The Grip Lit Collection

by Claire Douglas

  I’m straddling him. My shirt’s already half off and I push his to the top of his chest, pressing bare flesh to bare flesh. He turns my underwear into a coil, rolling it tightly over my hips, the swell of my ass, with one hand. With the other, he’s easing a small square packet out of his wallet. Seeing him do this gives me my first conscious thought since I stepped into the car: He carries a condom in his wallet? Like, just in case? Who is this guy, this stranger? It’s also my last conscious thought because after he slaps the condom on the dashboard, he half lifts me to plant his lips at the base of my throat, and my spine goes rigid and I bang the top of my head on the roof. His mouth slides down until he traps my nipple between his lips.

  I bend backward, hand him the condom. Close my eyes. Right before he pushes himself inside me, I open them. The strip of condom packet is still clenched between his teeth. And he’s staring at me. It’s like he’s forcing himself to see me, really see me, past my face and into my mind, my heart. The intimacy of the look is too much. I flick my gaze off to the side. Concentrate on the swirls in his ear, the creases in the leather headrest.

  I don’t expect there to be pain since this isn’t my first time. But there is, so much that I can’t think of anything else. I bury my face in his neck. Wait for it to be over. And then, through the pain, I start to feel the stirrings of pleasure. The pain continues to recede and the pleasure to get more intense until I can’t control my breathing and my body explodes in a series of contractions, like a string of firecrackers popping off. I bite down on his shoulder instead of crying out.

  We’re back in our separate seats. The sweat’s cooling on our limbs and no parts of our bodies are touching except for our hands on the console. Damon’s jeans are pulled up over his hips but are unzipped. My shirt’s on, but only one button’s buttoned. I look over at him. His eyes are shut and his hair’s flopped forward. It makes his face seem rounder. Younger, too. And sitting beside him, watching the light play over his closed lids, feeling the warmth of his palm covering mine, I think with pleasure, This really happened.

  And then, an image of Nica gazing at Damon post-sex as I’m gazing at him now, a thing she must have done dozens of times—dozens and dozens of times, knowing her—invades my mind. All of a sudden, the feeling of contentment’s gone and I’m filled with panic. What if Damon only got together with me because I’m her sister? Maybe when he was staring at me before and I took it as him trying to truly look at me, look into my soul, I misread him. Maybe he was staring so hard because he was trying to single out points of resemblance between us. Or maybe, even worse, it was to compare—compare my face with his memory of hers, compare me with someone beyond compare. The panic turns to horror. I need to get out of the car.

  I’ve just hooked a finger around the door handle when Damon says, “Hey, how are you feeling?”

  I let go of the handle. Pretend to be reaching for the bottle of Poland Springs water that’s rolled beneath my seat. “Fine, I’m fine. I guess I’m a little weirded out but …” I trail off.

  He laughs softly. “Yeah, for sure weirded out.”

  He doesn’t say anything after that. Needing him to talk, for something to fill up the silence, I say, “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking about how I’m going to have to lay off the wife-beaters for a while.”

  “Why?”

  He points to the top of his shoulder. Teeth marks are embedded deep in the skin.

  Horrified, I whisper, “Did I do that?”

  He grins. “That’s all right. It’s a first for me but I kind of liked it.”

  The sense of relief is so intense my eyes start to water. A first, meaning I’m the only one who’s ever bitten him. Meaning his experience with me was different from his experience with Nica. And he seemed okay about it. More than okay. We look at each other, but it’s too soon for that and we both quickly look away.

  “What we did,” I say, after a bit, “we shouldn’t have done it, right?”

  He sighs. “Yeah, probably. But there was no way I could’ve not done it. It felt”—he pauses, thinking—“inevitable.”

  The sense of relief again. “For you, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What next?”

  “Anything we want. Look, there’s no reason we can’t take the attitude that what happened was something we couldn’t avoid, was beyond our control. We got it out of our systems and now we move on. Focus on our friendship. Focus on what we have to do to find your sister’s killer.”

