The Lost (2 page)

She finished the last of her hot dog and wiped her face with the napkin.

“I wish I could just completely, hate him, you know?” she said.

“I wish you could too. Tell you what. Suppose I hate him for you?”

She smiled. “You already do.”

Elise tossed a twig past her into the fire. “Look, Lisa. You fell for a cute guy with a shiny red Corvette and a good, sad line of bullshit and it was spring. Okay. So then you find out that behind that great big smile and the poor-me what-a-sad-childhood act there’s a nasty drunken bastard. A guy who likes his frat parties too much, likes his beer too much and likes to punch people out when he’s had a few. Particularly people weaker than he is. Particularly woman. What’s not to hate?”

“I know. It’s just that he’s always so damn sorry after.”

“Sorry, hell. He’s done this twice, Lisa. And in this case I don’t think three’s the charm.”

“I know that too.”

It had always been this way between them. When Elise moved in next door she was seven years old and Lisa had just turned eight. But it was Elise who seemed to see things more clearly right from the start. That they each had fathers who were far more comfortable on a golf course than sitting over Sunday dinner, for instance. That they were each only children by design and not by accident. That they would never have sisters or brothers.

Their parents traveled in wholly different circles, Lisa’s Russian Jewish liberals a few years out of Manhattan and Elise’s strict Irish Catholics from Baltimore. But neither set of parents were opposed to the two girls more or less adopting one another. So they did. They were almost never apart. They traded sleep-overs almost every weekend and throughout most of every summer and continued straight through high school. Arguments were rare and quickly settled.

It was as though each had found the sister she longed for. And if Lisa seemed to blunder through puberty and Elise seemed to ride it like the crest of a wave, each forgave the other her predispositions.

Elise and Lisa. Lisa and Elise
.

Even their names were practically sisters to each other.

They went off to school together. Wellesley. Contrived to be roommates there. Lisa’s major was education, Elise’s finance. They still had plenty in common. They each liked the Beatles and Dylan and Judy Collins—though Elise said that Judy Collins lacked a sense of irony. Irony, she said, was what the cat knew that the dog didn’t. When they adopted a cat they named him Dylan.

They both liked Julia Child and Betty Friedan but
not
Helen Gurley Brown. Neither would be caught dead in a topless Rudi Gernreich bathing suit but both were comfortable with their bodies. They’d seen one another naked since they were kids. And neither was exactly a virgin anymore.

They shared a liking for simple quiet times and places.

Like now. Like camping in the woods.

Tonight at Turner’s Pool was the third time they’d been out this summer and the only time it hadn’t been pure simple fun.

The reason for that was Phillip. Him getting in the way.

She swatted a mosquito.

“I hope we’re not gonna get eaten alive tonight,” she said.

“I packed the bug spray.”

“Good.”

She tossed her paper plate into the fire, watched the edges curl and the dark bloom at the center.

She realized she was frowning. Elise noticed too. She watched her sigh and lean back against the oak tree, her long slim fingers picking the bark off the trunk.

“Even if he hadn’t hit you it wouldn’t have lasted. You know that.”

“I guess.”

“You guess? You remember Johnny Norman back in high school? He was the
same type
, Lisa. Cute and popular as hell and so full of himself you couldn’t
stand
him after what, two months? Only difference was he didn’t go ballistic when he drank. But he
did
drink, and too much.”

“You’re right. I don’t get it. Why do I keep doing this to myself?”

“Hey, you’re in there pitching and there are a lot of guys like that in the ballpark. You sympathize with them—no, you
empathize
with them—and then they use you. What are you supposed to do? Stop caring? Stop trying? Dry up like this poor old scraggly patch of grass here? You’re doing the right thing. You’re just not doing it with the right person yet, that’s all.”

She could feel herself poised on the verge of tears. She didn’t want to cry again, she’d done that to Elise one too many times already over the guy but she kept seeing his face going red that night and his lips pulled up into a sneer screaming at her to
shut up, shut up
and seeing his right hand ball into a fist and she couldn’t help it, she’d
cared
for the sonovabitch. She’d
cared
.

Elise opened her arms.

“Oh, come here, will you?”

She went to her and hugged her and let the tears happen to her again, not sobbing like last time but letting them flow against the neck of Elise’s yellow T-shirt. She felt Elise’s fingers in her hair and heard the crackling of the fire and crickets in the dark grass and the frogs bellow down by the lake.

“You’re who you are,” Elise said. “You’re fine. I mean, we’ll make plenty of mistakes. How old are we? Who doesn’t? But not all guys are jerks. We’ll find some. You’ll see.”

Lisa felt something strike the back of her shoulder,
an acorn falling from high above
, she thought,
from the tree
, but knowing even then that something was wrong, that whatever it was had struck her too hard and then instantly heard the crack, like someone stepping on a branch in the brush out there in the dark and at first there was no pain, it was only startling, a sound out of sync with the world. But she turned at the sound and at the sudden wet feeling on her shoulder.

And that was when her face exploded.

Her teeth shattered the bullet. Fragments of teeth and bullet drilled her cheekbone and poured out through her cheek.

Had her neck been turned a quarter of an inch to the right the third bullet would have severed her jugular, would have cracked her larynx a quarter inch to the left. Instead it entered and exited clean and thumped into the tree beside Elise’s shoulder.

She screamed, turning, falling to her side on the hard earth and heard the scream come out all wrong, a gurgled cough that sprayed Elise with blood and bits of teeth, sprayed face and neck and chest and ran in a dark thin drool down Lisa’s chin. She swallowed, the taste of it rich and sickening, overwhelming.

