Under a Dark Sky

by Lori Rader-Day

  I dropped the stuffed dog I’d picked up at the gift shop onto her bed. “Arf,” I said and turned to take a chair. On a ledge in front of the window, several more of the same stuffed toy dog formed a conga line. “Oh, now I get why they had a run on these things.”

  “The guys at the station,” she said, looking pleased.

  “How are you feeling?” I said, sitting.

  “You ever see a documentary where a baby is born and it’s all covered in goo and yelling and seems like maybe it’s a little chucked off to be alive? That’s how I feel.” She smiled. “Except where I’m happy to be alive. It just hurts to be, is all. Thanks for calling for help.”

  “I’m not convinced that was me.”

  “Some of the buttons you pushed on my radio were the right ones. You just need take your fingers off the button sometimes, so people can talk back to you,” she said. “So what part of that”—with gestures to my bandaged hands, the blood and wine on my shirt—“is our accident and what part is bar brawl?”

  I catalogued the injuries. “Interesting that you call it a bar brawl—”

  “They told me about your wine bottle, slugger,” she said, her eyes falling closed for a second. “Also you smell like the floor of the Hide-a-Way bar past three in the morning.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No apologies necessary.” She opened her eyes and seemed a little stronger. Mad. “He was going to burn down the house! What kind of—” The boundaries of her vocabulary failed her. “Why would he do that?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “To destroy evidence, maybe? To burn the house from the face of the earth, I think.”

  “He tried to hurt you?”

  “It seemed like he might.” I raised my hands to my face but stopped at the sight of the mitten bandages. “I don’t know. There were moments when I thought he would kill me, but then there were others . . .”

  “What?”

  “There were other moments when it seemed as though he couldn’t possibly have hurt anyone, that he just wanted me to—catch up. Like he wanted something from me, but never got around to asking for it. Or maybe he was asking the whole time and I didn’t understand.”

  She scooted upright a bit, sucking her breath in pain. “Always wear your seat belts, kids. What could he have wanted from you?”

  “Not sure.” I stared at the stuffed dog’s stupid face. Its tongue hung out in a pink felt half-moon. “Paris is waking up. Anytime now.”

  “She’s got a lot to take in when she does,” Cooley said, another twinge of discomfort crossing her face, either at her injuries or the topic or both. “Look, from what I hear, you didn’t have much choice. And then you tried to save him. That’s his blood on you, isn’t it? From dragging him out of the lake? From giving him CPR?”

  “He said he didn’t kill Malloy,” I said. “But I killed him. I killed him.” I was a good guy. I had always meant to be, anyway.

  “We hit him with a car, Eden. I’m not sure your wine bottle did all the damage. Anyway, you wouldn’t have hurt anyone if you didn’t have to,” Cooley continued more gently. “I don’t know you that well, but it seems to me you wouldn’t.” She walked the toy dog across her bedsheets a few paces. “Would you?”

  “The screwdriver—I thought—”

  “But he threw it away, right? That’s what the sheriff said. Perez recovered it in the shallows there.”

  “He threw it away.”

  “But you couldn’t be sure. Why set the house on fire? To destroy evidence—but against which of them? Himself. That’s what the sheriff thinks.”

  And probably why I was wandering around unescorted. I hadn’t killed Dev; I had killed the killer. I was impatient. “I’m sorry that I don’t care about that house. I’m sure the taxpayers of the state of Michigan care. I’m sure Warren cares—”

  “War-ren,” Cooley sang, then got serious. “OK, I’m sorry. You don’t think he deserved to die, and he didn’t. Even if he meant to set the place ablaze, even if he killed his friend. Even if he meant to kill you?”

  “What does Sam have to say about all these crimes he confessed to? Are they his or are they Dev’s?”

  Cooley plucked at the blanket over her knees. “Well, I’m not sure I can divulge police business—”

  “Cooley, come on.”

  “I can say he confessed to drinking red wine from a cup in your room, but that’s no crime.” She sniffed. “Made for a hard night for that other guy and his allergies, and he should’ve just said so.”

