flunked a chemistry quiz, and a few hours before that, when Greg Lurie called her Bitty Titty.

“She is such a talented girl,” she wails, raccoon-eyed, “and we all feed off her positiveness.”


Not long after, I see the news of the arrest.

The closed caption reads: Cheerleading coach husband to be charged in slaying.

Which is such a simple way to say what is anything but simple.

The snapshot they show on the news seems to be from some other world I don’t know, Coach and Matt French, faces giddy, a great custardy wedding veil whipping around her.

I think of him out there in the backyard the other day, his stillness. But wasn’t he always so still, a shadow drifting past all our antic energy? So strange to think how much was roiling in him. The thing we mistook for blankness, for boringness, for a Big Nothing, turned out to be everything. A battered heart, a raging one.

“What is this, the all-cheerleading network?” brays a tired expectant father in the chair next to me, until he sees my uniform, the sequins matted to my leg.

Later, Beth’s mom comes back from talking to the doctor and smoking twelve cigarettes in the parking lot.

She says it’s a skull fracture in three places.


“I was waiting for her.” That’s what Beth kept saying, lying on the gym floor, her eyes black. “Where did she go?”

All the way out, like on some continuous loop. “When will she come back? I was waiting for her.”


There seems no point in sitting, so I drive to the police station at two a.m. and sit.

It’s an hour before I see Coach, holed up in the back lot with a pack of Kools—these are not times for clove cigarettes—her breath making dragony swirls.

“Hey,” she says, when she spots me.

We sit in my car, her eyes darting over and over to the back door, like she’s waiting for the cops to realize she shouldn’t be out here alone.

I don’t tell her about Beth, don’t ask if she knows.

It’s her time to talk, and she does.


That night, like any other night, she tells me, Matt was working late and she still had no car.

Will wants to see her, needs to, really.

Says he’ll drive her back and forth if she’ll come. He never wants to be alone.

No one ever needed her half as much, not even her daughter. She is sure of it.

At his apartment, everything feels different. It’s been that way lately. The feeling that it’s all too much, and even scary, the way he holds her hard enough to hurt, talking the whole time about how she is all that keeps him from the way he feels, which is like his heart is pumping water and drowning him to death.

These are the ways he talks lately, and the only thing to do is to hold on to him. Some nights she’s held him so hard, she has bruises on the heels of her hands.

They are in the bedroom a long time, and nothing is made better for more than one tight minute. The look on his face after frightens her.

She takes a long shower to give him time to pull himself together, to shake off the night horrors of his dark room.

But when she turns off the faucet she hears a man talking loudly. Saying something over and over. At first she thinks it’s Will, but it isn’t Will.

Over and over, the same rhythm and the same feeling of panicky anger, like her dad after things started to go wrong for him, at work, with her mom, with the world, and sometimes it was like he would tear the whole house down with him, raze it, incinerate it.

She guesses she is hearing it through the ceiling, the floor. Doesn’t that happen in apartments, where nothing is private or secret?

For a few seconds she doesn’t even call out to Will, figures she is being silly, all the noises that rattle through these big buildings, the way sound carries in the gorges.

But then the sound flies up fast and is now familiar to her, feels close enough to touch. That’s when she pulls on her T-shirt, her body still so wet it fuses to her in an instant, and starts walking out of the bathroom.

“Will,” she says. “Will.”

And she is shaking the water from her hair. Her head is down and so she doesn’t see how it started.


“Listen, please, calm down and—”

Will, towel wrapped around him, is talking to someone in the tone she sometimes uses with Caitlin when Caitlin scares herself at night, seeing ghosts slipping under her closet door.

And another voice, one she knows:

“—think you can do whatever you want. Another man’s wife—”

And it is Matt, and how can Matt be here? She wonders if she is still asleep and this is like a soap opera when you walk out of the shower and learn everything has been a dream.

Matt.

At first she thinks it’s his phone in his hand, that black curve always like a dark beetle in his palm.


She remembers hearing Will say, “How did you get my gun—”

Will had shown her the gun the week before. He’d taken it from his top bureau drawer and said, Is this what life is supposed to be about?

He’d held it in his lap as he told her he hated the Guard, hated everything except her.

Because that was how he talked lately, which wasn’t a way she wanted anyone to talk, not after Dad.

In bed with him, it was all she could think about.

When he was sleeping, she opened the bureau drawer again, took the gun, and put it in her purse.

She hid it in her file cabinet at home, far in the back behind the hundreds and hundreds of Xeroxed cheer routines. She tried not to think about it. But it was there and, trying to sleep at night, she could think of nothing else.

But now her husband has the gun, holding it funny, like it’s this thing in his hand he doesn’t recognize.

It happens so fast, Will saying to Matt, “Do you think I care? Do you think I’d stop you?”

And Will grabbing for the gun, and Matt’s eyes seizing on her at last, spotting her standing there, and abruptly gaining focus, gaining balance.

