“Bullshit. You don’t give a flying fuck about us or our daughter. You just want a story. Now get the hell off my property.”
The reporter held her ground. “Mr. Light,” she said. “Just one more thing. I am also doing a follow-up story on the teenage pregnancies in town.”
“You people—” My heart was pounding. “You people have no sense of decency. No idea of how it feels to have your personal life invaded. Can’t you just leave us alone?”
“I have to ask. It’s my job. Many of the girls have now had their babies, and we are following their stories. I understand that some of these girls were schoolmates of Lucy, and I wondered if your daughter might have been—well, if she might have been pregnant when she was killed.”
A pain cut through with such thrust it might have been a hunting knife. In an action immediate and without thought, I shot my arm out and, palm against her chest, shoved her away from me with so much force that she stumbled and fell. That was the first time my rage escaped my control, but it wouldn’t be the last. Her tote and notebook arced through the air and landed in a puddle left from the earlier rain. I stared down to where she lay sprawled on the walk. She stayed there for a minute, mouth open in shock, and then she scrambled to her hands and knees and stood. One pant leg was ripped, and blood had already started to seep through. Her face was pale.
I turned away and strode toward the house.
“Wait,” she called. “Wait just a damn minute.”
I mounted the steps, breathing hard, as if I had been in a battle.
“Hey. You can’t do this. I don’t care what you’ve been through. You can’t do this.”
I just did. When I climbed the steps, she was still calling my name, demanding that I turn around, anger now in her voice. My hands trembled on the porch rail. Once safely inside, I didn’t bother listening for the sound of her car starting up. I rubbed my chest, as if I had sustained an actual wound. I wondered if your daughter might have been pregnant when she died. I headed straight for the kitchen, found the bottle of bourbon I’d shoved in the back of one cabinet, as if in spite of all intentions I had known I was going to need it. Think me a fool if you will. Or weak. But don’t judge if you yourself haven’t been lost, despairing. You may think you know how you’d behave, but the truth is we have no idea of what we will do when faced with a nightmare. We like to believe we will be brave, the person who jumps in the way of danger to save another, the person who will face horror with resolve and courage, who, when tested, will rise up. But believe me when I say we have no idea. I do know now that we are both stronger and weaker than we could ever imagine. And we are capable of things we would never have dreamed possible. I filled a tumbler half full, didn’t bother with ice, and drank a good part of it down in one swallow. I remembered the bitch all right. Remembered them all, the way they had appeared at our home only moments after Chief Johnson arrived.
We had been in the kitchen when he came. It was ten thirty in the morning on the second week of Lucy’s disappearance. When the doorbell rang, Amy went to answer it. She still hadn’t returned to Maine, and we had come to rely on her to run interference for us. Moments later, she reappeared and told us the police chief was there and wanted to speak to me. Me, she had said. Not both of us. Sophie’s eyes met mine, and she came with me when I went out to the hall. Whatever it was he wanted to say, we needed to hear it together. Back then—Before—we were still a team, partners. His face telegraphed the message of bad news.
“You found Lucy?” Sophie said. “Where is she? Is she all right?”
“No,” he said. He turned toward me. “There is no easy way to say this.”
Sophie took hold of my arm, her fingers pressing hard. “What is it?” I said.
He swallowed once, looked at Sophie. “You might want to sit down.”
“Tell us,” I said.
“Your daughter is dead.”
“No.” Her word was a whisper, a long, low sound of denial, as if that single syllable could reverse time, make the chief evaporate.
I pictured, as I had the first night, a car crash, a metal frame twisted against a tree on some back road, our daughter inside.
“Her body was found this morning. A woman walking her dog found her in the woods outside of town. We’ll have to wait for the coroner’s report, but it looks like homicide.”
People say things like time stood still, and I always thought it was just a facile expression, but it is true. At that moment everything froze, and yet at the same time, I was aware of everything. Sophie clinging to me, the pale echo of her moan in the air. Amy standing in the background.
“How—” I began, but was interrupted by the sound of engines outside, of cars pulling up and then the doorbell.
Amy went to check. “Oh God,” we heard her say. “I can’t believe this,” she reported when she returned to the kitchen. “There are three network vans out front on the street.”
I turned on the chief in a fury. “You told the press?”
“Of course not.”
“They’re here, aren’t they? How else would they know?”
“They live in scanner land. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
Nothing we can do about it. Vultures. Predatory bastards. Now seven months later one of them was back to feast on what meat had been missed, to strip bones, suck marrow. I finished the first tumbler of bourbon and poured another. Time passed but I had no sense of it, nothing beyond those walls. After a while I was aware of, somewhere in the muted distance, the sound of thunder and then, later, of rain against the window over the sink, as if the storm that had pushed through earlier that day had reversed course and was returning. And then, later still, I heard the sound of the doorbell, remember thinking that the parasitic bitch would never give up. I stumbled and caught myself on the table, stumbled again in the front hall. I swung open the door, fist raised. Detective Gordon stood there. His shoulders were spotted with rain from where he’d run from the cruiser to the porch.
“Hey, pal. Take it easy there.”
I lowered my fist but could not swallow the rage.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” The words were slurred.
“Glad to hear it, Mr. Light. Because, well, I have to tell you, you don’t look so good.”
I leaned against the doorjamb, spoke with the careful precision. “Actually, I’m a little high. Not against the law for a man to get high in his own house, is it?”
Gordon looked behind me, into the house. “May I come in?”
I stepped aside, stumbled, and then regained my balance.
“You sure you don’t want to sit down somewhere?”
“I wanna be left the hell alone.” What was he doing here? I couldn’t think straight. My brain was mush.