Trigger nodded and looked at me like he really wished I would explain myself. ‘Hastings, what a surprise. ’
Annette was still staring at Blaine’s waist. I followed her gaze up. Blaine’s cheeks had taken on a sickly pallor, despite her deep Texas tan. Her mouth curled into a grimace and she doubled over, clutching herself.
‘Whoops,’ Annette said.
Trigger caught his wife, keeping her from falling over the canvas fencing. ‘Babe? You okay?’
Blaine held one hand over her diaphragm. ‘I’m fine, I just . . . we’re really late.’
‘Oh, honey,’ Annette said softly, pointing subtly at Blaine’s waistline. ‘I think you have a visitor.’
I glanced down. It wasn’t her waistline. A red stain about the size and shape of my thumb was spreading through the crotch of Blaine’s sandblasted jeans.
‘Oh, God,’ Blaine said, placing her shopping bag in front of her crotch. ‘Shit, I forgot what day it is.’ She looked like she was about to cry.
Trigger was still clueless. ‘What? What’d I miss?’
‘Travis, let’s
go
.’ Blaine threw Annette the most artificial smile I have ever seen. ‘Nice meeting you.’ She shot me a look. ‘Bye, James.’
‘Tomorrow,’ Trigger said as his wife dragged him away.
‘Call me,’ I said. ‘We need to put Ghost to bed for real, man.’
‘Right!’ Trigger waved.
I couldn’t be sure, but when they were about thirty feet down the promenade, I thought I heard Blaine say, ‘Are you kidding me . . . it’s sick!’
When they had disappeared into the crowd I sat down with Annette. ‘Jesus, that was awkward. The poor thing was mortified.’
‘He seems nice,’ Annette said. ‘But she’s got issues.’
‘They must be fighting. She’s not always like that, really.’
I turned and looked at her tousled blonde hair, her big-framed glasses perched on her little nose, the yellow sundress. She was perfect, except for the tears sliding down from behind her sunglasses.
‘They weren’t fighting.’ Annette’s voice was so frail it was almost a whisper.
‘To hell with them,’ I said. ‘They’re just used to seeing me miserable. I’m so sick of people looking at me like I’m a victim.’
But even as I said so, I wondered who I was defending. I felt exposed in public, the eyes of the other shoppers and patrons prying into my affairs.
Annette seemed to read exactly what I needed.
‘Let’s go,’ she said.
16
There is a period where things are missing, hidden behind a wall of white noise. No matter how hard I concentrate, I can’t bring them back. This period was as short as two days or as long as two weeks. The in-between is snow static, a dead television channel, unpleasant to stare at. What did we do during this outage? What did she do to me? What deals were struck? How much did I give away? I don’t care to guess.
The next thing I remember is being in her bedroom. It was late. We were just in from the night, still dressed in street clothes. My cheeks felt cool, rosy from wind like we had been running through the yards and alleys of West Adams, kicking over trashcans and batting down mailboxes, giddy as truants. We weren’t drunk and I don’t remember being full or tired from a meal. I was wound up, ready to run another ten miles or solve a physics problem. We seemed to be in a groove, careless, sliding further into the music of each other. On her nightstand was the giant snifter terrarium, the one with Tiny Mr Ennis inside, resting on his little branch of driftwood. She had found him when she moved in and decided to keep him because he was cute.
‘Good night, Tiny Mr Ennis,’ I said, falling into her cool arms.
‘Who are you talking to?’
‘Your turtle.’ I turned off the lamp, plunging us into darkness. ‘That’s his name.’
‘Oh, you two know each other?’ Her voice was already laced with lust. When she went, she went quickly.
‘No, but I’ve seen him around.’ We began to grapple playfully, in synchronization, a dance so familiar I didn’t have to think of my next move.
‘What if Tiny Mr Ennis wants you to leave the light on?’
‘Is he afraid of the dark?’
‘No, he wants to watch you fuck me.’
I laughed. She didn’t. She turned the light on and plowed back into me. She was becoming frantic.
‘Will you fuck me, James? Will you fuck me until I say stop?’
This was a little too much. ‘I guess so.’
‘But I don’t want you to stop,’ she said. ‘Even when I tell you to stop, keep fucking me. I want it to hurt. I want to be sore. Promise you’ll do it.’
Did she seek punishment? Did she still feel guilty? Yes, but not for Arthur and his evil deeds. Her darkness came from a colder place.
‘I’ll try.’
When we had been going for a while, I told her I wasn’t going to last much longer.
‘Slap me,’ she said between breaths.
‘What?’ I was on top of her, eyes closed, nearly winded.
‘Slap my face.’
This struck me as so absurd I actually laughed a little. ‘No, don’t think so.’
‘I need it. Slap me. Come on. Slap my face.’
Whose voice speaks to you in the darkest moments? When someone invites you to do bad things? Invites - and then begins to beg? Who do you turn to when your Jiminy Cricket is out to lunch and you begin to believe she really does want it?
Smack the bitch
, Ghost said. He was cackling, drunk on Henney.
She’s a freak, give her what she wants, faggot. If you don’t, I will.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Stop.’
