The Mercy of the Night

by David Corbett

  “Cass—”

  “You’re always saying I’m the best thing to happen since Roni died. Well you’re the best thing to happen to me, period. I don’t want to lose you.” One shoulder nudged up, a guarded shrug. “I dunno, maybe I already have.” She met his eye. “I miss you.”

  “I’m right here.”

  “Actually, you’re not. That’s the problem.”

  He tried to think of a time when he’d felt more ashamed. He was a drunk and the bottle was filled with his beautiful misery. No one’s ever suffered like me, the very definition of asshole.

  “Is this it then? No more chances. Pack up. I’m out.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “Christ, no.”

  She puffed her cheeks for a sigh. “To be honest? I’m tired. Maybe I’m just not cut out for this. It’s too hard, wanting you so bad, not getting it back. Regardless, I’ve had it. Stick a fork in me and call me Dunn.” A small, distant laugh. “My mom says that. Dunn’s her maiden name.”

  Finally he got the nerve, reached out, took her hand, laced his fingers in hers. The skin felt hot and strangely dry. He squeezed. The hand just lay there in his grip.

  She said, “Know what my plan was? You’ll laugh at this.” She sniffed, wiped at her nose with her free hand. “I thought, if I could talk to her, this Garza kid I mean, I could get through. Because you’re so on the wrong track.” She chuckled, like everybody but him knew the joke. “You keep thinking there’s a way out, a happy ending, you can fix it, and she’s like miles ahead of you there. You can help her, maybe, a little bit. But that’s gonna be a long hard slog, and honestly? I don’t want her in our lives that long. So I came up with my stroke of genius. I figured if I could just talk to her for a second face-to-face, fill her in on the background, get her to realize you haven’t got some secret weird agenda, she might give in, talk to you. Let you be the swell guy you need to be so bad. And refuse to realize you already are. And the thing would be over and we could all move on.”

  He gave her hand another squeeze. Like trying to revive a trout. “I gave her the background, actually,” he said. “She was unimpressed.”

  She lifted her chin, shook the hair off her face. “Then fuck her.”

  “You mean figuratively, I assume.”

  She turned his direction. A wounded smile. “You ever so much as check out that girl’s shoes and there won’t be a surgeon in the world who can stitch you back together.”

  64

  Back at the house they let Noble out and watched him fussily sniff the yard, the ground heady with scent from the storms.

  In a moment of exhaustion-cranked fantasy, Tierney imagined following suit, pushing his face into the mulchy leaves, the soggy clover and woody moss, the earth not just soft but loamy, the air almost busting with the rainy tang of rot. To be a dog. Better yet, to be Cass’s dog.

  Easing up behind, he wrapped his arms around her, nuzzled her. It took a second but she eased her weight back into him, pulling her hair away so he could kiss her neck as Noble ticktocked back up the porch steps, a collar-rattling shake, nudging past them and making a bead for his water bowl.

  As though forgiveness were gravity, they drifted toward bed. Beginning in a kind of tentative trance, they made an awkward ritual of it, him kneeling to unlace her shoes, tug them off, strip away her socks, her lifting her arms so he could pull the awful yellow T-shirt over her head, then the mock turtle underneath, her red hair crackling with static.

  They kissed and the stale scent of her breath became one more reminder she was real, she was flesh, she was here. Sitting in just her jeans and bra, she let his fingers search out the scars and moles on her arms, her shoulders—his touchstones, like he needed to convince himself of something, rediscover her.

  Standing up, he shuddered out of his sport coat, nudged off his shoes, and her hands went to work on his shirt buttons, belt buckle, zipper, the teeth unlocking with a tight little whisper. He stood so she could tug his slacks down his hips, and he stepped out—one leg, the other—as she reached inside his briefs, pulled out what she wanted and kissed it, licked it, slipped it into her mouth and let it grow hard there.

