Bright Young Women

Roger’s head landed on his forearm with a final-sounding whump. I poked him, to be sure he was really out, before whispering, “Can you call the police? I think he was trying to hurt me.”

Tina went over to him, shoving her hand down the waistband of his jeans. It was only then I noticed that fresh blood was streaking his upper thighs. When had he started bleeding?

Tina extracted what appeared to be a small Swiss Army knife, partially unlatched.

I gaped at the blade. “How did he not feel that?”

“I’m a licensed therapist,” Tina said. “Everything in my toiletry kit is legal.”

I glanced at the open bathroom door, the leather kit on the sink, where Tina had stood a few minutes ago, washing out the glass she gave Roger.

Tina went over to the nightstand and lifted the phone from the receiver, dialing the police. “Please don’t tell the sheriff that part,” she said to me. “He already thinks I’m some kind of black widow.” Her laugh was gravelly, like it wasn’t all that ludicrous a thing to think.

I waited while she explained our situation to the operator. “It’s the Days Inn on West Tennessee Road. Room two-oh-three.”

“Why did the sheriff tell me not to spend any time alone with you?” I asked when she hung up.

Tina groaned—this again? “I was married to a rich old dinosaur who died of natural causes, and I got almost everything even though he had five adult children who are all nearly twice my age.”

“So he thinks you had something to do with his death?”

“Yes.”

“Did you?”

“Even if I did,” came Tina’s non-answer, “I have no reason to want to hurt you.”

“My family has money,” I said. “Maybe you’re somehow after that.”

Tina smirked. “I’m scraping by, all right.” She started tidying the room—fluffing the pillow she’d held in her lap and propping it against the headboard. “Come to Colorado with me,” she said, moving on to make the other bed. I got up to help her. It mattered to me too that when the police arrived they found a tidy room. “I’ve been in touch with The Defendant’s old cellmate. He’s agreed to put me on his visitors’ list.” In unison, we drew up the top sheet and gave it a half-foot fold.

“What is talking to him supposed to accomplish?” I asked as I lifted my side of the mattress and tucked in the corners of the comforter.

“Think about it,” Tina said while we straightened the pleated bed skirt. “You’re stuck in a six-by-six cement box all day, nothing to do, no one else to talk to in the world but your cellmate. You get to sharing things. About your plans. About friends, family, places where you can hunker down, and people who will help you go undetected.”

“Isn’t talking to him the sort of thing the sheriff should do?” I shook out the pillow, then gave it a good pounding with my fist. Tina held out her arms. I tossed it to her.

“It’s good policework,” she said, catching the pillow with a little bend at her knees. “So, no. Not your sheriff. Not any sheriff I’ve come across in all this.”

I stood staring at the freshly made bed, thinking about how much of my life I’d spent feeling simultaneously like a child and the only adult in the room. Why couldn’t people just do their jobs? Why was it that I could rely only on myself?

“I can’t just take off,” I said. “We’re moving back into The House in a few days. I have to show everyone there is no reason to be afraid. I have to be the example.”

“Well”—Tina laughed, collecting the dirty glasses and taking them to the bathroom for a rinse—“there is plenty to be afraid of. The Defendant is here in Tallahassee, and it’s in the papers that there was an eyewitness. You’re not safe as long as he’s out there.” The water went on, and Tina raised her voice to be heard over the stream. “Look at what just happened to you!”

“So this is about keeping me safe?” I fired back.

The tap went off. “It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.”

I’d read A Clockwork Orange twice the summer I turned fifteen. “I can quote Anthony Burgess too, but I’d prefer an answer that doesn’t evade the question.”

Tina turned off the light in the bathroom and went over to the window, checking to see if the police had arrived yet. “Ruth deserves a proper burial. There are rituals around dying. They’re not for the dead, they’re for those of us who are left behind. I think I deserve that. And I think you deserve better too. Has anyone even acknowledged what you’ve done, Pamela?”

The room spun suddenly and silently with red and blue lights. The police hadn’t even bothered to turn on the siren. “What is it I’ve done?”

Tina went over and unlocked the door for the officers. “You ran toward him. Don’t you see that? Anyone else, if they’d heard what you heard, they’d have run away. They’d have saved their own skin. You heard his footsteps overhead, and you pursued him. That takes a set of steel, Pamela. Everyone should be calling you a hero, but I have a feeling I’m the only one.”

“Afternoon, girls,” said the responding officer, taking off his hat and cupping it against his chest in a mannerly way as he came through the door. He saw Roger, passed out at the table, and clicked his tongue, chuckling. “Heard we’re having some boy trouble.”





RUTH


Issaquah

Winter 1974

When Tina called to tell me that a pipe had burst at Frances’s house and the grief group would be meeting at her place, her voice was sweet to the point of cloying. It was how we’d been speaking to one another ever since she came by my house and watched me make my nephew cry. Bubbly and impersonal.

“I don’t mind picking you up,” Tina said. “I know Clyde Hill is sort of a far drive for your mother.”

“Actually, I can ride my bike over.” I’d salvaged my childhood Schwinn from the junk pile in the garage and spent the weekend scrubbing at patches of rust with a kitchen sponge. My mother had barely spoken to me since I’d told her that CJ had sent his best but wouldn’t be able to attend the ceremony for my father, except to tell me that a more considerate person would have gone to the store and replaced the ham they’d gone through on Saturday.

“Are you sure, Ruth? It’s pretty far in the dark. And they still don’t know what happened to that U Dub girl.”

“I heard she ran off,” I told her.

Tina gave me her address, and I did a double take. I knew her house. I knew exactly who she was.



* * *




I left early for the session, after my mother picked another petty fight with me. I’d forgotten to bring in the mail, and if I wanted to live at home for free, a twenty-five-year-old adult woman, then I needed to remember the arrangement. I was there to step in where my father had stepped up, to help her ease into her new life as a grief-stricken widow.

“It’s right here,” I had the immense pleasure of saying after allowing her to prattle on and on, the most she’d spoken to me in nearly a week. I led her into the laundry room. It had sleeted overnight, but the day had been warm and the mail soggy and full of grit. I had spread it out on a dish towel to dry.

“Were you planning on telling me it was there, or were you waiting for me to ask where it was?” She didn’t give me a half second to answer before moving on to my next offense. “And you need to find another place to park that bike if you’re going to be using it again. I can’t get to anything I need with where you have it in the garage now.”

That was when I started snapping up my coat. I didn’t have to leave for another hour, but it was time to go.



* * *