by Mailie Meloy
His wife tried to put her arms around him.
“No really,” he said. “I’m disgusting.”
Alice dropped her hands to her thighs as if she had never really expected contact. “You are disgusting,” she said. “We were just talking about that. That was the topic of the afternoon, in fact.”
He smiled. “I’m the leading expert. I could give a guest lecture.”
“Why don’t you?” his wife asked. “It would be so—edifying.”
He patted his pockets. “No notes.”
“Oh, just wing it.”
“I’m sure you have the salient facts down.”
“Actually, we don’t,” Alice said. “That’s exactly what we don’t have.”
“Why don’t you just tell her?” Naomi heard herself say. She had meant to keep her mouth shut, but she couldn’t stand to watch the two of them banter obliquely about what was now her life: the life she had plunged willingly, headlong into.
He turned to look at Naomi without hurry, his gaze like a police searchlight, taking its time because it had time. It found her in the shadows, casing his house.
“Naomi’s right,” his wife said. “She’s an objective party. We should listen to her advice.”
He smiled. It wasn’t an unpleasant smile, but it wasn’t private, either—not wolfish, not adoring, not wistful. He was being Alice’s husband, confronted in his own kitchen, with nothing to hide. She shouldn’t have come. “Hello, Naomi,” he said. “How’s Max?”
“Fine,” she lied. Her husband was not as forgiving as Alice. Max had high expectations of other people, and didn’t care much for compromise or moral ambiguity. When she married him, this quality had seemed passionate and decisive, but now it seemed harsh. He had trusted her, and now he didn’t, and wouldn’t again.
Alice reached out to brush her husband’s snow-damp hair from his face, but he was still looking at Naomi.
“Who was it who said that marriage is a long struggle for moral advantage?” he asked.
“Someone bitter,” Naomi said. “It shouldn’t be. It doesn’t have to be.”
“As I was driving back here from the gym,” he said, as if beginning his lecture, “I was thinking about the time I did summer stock at a theater in Colorado, because my older sister was doing it and it seemed like a way to meet girls. And how everyone was isolated, and thrown together in a place they wouldn’t be otherwise, and nervous energy became sexual energy. There was friction, and suspicion about who was doing what with whom, and some of it was founded.”
“I told her we’re having a baby,” Alice said.
“You told her we’re having a baby,” he repeated.
Naomi watched him: his strong hands, the pained look on his face. He had the intelligence that physically beautiful people have, because other people confide in them, but he had real intelligence, too. It was irresistible, even when he was acting indefensibly, as he was now.
“Why don’t you just tell me,” Alice said, “what’s going on?”
He opened the refrigerator, pulled out a large bottle of reddish sports drink, and drank from it. Naomi thought she could see him trying to decide what kind of man he was, or what kind he might seem to be. He screwed the cap back on.
“Nothing’s going on.”
“He always says that,” his wife said.
“Nothing?” Naomi asked.
“Nothing,” he said, putting the plastic bottle back and closing the fridge. “Except that we’re having a baby.”
“A baby,” Alice said plaintively, and she reached for him again. This time he conceded, and took his wife in his sweaty, sweatshirted arms, and they started to dance. He steered her toward the refrigerator with a little hitch in their glide, then toward the dishwasher. She looked as pleased as a child as he spun her around and brought her back in. Then they headed back across the kitchen floor as if they had always been dancing like this, and always would be, and anything else was only a vivid hallucination.
Naomi gathered her coat and edged past them, slipping out through the dining room and down the hall. They ignored her and danced on. She struggled to put her coat on, with clumsy hands. His car keys were on the hall table, where she had listened to them drop as if there were no other sound in the world. She thought of taking them, or of keying some furious message into the gleaming varnish of the table, but that would get her no closer to what she wanted. Also on the table was a black-and-white close-up in a pewter frame of the devastating toddler who could only be his son. Alice’s stepson. The boy had loose, dark curls and his father’s sleepy look, and he seemed, for such a small child, frightfully knowing. His father was still steering Alice around the kitchen.
Naomi saw how reckless it had been to fall so hard, but it was already done. She was a careful, methodical person in the rest of her life, and she tried to think clearly. She understood, better than Alice did, what he was doing. He was acting like the man he wanted to be, in hopes that he could become it. He would keep acting until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and then he would be the man he was. It would happen soon, and then he would need her. The thought gave her some comfort.
She went outside and stood on the step, thinking that she would never get used to unlocked houses, or to snow in September. She thought it might be true that everything had happened because life felt so unreal here—the strange isolation, the long hours, the lack of sleep—that a new life with a new man seemed possible. But it did seem possible.
His car, a beat-up old station wagon that suited his self-deprecation, was parked on the street. She had meant to walk home, but to what? His windshield was still wiped of snow. He would come looking for her soon, to tell her she was all that mattered; that seemed very clear. He wasn’t going to dance with Alice all night. His car keys were back in the house, but she didn’t need them. She was very tired. There was so little time for sleep, and now this mental confusion. She opened the unlocked passenger door and got inside, where it was still warm and smelled of him, and she rolled the seat back as far as it would go, to sleep and wait.