  The rest of the clothes came off in blind tugs and tosses, and once in bed he wrapped his legs around hers and pressed hard into her body, as though if he didn’t she might get away. He cupped her breast in his hand and she arched her back, eyes closed, pounding a soft fist against his arm until she slipped beneath him, pulled him on top, locking her legs around his hips and guiding him in.

  Her eyelids floated open and closed as his rhythm stuttered, then found itself. His strokes grew angry, he was punishing himself, hating himself, maybe hating her a little, too, and with the punch-like retort of her hips she answered: I get it, I do, I know.

  She bit her lip against the trembling and her eyes clenched shut, she was slapping him now, his arm, his chest, whipping her animal, and when she finally bowed her back, head thrown to one side, she emitted a moan so wounded, so strange, Noble reared up from the braided rug and barked.

  She lay there a moment, shuddering in little aftershocks, saying in breathy jolts: “Good boy . . . It’s okay . . . Good boy . . .” Reaching out her hand toward the edge of the bed, she held it there as the dog slinked forward to lick her fingertips while, with the other hand, she covered her face. Please, Tierney thought, look at me.

  She cried like she was trying not to, almost ashamed. He settled down beside her, wrapped her up, tucking her face into the hollow of his shoulder as he stroked her mad red hair.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” Empty words. Lucky for him, not empty enough.

  The old house settled into its nighttime whimpers and moans, winter wind thrashing the trees outside. Cass lay beside him, fetal in sleep, the dog snoring off in a corner.

  The conversation from earlier just kept playing over and over in his head, and the more it repeated, the more frightened he felt, wondering if everything he thought he knew—about himself, his life—wasn’t spectacularly wrong.

  Cass had put her finger on a disturbing truth. Without realizing it consciously, he’d somehow convinced himself that Jacqi Garza remained trapped in her past, holed away in that terrifying cellar, mentally at least, incapable of getting out, moving on, living her life. He was the one, the only one, who could help her. Free her.

  He was the expert, after all, on ruin and reclamation. A handyman of the heart. Wonder Widower.

  Such a crock. He’d unconsciously rigged the whole thing, this elaborate trick of the mind, so he could ignore his own situation. His own prison.

  An eerie, Jekyll-and-Hyde unease descended. He had a doppelgänger, or rather the doppelgänger had him.

  This person out here in the world, this Otherwise-Known-as-Me, bothering with things, answering phones and asking questions, rescuing runaways and romancing redheads, lying awake in this bed—that was the shadow. The actual body lay elsewhere, parked in that hospital room outside time, invisible but strangely all the more real because of that—waiting out the miracle that never comes around, unable to leave, trapped in Phelan Tierney’s Finest Hour, his Hallmark tearjerker, his defining tragedy.

  For all he knew his life was just an elaborate hallucination, concocted by a brain in a jar, tucked away on some laboratory shelf. He was Neo in The Matrix, waiting for Morpheus to come along and flush him into the world.

  He recognized such imaginings as the stuff of adolescence, overheated riffs on H. P. Lovecraft and Twilight Zone, freshman misreadings of Plato and Berkeley and Derrida. He was also aware they couldn’t be proved false.

  For some reason, in the thick of all this he recalled a favorite saying of his mother’s: A lone wolf is a lost wolf. She wasn’t referring to lupine sociobiology. She was expressing her understanding of love as a mirror. Her belief that, though we die alone, we build a life among others.

  True
, both he and Jacqi Garza had locked themselves away somewhere else, and that was the secret of their connection. Except, there was Cass.

  She wasn’t just the next woman in line. She saw him more honestly than any woman he’d ever known, more so even than Roni if he himself was honest.

  Roni, the artist, bravely romanticized life, which made her death all the more cruel. Cass was an entirely different creature. He’d watched her back a thoracic surgeon into a corner at a cocktail party, tongue-lash him like the arrogant ass-hat he was. For her the heart was a muscle, love a cure for the disease called loneliness. That kind of pragmatism might just save him from his bullshit if he let it.

  A perfect match? Perfection was for suckers and zealots. Perfection was for the dead. And for the first time in a very long while he allowed himself the stark white fear of once again wanting to live his vastly imperfect life.

