by Lisa Unger
I fall to the floor, gripping at the pain in my arm, fighting to hold on to the dimming room. When I look back toward the couch, Layla is gone.
32
A vise grip on my wrists, I’m being dragged across the floor.
“Let’s get her outside and into the trunk. We’re going to have to burn this place as it is. What a mess you’ve made here, Mac.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, a teenager whining with regret.
“Then we need to find your wife,” says Tom, like he’s checking an item off a list.
“She won’t get far—there’s nothing but woods for acres.”
They’re both breathing hard, suddenly stop dragging me. I try to struggle, but whatever they’ve given me, I am weak to the point of near paralysis, my limbs heavy, useless. This is it. I’ve failed Jack. Layla. Myself. Oh my god, Izzy and Slade. That spiral of fear and despair, it’s spinning wide beneath me, pulling me into its depths.
“What is that?” Mac’s voice, distant and tinny. I strain to hear, but there’s only that awful, endless silence. I am lying on the floor in the hallway. Jack leans against the ladder to the loft, looking somber, bleeding from that horrible gash on his head. I told you to let it go, Poppy.
“What?” says Tom. “What do you hear?”
“Listen.”
I hear it; it sounds like the whine of a mosquito, a wail off in the distance. Then, the outside door swings open with a crash. Layla. She stands, bloodied, ragged, with a shotgun in her arms.
“Put her down, Tom. Step away from her.”
Tom complies, lifting his hands. “Be reasonable, Layla.”
“Where did you get that?” asks Mac. He seems frozen; his hands coming up in the air as he backs away from me.
“From the gun locker, you idiot,” she says.
“Don’t do this, Layla,” says Tom. “We can all still come to an understanding. We can still fix this.”
“Fuck you, Tom.”
The room explodes with a blast so loud that my ears start to ring. Mac lets out a scream, hits the wall. Then a strange widening silence. There’s something else. That wail is drawing closer.
Tom stands very still. His hands go to his middle and blood leaks through his fingers; he looks at me in shock and pain. Then he falls in a heap to the floor, revealing a black-red burst behind him on the wall. A river of blood flows from his mouth. Layla turns the gun to Mac.
“Layla,” I whisper. I know what she’s going to do next. “Don’t.”
“All her life she was afraid,” says Layla. “She walked on eggshells in that house. We never knew what was going to set him off. It could be anything—someone used the last of the peanut butter. He couldn’t find the remote. He didn’t like what she made for dinner.”
“Layla,” says Mac, his voice a whisper. “I’m sorry.”
“Shut up,” she says. Her voice is so cold. “Don’t say another fucking word.”
She squares her stance, but I can see she’s wobbly, her hands shaking.
The world, the room spins and tilts. That wail grows louder. Please.
“I hated her,” says Layla. “Because she was weak. Don’t get me wrong. I hated him, too. But I think I hated her a little more, because you know what? She forgave him. Every. Single. Time. Every time he brought her flowers, or cried, or was in a good mood, she opened to him like a flower. She loved him. I could see it. She loved him more than she loved us.”
“Forgive me,” whispers Mac. “I can do better. It hasn’t always been like this.”
She moves in closer, the barrel of the shotgun pointed at him. Tom’s body sits horribly, like a dropped toy.
“Honey,” I say, struggling to sit. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Once he hit her so hard she lost three teeth,” she says, voice breaking. “The next night I walked in on them dancing in the kitchen, swaying to some slow song.”
She laughs, a sad, mirthless sound.
“We’re all flawed, Layla,” Mac says. “We’re all broken.”
She shakes her head. She’s swaying now, pitching from side to side. “Not all of us,” she says. “Not like you.”
Now he’s weeping, a blustering, disgusting sobbing.
“Put it down, Layla.”
The voice surprises us both. She jumps, startled, but she doesn’t turn, keeps the gun trained on her husband. I see her face grow harder, her mouth pulled into a grim line. I know that look of determined anger. She can’t be stopped.