‘Pleeeeease, oh God, do it.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’
She kept panting, even as I stopped moving altogether. ‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t feel anything. I’m dead inside, James. I’m all cold and hungry in here.’
I rolled off her, disgusted. ‘God damn it, stop talking like that or else I’m out of here.’
She scooted across the bed and clung to me. My back was turned to her and she was crying against my shoulder. After a while I rolled over and looked at her. She was a cocktail of at least seven emotions, her eyes shimmering as she writhed against me.
‘I’ll leave you,’ I said. ‘This will be all over.’
This.
What is this?
‘No, you can’t leave. You have to stay,’ she said, clenching me. ‘Don’t ever say that. I won’t let you leave. You can’t ever leave me again.’
Something in me seemed to dissolve, then. I wanted to say, ‘I never left’, but I couldn’t form the words. The idea that this had been a game now seemed dangerously naive. I wondered at that moment who I was speaking to. I closed my eyes and let it happen.
Static.
White fuzz on a black screen.
I let her do what she wanted, whatever she wanted. She was insatiable. I could not keep up. I tried, but she was always one step ahead of me.
Toward the end of that week she began to rise before me. She would have coffee early out on the porch, and sometimes I heard her talking on the phone, discussing business details, money, her house.
There has to be a way, Dan. Find one. I don’t care, I’ll find a job if I have to.
I would drift off for a few more hours and then come out of her bedroom to find her with a yellow legal pad on her lap and a pencil between her teeth. Seeing me, she would set her calculations and plans aside. Sometimes she would have breakfast ready, or we’d make the short drive up to Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. She let me drive her drop-top and the clutch took some getting used to, but it was a nice change from the Audi. Nice to have your head up in the air like that.
‘What’s going on with the house?’ I said one morning, pushing a chicken wing around a pool of maple syrup.
‘There’s hope.’
She was starting to get antsy, but she wasn’t ready to tell me the details yet. I didn’t pry, but I began to worry that she might get the house back. She might get the magic call from her lawyer or find enough money to avoid foreclosure. She might decide to peel. Out of Mr Ennis’s house, out of West Adams, out of whatever thing we had going now, this thing that was getting heavier and stranger every day. I decided it was time to go home. I couldn’t think straight around her. I would slink back to the house, to give her some space for a day or two.
I think it was June. You don’t expect horrible things to happen in June, but they do.
Sunday morning was unusually cool, overcast. The house had two furnaces but I never used them. I awoke early with a chill on my leather couch gone cold. While I was microwaving a cup of yesterday’s coffee, wondering if I was coming down with the cow flu or geese flu or whichever one it was now, I realized I had forgotten to check my voicemail since coming home from Annette’s.
There were eleven messages. The first five were hang-ups. That’s strange, I thought. The sixth was from Trigger. My throat locked up. I
knew
it would not be good news.
‘Hey, James. Trigger. Call me sooner than later. Thanks.’
That was it. No ‘My man, Ghoster’ or ‘
amigo
’, just ‘Hey, James’. The tone was . . . well, it wasn’t any Trigger I had heard before. The Trigger I knew said things like, ‘I want to make you a
cock
load of money!’ and, ‘You beautiful monkey, why you won’t give me no love?’
I scrolled through the caller history and dialed back. His assistant, a young man named Renny, gave me a quick ‘hiya, James’ and put me through.
‘James? That you?’ Trigger sounded like a moist wrinkled shirt stuffed in a wicker hamper.
‘Trigger, hey. Sorry, I was away for a few days. Everything all right?’
Trigger cleared his throat. ‘I don’t have anything urgent here. No jobs, I mean. I didn’t want to get your hopes up. I’m just giving all my clients some notice.’
I had wandered into the kitchen and stood over the sink. The sink was where I took the bad calls.
‘Aw, shit,’ I said. ‘You’re getting out?’
‘No. Not permanently, anyway. But I’m taking a few months. Things are, ah, pretty hectic around here. At home. I can’t put myself into work. I’m hoping to ride out the year and kick off with a new plan in January.’
January was seven months away. This was not a vacation.
‘No problem, T. I’m not starving here. Do what you need to do. But you don’t sound like yourself, boss. What’s going on?’
We’d talked about our finances, our most embarrassing bedroom encounters, petty crimes we had committed growing up. Guy stuff. Friend stuff. So when he didn’t speak for nearly a full minute, I knew. I knew right then that whatever was bothering him had something to do with me. With us.
‘It’s Blaine. Blaine’s in trouble.’
For a terrible moment I was relieved, and then felt like an asshole for being relieved. ‘What happened?’
‘That day we saw you at the Grove. You remember?’
‘Yeah, she seemed uncomfortable,’ I said.
He lowered his voice, as if not wanting colleagues outside his door to hear. ‘We were driving back to the hotel and she was in serious pain. I’m talkin’ . . . screaming pain. So, I take her to the emergency room. They’re short-staffed, of course, there’s a line of wailing people going out the door. She was in a state, and the blood, it wouldn’t stop. She almost bled out, James. Another five minutes and she would’ve fucking died.’
I closed my eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Travis. Is she okay now?’
‘She’s not okay, no.’