  I’m nodding to everything he’s saying, anxious to show how completely in agreement I am with his reasonable and balanced viewpoint. I’m like a fucking bobblehead doll. Forcing myself to stop, I uncap the bottle of Poland Springs. Swallow too much water. I’m not sure what to do now. Start the car, drive back to Hartford? I guess so. What else? As I slide my seat belt into the buckle, I sneak a glance over at him. He’s doing the same with his seat belt. His posture is easy, relaxed, but his eyes are sharp; they’re watching my every move. And then my mouth goes cottony. My hands begin to tremble. Again, I think. So soon? Is this normal? Ashamed, I drop my head, try to hide what I’m feeling. But he must sense the change in me because he unbuckles his seat belt and mine in two seconds flat, pulls me onto his lap.

  He’s just taken my face in his hands, run his thumb over the scar above my eyebrow, when his cell rings. We both freeze, look at each other: Max.

  “You should get it,” I say when it rings a second time.

  He tugs the phone from his pocket. Checks the caller ID. “It’s Frankie,” he says, and I can hear the tension go out of his voice, the fear, too. He tosses the phone in the backseat, reaches for me, but the mood between us has been broken. He leans his forehead against mine for several seconds. Then he takes a long breath, kisses the scar instead of my lips.

  We reassemble ourselves as best we can. And after he throws the condom in the trash barrel by the library’s back entrance, we hit the road.

  It takes me from Brattleboro, Vermont, to Springfield, Massachusetts, to tell Damon the story my mom told me. And then it takes Damon from Springfield, Massachusetts, to Windsor Locks, Connecticut, to absorb it all, to move past being floored. He does move past it, though. And we begin revising our suspect list.

  First I make the case for Mr. Amory, already on the list, but the reason changed. The strong interest he’d taken in Nica wasn’t sexual, as we’d originally thought; it was paternal. It could be, I argue, that he later regretted sharing with her the secret of her birth. After all, he did it in a moment of high emotion. And the possibility of her reneging on her promise of silence and passing on what she knew to Jamie, causing Jamie to hate him and/or spill the beans to Mrs. Amory who, according to Mom, controlled the purse strings, might have been too much for him. He had a lot to lose. Everything, it sounded like. What if he decided to try to scare Nica into shutting her mouth? What if things went too far and he wound up shutting her mouth permanently?

  Next I make the case for Mrs. Amory, the list’s latest addition. As far as Mom knew, Mrs. Amory was in the dark about her affair with Mr. Amory. But that doesn’t mean that Mrs. Amory actually was in the dark. Maybe Mrs. Amory was only in the shadows. Say she didn’t have cold hard proof, but she did have woman’s intuition. Say she put two and two together, or rather one and one—her husband and my mom—and came up with three, Nica. Say, though, that this knowledge was fuzzy and half-conscious and thus never acted upon. Say that this knowledge sharpened into clearest focus when Nica dumped Jamie because the breakup revealed to Mrs. Amory how emotionally fragile her son was. And, finally, say that Mrs. Amory, sensing Jamie would be damaged in lasting ways if the same knowledge was thrust on him, decided to eliminate the potential source.

  “That takes care of motive for Mr. and Mrs. Amory,” Damon says when I’ve finished talking. “And since they’re each other’s alibis, they don’t have one. Plus, Manny Flores was in Jamie’s dorm.”

  The cars in front of mine slow down. Up ah
ead I see orange cones, traffic narrowing to a single lane. Road work. I ease up on the gas pedal. “So?” I say.

  “So, you remember how chaotic it was at Chandler right after your sister died—cops everywhere, reporters hiding in broom closets, parents driving up, yanking their kids out at all hours. Normally a stranger would get noticed in the dorms. Not then, though.”

  “And Mr. and Mrs. Amory weren’t exactly strangers at Chandler either. Both are heavily involved in the school, on a bunch of committees. And Mrs. Amory was in and out of Endicott House all the time—dropping off restrung rackets for Jamie, grip tape, new laces for his sneakers.”

  “There you go. I’ll bet no one would have even looked twice at either one of them.”