Detective Grayson walks into the room from behind her, his gun drawn. “This is not what you want.”
“How do you know what I want?” she asks, looking between him and Mac, back to me.
“Maybe he doesn’t,” I say. “But I do. You want to be safe. You want to love your kids. You can have all that, Layla. Just put the gun down. Walk away.”
In a breath, I see our life together—riding bikes, and driving in her beater car, the sleepovers, the proms, our weddings, all the dried tears, and belly laughs. Her strength, her flaws, her toughness. Through joy and grief, laughter and pain, she’s been there. Our friendship has been the most solid thing in my life.
“Whatever comes next,” I say. “We face it together.”
Slowly, she drops the gun, sinks to her knees and lays it on the floor. She bends over in a sob. And I struggle through my pain and weakness to move toward her. As I do, out of the corner of my eye, I see Mac scramble to his feet and dive for her. His wail of rage fills the room, but I use the last of my strength to throw myself between them, and take the full brunt of his weight as he knocks me to the ground, my head hitting hard against the solid wood floor. I have nothing left, no strength, no will to fight. I can barely lift my arm to fend off the blow I see coming.
Then a deafening shot rings out and Mac seems to freeze midstrike, his arm raised, a flower of blood blossoming on the white of his shirt. The moment pulls strange and twisting. His face goes slack and he falls off, hitting the floor beside me. Layla’s wail fills my head as she crawls to me.
Detective Grayson, my enemy, my friend, the poet detective comes to kneel beside me. And his is the last face I see before the world fades to nothing.
33
Jack stirs beside me and I lie still, listening. It’s dark, amber streetlight sneaking in through the blinds, the room a familiar field of shadows—his clothes in their eternal slouch over the chair, the little-used fireplace dark, a stack of files on the narrow desk by the window. He’s awake, lying there, wondering if I’m awake. I am, barely. The cold medicine I took has me foggy, my limbs heavy. I don’t move. The fight we had last night still aches at the back of my throat. Angry tears burn behind my eyes. After a moment, he slips from bed. Still, I don’t move.
Water running in the bathroom; he’ll be splashing cold water on his face, running his wet fingers through his sandy mane of hair, then brushing his teeth. I can see him as if I’m standing beside him, so familiar is he, this routine. Normally, I’d be squeezing next to him in our postage stamp of a bathroom, jockeying for position at the sink—reaching for the brush, a tie for my hair. This bathroom, I might complain. This apartment.
The water goes off and there is quiet except for the street noise. I haven’t moved a muscle. The bathroom door opens and a rectangle of light slides across the floor.
“Poppy?” Just a whisper. There’s apology in his voice, a plea.
But I’m heavy. Heavy with this cold, with the medicine I took to stop coughing. With the fight we had last night, with the fear that things between us are too far gone. How did we get so far apart? When did it happen? It’s not just one thing, not even what we fought about last night—though that’s a big chasm between us. I could turn around and look at him. It’s still there, whatever it is that brought us together. If I reach for him, he’ll still come to me. But I don’t move.
I listen as he pulls on his
running clothes, laces his shoes sitting on the bench at the foot of the bed. He pauses at the door; I can hear him draw and release a breath. It’s not too late. I could still hop up and hustle into my clothes, too, head out into the morning with him, take our daily run in Riverside Park before the sun comes up. The sky will start to glow over the horizon as we make our two-mile loop, our breath in clouds. He might take off, leaving me behind for a bit, but I’ll catch up by the underpass. What I lack in speed, I make up for in endurance. On the bench at Ninety-Sixth Street, we might stretch. That’s when we’d talk, probably make up, or achieve some peace that will get us through a few more days.
So many mistakes, wrong choices. His. Mine.