  Lose her, he thought, and you’ll spend the rest of your sorry life chasing the next bright lie. Wrapped in a fool’s cocoon. Because the truth doesn’t lie in a book or an axiom or the mind of God. The truth lies between people, if they’re up to the task. His truth, in particular, lay with Cass, if he was man enough to hear it.

  In time he managed to drift into a kind of half sleep, then from somewhere on the floor, inside his tangled sport coat, his cell phone emitted its nagging, muffled hum.

  “I know you need to get that,” she said—suddenly wide-awake.

  He murmured into his pillow: “Voice mail.”

  “They never call this late unless it’s important.”

  “Depends”—he lifted his head just a little—“on who, exactly, ‘they’ might be.”

  “That’s why you’re supposed to answer. To find out.”

  He couldn’t help but think that was a spectacularly bad idea.

  She said, “What if it’s her?”

  He rose up on his elbow so he could see her face. The room was dark, he let his eyes adjust. Somewhere in the scrambled mass of shadowy hair, her eyes and mouth and freckles lay waiting.

  “I know what it feels like,” he said, “to lose everything. I’d rather not go through that twice.”

  She lay there perfectly still. “Then don’t.”

  PART VI

  65

  From what she could tell, the bleeding had stopped.

  Stop touching it, she thought, and yet, at that moment, the stiffening tacky feel of it, the clumps of matted hair, offered what small consolation she could wring from the situation—she wasn’t dead yet.

  Tierney was on his way, fine, but he’d sounded pretty put out about it. Couldn’t chase her enough before, now he’s all, like, You want what?

  Fuck him. Fuck everybody. Fuck Jesus.

  She sat in a dark clump of hawthorn just beyond the plaza of a gas station, lit up for the nighthawks, its nozzle-armed pumps like robot soldiers in the buzzing stillness. She still felt unclear as to how exactly she’d gotten there.

  She’d been unable to return to the bus stop the way she’d come—Mama Cracker and her arson army had blocked the way. Them and the fire.

  She’d stumbled, coatless, beneath the evergreens instead, the Homewood hills a pathless maze of darkness and blackberry brambles, tendrils coiled like barbed wire, thorns like razors, getting snarled up and cut and then turned around in the wind-whipped night even as she heard the fire crews arrive, saw their whirling lights beyond the crosshatched pine branches and the haze of smoke. They seemed to come to a dead stop several times before reaching the fire. Somebody’d thrown up barriers in the winding street, another vigilante trick. Delay all rescue, burn that shithole to the ground.

  She found her way to pavement finally only to discover she’d trudged the wrong way down a long cul-de-sac—that happened twice—then needing to retrace her steps, try a new direction as rain came and went and the wind slapped her around.

  The coyote damn near did her in. She stumbled into a small clearing and saw nothing at first, just heard the low whimpering yip, then a growl. Turning slow toward the sound, she saw in the darkness of the nearest brush the narrow-set yellow-gray eyes. She could smell something too, rank with decay—the coyote was feeding. She’d heard they’d been coming down from the hills, preying on house pets or their scat. A meter reader had come across one curled up in a lawn chair, gutting a rabbit snatched from its hutch. But those were stories. This was here.

  Not knowing where the impulse came from, she crouched and uttered a menacing, bare-tooth hiss, then began edging back, retracing her steps, wondering if there were others around, a den. Her heartbeat hammered in her chest for ten minutes as she tried another way down the hill.

  Despite the adrenaline, she’d felt exhausted, still did. Scared to close her eyes, because every time she did there they were—Teddy Buker, LeQuan, Ben and Hector, the fire—each image like a diamond in her mind. Not just the images. Fires, she thought, they don’t sound the way you imagine. They’re quieter than you expect, even as they cackle and hiss and groan, eating away, the wood, the cloth. Flesh.

