Twenty minutes passed. The other passengers were restless. The woman was texting someone. The sound of her nails on her phone’s screen put Sam on edge.
After forty-five minutes, a flight attendant informed them that there was a problem with the engine. There was a chorus of irritation and disappointment.
“We will of course provide everyone with accommodation for the night,” the flight attendant added.
“Fuck you,” a man said.
“It’s not her fault,” Sam said without thinking. The man didn’t seem to hear him, but the dark-haired woman smiled.
“It can’t be a fun job,” she said to Sam.
He nodded. “You have to deal with people at their absolute worst, their most irritable.”
“And entitled.”
“Yes, and entitled.”
He helped her get her suitcase down from the overhead bin. She didn’t actually look like Sara at all, he realized. Her features were sharper, and she was taller. But now that the idea was in his head, he couldn’t get rid of it.
As they exited the plane, he texted Jocelyn to let her know what was happening. She sent back a frowning face, and then: I miss you.
I miss you too, he replied. He spotted the dark-haired woman a few feet in front of him. He walked faster, until he was close enough to tap her shoulder.
“Have a drink with me?” he asked.
Sam and Blake were roommates their freshman and sophomore years of college. During their junior year they moved to a house off campus, which they shared with two other students.
It was difficult, afterward, to explain why they were such close friends. At the time Sam didn’t give it much thought. The two of them just got along really well. They liked a lot of the same music and movies and were content to sit around smoking weed, talking about girls and philosophy and basketball. You wouldn’t think a life-altering friendship could be built out of such mundane things, but it can.
Sam and Sara slept together about a year before she and Blake started dating. It wasn’t that big of a deal. Everyone in their group of friends slept together at some point. Blake once joked that casual sex was the only sport at which Crawford students truly excelled. It was unfashionable to get jealous, to take it too seriously.
In the small Massachusetts town where he grew up, Sam was called a faggot, or ignored. At Crawford, girls loved his thin frame, his curly hair, his T-shirt with Walter Benjamin’s face on it. He had a reputation as a womanizer, selfish, bad news, a possible sex addict, which he thought was unfair. He believed that he was a much more modern and enlightened kind of man than his father, a second-rate anthropology professor who left his mother for a TA.
At the time Blake and Sara started dating, Sam had just broken up with his most recent girlfriend, an impossibly beautiful sculpture major named Alison. For reasons he could not explain, even to himself, he had cheated on her mercilessly. One of the girls he slept with toward the end of the relationship was Lizzie, Sara’s best friend. But Lizzie had known he had a girlfriend, just as Alison knew he slept around. It wasn’t particularly nice of him, but Sam still didn’t think he deserved the cold way that Sara treated him.
When he brought it up to Blake, it went badly.
“What the fuck are you even talking about?” Blake had asked.
“She’s just kind of …” Sam struggled. It was true that she had always been unfailingly polite.
“If you think she’s judging you, maybe that’s your issue.”
It was as close to a real fight as they ever got. Sam admitted that he was being paranoid.
Sam knew that Blake started taking antipsychotic medication in high school. Blake had revealed it early in their friendship, during one of their many late-night, alcohol-fueled conversations. Sam didn’t take it very seriously at the time. A lot of the people he knew at Crawford were on one psychiatric medication or another. It wasn’t until senior year that he realized Blake had a real problem. He found him in the kitchen at dawn, sewing Sara’s name into the palm of his hand. Sam startled him, and Blake—accidentally, apparently—plunged the needle straight through his hand. Sam wrapped the wound in paper towels while they waited for the ambulance to arrive.
Sara met them at the hospital. She sat by Blake’s side all night, still wearing her pajamas, clutching his uninjured hand in hers. They had only been dating for a few months, but under the cold fluorescent light, they looked like they had known each other for decades. Their bodies folded into each other’s.
