Burning September

by Melissa Simonson

  “No. Not really. I just wanted to see how you’ve been, say hi.”

  “Well. Hi.” I gave him my best attempt at a smile. “But I do have to get going.”

  “Sure. Sure.” He smiled back, returning my wave as I headed backward for the music breezeway.

  That fake smile fell off my face as I faced front, hoping with a passion Kyle hadn’t been right about Jeff’s hanger-on status. If he were this clingy towards me, how had he been like with Caroline? She wouldn’t have stood for such buffoonery, she’d have aimed a few cold, curt words like an icicle to his heart. I may have taken more pity on him if he wasn’t completely transparent in his intentions. Caroline was unreachable; I wasn’t. I was just the next best thing. Is Pepsi okay?

  I hadn’t thought it possible I’d grow even more sick of men.

  ***

  “Two hands, kid, you’re not a Crip.” Professor Lawlis leaned over on his good leg to clap my left hand into place around the handle of the gun. “Relax your shoulders some, they don’t need to be way up there by your ears. You ready?”

  No, but I doubted I’d ever be, so I nodded.

  “You want to aim for center mass, easiest target, it’s bigger. Go ahead, now.”

  I had to apply more pressure than I thought was possible, and the recoil knocked me back a few steps. Professor Lawlis studied the ragged hole smoking through the target paper. “Hmm. Well, kidney shot will drop someone too, I guess. Good thing the HSC exam is a written test.” He nudged my feet back into the appropriate stance. “Try again. You know what the kickback feels like now, try to adjust your aim accordingly.”

  Though marginally better than my first attempt, the second left a lot to be desired, a shot through the shoulder of the target paper outline.

  “But that’d still hurt someone, right?”

  He snorted. “I’m sure it wouldn’t feel nice, but it wouldn’t stop any determined person for long.”

  I slid the earmuffs off, letting them circle my neck. “Well, I can always say, ‘fuck off, asshole, I’ve got a gun’ right?” I hadn’t expected that much recoil in such a small gun. He’d chosen a revolver which held only nine rounds, but he’d said that should suffice. If nine rounds don’t do the job, nothing will, he’d told me, to my mild horror. Learning came easier on a revolver, he’d stated, especially for women—semiautos had a bigger grip, made it harder for tiny hands to keep firmly in place. It’s not sexist, he’d said to my glare, just the truth. I’ve seen your hands up close on a guitar all year, don’t give me that look.

  “There’s always that.”

  “I don’t know whether this is such a good idea.” I waved the gun feebly. “It’s not worth keeping a gun if I can’t even use it properly. Is California even a stand your ground state?”

  “Not in so many words. There’s something called the Castle Doctrine. You can use deadly force in your own home if you have reason to fear imminent bodily harm. Seems like it may come down to it eventually. He’s gone a step up from stealing cats and creeping around outside your place. You get that camera yet?”

  “Kyle’s getting one later when he’s finished with a deposition, or something.”

  “Hmmm,” he said, and within his voice swirled a world of amusement. “That’s nice of him.”

  “Can you stop with the smirking and the hinting? I’m holding a gun.”

  “I could, but where’s the fun in that? Don’t wave the gun around, the DOJ wouldn’t take kindly to seeing that. I suppose he shot right over in the dead of night to tend to you.”

  “It was ten p.m. That’s only the dead of night for you, old man.”

  “Is it just me, or have you gotten a smart mouth recently? That kind of sass might get you knocked off the free guitar lesson list.”

  I laughed, popping open the cylinder the way he’d taught me. “I should have told you this a while ago, but I kind of got a car. I don’t have to hang out at school all day for the bus anymore.”

  “So you’ve been taking advantage of me all this time?” But he didn’t seem all that surprised.

  “I guess so.” I dumped the bullets into my palm.

  “I should be flattered some young thing’s taken an interest in me. Maybe I’ll start billing you. Not unlike the setup your boyfriend’s got.”

  “Do you ever get tired of recycling the same stupid jokes?”

  He was only kidding, we both knew it, but something about hearing another person voice the very thought I kept having made it seem more real, a bigger concern. Maybe Kyle wasn’t pumping up his billable hours by visiting me, but his ‘visits’ could have had ulterior motives. If he won this case, the partners of his firm would be beyond pleased, would probably put him on the fast track to becoming partner himself, and he couldn’t win the case without me, his PR face and mouthpiece, the alibi and star witness. The only thing that stood between him and a better office, really.