I let him go, listen as footfalls creak on the hardwood floor, as he opens the door, closes and locks it behind him. The ding of the elevator, faint and distant. Still. I could still get up and go after him. Maybe I’ll catch him by the playground; maybe he’ll be moving slowly hoping that I’ll come out after him. But I don’t. This cold, a kind of fatigue that’s settled in over our life together, a crushing inertia keeps me lashed to the bed. I sink in deep, sleep wrapping itself around me, pulling me down, down, down. We’ll talk when he gets back. We’ll work it out. We always do.
No. Something gets me up. I hustle into my running clothes, find my shoes by the door. I don’t wait for our ancient elevator, I take the stairs, burst through the lobby.
“You can still catch him,” Richie calls after me. “He wasn’t moving too fast this morning.”
“I’ll catch him,” I call back with a laugh.
The air is so, so cold. But I don’t waste time warming up. I break into a sprint. I see him crossing the street.
“Jack,” I call. But he doesn’t hear me. He jogs across the street just as the light turns, disappears into the park.
I wait for the flow of traffic to pass. When the street clears, I cross and follow, moving faster, faster. He seems always just ahead of me, his speed effortless, his hoodie pulled up against the cold, drawstring tight. He probably has his headphones in. He can’t hear me; he doesn’t know I’m right behind him. He picks up speed.
I dig down deep, move along the path faster than I’m used to running, a stitch sharp in my side. He turns the corner; I think I’ll lose him. But true to form, he slows by the underpass.
“Jack,” I call, my voice loud, resounding off the concrete.
Finally, he hears me, stops and turns.
He’s just a shadow standing there, a hooded man in the dark edge of my life. But I don’t slow down, run right into his arms. He wraps me up and holds me tight, pulls me into a kiss. That kiss, our kiss, the one that always melted me and made wrong things right again.
“I’m so sorry.” Pulling back his hood, I put my hands to his beloved face. “I love you.”
* * *
I swim up through the layers of sleep, resurface in dim light. Breathe in wakefulness like air. Dreams and memory twist and mingle, a confused tumble. Don’t bother trying to sort them; it doesn’t matter. What’s real? What isn’t? Who can really say?
“Poppy?”
My throat is dry, head heavy.
“I’m ready,” I tell Jack. “I’m coming.”
There’s a moment, a beautiful suspended moment where I float in that final dream space with Jack, where I catch him at the underpass, feel his lips on mine. And it’s all okay again; we live to fight another day. And maybe in another universe, somewhere on another plane of existence, we leave the park and go back to whatever life we’ll live together. It’s right there. I can almost touch it.
“You’re probably not going anywhere for a while.”
Not Jack’s voice.
Instead, a rumpled Detective Grayson sits grim as a gargoyle in the corner of what looks like a hospital room.
“Where are we?”
Then it comes back in an ugly Technicolor rush—purging the apartment, Grayson’s visit, the pack with all Jack’s evidence about Elena’s murder, my race upstate, Mac, Tom.
“Layla,” I say, sitting up painfully.
“She’s okay.” He comes to stand beside me. “She’ll be okay. Just—lie back. You don’t make things easy, you know that. Do you know how crazy that was? You almost got yourself killed.”
“Is Mac—dead?” I ask.
He pauses a second, then offers a solemn nod. I wait for waves of grief or sorrow, some feeling. But there is only a deep and total numbness. Pain will come. Of course it will. We’re old friends now.
“They killed Jack,” I tell him. “I understand what happened now.”
He holds up his palm. “We don’t have all the pieces yet, but it looks like Van Santen and Elena Montoya shared a night that she caught on film for the purposes of blackmailing him. She was aggressive, apparently, demanding more and more money, showing up places to unsettle him, like that wedding for example. He empowered his security firm to handle the problem. And they did.”
“Jack found out.”
“From what was in that pack, it looks like he suspected that Mac had something to do with Elena’s death, investigated and confronted him.”
“Where did he get those pictures,” I ask.
“I don’t have the answer to that,” says Grayson.