Blake’s psychiatrist put him on new drugs that made him a little quieter and more tired than before, but otherwise he seemed back to normal. He and Sara started to spend all their time together. Theirs was a secret world. No one else was allowed inside. No one else was even allowed to look.
The dark-haired woman’s name was Mary. “Boring, I know,” she said.
“Not at all. Like, if I met an old lady named Mary, that’s not a big deal, but you don’t look like a Mary, so that makes it exciting.”
Listening to himself talk made him want to bash his head into the wall. But he kept going.
“So what brings you to sunny California?” Outside the airport hotel, it was raining heavily.
She laughed, a pretty, girlish laugh he suspected was practiced. “Work.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a pharmaceutical rep.”
“Really?”
“I know, I know. It’s not exactly the most honorable job.”
“It’s not the least honorable job, either.”
“I suppose not.”
“Like, if we put it on a scale, ten being a war criminal, and one being, let’s say, doctors without borders, a pharmaceutical rep is maybe, a five?”
“A five?”
He worried briefly that she was offended, that he should have said a three or a four. But she smiled.
“Is ‘war criminal’ really a profession, do you think?” she asked.
“Well, I imagine it eats up a good part of the day.”
“Yeah, it’s hard to believe they see it as a hobby.”
“I wonder what the hours are like,” he said. His second gin and tonic was making him reckless. “I wonder if they get lots of paid time off.”
“Probably not. And the work-life balance must be hard. Great opportunities for growth, though.”
Now he, too, was giggling. They went up to her hotel room.
During their sophomore year Sam and Blake started a literary magazine called the Pine Street Review, named after the street they lived on. They got all their friends to write poems for it, and Sara made the cover, a cyanotype of keys and leaves and a dead moth. One of their friends, who lived in a big old house off campus, hosted the release party. They decorated the living room with Christmas lights and wildflowers in small glass jars. Of course, the party and not the poems was the point of the whole endeavor.
The poems were, on the whole, pretty bad. Sam had not kept a single copy. What he did have in his possession was an edition of Crawford’s student newspaper from the week that Sara was declared missing. The Crawford Voice was published monthly, and that issue contained, in addition to information about the case, a poem Blake had written, titled “For Sara.”
& when i woke
all that was left—a shadow
of a memory of a shadow
i pressed my lips
bang against the paper.
i took a silver hammer
to the delicate machine
in my head. inside
a bird, its wings heavy with honey and ink—
a song so beautiful only you can hear it
By the time the issue went to print, Sara’s body had been found, and Blake had confessed to killing her.
Sam told the police that he never saw Blake display any violent or misogynistic tendencies. He didn’t consider the hand-sewing incident violent, because Blake clearly didn’t want to hurt anyone else while he was doing it. And anyway, Sam would have lied for Blake, easily, even und
er oath.
There was only one other exception, and it didn’t even come to mind until a couple of years after Sara’s death. It was the last week of their junior year. Some friends of theirs were having a celebratory barbecue. Sam wasn’t sure why so many of his classmates wanted to act like suburban dads, grilling hot dogs and standing around in flip-flops. Their friends had a big, long backyard that dipped into a creek. There were girls playing in the water. He saw Alison in a black bikini, laughing, her hair wet against her shoulders. When she caught him staring, she glared imperiously.
Sam spent most of the party with Blake and Sara. Blake was eating ribs and Sara was daydreaming. She leaned into him and he stroked her head, leaving drops of barbecue sauce in her hair. Lizzie was there, sort of hovering around Sara the way she often did, like a guardian angel or a babysitter. If it irritated Sara, she didn’t show it.
By sundown almost everyone was drunk. A girl Sam didn’t recognize came up to them, barefoot, swaying. She was probably someone’s sister or cousin, in town for graduation.
“Wow,” she said to Sara. “You are so beautiful. You are exquisite.”
“Thanks,” said Sara, bemused.
The girl wandered off. When she was out of earshot, Blake said: “She has a dog’s face.”
