Mrs. Powell’s expression turned chilly. “What makes you think my daughter would do anything like that? What makes you so certain she’s upset?”
“No, of course not. I did not mean—”
He heard the creaking floorboards upstairs and knew that Trish was probably listening, and a silence followed, during which time Mrs. Powell’s expression grew sharper.
“She is a good girl, you are right. My wife, Bella, always watched her play outside when she was small. She was fond of your daughter. We were never able to have children, you know, but Bella wanted them. She wanted many children. It was my fault we could not have children, the doctors said.”
“I’ll remind you, since you’re accusing my daughter, that there were a lot of accusations, too, surrounding you and your wife’s death.”
His mouth went dry. He felt as if he were chewing on grit. “I did nothing,” he said.
“What you did,” Mrs. Powell said, “is your own business. I know what people go through when someone is sick. But Trish. She’s my daughter, and you have no right to accuse.”
The statement was an affront. He believed she was kind, but now he felt rebuked, and his own anger rose in him like a sudden storm. “Of course,” he said, looking down at his hands. “I am sorry to have bothered you. I’m sure you are teaching your child well, particularly since she no longer has a father.”
“My husband died in an accident,” Mrs. Powell said flatly.
“I know,” he said. “I’m so sorry. But my wife was very ill at the end. I do not know if you knew that. She did not remember anything, even her own life. She could not swallow on her own.”
“You should go,” Mrs. Powell said. “There’s really nothing more to discuss.”
LATER, AFTER TRISH CAME HOME from work, Ryan’s old sky-blue Civic pulled up in front of her house, and Trish ran outside, down the steps. She signaled to him, barely gave him a chance to step out and close the car door before she hugged him tightly.
“Hop in,” he said, pinching her sides. “We’ll drive. Where do you want to go?”
“How about L.A.?”
Ryan grinned in the fierce, reckless way that Trish liked. He was a short, muscular boy, good-looking, rugged. He had been through everything, it seemed, and had continued to push on. He rapped on the hood of his car. “We probably only have fifty miles before this piece of shit gives out. How about Jersey? We could sneak in and gamble, win a little money.”
Trish kissed him. When she pulled back, she studied his rugged face. “Wrong direction,” she said.
“Get in.”
She looked back at her house. “Can’t. Jersey, L.A., or otherwise,” she said. “Grounded.”
He looked down the road. Then he took out a cigarette from his pack and lit it. “You’re too old to be grounded. What does your mom think, you’re a baby?”
“Don’t turn eighteen for another month. Her show until then.” She didn’t tell Ryan that it was the old man’s visit that led to her mother’s refusal to let Trish go out that evening, nor did she mention that was only an excuse. It was Ryan her mother disapproved of, really.
Ryan glanced over his shoulder, toward the old man’s house and yard. He flicked his cigarette anxiously.
“You didn’t help that old man take the shit down?”
“Why would I?”
“Because you’re you,” Ryan said, eyeing her up and down. “Miss Nicey-Nice.”
“Hardly,” Trish told him. “I think a cop helped him.”
“Doesn’t matter. He’ll pay more by the time we’re through.”
“I don’t know why you hate him so much,” Trish said, though she knew this could lead to an argument, or worse, Ryan getting angry and just taking off, as he sometimes did. Still, regret had crept up on her; Ryan was right. She had seen the old man through the living room window, saw how he stood outside for a long time, staring helplessly up at the tree. It was a stupid prank. The old man was hardly worth the energy that Ryan so mercilessly directed toward him. “He’s just an old man,” she said now. “He’s not worth it.”
“He’s a fucking murderer,” Ryan said. “The bastard should be in jail.”
“You weren’t even here when that all happened.”
“You told me,” Ryan said. “Everyone did.”
“So what does that make you?” she asked. “Some administer of social justice?”
He gave her a stony stare. His nostrils flared. “No. Makes me the damn hanging court.”
“Come on,” Trish said. She tugged at his T-shirt and went to kiss him again but he turned away. Silence passed between them—she hated when he refused to speak to her, when he gave her the silent treatment for hours. She huffed and leaned against his car while Ryan got in and sat there. The truth was she wasn’t sure about the old man—he was cranky, he was practically a cripple, and he often gave her a look that said he didn’t approve of something about her, the way she wore her hair or dressed or talked—who knew? But she didn’t think he was a murderer. That seemed beyond the old man’s capability. And, anyway, Trish thought, after living so long with someone? It didn’t make sense. Still, she remembered that night, how the snow came down heavily, and the siren in the distance, coming closer, its shrill sound still cushioned by all the snow that blanketed the ground. When the ambulance finally skidded to a stop, the flashing lights burned through the whiteness, and workers carried the gurney up the steps and into the house. Within the hour, the woman was being taken out on a stretcher, her face already covered. The old man tumbled out behind her, still in his pajamas, weeping.