  “It’s just—” I break off.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s just, it looks like whoever killed Nica killed her in the heat of the moment. A crime of passion. Horrible, obviously, but human, too. Understandable. Whoever killed Manny, though, devised a plan, waited, waited, waited, and then executed. Even coerced him into writing a suicide-slash-confession note. And picked him in the first place because he was parentless, friendless, and no one would care enough about him to look closely into his death.”

  Impatient, Damon says, “Your point?”

  “My point is that it’s a cold, calculated act. It’s the act of a monster, basically. And I don’t believe that anyone we’ve talked about is capable of acting like a monster.”

  He gives me an odd look. “People are capable of anything, Grace. Things you’d never dream they could do, they do. All the time. Trust me.”

  “I know you have way more experience with criminal behavior or whatever, but—” Again I break off.

  “But what?”

  “I don’t know what. It just doesn’t feel right to me.”

  “Look, how about we don’t get caught up in the psychology stuff? How about we just go where the evidence takes us?” He holds my eye until I nod.

  But then, unable to help myself, I say, “Still, I think we have to admit the possibility of a dark horse suspect—someone we’re unaware of.”

  He runs a hand through his hair, an exasperated gesture. “But everything about the crime says the killer is someone she knew. And that last call came from a Chandler pay phone.”

  “Someone she knew but maybe not someone we knew. Or didn’t know well, because, yes, you’re absolutely right, the person is very likely associated with the school in some way.” When Damon doesn’t say anything back, “She kept you a secret. She kept Maddie a secret. Is it such a stretch to think she kept a third secret?”

  He closes his eyes, touches his fingertips to his lids. In a quiet voice, he says, “No, it’s not.”

  “And then there’s the order of the list.”

  “What about it?”

  “So Jamie, who was a weak suspect to begin with because of his strong, at least semi-strong, alibi”—I pause, wait for Damon to contradict me, which he doesn’t do, though the muscles in his jaw tighten—“drops down from the number one spot.”

  “Jamie only drops if he never found out the truth about Nica. Then his motive would be the same as it had been for the two months before she died. But what if he did find out?”

  “It sounded like Mr. Amory wasn’t ever going to tell him, though.”

  “Could be he didn’t hear from his dad.”

  “Then from who?”

  Damon thinks. “We know he was hassling Nica, hounding her about why she broke up with him, demanding a reason. What if she finally lost her temper, gave it to him?”

  “Then he’d be murderously angry at Mr. Amory. It’s not like Nica was the one who’d been lying to him all those years.”

  “Yeah, but she had been lying to him all those months. And think about what a hard thing that would be for him to hear. Not only was he having sex with his sister, but his dad knew about it and let it go on. He might have reacted by taking his rage out on her. Or maybe he didn’t believe her, thought she was insulting the honor of his family, something crazy like that.”

  After a pause, I say carefully, “I don’t think that’s what did happen, but I do agree it could have happened.”

  “And, don’t forget, your mom says he’s a junkie. Junkies have mood swings.”

  I start to object. Mom, who only ever half listened to any conversation she wasn’t the subject of, had, I suspect, gotten the details of Jamie’s drug history wrong, had misunderstood somehow. Jamie was too openly a druggie to be an actual addict. He was chronically stoned, basically, and if he had a problem with drugs, he’d be more secretive about using them, wouldn’t he? Even a peanuts drug like marijuana? But I stop myself. If I say that, I’ll only piss Damon off, further convince him that I’m hopelessly biased where Jamie’s concerned. (Like he’s not just as biased.) Plus, my sense from my talk with him about Ruben and Ruben’s dealing is that’s he’s pretty black and white as far as drugs go. Doesn’t distinguish between a dime bag of pot and a rubber balloon of smack, or believe that such a thing as casual use is possible. So instead I say, “It looks like we’ve got a two-way tie for the number one spot.”

  “You mean a clear winner, don’t you? You honestly think Mrs. Amory could have sexually assaulted Nica before strangling her?”

  Laughing, I say, “No. I think you’re the sexual assaulter.”

  Damon’s eyes bug. “What?”