  “I barely remember the wine,” I said. “Sam drank it all.” He’d finished the cup he’d poured for me that morning as I slept. Hair of the dog. Maybe Sam hadn’t gotten fired for the theft of wine by the bottle. Maybe he’d been sacked for all the wine he’d stolen, sip by sip. He hadn’t rescued the wine from evidence because of its street value, my guess. It mattered more than money to Sam to know where his next drink would come from.

  “He also suggested that he might have broken the railing Paris went through,” Cooley said. “He remembers sitting on it that first day.”

  “But no one broke it,” I said. “It was fixed, wasn’t it?”

  “He didn’t seem to know that,” Cooley said.

  We looked at each other. A man who confessed to crimes he hadn’t committed only injected further chaos into the situation, but for what purpose? What was the point? Who did it protect?

  And then I saw it.

  Himself.

  The empty jail was a safer place than the motel. Malloy. Paris. Dev. A murderer was loose, and Sam had decided not to take any more chances. He knew he wasn’t the killer, so he knew he wasn’t safe.

  “He didn’t confess to Malloy’s murder at all, did he?” I said. “He confessed to causing accidents just to take himself out of the game. But not to the murder. Though I bet Barrows is giving Sam the time to think about other crimes he might have committed. Did he happen to fess up to anything . . . older? Like, five years older?”

  Her eyes widened. “How did you—” She sat up straighter in the bed. “I mean. I can’t say.”

  Tash’s belly full of wine. That and the pills from Dev, but neither had known about the other. Neither had been willing to admit their participation.

  We all did our part.

  Malloy broke things off with Tash for Paris. Paris felt guilty.

  Dev got Tash the pills she asked for. Dev felt guilty.

  Sam plied Tash with wine. Sam felt guilty.

  Martha? Martha had left Tash alone. Martha felt guilty.

  Except if they’d only conferred, they might have been able to sleep at night. “He won’t go to prison for that, surely.”

  “Not for that,” she said. “He’s being held as a person of interest, but then you—well, Dev seems like a better suspect, but he’s—”

  I looked down at my shirt, pink with wine. There was a smear of dark red-brown across my stomach. Dev’s blood. “So that’s the going theory? That Dev killed Malloy? I’m not convinced.”

  “You didn’t really have a thing for that kid, did you? Thought you’d be tired of guys with a body count by now.”

  I wouldn’t look at her.

  “Come on, that’s a joke. Just not a funny one, I guess.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t talk.

  “Why are you crying? I’m sorry. I won’t make any more jokes, honest.”

  I couldn’t talk. I concentrated on the light coming through the slats of the blinds. “Bix,” I whispered.

  “Your husband,” she said, nodding at me to pick up the thread of the story. “Look at the doggie and tell me. Tell the doggie. Your husband was in a car accident with his—friend and they both died, along with a couple more people . . . jump in when we get to the sore spot.”

  “A family,” I choked.

  “I heard that,” she said and now she looked at the dog instead of me. “A kid.”

  The photos in the paper afterward haunted me. I visited the online comment sections of the local newspapers
and community pages, just to read the names they called Bix. I wasn’t trying to get it all out, as Martha had suggested. It was not a purging. I stuffed it back in, force-feeding myself the punishment, the entire dose for both of us. “He was four years old.”

  Cooley didn’t have to say a word.

  “And—” I gulped.

  “And?” she said.

  I felt hollow. No, worse than that. I was turned inside out so that I wore my shame on the outside, black heart and all.

  “Bix was at fault,” I managed.

  “He was drunk,” she said, gently. “I read the medical reports, Eden. He was bombed. He drove down the wrong side of the divided highway. I mean, how out of it do you have to—”

  “He did it,” I said. “On purpose.”

  Cooley’s mouth fell, and then she turned her attention back to the toy dog, pulling at its pink tongue.

  “He did it,” I said. “He did.”

  “How do you know?”