Ryan had heard the stories, of course. The old man had murdered his wife. He’d gotten away with what many thought to be unthinkable, given her pills, overloaded her system until she stopped breathing altogether. There was a note the old woman left, one that exonerated her husband of any wrongdoing, written, it seemed, years before, when she first realized she was ill. And there was a liberal judge, new to town, whose mother had suffered from Alzheimer’s as well. Still, every time Ryan saw the house or the old man out in his garden, he’d grow intense, brooding, angry. The previous night, when they were all on the porch, drinking beer and talking about plans for summer, Ryan had gotten out of his chair suddenly, swaggering a little as he did. He said, “It’s not right.” Then he knocked the chair over and cursed it. “He can’t expect to do that and not pay.”
She didn’t remember who rallied behind Ryan first, or even who decided upon toilet-papering. What she did remember was how Ryan commanded the attention of her friends, and how that impressed her. “He’ll be fucking clearing this shit for hours,” Ryan said, tossing the roll up into the branches, waiting until the roll caught and tumbled back down to him, or to Trish, who waited on the other side. The others tossed more rolls, and soon the entire tree was white, billowing with paper.
“Please don’t be angry at me,” she said now. She did not turn to look at him.
He gunned the engine. “Why should I? I’m out of here.”
She shimmied her rump a little against the door. “I could use some company.”
“We doing it?”
“Mom’s sleeping,” she said. “Later, after she goes.”
“I’ll come back then,” he said, still irritated with her. “Later.”
“Stay.” She hated when he did this, and she hated herself more for pleading with him. Ryan cocked his head, and finally he shut off the engine.
They sat out on the porch steps. Ryan leaned back, drew in the smoke from his cigarette and tipped the ashes. He flexed his biceps. He could bench-press two hundred. When Trish was in his arms, she felt overwhelmed by two contradictory feelings: First, she’d feel as though she couldn’t breathe, that he could crush her, that the intensity of him was too much, and then she’d feel as if the entire world were shut away from her, and that feeling wasn’t altogether unpleasant.
“We could break in, tie the old man up, really have a go at his house, or him,” Ryan said. His jaw tensed.
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br /> This was the kind of talk that frightened her. She was sure Ryan wouldn’t actually go that far with things. At least she hoped he wouldn’t. She shifted her weight and ran her hands over her shorts. She stretched her long legs.
“Did you hear me?” he asked, nudging her with his huge arm. “I got a baseball bat.”
“Oh, give it up,” Trish said. “The guy will have a heart attack, he’ll fall over dead, and then you’ll be the murderer.”
She shifted again and felt the tension pour through her limbs. She twisted the silver ring he’d given her, worked it around her thin finger. She looked up to the gray sky. She slipped her hand around his arm, moved closer to him, but he pushed her away.
“You don’t just go fucking with someone and not pay.”
“The old man?” she asked. “You knew his wife, didn’t you?”
“Only a little.”
“What was she like?”
“I don’t know,” Trish said, and made a face. “She was, I don’t know, motherly or something. What you’d expect.”
“Right.” He nodded. He exhaled a thin line of smoke and his jaw clenched again. He smothered his cigarette on the step, leaving a circle of ash against the gray paint. “We’ll do it tonight. We’ll get everyone together.”
“I’m grounded, remember?”
“Don’t act like a kid, Trish,” he said. He got up and looked down at her. “I don’t like hanging around with kids.”
Her face flushed hotly, but she knew there was no arguing with him when he was like this. She lowered her eyes and stared at the ground.
“Don’t do that,” Ryan said.
“What?”
“Remember,” he said, lifting her face so that she had no choice but to look at him now. “We’ve got a pact.”
SINCE HER FATHER’S ACCIDENT early last fall—during a night when temperatures slid suddenly and rain turned to black ice—Trish often felt that the promise she’d made with Ryan was the only thing that really mattered anymore. It comforted her in a way that nothing else could. She didn’t find solace in the guidance counselor’s assurances that everything happened for a reason, nor did she find comfort in the stories she’d heard in whispers after her father’s funeral was over. That night, her father had driven home from New Jersey and had been drinking; there was a young woman with him in the car, a girl from work. “Poor Ruth, what she put up with,” a once favorite aunt had said. The rumors stabbed at her, made her sick. She began to blame her mother. She slipped out that night to be with friends, girls who were both cheerleaders and stoners, girls who she’d hung around with since the beginning of high school despite the fact that many of them, she knew, wanted Ryan as much as she did—that attractive boy who showed up in the hallways, looking like he was ready for anything.
