“Good girl,” Jacky says, rubbing his fingers through her hair. She’s laid out on the couch, her head up on one arm and her feet propped on the other, and it occurs to her that the last person to sit here was Chris Weber, that nice young man from the paper, but what had happened? And then she remembers—the golf club whistling through the air and the crunch of bone. Gloria had screamed, she’d screamed until it felt as though her chest were ready to burst, and then there’d been the merciful darkness. She pinches her eyes shut, trying to get the image of Weber’s last moments out of her head, but Jacky slaps her, lightly, on one cheek and then the other. “Oh, no you don’t. I want you to look at me.”
She opens her eyes again, but this can’t be Jacky, it’s dim in the room, the blinds are drawn and it must be a trick of the light, a trick of her mind. She looks at Jacky, but it isn’t him, not really. Jacky is fat and old now, he’s far past his prime. And Jacky is in prison, don’t forget that. He’s hours away from here, sitting alone in a cell, behind a locked door and four walls of concrete. This isn’t Jacky but somehow it is. This man is Jacky when he was young, Jacky when they were first married, in those first few years when everything seemed so uncertain and exciting. It is Jacky, but then she blinks and it’s not, it’s only a boy wearing torn jeans and a sweatshirt with his hair parted sharply to the right, like Jacky always did.
“What did you do?” she whispers, and the boy smiles, there’s something in his eyes that is missing, something that is dead, and she never saw Jacky like this. But then she thinks of what she found in the garage. That girl, blindfolded, and she’d known Gloria was there, she’d asked for help, and Gloria had turned and left, she’d gone back into the house and locked the door and kept her mouth shut. Gloria had never seen Jacky look like this, but that girl surely had—and what about the rest?
“This is our little secret,” the Jacky-boy says, and he slips a hand up her skirt, and she slaps him, claws at his face, but he means serious business, and he is strong, and in some ways it is like the other time Jacky hurt her, but in other ways it is worse, because she thought she was safe, she thought it would never happen again, but now she knows better.
It’ll never be over.
SAMMIE
Dean wasn’t there when she got home, the house was empty and cold, and it had that smell a place gets when no one has been there all day. Like dust, she thinks. The flat mineral smell of water standing in toilet bowls. The furnace whooshed to life when she opened the front door, and she screamed in surprise, then laughed at herself, a little too loudly. It was unnerving, to hear all the sounds of life around her, even when she was still. The humming of the fridge, the slow drag of the wind against the siding. And a clicking sound, it reminded her of Dean clipping his toenails, and she spent an hour wandering through the house, trying to catch up with that sound before it finally disappeared.
She tried to call Dean’s cell phone, but he never answered. She didn’t know who else to call, or what to do. If your husband goes missing, what do you do? Search for him? She almost did that, walked out to her car with her key in her hand, and then turned around and went back inside. Denver was a big city, and he could be anywhere. She had no idea where to begin. There were hundreds of places to hide in the city, thousands, and it would’ve been a waste of time. Dean was angry, he was hurt, and maybe it was best to let him be that way, to wait until he came home. He knew how to find her.
So she went to bed. The sheets were ice-cold and she couldn’t seem to warm up until she lay on her stomach and crossed her hands under her belly, with her face toward the big numbers on the digital clock. She fell asleep that way, and when she woke up she was sure it was morning, but only ten minutes had passed. She tried to call Dean again, but it had stopped ringing altogether, and went straight to voicemail.
“Goddammit,” she said after the beep. “I know you’re angry, but don’t do this. Come home so we can talk about it.”
Twenty minutes later:
“I’ve seen Hoskins a few times, but it was only because of this stuff I’m doing for the paper. But nothing’s happened, Dean. I swear. Nothing happened.”
And then, later:
“Go fuck yourself.”
She doesn’t get out of bed until the watery gray sunlight is peeking through her blinds, even though she’s been awake for hours. There’s no sound of a car in the driveway, or a key in the door. She pads to the bathroom and sits down on the cold toilet. Lowers her head down to her knees. Almost. She’s not as flexible as she used to be.