  By the time she’d found her way to the strip mall turnaround, the buses had stopped running. She saw lights a couple hundred yards off, hoped for an all-night service station, got lucky. She got change from the curry-scented night clerk, ignored his stare, made the call from a nearby pay phone, squinting to see the number clear enough to recite it on the voice mail recording, fearing the overhead light, wondering who else might be sharking around, looking for her.

  It took a while, but Tierney rang back, the trill of the phone like the starting bell at a dog track, and at the sound of his deep, raspy, egghead voice her heartbeat started racing, ecstatic and resentful and scared all at once.

  It wasn’t till after she hung up the phone—having provided her location and a brief account of the mess she was in, with a promise she’d actually stay put till he got there—that the eerie circularity of it all hit home.

  The escape through the forest, the barbed-wire blackberries, even the goddamn coyotes—not just a threat this time but real—like everything fit into a pattern, an elaborate moving jigsaw, and except for this little twist or that random change it would all just keep happening over and over forever.

  The clincher: once again she was waiting for a car to appear, someone to show up and save the day. And just like last time, rescue wouldn’t come free. The man would have his own agenda.

  He didn’t come alone, and it wasn’t him who got out first. It was a woman, Amazon tall with legs to prove it, topped with a mane of wild hair. The nurse, she thought. He brought his girlfriend along. What was up with that?

  For a moment she considered staying hidden, pretending she hadn’t stuck around. But the cold, the pain, the blood—she just wanted to lie down somewhere, if only for a little while, even the backseat of Tierney’s sad little beater.

  Turned out it didn’t matter, the nurse picked out her hiding place like it was flashing a signal.

  “It’s okay,” she said, pulling out a tiny flashlight. Crouching down, she clicked it on and aimed the beam at an angle, a little up, a little to the side. Jacqi winced, even as she felt the fear and anger inside her subside, like the embers of a fire growing dim.

  Tierney came up behind the nurse like an umpire, hands on his knees, face masked by the flashlight glare.

  “Good God . . .”

  66

  After her run-in with the coyote, the dog scared her at first, but he seemed old and slow and harmless. His tail wagged sleepily as he nosed up, sniffed her knee.

  The nurse said, “Noble, don’t bug her,” as Tierney locked the door. He’d been weirdly quiet the whole trip here, sitting up front alone, glancing in his rearview as his nurse girlfriend did her bit—tracking Jacqi’s response to the flashlight, looking for fluid trickling from her ears or nose, asking if she had a sweet taste in her mouth.

  The routine conjured Polly Bell, the tattooed nurs
e in Santa Cruz. One more piece in the looping puzzle. And just like back then she let herself feel, though never longer than an instant, that all this concern wasn’t just a chore. For the first time in a decade it didn’t feel dirty, being looked at, being touched.

  Dishes lay racked beside the sink, pictures and knickknacks cluttered the nearby shelves, the kitchen table piled with papers and mail and magazines. It’s her house, Jacqi thought, not his, not Tierney’s, just like he’d said, though clearly he felt at home, kicking off his shoes, slipping off his jacket, draping it on a chair back as the nurse wrung out a hot towel, filled a bowl with soapy warm water.

  “Have a seat,” she said, nodding toward the table.

  “Don’t make me go to the ER, okay?”

  “I’m not going to make you do anything.” She started dabbing at the blood with the towel. “But I need to take a look at that wound.”

  Jacqi sat still and let the nurse go at it, but after only a moment of trying to stay quiet a fidgety restlessness made her feel naked.

  “You said your name was Cass. That short for anything? Cassandra, right?”

  “Cassidy.”

  “Wow. Cool. Great name. Can I have it?”

  The nurse shot Tierney a look. “You can’t afford it.”

  Tierney said nothing, just leaned back against the counter, arms crossed, looking like he couldn’t make up his mind about something.

  “You’re different,” Jacqi said as her chin and cheek got washed. “You’re, like, quiet.”

  He chuckled like that was funny, not wack. “Been a bit of a day.”

  “Yeah. Say that again—ow!” She backed away from the towel, which now was stained pink with her blood, same as the water in the bowl.