  “I might consider it when they stop being funny.” He paused for a moment, studying my expression. “Don’t tell me you’ve suddenly gotten sensitive.”

  “No.”

  “Then tell that to your face.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Really?”

  I felt his concern rolling off in waves and realized this man, with his cynicism and metal rod leg and strange smiles, acted more like a father to me than my real one had. Here he was at a shooting range, teaching me how to put holes in target paper. Showing me how to play guitar, ribbing me about men. He didn’t even have children of his own, but he somehow knew more than my own father had.

  I bit back the blasé comment I would normally answer with. Why lie? This wasn’t Caroline who’d laugh, who would try to ‘help’ me stack the deck or come up with strategies to use what happened to my advantage. “I guess there’s something that’s been making me…uneasy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He kissed me a while back.”

  “Oh,” he said, and I didn’t misread that highly uncomfortable look he now wore. “And did you, uh…did you not want him to?”

  “I don’t know. He took me by surprise. I didn’t even know what hit me until a few seconds after it happened, and then he left. Why would he do that?”

  “Kiss you, or leave?”

  “Kiss me.”

  “I’m going to assume it’s because he wanted to.”

  “But isn’t it wildly inappropriate?”

  “Kid.” He pried the gun from my grip, unzipped his case, and shoved it inside. “Stuff like that is never entirely appropriate, it never comes at the “right” time or adheres to all the rules. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.” He limped toward the exit, gesturing for me to follow. “When I first met my wi—ex-wife, she told me straight to my face I was ‘disgusting.’ Right in my face, just like that. ‘You’re disgusting.’ That may have had something to do with the Jim Beam, but still. I almost impaled her with a dart I was throwing. You’ve never seen a woman so pissed. But I took one look at her and just knew. One of those intangibles. I didn’t let the fact she thought I was disgusting stop me.”

  “I would have been pissed if you’d almost hit me with a dart, too.”

  “You should have seen her face when I told the bartender she was too drunk to drive home, that he should take her keys. I was hoping I’d get to swoop in and offer her a ride. Didn’t go over so well.”

  “Sounds like you were an idiot.”

  “No argument there. What drunk twenty-nine-year-old isn’t an idiot?”

  I jogged the final few steps to the door. He grunted, annoyed, but let me hold it for him.

  “I guess what I’m trying to say is, there are times in life when you just need to go for it and worry about consequences later. You have to shelve your pride sometimes, hard as that is to do.”

  “But he’s twenty-nine, and I’m barely legal. Shouldn’t you be saying that’s wrong, that he’s using me, he thinks I’m some easy mark, like a wounded antelope?”

  “If you’re an easy mark, I’m a ballerina.�
�� He hobbled to the sign-out desk and snatched up a Handgun Safety brochure. “I don’t know how important the age difference is. You don’t act immature, for the most part. No pissier than an older woman, but then, you’re all crazy. That can’t be helped.”

  “I’d rather be crazy than an idiot.”

  “Good point.” He flipped the brochure open, his eyes whizzing over the paragraphs before he handed it to me. “I’ll help you study this for a bit, and we’ll go back for another round. You’ll hit center mass if it’s the last thing I do.”

  ***

  Caroline listened silently as I regaled her with my latest stalking tale, her eye contact never wavering, even as aides came and went, banging through the lobby doors.

  “And you never got a look at this person?” she finally asked, after I’d fallen silent.

  “No. It was dark. I asked the neighbor lady about it after I found the footprints. She hadn’t seen anyone, but her baby was sick, so she said she was pretty busy.”

  “And did the cop follow through? Did he station a patrol car outside the unit?”

  “Yeah. For that night, at least. Nothing since.”

  “How helpful. Of course the idiot wouldn’t have come back the same night.” She ran her index finger over one of the violet crescent moons bleeding over the delicate creped skin beneath her eyes. “And me speaking to Karen Stone is supposed to do what about this, exactly?”

  “It’s just an opportunity for her to speak to me again, really. Your interview is the excuse I need to mention it.”

  I wondered if she felt the oddness of that statement the way I did. Never before had I requested the limelight, asked her to be a stagehand and wait behind the red velvet curtain. She had to have felt the tides turning, but if she did, she didn’t show it.

  “What the hell can Karen Stone do about this?”

