All for One (40 page)

But he couldn’t do it, because besides that desire there was shame. Michael was his best friend. Joey and PJ and Elena were his friends. Even Jeff was his friend. And Jeff was right; he had gone into this willingly. Maybe with some fear, but not with regrets.

At least not until later.

“I’ve gotta go, Mike,” Bryce said to the spray bottle. He lingered a few seconds more, then left the janitor’s closet, his head down and shaking.

*  *  *

Dooley walked back and forth at the front of the blue Cherokee, his breath trailing past his cheeks like misty whiskers flowing in the wind. One by one the cars that had been parked on the ball field were lighting up and parading away, those in the teachers’ lot also thinning out. The music had stopped twenty minutes ago.

He paced and waited and watched, and soon he saw her in the distance, stepping into the glow of the auditoriums’ outside lights. Three people had come out with her, two tall and one short. Mother, father, child. Mary chatted with them for a moment, then the family walked off, waving pleasantly back at her. She started across the ball field, the hem of her coat spreading in the breeze, her gently bobbing form black in silhouette. Her head was angled at the way before her, but every so often it would swing sideways, looking off at something and tossing the loose cascade of hair into the breeze, the distant back light setting every fine shadowy strand afire. The brilliance would die as quick as it had been born, and she would face forward again, beauty in shadow, night within night coming his way.

Three-quarters of the way to the teachers’ lot she slowed, her coat hugging her legs again, and he knew that she had seen him.

Her face was downcast and eclipsed, but when she came into the glow of the standards in the teachers’ lot she lifted her eyes and smiled.

Dooley smiled back and patted the hood of her car. “Good as new.”

“Amazing what a few new parts and some paint can do, isn’t it?” Mary stepped close and brushed a stubborn piece of lint from his shoulder, then studied his face and touched one of the small scars remaining, a short pinkish welt below his left eye. “You’re looking better.”

“I heal fast.”

His sure, quick reply stung. She withdrew her touch from him and glanced at the stars in the clear night sky. “Let’s see; the last time we were together you were a bloody mess and I was a blithering fool.”

“Second to last,” Dooley corrected her, and after a second’s worth of thought she nodded.

“That’s right. There was that little show in my class the next day.”

“In hindsight that probably wasn’t what I should have done,” Dooley said. “But it felt good then.”

It was close to an apology. Mary wondered about its boundaries. “Does the same sentiment apply to what we did?”

Dooley hadn’t thought he was talking about that, but now wasn’t sure. He’d tried to keep thoughts of Mary, and of their encounter
(It wasn’t an ‘encounter’; it was a fuckfest, Dooley, with a witness. Swallow that and see how it tastes.)
, out of his head. He already had one mystery to solve. Trying to figure out why he’d let that happen would add another. He didn’t need that now. He hadn’t needed it
then
.

But here it was.

“Can’t remember what we did?” she asked facetiously when his silence lingered.

“I remember.”

“Kinda hard to forget,” Mary said. Her eyes avoided his for a moment while a thought gripped her. “It probably wasn’t the best time for it to happen.”

“It definitely wasn’t,” Dooley agreed, upping the level of certitude to a place he was instantly uncomfortable with. It might not have been the best time, but he didn’t mean for it to sound like what had happened between them was...wrong? “I wonder if it would have happened at all if it didn’t happen then.”

“
It
,” Mary said, plucking that singular, evasive syllable from the exchange. “What was
it
that we did, Dooley? There was no sleep, so we didn’t sleep together. Don’t take this personally, but I don’t love you, and I doubt you know me well enough to love me, so my inclination is to say we didn’t make love. That leaves sex.”

“I didn’t come here to talk about what we did.”

“Plain old fucking,” she said, gulping his reaction with wide eyes. She wanted to shock him, and shocked herself in trying.
I said that?
“Was it that, Dooley?”

“Mary, this isn’t—”

“Sure,” she interrupted, nodding. Her brow compressed to an angry, unattractive fall of creases. “
That
wasn’t a good time to do
it
.
This
isn’t a good time to talk about
it
. Fine.”