It wasn’t exactly sexist, or even that cruel, but it stayed in Sam’s mind because of the glee with which Blake had said it. Sam and Lizzie had made eye contact for just a second, and then both burst into laughter. It was such a strange thing to say, especially for Blake. There was no way to understand it except as a very odd, bad joke.
In Mary’s hotel room, Sam felt the drinks wearing off, his exhaustion creeping in. He suggested that they have another drink out of the minibar, and she agreed. The tiny bottle of Sapphire gin in her hand made her look like a giant.
“You remind me of someone,” he said recklessly.
“Who?”
“Someone I liked a lot.”
“An ex-girlfriend?”
“No. No.” He rested his hand on her thigh, the soft, dark fabric of her skirt. “She wasn’t my girlfriend.”
“But you wanted her to be?”
He didn’t mean for her to take it seriously, to get so curious.
“Not exactly.”
“What happened to her?”
“She was murdered, actually.”
“Oh my God!” Mary’s eyes went wide, revealing wrinkles Sam hadn’t noticed before. The light in the hotel room was less forgiving than it was in the bar. “That’s terrible.”
“It is,” he agreed.
“Why? What happened? Did they catch the person who did it?”
Sam sighed deeply. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Mary frowned. “You’re the one who brought it up.”
“I know. I know.” His hand was under her skirt now, her thighs cold from the air-conditioning. “I shouldn’t have.”
They kissed for a while. Abruptly Mary stood up. “Would you like some water?” she asked.
“Sure.”
She got two heavy glasses from the bathroom and filled them with tap water. They sat and drank in silence. When his glass was empty, Sam kissed her again, and started to unbutton her shirt.
She moved his hands away, but continued to kiss him. This went on for a few minutes. Sam was irritated. He took each of Mary’s cold, pretty hands firmly in his and placed them by her sides.
“Really?” she said.
“Really, what?” A headache started to pulse behind his temples.
“Is this really what you want to do?”
“To have sex? Yes. Isn’t that why we’re here?”
“I don’t want to have sex with you.”
“Fine. You could have said that.”
“I am saying that.”
He stood up. He could not remember the last time he felt so humiliated.
“You know,” he said. “A person could get a little confused, after being invited to another person’s hotel room. They might get somewhat puzzled.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, it is.”
“And then that person might, in their confusion, do something like pin my hands behind my back?”
“What? I didn’t do that.”
“You just did!”
Sam had no idea how to respond. He was not a man who hurt women in hotel rooms. The whole thing felt like watching a bad television show, watching a character make terrible choices. It was unbearable.
“That wasn’t my intention,” he said, finally.
“I’m sure it wasn’t.” Her voice was quiet and very even.
They stared at each other. Finally she said, “I think you should leave. To avoid further confusion.”
He did.
In the morning, Sam paid a stupid sum of money for an upgrade on his flight home, just to make sure he wasn’t seated next to Mary. This time the person next to him was a grumpy man in an expensive-looking suit. Once the plane was safely in the air, Sam took two Valium, a parting gift from his mother.
He started to watch a movie but fell asleep twenty minutes in. The movie was about a gangster who wanted revenge against another gangster. The Valium made it hard to tell if the movie was supposed to be funny or not. It slipped into his dreams. In his dream, both gangsters were Sara. One Sara had a gun, but she didn’t know how to use it and wanted him to help. He kept saying he didn’t know how to use a gun either, but his voice was too quiet for her to hear. What? she kept saying, getting louder and more irritated. What? The other Sara was approaching. Sam woke with a start as the airplane was touching down.