Had she not fallen, the fourth bullet would have taken her in the spine.

Instead it slammed into Elise’s head below the hairline just over her left eye and threw her back against the rough bark of the tree. Blood washed down her forehead and into her eyes, washed into Lisa’s own blood spackled across her cheek. Elise shook her head like a wet startled dog and raised her hands to wipe away the blood from her eyes, to clear them and Lisa watched the fifth shot enter her just below the breast. A sudden dark hole in the T-shirt welling blood. A sudden desecration.

Cover
, she thought.
Hide!

The tree was cover
.

Elise looked dazed, amazed, like a child whose toy has just fallen from her hands and lies inexplicably broken in front of her, her eyes open wide and blinking against the steady wave of blood. Lisa rolled and stumbled to her feet and took her by the arm and started to drag her. She was aware of someone shouting somewhere in the brush, of the blood nauseating in her mouth, gagging her and of the jagged broken edges of her teeth.

“Elise!” she said. “Get up! Elise!”

Her voice wasn’t hers anymore. What came out of her mouth was all but incomprehensible. She grabbed Elise’s other arm and pulled with all her strength and Elise slid along with her and then they were on the other side of the tree hidden for a moment from whoever was out there doing this, but she knew they had to run and she knew that Elise
couldn’t
run, couldn’t even seem to move or stand, she just kept blinking and the blood from her head was all over her, rolling into her eyes and down her neck, soaking the T-shirt, glistening on her jeans in the moonlight.

She had to go find help. She had to go find somebody but she couldn’t stand to leave Elise this way, she was afraid Elise was dying on her, that her friend was dying right in front of her but she was also afraid to stay. Because they were still out there.

They’d come finish what they’d started.

They almost had to.

Oh my god, Elise
.

She couldn’t stay.

They’d both bleed to death if she stayed.

She’d heard them only seconds ago through all her panic. She wasn’t imagining. Out there in the dark. Like they were arguing. At least two male voices and a female voice out in the brush.

They’d stopped.

Maybe they got scared, she thought. Maybe they ran away.

If they had so could she.

She had to try.

She reached down and gave Elise’s hand a squeeze thinking how small it was and how fragile and then let go of the hand and the letting go was itself a kind of death, a surrender that made her sob aloud in the suddenly quiet forest.

She peered around the tree.

In the glow of the fire the last thing she saw was a man she vaguely recognized from somewhere sighting down the barrel of a rifle not three feet away.

And her very last thought was
why?

Ray was a little pissed off.

His shooting was usually better. But after the first shot Tim and Jennifer set up this fucking racket and it unnerved him. So that he had to go in up close after the first five shots and they’d moved around the tree by then and he didn’t like that, that was dangerous because who the hell knew what kind of condition they’d be in, whether they’d have enough left in them to try to fight or run or what? But he was lucky. The one still standing had given him a clean clear head shot and he’d taken her out with a single shot to the eye.

The other one, the redhead slumped against the tree wasn’t going anywhere.

He was surprised, though. It wasn’t like the movies.

People took a lot of killing.

Six shots counting this one. Four for the brunette alone.
Shoulder face neck eye
.

He doubted he’d need a seventh for the redhead.

“What’re we going to do, for god’s sake?” He was fucking tired of Tim asking him that. If he hadn’t felt so basically good at the moment, if the whole thing wasn’t so goddamn
cool
he’d have been annoyed. But you had to be patient with Timmy.

“We’re gonna bury ’em, Tim. Then we’re gonna pack up all their gear and dump it. Nobody’ll ever know they were even around here. That sound like a plan to you? Huh?”

“I want to get out of here,” Jennifer said. She was standing to one side and wouldn’t even look at them, wouldn’t even look at the body.
Bodies
. While he could hardly
stop
looking.

“
Bury
’em? Bury ’em with what?” said Tim. “You see any shovels around?”

“You and Jennifer are going to take the Chevy over to my place. There’s a spade and a pitchfork in the storage shed. Nobody’s home so don’t worry. Meantime I’ll tidy up. Get their stuff together. Kill the campfire so it won’t attract attention. Gimme your flashlight. Look, here’s the keys. This one’s to the storage shed. Remember to lock up when you’re done. And Tim, you drive. I think Jennifer’s a little upset at the moment. And you drive
carefully
, you hear? You keep to the speed limit and take your time. Don’t go fucking up on me.”

“I won’t.”

“I want Tim to drop me off at my house.”

“No you don’t. You just think you do.” He went over and hugged her. “Listen, Jen. You’re a part of this.
I want you
to be part of this. It’s important to me. You’ve never done anything like this in your whole life and you probably never will again. Me and Tim, we could still get drafted, who knows? And then you never know how many people we’d have to kill. But for you this is a first-and-only. You’re gonna remember tonight for-fucking-
ever
.”

“I don’t want to remember.”

He leaned in close and whispered in her ear.

“You will, Jen, once we’re through. I
promise
you.”

He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her gently on each eyelid. It almost always worked. It always seemed to soothe her.

“Now you guys get out of here. And be careful.”

He watched them walk down the path and disappear into the dark. He didn’t worry about them finding their way without the flashlight. They knew the place almost as well as he did. They’d do what they were told and they’d do it quietly and they’d do it right and that would make them accomplices. Accessories to murder, which was exactly what he wanted.

It occurred to him that he had a couple of slaves now.

He checked in on the redhead. Her breathing was shallow. She hadn’t moved. You could see her tits through the blood-soaked T-shirt. From the waist up she might as well have been naked the way the shirt was plastered to her body. They were good tits. Small but not half bad.