  How did I know? I had only ever been the person tuned to his station for his mood, his rage. My bones still hummed his desperation. He had built me from his misery. No version of myself would have ever been the right one. The irony was while he tried to piece me together, he was the broken one. No amount of trying to put Bix together would have ever done the trick. It had just taken me a long time to understand that, much too long to save them all. In this, I was no hero. But neither was he.

  I would never know if he remembered, years ago, the car that had roared past us in the night, the one he’d spotted first and then saved us from. I remembered. He’s going to kill someone, I’d said, even though the road was empty, the hour late.

  If he was going to kill someone, Bix had replied. I had never heard the rest. But I knew what he’d said, now.

  If he was going to kill someone, he would have turned off the lights.

  Like Bix did, when the time came. If it didn’t matter who was killed, and you just wanted to make sure someone went with you, you turned off the headlights and you drove. You closed your eyes, maybe. You put things in the hands of luck and you drove until something stopped you.

  “He didn’t want to live anymore,” I said. Cooley leaned forward to hear the words through my sobs. “He didn’t want to live.”

  “He was military?” she said. “Did he see combat? PTSD?”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Did you? See combat?”

  My eyes flew open. “He didn’t mean to,” I said, thinking of the barbecue we’d gone to the day after the worst night. Bix holding court, me in long sleeves to hide the bruises. “It was just once. Twice. He didn’t know what was happening, he was so out of his mind on the bad nights—”

  “Was he in treatment or anything?”

  I shook my head.

  “He needed to be. You both did. Did you ask him to go to therapy?”

  Here was the tricky part. I had never insisted. “He got better,” I said. “Just one day, I realized that things had been quiet, calm. No more bad dreams. No more screaming in the night. The neighbors stopped calling the cops. He got better.”

  Cooley stroked the toy dog’s ear and gazed toward the window. “Just one day? Like that?”

  “We moved from base to base and I thought, maybe once we settled down, saw his family more often.” I went along with it all. Any plan that might work, I went along. And then the house, the dream house, the stability. Surely it would work. “I thought if he could stay in one place for a minute—”

  “But then he met the other woman?” she said. “Or, you mean he got better because of—”

  “Colleen.” I wasn’t even afraid of the name anymore. It was just a name, not an incantation. She would not appear before me if I said it aloud. She would not appear, ever.

  I couldn’t even hate her anymore. She had paid for her decision, hadn’t she? She had paid the bill, all right. His, hers, mine. “He was better. I didn’t know it was because he was somewhere else, taking it out on her.”

  Or maybe I hadn’t wanted to know. My specialty was surfaces, the slant of light on the outside of the thing instead of what went on underneath. I had not been paying the proper attention because it was easier not to notice.

  “You know he did it on purpose?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “But you didn’t tell anyone? Because of insurance or what?”

  I had needed the insurance, it was true. But I’d kept it to myself because I didn’t want to face the full truth. I didn’t want to put it in words. Even now, to Cooley, I didn’t want to say it.

  He had loved Colleen enough to take her with him.

  When the time came, when he really meant forever, he chose Colleen. He chose Colleen and . . . not me. He had killed her, and still I wondered. Why not me, Bix?

  He had led a thousand troops into war, trained them and led them and sometimes cradled them as they died, but when the time came, he left one behind.

  “Never mind,” Cooley said. “Does anyone else know he did it on purpose?”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. “No.”

  “Who would it help if you told the whole story?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Who would it hurt?”

  I pictured Colleen’s mother, wrapped up in her blue coat, cold to the bone despite the heat. She had wanted the truth but needed the lie.

  “Would it hurt more than it helped?” Cooley said. “To tell the whole truth?”

  The whole truth made me a horrible person. I knew that much.

  “It’s OK to stay uncertain about it,” she said. “You weren’t there. You don’t know.”

  “What about . . . justice?”

  “Did you want me to side with justice? I can do it.” She gestured toward a cabinet near the door. “Grab my shiny badge from the closet.”

  “I just thought—”

  “Whose justice? Will you feel better?”