A week after Blake was released from the psychiatric hospital, Sam went to visit him. Blake’s family was more or less what he imagined: kind, warm, worried. They gave him the guest room, down the hall from where the rest of them slept, with fresh towels folded at the foot of the bed and African violets growing in little terra-cotta pots by the windowsill. Blake was barely recognizable. He was skeleton-thin, despite the bowls full of healthy snacks that his mother kept bringing him, and his hair had been cut very short. Due to the new antipsychotics he was on, he spoke slowly, or not at all. Even if Sam had the courage to ask him what had really happened, Blake probably wouldn’t have been able to answer. They spent the weekend watching television and going for walks around the neighborhood. On their walks, the Campbells’ dog, Louis, whined and tugged at his leash because of how slowly they were moving. Sam was relieved when Monday arrived. He and Blake had not spoken since that visit.
Later that same month, Sam moved home to live with his mother. He got a job at a gallery in Boston. It took him an hour and a half each way to get to work. He passed the time by reading. He read more during his commute, he suspected, than he had during his entire college experience. He was especially interested in books about sociopaths. He learned about their typical traits. They were charming, had few inhibitions, and were often cruel. Blake was certainly charming, but so was Sam. He didn’t have many inhibitions, but neither did anyone at Crawford. As for cruelty—didn’t killing Sara speak for itself?
Sam knew that the judge ruled that Blake was temporarily insane when he killed Sara, which meant he didn’t know that what he was doing was illegal. Sam also knew that Blake was on a lot of medications, even before he started college, and that he sometimes said incomprehensible shit or slept for days at a time. That, plus the acid the two of them had taken, could lead to a psychotic episode.
Everyone who mattered had decided that Blake was out of his mind and could not be held responsible for Sara’s death. Sam had no reason to think he knew better. Still, he wondered if Blake could have fooled everyone. It was hard to imagine, but not that much harder than it was to imagine his best friend slitting Sara’s throat.
What he hated Blake for, he had to admit to himself, was not just killing Sara but destroying every good memory he had of his college days. It was all poisoned. When Sam thought of the bonfire they made in the woods at dawn, the issues of the Pine Stree
t Review they stayed up all night putting together, the parties they went to, the road trip they’d taken to an abandoned Christian theme park in Connecticut, he did not feel nostalgic or sentimental. He felt ill. Every good moment, every small adventure, was now colored by the knowledge of what Blake had done, of who Blake was. Even the image of sitting around their backyard at dusk, smoking weed, now felt sinister.
It was late when he got home. Jocelyn was asleep on the couch, a stack of papers on the coffee table beside her. She rose to kiss him, standing on her toes to meet his mouth. She really was absurdly pretty, Sam thought, maybe even prettier than the girls he slept with in college. She followed him into their bedroom. They fucked quietly, efficiently, and fell asleep. Around dawn, they woke and fucked again. Jocelyn made sounds like a dog being kicked.
In the morning, they slept late and went out to brunch around noon. It was Sam’s idea, but Jocelyn picked the restaurant, a place a friend of hers had recommended. The white tablecloths and heavy silverware made him think of room service in a hotel. Jocelyn was wearing a blue dress and her hair in braids across the top of her head. They talked about her classes, her friends, the television shows they both liked, a movie she wanted to see. They both drank several glasses of good red wine. Sam didn’t mean to bring up Blake, but he did. They had only spoken about him a few times, when they first started dating. It took Jocelyn a few seconds to recognize his name.
“Oh, shit,” she said, when she did. “What made you think of that?”
“Not sure,” Sam lied, pouring himself another glass of wine. “He’s been on my mind lately. I guess I’ve never really dealt with what happened.”
Jocelyn murmured sympathetically.
“It’s fucked up,” she agreed. “But you know, it happens. More often than you’d like to think. People take the wrong cough medicine and end up strangling their kids. The only thing more fragile than the body is the mind.”
Where the fuck did she hear that? Sam wanted to know. Instead he said, “I’ve been wondering if he’s a sociopath.”
She nodded. “It’s possible. I know a therapist who had a client who she says was a psychopath. He killed himself in her office. Like, hanged himself in the entryway, so that when she opened the door, there he was.”
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