“He never told me anything,” I say. “I didn’t know.”
It kept him up nights. It explains why he was so distant, so tense in those final months.
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
“Obviously, he wanted to protect you,” says Grayson.
“I wish he had protected himself.”
He presses his mouth in a grim line, squeezes my hand. “I do, too.”
“Why didn’t he just go to the police?”
“From the texts on that disposable phone it looks like he was trying to convince Mac to get a lawyer and turn himself in, turn in Tom’s firm Black Dog Security and Crisis Management. Mac and your husband were friends, it seems. Jack didn’t just want to go to the police. My guess is that he was trying to make things easier on you, Layla and the kids.”
That sounds like Jack.
“Mac was hurting Layla. There was abuse in their marriage and I never saw it.”
“Sometimes we only see what people want us to see, you know.”
It reminds me of Mac’s words. The thought of him—what he’s done to all of us. The betrayal is so deep, it’s a gully through my middle. I wish I could go back to that night when Jack was staring at Elena’s picture on a screen and force him to burn it all down right there—go to the police, report Mac, save us all. But we can’t go back, no matter how hard we try, or how badly we want to. I fight helpless tears, but they come anyway.
Grayson takes my hand and says nothing. There’s nothing to say.
“What did he give me?” I ask. My arm still throbs, my awareness still thick and slow. “He put something in my arm.”
“Some kind of sedative, I think,” he says. “Just rest now.”
There’s a doctor then, and a nurse. Questions, light in my eyes. Grayson gets pushed out of the room; he lifts a hand and disappears. I drift away again.
* * *
When I open my eyes, it’s dark outside the window. Noah dozes in a chair beside me, his hand over mine. I watch him until he opens his eyes and looks back. He startles a little, smiles, sits up. I lace my fingers through his and he holds tight.
SIX MONTHS LATER
34
Above us, a hawk makes wide, lonely circles. It dips and turns, wings motionless, lofting on the air. Silver white and black around me. My breath. Snow crunches beneath my feet, as the cleats on my snowshoes find purchase.
Once you awaken, you cannot go back to sleep.
This is the last of winter. Soon the snow will be gone. I can already see the green buds on the black branches. In places, blades of grass push up through what’s
left of the snow.
“It’s not that bad out here,” says Layla. “I am starting to like the quiet.”
“How much longer?” complains Izzy.
“This sucks,” adds Slade, huffing and puffing down the trail. “I can’t, like, breathe. Can we go home now?”
“I guess we’d better head back,” Layla concedes, dropping a comforting hand on Slade’s head.
* * *
Back inside the kids collapse on the couch, immediately returning to their devices—Izzy on the phone, Slade with his iPad. Despite all that’s happened, despite the fact their worlds have imploded, they seem—okay. Less light and exuberant, more prone to meltdown and tears. Izzy’s lost weight; Slade has gained some, a constellation of acne on his chin. Grief and sorrow have taken up residence in their eyes.
But they’ll be okay; we’ll make sure of it. They have Layla; they have me. We have each other. Friends are the family you choose; and family pulls you through your darkest days.
Layla and I make hot chocolate for the kids.
“Stay the night?” I offer.
“No,” she says. “We should go home. I’m trying to keep their routine.”
I get it. Trying to find that new normal after tragedy. It’s a slog; one foot in front of the other. She’s taken them out of school and they are attending classes online now until she figures out what to do, where to go, what’s next.
We don’t talk much about what happened, about the years of abuse she suffered with Mac, the fights turned violent, the affairs, or why she hid it all from me, or why I didn’t see it. We don’t talk about that final night in the cabin when I saved her, then she saved me, and then Grayson saved us both. We’ve been saving each other all our lives. It’s what we do.
“I don’t know if you heard,” she says. “But the magazine hit the shelves this week. The television news feature runs on Wednesday.”
“Yes,” I answer. “I know.”
She walks over to her bag and slips out an envelope, leaves it on the counter.