  I didn’t answer. I would never feel better.

  “He was drunk. He drank a lot?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was a sick man, your husband,” she said.

  The lights on all through the house, and Bix raving. A bad night. The worst night. Bugs just under his skin, crawling. Lashing out. I was the enemy. And then crying when he realized, crying and wanting to go home, and yet there we were, in the only home he’d had since he was a kid. He didn’t mean home. He meant—before. Before all the things that changed him. But his was another youth lost and unavailable. His mother hadn’t realized. He hadn’t wanted her to know. Bix was her war hero, her cherished son and clean soul, unassailable. She would have been no help. I was no help, and I didn’t ask for any. When Michele made jokes about how I went along with it all, never made a peep, never stood up for myself—I could barely take the insult. She had no idea what I’d gone along with.

  Only Colleen had helped, but then she had only helped me.

  “Sick,” I said, but I didn’t mean Bix. “It’s just that it’s—”

  “What?”

  “Lonely. To be the only person who knows.”

  “I guess it would be,” she said. “But now you’re not.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Cooley lay back in her bed, blinking. Exhausted. I felt the same but hadn’t managed to snag a hospital bed for the night. I had no place to go. No room at the Hide-a-Way, and the guest house was still closed. For a moment I was sorry I hadn’t gone back to Warren’s house. I could have messed up that neat arrangement of throw pillows. I spent a few minutes imagining how, but then forced my mind back to the events of the week. Even the jail would be occupied, at least one cell.

  “Why don’t you get some sleep, Cooley?”

  “I’m all right,” she said, but by the time she had said it, her eyes were closed. I stood up, fetched the dog from her bed, and went to the ledge to place the toy among its peers.

  All six of the dogs faced out, the pink felt tongues razzing me. I started to turn for the door, but went back, reaching for
my camera and then stopping. Six dogs. Six of them.

  One, Malloy. I plucked it off the shelf.

  Another one, Hillary. She had everything to gain and everything to lose, but I couldn’t assign her Malloy’s death. I didn’t believe in it. I tucked the two dogs under my arm and faced the last of them. Four.

  Sam, who had chosen police custody rather than face what was happening. Who did he protect by confessing to things he couldn’t have done? Himself? Or someone else? Dev, who had decided to burn the whole world down, to destroy or protect, no one alive knew which. Paris, I counted out. Martha. None of these people were whole. I couldn’t separate them out.

  I put the dogs back, lining them up prettily so that Cooley could enjoy their smug little faces when she woke up. All six of them.

  Six.

  But it wasn’t six, anymore.

  One, Tash. I moved one of the dogs off the ledge. Five.

  Paris, who stole the boyfriend, and could not move beyond him, though he was long lost to her and wouldn’t take her calls.

  Dev, who supplied the pills, but had locked himself into a future of doling out pills, a future he wouldn’t have chosen if he had known how to defy momentum, how to get the girl any other way.

  Sam, who brought the wine, who always brought the wine. Who had developed a life around wine and then smashed it to pieces.

  Martha, who left Tash alone. Martha, who could not stand to be alone.

  The last dog on the ledge was Malloy.

  What had Malloy said about the friends coming together for the week? Some of us have not had our fill of mourning. But Malloy had. He had called himself cruel, an asshole. And then a pilgrim, but for what? To work through a few things—but not him. Not Malloy. The work belonged to others who couldn’t move on from the role they each played in Tash’s death. But Malloy was fine. Malloy would always land on his feet. But the rest of them hadn’t.

  They didn’t love him.

  They didn’t love him at all. They hated him.

  It all made sense to me now. How they couldn’t be together comfortably. How they had followed, me, the stranger, around while they figured out how to be in the same room. They feared him, maybe. They wanted something from him he couldn’t give. They wanted him to be someone he wasn’t. But he was not the center. There was no center, not without Tash. He was only comfortable, while the rest of them suffered. He was merely charming. The problem with charm was that it masked a multitude of sins. Charm was the worst.