“What is this about, Mary?”

Her jaw dropped incredulously.

“I know what this is about,” Dooley said. “But what
else
is it about?”

The skin of her brow smoothed, anger becoming hurt. “I don’t take every man I meet into my bed. Under the circumstances we came together I sure as heck don’t understand why I was attracted to you.” She paused for a second. “Am attracted to you.”

He put his hands up in frustration. “Let’s not do this now, okay?”

“Fine,” she said, her head shaking slightly. “I take it then you weren’t waiting out here to hash this out.”

“No.”

“Did you come for the pageant?”

“No.”

She nodded. “Monosyllabism does not become you.”

“Is that a spelling word I should brush up on?” he asked, smiling, her face brightening in concert. God, she was a vision, he thought.

“No,” she answered cutely, monosyllabically. She wanted to touch his face again, to put her palm to his cheek and feel him turn into the caress. She wanted to, but she didn’t. Whatever there was between them would not blossom now. It needed time. Needed space. “You missed a really good pageant. Elena sang.”

“Mrs. Gray told me.”

“It was beautiful,” Mary added proudly.

Dooley nodded through a deep draw of chilly air. “Mrs. Gray also told me that Bryce left before the show started.”

She stared at him, her shine fleeting. Gone with the pleasant moment from which it came. Gone, as was his smile.

“He wasn’t feeling well,” Mary said.

“Mrs. Gray told me that, too. I was wondering why.”

“Taking an interest in Bryce, are you?”

“Mary, I’m—”

She waved off his explanation, evasion; whatever it was going to be. “Mrs. Gray filled me in.”

“I asked her not to.”

“I’m his teacher. You thought she should know, she thought I should know.”

A pair of teachers hurried past from the ball field, waving and bidding goodnight to Mary and her companion, and got into a big old boat of a car. A monstrous old Buick, Dooley saw as it pulled out and drove past them. Its malodorous exhaust coughed from the tailpipe and swirled about the ground until the breeze pushed it past them and made it nothing.

Mary coughed quietly into her hand and said, “How am I supposed to know why Bryce isn’t feeling well?”

“I thought maybe something had happened with the other kids,” Dooley said. “Maybe that feeling sick was an excuse.”

“Do they know that you and he are...”

“I didn’t tell them,” Dooley said. He hadn’t meant to, but there was accusation all over his statement.

“Neither did I,” Mary assured him very calmly.

“Did anything happen with them?” Dooley asked directly now.

Mary sampled his inquiry for a moment. “This sounds like the policeman in you talking.”

“It...”

A policeman. Two...

On the sharp tail of the ‘t’, Mary’s world changed. What was around her, the rows of cars pale under the artificial lights, the dark swaying smudges against the night that were trees bending in the gentle wind, the stars dotting the sky above, seemed to collapse as if part of an inflated landscape being drained of what gave it form and presence. Collapsed inward toward the corridor of sight that existed between she and Dooley, the edges curling and warping and spinning until everything was a rotating funnel of night-dulled color that was pulling at her senses, the remnant odor of the departed old Buick, the brush of cold air on her cheeks, the tickle of hair dancing across her brow, and the sound, the sound of Dooley. Saying something.

...is.”

...policemen.

Her world was black for an instant, an internal night that was only similar to the recurrent darkness her sight sometimes spun toward in their shared lack of definition. But this was not that inner darkness. Not at all. This was in a different place,
of
a different place. In the other (
another? more than one? two?
) the bright-eyed hound lived. In
this
flash of nothingness the hound could not live. Could not survive. Was not welcome.

She could not see it, but she did feel that in that other place the hound was waking and baring its angry, brilliant fangs.

And the inner night burst to an old light. Light that echoed off the things Mary was seeing. Not Dooley a step away in a dark parking lot. Not him. Not there. Not here. Not...
now?

Then.

(When?)

