“But she didn’t? I mean, say anything?”
One corner of my mouth twitches. “You mean, did she tell me what you did that night? No, Audrey, she didn’t tell me that.”
Her face is a mass of confusion. “Then how—”
“Gillian dropped by,” I interrupt, “and we had a nice, long conversation about things I didn’t know.”
She draws back—slowly—as if collapsing in on herself.
“Anything else you care to tell me? Anything else I didn’t know about the night you thought about watching someone die?”
Her whole body is quivering. I can see it.
I should be horrified. I should be pissed.
But secretly I’m enjoying this. I shouldn’t, with all that’s going on, but I do, mostly because it is amazing to see Audrey panic. I’ve seen it before, but only at the hands of Madeline.
Not that that will happen anymore.
“We didn’t—I mean, we just kind of stood there.”
“And did nothing?”
She nods, hoping that it will end the issue.
But it doesn’t.
“That’s worse, Audrey,” I say. “If you’d only shown up, you could have done something. But instead, you showed up and then decided to leave him to die on his own?”
Her face draws up a blank expression, as though the words had been smacked right out of her head. She’s apparently incapable of embarrassment, but the shock registers quite nicely on her face.
“I didn’t think of it that way,” she says.
“You didn’t think. At all. You wonder why in the hell you’re getting threatening text messages. You’re lucky that’s all they are at this point.”
“No, you’re right,” she says, her eyes welling up.
“I know I’m right,” I reply. “Something very bad could happen to one of us. Has already happened to one of us.”
“No, I know,” she says. “I just—”
“Thought it would be okay to flirt with death like that and then avoid any consequences for it? You forget, Audrey: I am the one who had to pay for what you did. What we did. What we all did.”
Her face blushes red. “Broken record, Mary Ellen,” she says. “Get. Over. It. We’ve all had to suffer. You don’t think we have to pay every single day for what we did?”
“I’m the only one who went to jail for it.”
“Then you went to Seattle and hid for all these years. Do you know what it’s like to face these people and have to ignore the fact that they know?”
“Well, no,” I say.
“It’s like being able to read someone’s mind,” she replies. “You just have to focus on what you have to say, knowing all the while that all they can think is murderer murderer murderer.”
She’s got a point, I think.
“But it doesn’t help that you held a secret about what you did for all these years,” I say, bringing the conversation back to my original point.
“We didn’t do anything,” she says, exasperated. “We went over there—it’s shitty, I know—but we didn’t know what to do. We were shitty teenagers. It didn’t get real, not really, until that moment. And then we chickened out. That’s it.”
The last syllable slants up, reaching a pitch I’ve never heard, and then Audrey, whom I’d always thought was made out of bricks—gold or not—crumbles like a child’s sandcastle, folding over herself and hiding her face in her hands.
For a moment, the shock is too great for me to abide.
Then, as if my emotions are on a hair trigger, all of a sudden I’m crying, too, even if I’m not entirely sure why. I should hate Audrey, should resent her for the way she’s ruined my life and destroyed my potential, but the sight of her weeping—as well as the lingering feelings over Madeline’s death—are much stronger than my bitterness over the past.
I need to feel less, and Audrey seems ready to abide by my decision.
Audrey looks up from her hands at some point and says, “Drink?”
I can’t help but nod.
She gets up and fills two shot glasses with Tito’s.
So much for a quiet evening in.
It’s not long before the night elongates and grows hazy under the weight of a few stiff drinks. Audrey, who came to my place already wasted, still manages to drink me under the table. It doesn’t take much for me to end up in blackout mode, and so when I reach my limit, she tucks me in before staggering out back into the night.
At least I think that’s what happens.
15
NOW
“Did you know a woman poisoned her husband on the hotel’s fourth floor?” Gillian asks nonchalantly as she and I order our usuals—vodka sodas—from the super trendy bar atop the Noelle.
I’ve spent most of the day fending off a hangover. The spontaneous wake with Audrey has left me dehydrated and achy, and I guess the only solution to that problem is more drinking.
“Where’s the ball-and-chain today?” I ask.
When she doesn’t exactly make the connection, I prompt her by mentioning the guy from Audrey’s party at her place in the Gulch.
“Oh, Charley?” she asks. “He’s clueless. If I had to guess his whereabouts—and I’m not—then I’d say he’s probably stalking some poor, unwitting producer on Music Row.”
“That bad?”
“He’s...fine, I guess,” she says. “He doesn’t know how to play the game, but he thinks he does. It’s pitiful when someone thinks they are being clever, isn’t it?”
She leans back, surveys the expanse of downtown sprouting up on either side of us.
After a pause, she says, “It must be a treat to rediscover the town as an adult.”
“Like finding a secret passage under the bed,” I reply. “The new restaurants, and the restored neighborhoods—”
“I mean, you’re staying in The Nations, for crying out loud. How much better has that area gotten in the last few years?”
“Exponentially better,” I reply, but I don’t follow up with more chit-chat about Nashville, because I understand what we’ve come here to discuss.