  “I’m kidding. About the assault part, at least. But you did have sex with Nica that night. You told me so. And, as it turns out, the cops never said that she’d been assaulted, just that she might have been.” Off his stare, I went on, “Yeah, I only looked at the newspaper headlines at the time, too. Well, lately I’ve been reading the actual articles. Her underwear was missing, but you know as well as I do that she often didn’t wear any. And there was vaginal tearing, which means she could have been forced to have sex, or she could have just had, you know”—flicking my gaze from his face back to the road—“rougher-than-usual sex, or even just more-than-usual sex.”

  A few seconds pass, and then Damon asks, “Any body fluids?”

  “Why would there be? You use condoms, right?”

  He laughs. Attempts to laugh, anyway. “Mostly, yeah,” he says, before falling into silence. A minute or so later he pulls himself out of it. “So it’s Mr. and Mrs. Amory, Jamie, and a dark horse. Any other candidates you can think of?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  A name jumps suddenly to the tip of my tongue. I swallow it back, though.

  When I don’t speak, Damon says, “That’s our list then.”

  We pass the construction site, and the highway opens up again. We encounter no more delays.

  By the time we’re back in Hartford, Damon’s retreated into himself, just stares silently out the window at the passing scenery. I drive him to his grandmother’s, assuming that’s where he wants to go. But when we pull up to the house he looks at it blankly, like it’s a place he’s never seen before, then asks me to drop him off at the hospital instead. I get the feeling he’s anxious, so I rush—roll through stop signs, gun the yellows. Once St. Francis’s entranceway hovers into view, though, he tells me he needs a minute. I turn into the Wendy’s across the street. Parking, I run inside and pick up a couple of chocolate Frosties.

  “Hey, look who’s here,” Damon says, when I’m back in the car.

  I follow the direction of his finger to the front of the hospital: Renee, leaning against a patch of wall, smoking beside a sign with a cigarette on it, a big red line through the cigarette. “Should we go over and say hi?”

  “In a bit,” he says.

  I flip on the radio. Tune into a talk station. There’s a program on about the global spike in food prices. We listen, drink the Frosties, let our thoughts go away.

  Abruptly, Damon kills the radio. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he says.

  “Okay.”

  “And you’re not going to like hearing it any more than I
like saying it.”

  My stomach pulls in, and the blood starts pounding in my skull. It’s coming now, the “This was a huge mistake, I love your sister” speech I’ve been expecting—dreading—since the moment Nica’s face popped into my head in the library parking lot.

  He’s silent for a second then inhales sharply, like he’s about to speak. But before he can, there’s a rap on my window. I turn. On the other side of the glass is Renee.

  “Visiting hours are almost over,” she says, when I lower the window. “You two coming in?” She looks beyond exhausted, just totally worn out. Like she hasn’t slept a minute since Max’s heart attack five days ago.

  “Just me,” Damon says.

  As he reaches into the back to get his things, Renee points to the cup in my hand. “That a Frosty?”

  I pass it to her.

  “How’s Max doing?” Damon asks.

  “Same.” Renee pulls my straw out, spilling a drop of frozen dairy product on her chest. She dabs at it with her fingertips. “His cunt ex-wife’s up there. Got me kicked out because I’m not immediate family.”

  “Helene or Deidre?”

  “Helene.”

  “Shit, I better hurry.”

  “I would if I were you. She’ll probably put a pillow over his face as soon as the nurses aren’t looking, hope he remembers her in his will.”

  Damon turns to me. “Write this down.”

  I search for a piece of paper. End up pulling an old receipt out of my wallet, scribbling the numbers he rattles off on the back.

  “That’s Max’s room,” he says. “Tell it to the hospital operator and she’ll connect you directly. They don’t allow cell phones, so that’s the best way to reach me. Got it?”

  I nod that I do, and he gives my hand a quick squeeze. Renee, I notice, catches the squeeze. She doesn’t say anything, though. Just peels off the lid of the Frosty. Puts her mouth on the side of the cup.

  Damon swings himself out of the car. “All right, Renee. You ready to raise a little hell?”

  “I was born ready, baby,” she says to him. Then to me: “I’m going to finish this, okay?”