THE GIRL SAT in one of the mismatched upholstered chairs in the hotel room, and Leo sat in the other, where he’d waited for her to arrive. The window looked out on a courtyard, but the heavy curtains were closed. The girl didn’t seem to mind. Leo was still startled that she had come. Finding her ahead of him in line at the sandwich bar near the courthouse, he had asked her to meet him, convinced she’d say no. Or not show. There wasn’t much in it for her. But here she was.
“So,” Leo said.
“So.” She tugged her black skirt so it hung farther over her crossed legs.
“Where did you first meet him?” He wanted to get to the point, but carefully, afraid he might bore her or scare her away.
“At a party.”
The black skirt had a pointy, uneven hem, and she wore it with a blue Levi’s jacket and black flip-flops. Her hair was streaked dark and light, and her eyes were outlined in black. Montana Goth, he had come to think of it. It wasn’t real Goth; her lips were glossed pink.
“What kind of party?” he asked.
“Just some keg, at a house.”
“Was it a high school party? Why was he there?”
“He knew the kids who were having it.”
He imagined Troy Grayling in a dark room full of teenagers, sipping cheap beer from a plastic cup.
“How old were you then?” he asked. He felt himself slipping into the rhythms of the courtroom. He did it with Helen, too, caught himself grilling her, after a day watching the trial. He cross-examined waiters when they went to dinner. Helen was back at their hotel now, reading a novel, thinking he had to swim at the university pool.
“Fifteen, I guess,” she said.
She was eighteen now, he knew. Troy Grayling, who had killed Leo’s daughter, was twenty-four. The case had taken almost two years to come to trial. The trial took two weeks, and the jury had returned a guilty verdict the day before. Leo and his wife, Helen, had been in the Missoul
a courtroom every day, and it had been harrowing. Each morning in the gallery, confronted with the blank, mildly surprised look on Troy Grayling’s face, Leo thought about charging the defense table and prying the young man’s eyeballs out of his skull with a ballpoint pen. Or of bringing a knife in Helen’s expensive handbag, which no one ever searched, to draw across Grayling’s throat: the satisfying pop of the trachea, the sudden flow of blood. No conviction could be satisfying like that. He had touched his own throat during the testimony, feeling for the right spot.
But this girl, Sasha, had been a child when she met Grayling; he tried to remember that.
“How old were you when you first slept with him?” he asked.
“Fifteen,” she said.
“Was he the first?”
There was a pause. “Yes,” she said. It sounded provisional, and he wondered about her childhood.
“Did he seem dangerous to you? Back then?”
She pulled one foot up on the chair, hugging her knee—the skirt was long and loose enough for that—and considered the question while pulling on her darkly polished toes. It was a childish gesture, not a seductive one. “A little bit,” she said. “Not in a bad way.”
“It was a good kind of danger?”
“I mean, that’s just how Troy was.”
Leo blinked, and forced himself to breathe.
He had spoken to his daughter the night she disappeared. It was late in Manhattan, and would have been dark in the wooded canyon outside Missoula, where Emily was house-sitting. She was studying forestry at the University of Montana and had been telling him about her fieldwork, which she loved, when she stopped abruptly and made a funny noise, then said, “Give Angela my love,” and hung up. Leo hesitated, called back to no answer, and then called the Missoula police. He didn’t know anyone named Angela. It had to be a code: Emily was being told to act natural and get off the phone. He spent some time describing the problem to the dispatcher, and then searching his e-mail inbox for the house address Emily had sent. When the police arrived in the canyon, the house was empty. There was a cut window screen and a full cup of cold tea by the phone, no sign of struggle. They never found the knife, and Leo guessed it was at the bottom of the river that drifted through town. A pair of hikers found Emily’s body in a disused railroad tunnel in the mountains. It had been a bad moment when the DA showed the photographs in court. Leo had seen the photos before, but not projected on a six-foot screen. Troy Grayling was the only suspect, with a DNA match, but he had never confessed. He said he had been fishing near Whitefish, two hours north, on the night she was taken. His brother and his parents swore it was true. Leo had quit his job after Emily’s death so he could give his full attention to the case, and now it was over, but questions remained unanswered.
Lying awake at night, Leo had gone over the decisions that might have led to a different outcome. If he had objected to Emily’s house-sitting in a remote house. If he had tried to keep her on the East Coast for college. If they hadn’t sent her at fifteen to the outdoor course in Wyoming that convinced her to want bigness, ruralness, westernness. Leo designed sky-blocking office buildings for a living, and wondered if forestry was a direct challenge to him. But he had loved her adventurousness, amazed that he and quiet Helen, who taught fourth grade in a private school, could produce such a fearless girl.
He had argued with Emily about her choices, to test her resolve, but her gray eyes would only get solemn and sure, and her chin would lift stubbornly. Her favorite book at seven had been The Lorax, Dr. Seuss on environmental ruin and corporate greed: “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.” She had read it in their apartment in Chelsea, with its little square of garden. The chopped trees in the book had triggered in her a fierce indignation and fear for the planet. Even as a child she wanted vast forests, not gardens.