Gil sighs and kills her drink.
“So, what else is new?”
“Audrey tells me she has a stalker,” I reply. “Says she started receiving messages right before—well, right before I came back.”
“I see,” she says. “So this is just the beginning.”
“Seems like it.”
“Did she say anything else? Any mention of Madeline in the messages?”
“It all seemed pretty vague, the kind of stuff I usually get—”
“When the documentaries start popping up again?”
I nod my head, looking over Gil’s shoulder for our server. We make brief eye contact, long enough for me to tap my glass with a fingernail.
“You need another?”
“I’m good,” Gillian says. “With all the anti-anxiety meds, I shouldn’t be drinking.”
“Same here,” I reply, downing the rest of my vodka-soda.
“You never considered doing anything like that, did you? Sending us threatening messages?”
How do I answer that question? Of course, I did. I thought of everything, up to and including murder. I hated them. I loathed them. I wished them dead every day for years.
“No more than I had right to,” I respond, finally.
Gil smirks. “Fair. Totally fair.”
“Wait, do you think I’m sending Audrey those awful messages?”
Before I can say I would never..., I clip the sentence off and shove it back down, way deep inside, where I keep the emotional hangover associated with the whole Suicide Blondes phase of my life.
“Of course not,” she says, though Gillian is too smart to complete endorse a lie, so it comes off like she doesn’t entirely believe me.
I let it go, because distrust is just baked into this cake, I guess.
“Madeline thought someone was after her, too,” I say, broadening the topic. “When she came to see me, right bef
ore her death, she was drunk and desperate, and it was obvious she was hiding something.”
“Huh,” Gil replies. “That’s odd.”
Then it occurs to me.
“Wait, have you been receiving threats, too?”
She doesn’t answer, even when I stare without rephrasing the question. I can see the muscles working in her jaw, tensing up, and so I know the answer, but she’s not ready to talk about it quite yet.
“You know you can talk to me,” I say. “I’ve been going through the same thing.”
“Has someone been threatening you?”
“Not through text messages,” I reply, “but I could swear someone was following me at Percy Warner the other day.”
“Did you get a good look at the guy?”
I shake my head. “I think maybe they turned off the path.”
“They? Was there more than one?”
“No, like they, as in, I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, it sounds crazy to say this, but I didn’t actually see them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when I turned to confront the person—it was someone else.”
“How do you know someone was actually there?” she asks. “How do you know it wasn’t—”
“Just my imagination?” I interrupt. “Because I know. Trust me. Someone was there. And that someone wanted me to know it, too.”
There is another extended silence between us.
“Come on,” Gillian says, at last. “Let’s get off this fucking roof.”
The rickety elevator takes us down to the lobby level of the Noelle, and we bypass a wedding party in the main dining area before stepping out onto the street—
Where I full-on slam into a couple of people hurrying up the sidewalk.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble, before I’m able to gather my bearings. I’m a little drunk, and so it all comes out a little more flippantly than expected.
Then, I recognize the woman I’ve just plowed into, and this night takes an unexpected nosedive toward the concrete.
The woman—it’s Everett Coughlin’s mother, and she doesn’t take so much as a breath before her hand collides with my face. The force of the blow is enough to send stars floating out into the most distant point in my field of vision.
A woman stepping around us gasps. “Oh my God!” she exclaims.
But I’m not focused on her.
I’m focused on Myrtle Coughlin, whom I know only through the varied and expansive interviews she’s given over the years, calling for my head on a spike. I’ve always been just out of reach, just beyond the length of her arm.
But not this time.
Here is her chance, and she doesn’t hesitate. Her eyes glazing over with twenty years of sadness, she strikes me again and again, and I don’t move to defend myself.
Neither does Gil, who keeps one hand on my shoulder but doesn’t try to pull me away. She just kind of observes this smackdown with a detached serenity.
I deserve it.
Perhaps Gillian knows it, and that’s why she allows me to get my just desserts from the mother of our victim.
I take another shot to the face, and the pain swells like somebody twisting a volume knob to ten. My face hurts, and I’ll have to apply plenty of makeup to hide the bruising, but at the same time, I’m pleased to feel this. The hurt seeps up through the cracks of my drunkenness and wakes me up.
There is no way to be somewhere else.
I am trapped fully in this moment, and I could not be more compliant with fate’s wishes. Predestination has drawn me here, and so I accept the consequences.
Mrs. Coughlin strikes me one more time, and it appears like she might be done.
In a talk with CNN’s resident mummy, Larry King, she once referred to me as “The Deep South’s Exquisite Harlot.” She said this as I lay on a bunk in the common area of my juvenile dorm, where the CNN cameras either could not or would not tread.
And so I have spent the better part of my adult life with her words rolling around in my head like a marble in a sink drain.
I feel the pain stinging my cheek, but now that we’re here, now that she and I are in the midst of an audience, I want it all.
Or, rather, I don’t want it to end.