Matt, suddenly realizing, but not fast enough to stop it.

The two men pressed together, almost like they are embracing. It is as though they are embracing.

And then suddenly the gun is shoved up between their faces, and Will tipping back, the gun tilting—like the way you’d feed a bottle to a baby.

“This is it,” he says. Will says.

She’ll always remember that.

And the pop.

The flash from Will’s mouth.

Like a cherry bomb.

Like Will’s face lit from within.

Candescent.

And Will sliding to the floor.

It is so graceful, like a dance.

If it hadn’t been what it was, it would’ve been beautiful.


After that, she loses time.

Mostly, she remembers the high, sharp whistling sound that she finally realizes is coming from her.

And Matt crying. She’d never ever seen him cry, except when Caitlin was born and he’d sat in the chair next to her hospital bed and told her that he had never been so happy and nothing could ever be bad again, he wouldn’t let it be.

After that, everything is a red blur, Matt smearing the gun on the sofa cushions, smearing his fingerprints away.

She remembers thinking, How does he know to do that? And then thinking, Everyone in the world would know to do that.

She remembers him holding her in his arms and telling her things, and the red-wrung way of his face, and how she felt sorry for him, she just did.

She remembers how she looked down and his shirt cuffs were misted red.

He tried to get her to leave with him, but she refused. Maybe he tried. That part she doesn’t really remember.

She remembers sitting on the leather sofa for a minute, staring out the big windows, night-blackened.

She couldn’t have, but she thinks she heard Matt driving away, twenty-seven floors down.

She doesn’t remember calling me.

She never looked down at the floor.


When she finishes telling me, we’re sitting on a back curb and it’s so cold but neither of us wants to go inside.

“After, I remember shouting, ‘How could you do this to me?’” she says with almost a wry laugh. “But which one of them was I saying it to?”

How could you do this to me? I wonder if she knows she’s still saying it in her sleep.

“When I came home that night, all the drawers were open, the file cabinet dumped on the floor. He’d gone through everything,” Coach says. “But I don’t know what started it.”

I don’t say anything.

“I don’t think he ever meant to use that gun at all,” she says. “That’s not how he is.”

“But if Matt explains how it was, if you both do,” I say, my voice rising up, “maybe they’ll let him go.”

She looks at me wearily, as if to say, And then what, Addy? Then what?

“I saw his face right before,” she says. “Will’s face. I saw the way he was looking at Matt.”

She turns to me.

“He never looked at me at all.”

Picturing Will, I think I finally see what it was. I could never name it before, the way his eyes were always drifting, never connecting. There was the feeling with him always of a room everybody had left.

“Tonight, just before they came to arrest him,” she says, “Matt said, ‘What they’ll never believe is that he wanted to die.’ He said, ‘Colette, it doesn’t seem fair that I get to know that. That I get that. But it’s true.’”

She looks at me, smiling sadly. “But you know what? He’s right. It really isn’t fair that he gets to know that.”

Her smile turning grim. “Because that doesn’t help me.”

We sit quietly for a long time.

“Coach,” I say, my voice surprising me. Then I ask something because I have the feeling it’s my last chance to ever ask it. “I never knew why you love it. Cheer. How you came to love it.”

She runs a finger along her upper lip. “I never loved it,” she says, shaking her head. “It was just a thing. I never cared about it at all.”

I don’t believe her.

“What happens now?” I say.

She looks at me and laughs.


A few days later, I’m watching the news, my new habit, when I see the latest report.

“The break came when a witness identified Matthew French as the man he had spotted running from The Towers apartment building the night of the murder. Sources say the witness reported that, under the parking lot lights, it looked like French’s clothes were covered in blood.”

You can’t keep secrets long, and it’s RiRi who tells me who the witness was.

Jordy Brennan, crooked nose and high-tops.

One of his late-night runs, he made it nearly all the way to Wick Park. Spotting the bright lights of The Towers parking lot, he stopped to look for just the right song for the run home.

I wonder what it must have been like to see Matt French tearing through those front doors. If Jordy was really close enough to see any blood. If he was close enough to see the expression on Matt French’s face. Sometimes I feel like I can.

Jordy Brennan. I picture him up there, taking long, dragging breaths in the frosted air, during the moments before he saw Matt French. Just a few hundred yards from the spot where he once kissed me messily for a half hour or more, those vacant eyes of his shut tight. Believing something was beginning.

Those moments when he stood up there, catching his breath, looking for his song, I wonder if he thought about me.


I visit Beth in the hospital once. It’s very late and past visiting hours, but I don’t want to see her mom again or all the squad girls teeming there, at first as if on deathwatch and then as if on a healing prayer vigil. Oh, to see them and to watch their paroxysms, like Salem witches tearing their hair out, lolling their tongues.