It was perhaps because of her father’s death that she and Ryan got together at all. He’d heard about it and came up to her after classes. He leaned against her locker, arm up, and asked how she was doing with everything. They started hooking up, and when she lay there next to him, she felt as though he was the only one who understood her. Ryan understood, Trish soon realized, precisely because he didn’t try to act as though he knew all the answers. He didn’t know if her father was cheating, if he was drunk, if there was more to her parents’ life than Trish knew about. “Wouldn’t want to venture a guess,” he said, staring up at the ceiling, pitching his cigarette into the air. This was on a night when they lay outside in the park, on blankets, when the night was cool and the sky so black it seemed to swallow everything.
Trish shivered and pulled Ryan close. He was always more comfortable at night, in the dark, and she could feel his warmth, hear him breathe. She placed her hand on his chest, and he covered her with a blanket while she slipped into her jeans again.
“You know there’s nothing that’ll make it hurt less,” Ryan said.
“I guess.” She buried her face into Ryan’s stomach, wanting all the warmth that lingered in his body, all the strength. She hated herself for feeling so weak. Ryan ran his fingers through her hair, pulled back the long strands from her face. “You should dye your hair black,” he said offhandedly. “As a sign to the world, you know, that you’re through taking all its shit, that you’re strong, a survivor.”
She nodded, wiped the tears from her face.
He lifted her chin and kissed her. Then he stared at her, in a hard way. “You know, my dad was hardly around, and when he was he was hitting my mother. She died from that fucker’s fists.”
“That’s terrible.” Trish held on to him harder.
“Hell,” he said. “Nothing to be sorry for. You didn’t do it. Besides, he’s paying for that now. Thirty fucking years for that.”
She shivered, then closed her eyes. “Let’s run away together,” she said. “After graduation, let’s just go. There’s nothing here I want to remember, anyway.”
Ryan seemed to consider this option. “Maybe,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Swear.”
“Swear what?”
“That we’ll always be together.”
“Okay,” he said finally.
“And if we break the pact?”
Ryan grinned and made a slicing motion against his throat. “Kidding,” he said. He took off his ring, a simple silver band with a skull engraved on it. In the dark, he slid it on her third finger, and it hung there, too loosely.
“I’ll wrap the ring in red thread,” she told him. “I’ll dye my hair black.”
Ryan leaned back and laced his fingers through hers, turning the ring over. “Till death do us part. You renege and I’ll kick your ass.”
“You wouldn’t,” Trish said.
Ryan thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “I’m not like my old man. I’m better than that.”
VIKTOR SAT on the porch with his gun positioned on his thigh. His skin felt clammy. The front lights were off. It was just past eleven in the evening and the air threatened more rain. He felt alert, filled with a sense of purpose, and he watched out over the street, toward the neighboring houses, waiting for any teenagers who might gather again, thinking to do something to his house, his property. It was his house, he told himself again; he owned it. It was his yard. Anyone who came onto his property was an intruder, a trespasser. He was within his legal right to hold the gun up, in the trespassers’ direction, to threaten force if necessary, to shoot. They’d run off with their tails between their legs, he told himself. Let them tell people he was crazy. Let them call the police. What did it matter now?
He looked out across the garden and listened to the sound of distant sirens—always sirens in this part of the city, always someone in trouble, always someone in need. Every once in a while, he’d cock his head, catching sight of a shadow moving across the road, and he’d wait, the adrenaline pouring into his arms. But then there was nothing more, and he’d decide it was only his eyes and imagination that had toyed with him. Still, the light down at Trish’s house was on, and though the front porch was empty and silent, he knew they’d come. He ran his hand over the metal barrel. It felt strange, just as it had felt strange the night Bella died. She would not have the gun, of course, though in the end it would have been quicker, less painful. He said, “Bella, pills will hurt.” He smoothed her hair. “I do not want for you to hurt any more,” he said.
That night when the snow grew deep and everything around him seemed perfect, he removed the letter from her jewelry box and placed it next to the bed. He washed her bedspread and tucked it neatly around her. He placed flowers on the nightstand. Then he smoothed each round pill in his trembling fingers and gave her one after another, massaging her throat and working her mouth in his hands until she swallowed. She never opened her eyes that night—he might have told that to someone if he thought he could explain the night at all, to anyone. Who would understand all the years, the pain? She convulsed once then twice and a third time—much of the bottle was gone. He told her: “Tonight, I go where you go.”
Now he heard laughter down the street, saw the slinking shapes of teenagers gathering outside on the road in front of the Powell house, the tall shapes of boys, the smaller movement of the girls as they talked anxiously among themselves. They moved closer. They walked slowly. Surely they saw him there after a time, even in the dark. There were five of them—Trish, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, as if she were cold; the boy Ryan, who held a bat; two other boys with sweatshirts on, hoods drawn tight around their faces so that he couldn’t see who they were at all, or if he knew them; and another girl with braids throughout her hair, someone he’d never seen before, talking now, louder, saying, “That fucker’s up waiting for us.”
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