It would suit me just fine if she held me down and bludgeoned me to death with a stone from the Central Basin. Just put me out of my misery, right here for everyone to see. Then maybe I would be free of this curse.
I don’t deserve the life I took from Everett Coughlin, but I’m too drunk to explain all of this to her. The words kind of fulminate and fight against being released, so I just stand there and stutter dumbly, like a junior actress who’s forgotten her one and only line in the high school rendition of Brigadoon.
To my benefit and chagrin, Myrtle Coughlin is in shock. Full-blown shock. Her eyes remain fixed on me, but I can see the way she holds her hand, like it’s a foreign object, a gun she didn’t mean to fire.
And it’s pointed at me.
“You deserved that,” she says, her eyes brimming with tears.
“I know,” I say.
Then the thing I don’t mean to say, the thing that occurs to me in the moment, dribbles out like warm syrup. “You can do it again, if you want. I don’t mind.”
There is a sharp intake of breath from all those gathered around, all the hangers-on. They think I’ve insulted this poor, destitute woman, and judging by the look she’s giving me, she does too. She’s already begun backing away, her mouth open in a misshapen, stammering capital O.
And then she does.
She hits me again.
And again.
It isn’t over, after all.
Some of the onlookers pull out their phones.
These videos will be on YouTube by the close of the hour.
When she strikes me again, Luther Coughlin steps in and wraps both arms around his sobbing wife.
“I think she’s had enough,” he says quietly, his own eyes lacquered with tears.
I can’t help but stare at the way his bowtie has been knocked askew. It might be funny, if it weren’t so sad.
My mouth tastes like blood. My ears ring like I’ve just left a concert. I struggle to keep my head up and my shoulders back. I want to collapse at her feet. I want to beg her for forgiveness, but the situation—and, I suppose, my own pride—prevent me from doing anything but standing there and taking it.
“He was our only son,” she says as she is slowly led away from me. “I breastfed him. I changed every single one of his goddamned diapers.”
All I can do is nod.
Now it is my turn to tear up.
But she doesn’t stop. “It was the best, shortest time of my life. I’ll never be a grandmother, never see my own child as an adult. You robbed me of that, and I hope you die a miserable, painful death.”
“The way things are going,” I respond, “you just might get your wish.”
I can see iPhones flashing as people commemorate this moment with a photo. Or a video. It certainly is fitting, given why this is all happening.
Her last act of desperate ire is to spit on me. Flecks of wet speckle my face, and I can smell the nicotine in all of it. Her face, in that moment, is a contorted mass of anger and confusion, an impressionistic painting of a human being in agony, and that is the vision I am left with as she is hurried through the crowd.
“I think that’s all, folks,” I say to everyone standing there, and in turn, each of them films me as I stumble drunkenly away, daubing the back of one hand at the blood which has begun to trickle from one corner of my mouth.
Intellectually, I know it’s a bad idea to search for myself on the internet. It’s a bad idea for anyone to do it, but especially me.
The articles themselves are the worst, online “crime writers” or “internet sleuths” (or whatever they prefer to be called) portraying me as either monster or victim, with a tiny isthmus of pathos in between
. They are viciously opinionated, believing themselves to be
But, then again, the internet is humanity. It is the whole of humanity. It is just what and who we are as a species. I recognize my place in the clamor to reach the bottom of the barrel, but I feel confident I’ve got it all pegged. There is a special place in Hell for all internet trolls, the seventh circle of a digital dungeon somewhere beneath Satan’s cloven hooves, and I know I deserve to be there, but so do millions of others.
And so I brace myself for when I look for details of my...situation with the Coughlins from last night. There are several vids posted, many of them already above a thousand views. I watch them, each one, with a quiet sense that it is somehow my duty to do so.
It is the penance that I pay. The intellectual equivalent of self-flagellation. I walk into the firing line just to see how injured I can get and still survive the onslaught.
It’s not that bad.
Oh, it’s vicious, but vicious doesn’t necessarily mean witty, so it doesn’t actually hit very close to home. They call me a slew of monosyllabic names—bitch, whore, slut, cunt—but nothing that reveals anything more than their latent (and lazy) misogyny.
In fact, when I see the videos and the vitriol people levy on me, I usually join in.
I can’t help myself.
My online profile cannot be tied to me in any feasible way, and sometimes I spend hours going through my own comments about myself in online forums to see what I actually feel about myself.
It’s not great.
These people in the peanut gallery on YouTube think they have it in for me. They don’t have shit. They are mouth-breathing hypocrites, people who pine for civility when it comes to what I did, while nothing would make them happier than for me to jump off the Pinnacle Building or dive headfirst into the Cumberland with a pocket full of rocks. They’d watch the bubbles slowly stop appearing, if they could.
But they can’t string together an insult that hits home. I’m inured to the uncreative jabs people take out on me, and even if one did somehow manage to hurt me, the anonymity ironically frees me to feel nothing about it.
This isn’t honesty.
It’s vengeance.
Suicide Blondes Page 15