Two policemen stood before a haggard young woman whose listless form seemed swallowed by the wingback chair in which she sat.

Stop sign!
The muted shout, a distant sound echo, folded into the scene, but did not fit. Mary knew this.
(How?)
But it did matter.
(If it fits, what does it mean?)

Both policemen had their Smokey Bear hats tucked under their arms. Black straps angled across the front of their uniform tunics, and one of them had a very small notebook in one hand, the stub of a pencil in the other. He was looking at the woman, and she was looking back at him, her eyes sad and vacant.

He was saying something.

Stop sign!

No, he was
asking
something.

Mary watch/listened, feeling herself lean in to hear. Feeling the raised embroidery of the wingback’s upholstery as her hand came to rest upon it. It tingled familiar under her touch.

Why was there...

Listen, listen, listen. She knew she must listen. Something wanted her to listen. Not the hound. No,
it
wanted her not to listen. And the quick little voice, it wanted her not to listen. Mary knew this, believed this, as much as she knew and believed that she
had
to listen.

She leaned close, close to the woman in the chair, shoulder now against the curved side of the wingback, feeling the hard frame beneath the upholstery, a forever dead skeleton covered by pretty painted skin, and listened. Shhh. Listened.

...a gun in the truck?

She listened, heard, wondered. What did it mean? What did he/that/it mean? What gun? What truck?

Why was there a gun in the truck?

Mary’s fingers dug into the top of the chair and she peeked around its side at the woman...

(I feel so small)

...and the woman looked at her. Young and pained, the woman looked at her.

Then the policemen looked at her.

One of them was asking her something.

Shhh. Listen.

DON’T LISTEN! DON’T!

youdon’tneedtohearthisMARY

She’s listening...

Asking. The policeman was asking her...

Why...

Leaned closer still to the chair, holding it, listening like a good little...

...did you kill your father?

The world winked to black again, and she heard herself scream, felt herself scream, felt the rush of the scream (scream?) wash soundless (?) and cold over her face.

Her eyes teared in the stiff gust that had come up without warning, as things timeless and elemental would, the wind howling now, screaming past her ears. She blinked the blur of the chill tears away and Dooley was there. She was there. In the parking lot beneath the stars.

“I have to ask you these things,” he said.

Mary hadn’t moved an inch, not relative to any physical benchmark at least. Except for the reflexive flutter of her eyelids and the somewhat deeper breath throes beneath the layers of her coat, what was her arms and legs and head and chest and all the flesh that was her felt as rigid as a stone monument that only time could wither. Blood flowed somewhere inside, but it coursed thick and slow like an ancient and viscous snake of magma oozing toward the cool ocean. She felt too much there. Too present. Like her density had increased tenfold, and that realization spawned a sudden and frightening thought that twirled around in her head like a bullwhip in the last of its snapping arc, the
crack!
only an instant away. A mélange of thoughts all compressed to one: density, light, time, space. All these things warped by forces primeval. Forces still not understood in totality.

The force of a bright, shining star that could collapse into itself in death, yet still live as something else. Something opposite. As a black void that played with time, and light, and matter, and space. A black hole it was called in science. A dead star, so cold it was hot, so hot it was cold, so dead it was eternal.

The fingers of one hand began to move and rubbed slowly across its palm, the touch memory flashing, and she could remember the gnarled embroidery that covered the wingback chair like dark green scars on paisley print skin. She remembered the chair, and she remembered the woman in the chair. Her mother. Her mother in the chair.

Two policemen and her mother in the chair. The moment.

“I don’t enjoy having to ask, Mary.”

She heard Dooley. She listened. But mostly in that micro moment she thought. She forced her thoughts to that moment.

It happened.

That real moment. The policemen asking their questions.

Why was there a gun in the truck?

Her mother didn’t answer.
Yes, she did.

Yes, she had. But what did she say? What were they talking about? A gun—what gun?

And the other question. Asked of her.

Why did you kill your father?

What did they mean by that? She hadn’t killed her father. A garbage truck running a stop sign...