She was their only child, born when he and Helen were both in their thirties, and they had been happy with one. He wondered now if that had been a mistake, but it was hard to imagine other children. Emily was so particular and real to him, still. The way her hair curled around her small ears, the faces she made at his jokes, her breathless laugh. When she was in high school, a man tried to pull her off her bicycle, and Emily had roared at him, pushing him away, and ridden home. She had described the scene in the kitchen, crying and shaking and laughing at the sound she had made, trying to imitate it with all the adrenaline gone. She was slight but very strong. He wondered why she hadn’t fought off Troy Grayling, and guessed the man had surprised her. She had been talking on the phone, and then the knife was at her throat. There were marks there, where he hadn’t cut her deeply but had held the blade against the skin. Grayling must have whispered to her to get off the phone as if nothing was wrong, and she must have believed he would kill her if she didn’t. But she was clever, and sent her father a signal, knowing he would understand.
The Goth girl was looking at him, waiting. What had she said? That’s just how Troy was. He tried to pretend that this statement could be reasonable. “What do you mean, that’s how he was?”
The girl shrugged. “He had an edge.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“He didn’t do anything,” she said, but she watched him for information about her performance. It was an infantile expression: a child’s attempt at lying.
“What about the DNA match?” he asked.
“He was framed by the cops.” She threw the words away, bored by them already. “Why did you ask me to a hotel room?”
“To talk in private.”
“I thought maybe you wanted to fuck me.” Again the unguarded, waiting gaze.
He coughed in surprise. “No.”
“Didn’t you think about it?”
He hadn’t. He had watched her testimony and felt only horror at her loyalty to Troy Grayling, her stonewalling of the DA, but he had hoped to find a way through to her. He had, after all, some experience with teenage girls. Now she lazily pulled off her jean jacket and he watched, frozen, as she crossed to him and put her hands on the arms of his chair, leaning so close he could smell her sweet powdery scent. Her features were immature and undefined under her makeup, and her black tank top hung loose, revealing small breasts in a black bra. Her knees bumped against his.
“But you want to,” she said, playing at grown-up seduction. “And I could use the money.”
He made himself stern and distant. “Sit down,” he said. “I’m not giving you money. I don’t want sex. I just have questions I want to ask you.”
She sighed, and stood, and flopped down in her own chair again. “Twenty dollars a question.”
“I’m not paying you,” he said. “I think you owe me the truth.”
“I don’t owe you shit.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that.”
She laughed and rolled her eyes. “Okay, Dad.”
The word made his stomach flip. He tried to focus on the questions that had made him approach her in the first place. He was within reach of the information he craved. He just had to find a way through this disorderly adolescent mind. “Did Troy know my daughter?” he asked. “I’m not trying to get you in trouble. I just want to know.”
She said nothing.
“If they had known each other, how might they have met?”
She sighed, and looked around the dim room.
“Sasha,” he said. “Did he know Emily?”
“I dunno.”
“But it’s possible?”
“Missoula’s not huge or anything.”
“Had he seen her?”
“Stop asking me!”
“Tell me about him. What does he like to do?”
She thought about it. “He plays drums,” she said. “He’s awesome at pool. He ran track in high school, and he still likes running, ’cause it calms him down.”
“Where did he run?”
“On the river trail, or at the track.”
“Which track?”
She hesitated. “The Grizzly one,” she said, her eyes locked to his.
Leo forced himself not to react, to stay quiet. Emily had run at the university track. Slight Emily in running tights, on the rubbery track in the clear mountain air. She had a loping, easy stride, and had to sprint to break a sweat. Would Grayling have fallen in beside her? Struck up a conversation?
“So he’d seen her,” Leo said. “Did he talk to you about it?”
“No.”
“But you know he’d seen her.”
“No.”
She had wanted to tell him, clearly. Now was she changing her mind?
“I won’t get you in trouble,” he said. “They already have a conviction. It’s just between you and me.”
“Fuck off.”
“Did he talk to you about her? Did you think he would do something?”
“No!”
“Were you jealous?”
She said nothing.
“You were!” He was on to something, lifting the edge.
“He already had me,” she said, her voice high and strained.
It took him a second to get his head around this. “What do you mean, he had you?”
“I mean, why did he need her?”
“He raped and killed her,” he said. “You wanted to be his girl to rape and kill?”
She hesitated. “He wasn’t going to hurt her.”
There was a silence in the room that seemed to roar in his ears.
“How do you know that?” he asked.
She blushed furiously. “I just know.”
He tried to follow this. “Did he rape you?”
She glowered at him, and he knew he was right. He felt the excitement of the chase, of the discovery.
“Did he the first time?” he asked. “Or was that his thing, did you pretend?”
She looked like she might cry. Why hadn’t the cops gotten to this? The DA? But the DA was just a kid. And maybe it wouldn’t have helped the case, which he had won with what he had.
“So you were jealous of Emily,” Leo said, “because Troy had seen her and wanted her. Had you met her, too?”
She shook her head.