This job was easier. The motel carpet seemed built for the aftermath of violence. Before Hawley knew it, he had erased what was left. The blood was gone. Every speck of it scrubbed out of his life, except for what was still pumping through him.
Hawley went into the bedroom and pulled out the box he’d kept of Lily’s things, the scraps and pieces left behind, after Mabel Ridge had packed up the rest and driven away with Loo in the car seat. There was a photograph he wanted to look at. The one he’d taken on their honeymoon in Niagara, with Lily smiling and the waterfall rushing behind her in a cloud. He found it in an envelope. It was a Polaroid, the edges thick, the layered colors starting to blur.
He needed pictures now. He was starting to lose the details. The way Lily’s waist fit into the crook of his arm, how he could feel the pulse in her neck when he put his lips against her skin. For months he’d been able to pull these memories out and burrow inside them so completely that he could conjure every aspect of her. The sight, smell, taste, touch, even the sound of her voice. Hawley would lose himself for hours, imagining her in bed beside him. But now the images were fogging around the edges, like an old movie narrowing the lens on a scene that he was still trying desperately to slip through.
Hawley turned on the faucets and filled the tub. He rummaged through the bathroom drawer until he found some rubber tape he’d bought to seal the drains. He tore off a piece and taped the Niagara picture to the bathroom wall, underneath the showerhead, where he could see it. Then he pulled his shirt off. He got his good leg out of one side of his jeans and then took a pair of scissors from the medicine cabinet and cut the rest away so he wouldn’t have to redo the bandages on his foot. He picked up the Colt from where he’d left it on top of the toilet and lowered himself into the bathtub, keeping his bad leg out of the water, propped along the edge.
He opened the cylinder and checked the bullets, even though he had loaded the gun only a few hours before. He closed the cylinder. Then he opened it again. The brass fittings on the ends of the bullets shone in a ring. A circle of six circles.
He looked up at the picture. It seemed crooked. Was it? He shifted forward in the tub and reached for the wall, dripping on the tiles, measuring the photo with his finger to be sure. And as he was measuring he remembered another photo that he had, that he liked even better than this one, and he realized that was the photo he wanted to be looking at.
Hawley got out of the tub and hobbled into the bedroom. He opened the box again. He found the photo strip. It was from their first week together, taken on the boardwalk at Myrtle Beach. His face was hardly in it. Only one eye and the side of his beard. Lily was trying to make him laugh. The first shot she was sticking a finger up her nose. The second she’d blown up her cheeks like a balloon. In the third Hawley was out of the frame completely, and Lily looked surprised, the edges of her mouth starting to soften, because in between those last two pictures, Hawley had taken her hand and threaded his fingers tightly with hers. And in that captured moment, as the light flashed inside the booth, he’d felt a flash inside his own body, striking a spark that turned the rusty gears of his heart, gears that had been frozen for so long Hawley had forgotten they’d even existed, until the parts in his chest groaned and started to move.
Hawley taped the strip to the bathroom wall, too. Then he went back and pulled everything else he had from Lily’s box. A pink razor blade, the small bag of cosmetics she always carried around but hardly ever used, some old brown prescription bottles with her name on the label from when she had strep throat, her comb and brush, still tangled with strands of her hair. He carried it all into his crummy bathroom, and arranged the objects around the sink and in the drawers. He hung her green kimono from one of the hooks. He slid her toothbrush next to his beside the sink. Set her lipstick by the mirror. He arranged her shampoo and conditioner along the edge of the tile. Then he got back into the tub. He closed his eyes. He opened them.
It was as if she had only just stepped out of the room.
The water had cooled but was still warm enough. He wet his hair and then used some of Lily’s shampoo and ran it through with his fingers until his head was white with foam. Lily had always taken showers at night, and she would climb into bed smelling like freshly washed berries. He paused for a moment, inhaling and exhaling her scent. Then he pushed himself down under the water until his lungs burned.
He came up sputtering, as he always did, full of shame and guilt and self-disgust. He looked again at the pictures he’d taped to the wall. He looked at Lily’s brush on the edge of the counter. He looked at the half-used bar of almond-milk soap he’d placed by the sink, the dragons sewn into the back of her robe on the door, her perfume bottle and its tiny glass stopper.
He was ready now. He picked up the gun. He pressed the barrel to the soft flesh beneath his chin.
The phone rang. Hawley sat there in the tub, listening to it ring. He’d conjured Lily so well that he could almost hear her bare feet padding across the rug beyond the bathroom door, the click of her lifting the mouthpiece from its plastic cradle.
Hello? she said. Hello?
The phone kept ringing. Urgent and echoing. And now Hawley imagined her voice on the other end of the line, reaching out at last, after all the times he had asked her to come and she had not. Hawley put down the gun. He scrambled out of the tub and went into the living room. He picked up the phone.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” said Mabel Ridge, then coughed as if Hawley had been the one to ring. “Louise had a nightmare. Too much candy, I think. And now she won’t go back to bed.” Her voice was like Lily’s, or what Lily might have one day sounded like, if she had lived to let the years pass and take their toll. Mabel Ridge cleared her throat. “She wanted to talk to you. I told her it was too late to call. I told her you were asleep.”
“Not yet,” said Hawley.
A muffled sound of the phone being passed. Voices low and far away, the mouthpiece pulled across a length of fabric. And there she was.
“Hello,” said Loo.
“What’s wrong?” Hawley asked.
“You’re not outside.”
“Not tonight.”
“But you’re always outside.”