Then, when the Reaper no longer lurked and there was no more talk of intracranial bleeding and cognitive impairment, they turned to epic poems on the We Miss You Beth! Facebook page, where everyone wishes their ♥♥ and get well soon, sistuhs! and to hourly deliveries, cookie bouquets, pluming gift baskets stuffed with smiley-face cupcakes, teddy bears donning nurse’s hats. Everything Beth would just love.

So I come late, the hospital blue and lonesome.

I stand at her bed, my hands on the side rails.

There’s a start in my chest when I see she’s awake, her eyes bright in the moonlight, as if waiting for me.

She tells me she didn’t think I’d come, that everyone has come but me.

“Even my dad,” she says, smiling faintly. “He wants to talk about a lawsuit. Can you figure?”

I tell her Coach has left town, has taken Caitlin to her mother’s, will only come back for the trial.

But she doesn’t say anything and it’s a while before she talks again.

When she does, she starts in the dreamy middle of something, her words caught in her lips.

“I’ll never forget seeing it. How she came in one day and I saw her wearing it,” she says, her voice wool-thick and plaintive. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. It was the worst part, worse than anything.”

I don’t know what she means, and wonder about the things happening in her brain.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “You gave it to her, the very same one, the very same.”

She keeps looking at me, a barely banked fire there, hovering behind her eyes.

“How could you give her that bracelet, Addy?” she asks.

The bracelet. I can’t believe we’re back on the hamsa bracelet after everything that’s happened. The fluid pressing on Beth’s skull, that’s what it is, like when it happened, the black blood pooling in her ear.

I shake my head. “It was just a bracelet, Beth. I don’t even remember where I got it—”

“I mean, that was the worst part,” she says. “It really was.”

That’s when I remember.

A present for you, Beth had said when she gave it to me a year ago, or more. Wear it forever. Which I think is the same thing I’d hoped for Coach.

“I forgot,” I say. Which must be a lie, but it’s one of the pieces I don’t look at. Like Beth says, I choose what to look at. I choose what to remember. Beth is my memory, remembering for me.

“You’ve given me lots of bracelets. We all do that,” I say. “It’s what we do.”

It’s a terrible thing to say, but I’m ashamed.

“I shouldn’t have kept it,” she says. “I should have thrown it down the gorge. Down at the bottom of the gorge with the Apache maidens.”

“I can’t believe I forgot,” I say, softer now.

Her eyes glassing, she turns away.

“It was you and me, Addy,” she says.

Something plucks inside of me, something deep and near forgotten.

“Addy, are we going to pretend forever? I know you remember,” she says, her back to me.

But of course I remember. I know precisely what she is holding tight.

A year ago, early spring, drunken sky-searching at midnight up on the ridge, cold enough to see our breath, but Beth, stripped to streaky-white, and the way I leaped after her, foot sliding in wet leaves, and my hand on her back, hot to the touch.

Collapsing to mossy soil, our backs sinking into it, our faces pitched up to the sky. Just back from two weeks with her mother in Baja, she has something for me, and asks me to lay my hand across her belly and close my eyes. The feeling of the soft leather on my wrist, the cold amulet, the Hand of Fatima charm.

And she told me the story of Fatima, how she was stirring a pot when her husband came home with a new wife. Brokenhearted, she let the ladle slip from her fingers and kept stirring with her own hand, not noticing the pain.

“The hand protects you,” she said. “Nothing can hurt it now. Nothing can touch us now.”

We raised our arms in the air and let our wrists touch, the beam from its mirrored hand, its promise of protection.

Wearing it, it made me feel strong and safe. Powerful. It made me feel like her.

Lying there, our shorts riding up, we compared the plummy bruises that marked both our right hips, matching thumbprints from where Mindy, Cori, and other girls would press hard to spin into their stunts.

She pushed at mine and I poked hers, and, wincing, we kept pushing on each other’s, the pain mysterious and soothing and strange.

How did it happen, us tangled upon each other?

My breath on her neck, my mouth on her ear. I started it, but I don’t even remember why or how. We never tugged our shorts all the way off, and we never did what things we might do, but if I let myself, I can still feel my cheek on her knee bone, still feel the pressure of her hands on my thighs. My mouth on her mouth, her laughing.

We never talked about it, and things were maybe different after. Maybe I felt different.

Then the season ended and there was a boy or another boy, and cheer camp, and I bunked with Casey Jaye and wore the love knot Casey gave me, and things got bad and were never the same again. And when she saw Casey and me, legs swinging from the upper bunk, laughing—the look on her face, and the look on mine. I can guess what mine looked like.

No, I don’t think about it ever, that night with Beth up high on the ridge.

There was a wonder in it, and who needs to talk of such wonders? We nestle them away, deep in the fury at the center of us, where things can be held tightly, protected, and secretly cherished as a special notion we once held, then had to stow away.

“You never could look at yourself, Addy,” she says. “What you wanted, what you’d do to get it. But here you are.”

Here I am.

“You wanted it. It’s yours now,” she says. “It was always you.”