  “Shed light on the fact that the police aren’t taking me seriously. In the end it’ll get more of the jury pool thinking the cops have it out for you, that’s why they’re ignoring me.”

  “If you say so.” She let loose a long sigh, cracking her neck. “Make sure that camera’s running at all times. I’m not sure when was last time I was at a complete loss, but I can’t think of anyone it could be. Not a man, anyway.”

  “You have female suspects in mind?”

  “A big footed female, I guess. Brian’s mom. She’s a beast. And then what’s her name. That woman with the stripper name, the one wearing leopard print heels. Did she have big feet?”

  “I really didn’t notice.”

  “Was she tall?”

  “I guess. Didn’t look like she’d ever worn a pair of Vans, though.”

  “Well Prada doesn’t make proper B&E attire, babe.”

  “I really doubt it’d be her anyway. Looks like she’s got better things to do. Wash her hair, glue rhinestones to her jeans. She doesn’t even know where we live, anyway.”

  She shrugged, one pale shoulder slipping out the neckline of her scrubs. I couldn’t remember a time when her skin hadn’t been tinged with gold, but I guessed being locked up in Breakthrough would do that to a person.

  “Well she’s seen your face all over TV. I’m sure even an idiot could poke around on the internet and find your contact information. A shitload of journalists managed to do it. Why not one big footed stripper? She sure as hell didn’t like you that much.” She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I’ll do the Karen Stone interview. You’ll have to contact them for me, though, I don’t think the powers that be kept her contact information after I had them decline the interview for me earlier.”

  “Thanks.”

  She nodded, lips downturned, eyes glittering, her busy brain likely clicking and humming like a CPU buried deep in some complicated machine.

  APRIL

  I didn’t like seeing that strange happiness shining out of Caroline’s eyes as she surveyed the controlled chaos of Karen Stone’s production crew. Like the Joker looking down at the madness he’d unleashed on Gotham, so proud and self-impressed, spinning sticky webs of lies. It wasn’t fire season any longer, but I still felt trapped in the center of a landscape of wildfire, like I had to cringe through hot smoke and cover my face to protect it from flying sparks and ash.

  And to think I could have kept the whole thing from unspooling by asking her a few prodding questions. How are you feeling, Caroline? What are you thinking? What are you doing to yourself? We can’t carry on like this any longer. Let’s go somewhere, anywhere, it doesn’t matter. We could go to Belize, you never wanted to stay in the States forever. Visit those icy lakes in Norway you told me about, look at the architecture in Russia and sample the vodka, go see all those crazy outfits the girls wear in Tokyo.

  I could have convinced her. Made her pause, anyway. All I would have needed was a second of hesitation.

  You’re going to kill him because he exposed your weakness, proved to yourself you weren’t carved completely from glass? And that weakness was only love; most people have come down with a case of love a few times in their lives. It’s nothing that chronic, I can find you the antidote. Give me a few minutes to Google. I could have said all that and more, but I hadn’t.

  Nobody else in the room seemed to notice her lively eyes, but then none of them knew her the way I did.

  Kyle shifted his weight to his left foot, leaned against the wall we’d been holding up for the past thirty minutes, across the room from Caroline, watching the makeup artist try to find a flaw to fix on my sister’s face. There weren’t any, but she made a valiant effort to improve upon Caroline’s perfection. The result was nauseatingly beautiful. I couldn’t watch this.

  I cinched my arms tighter around myself and exhaled a shuddering breath. “I need to go outside, or something. I don’t have to be here, do I?”

  He blinked down at me, lines of concern I didn’t deserve rimming his eyes. “No. Is something wrong?”

  Caroline’s gaze caught in my peripherals. Watching me. Us. Me and Kyle. Trying to dismantle the situation, pick apart body language and micro expressions, catalog our every movement for a later discussion I had no wish to be a part of.

  Bile boiled in my stomach, blisteringly acidic. “I just can’t watch this. I…I need to go somewhere else. Just for a little while. Until this is over. Karen isn’t going to talk to me until later, back at home, right?”

  “Yeah.” His hand snared around my elbow as I brushed past him, toward the door. “I—I’d go with you if I could, but I can’t leave.”

  “I know.”

  He unearthed his keys from his pocket, dangled them in front of me like a fishing lure. “Do you want to visit Nicholas? I can give you the key to my apartment. You’ve just got to be back home by five.”

  My fingertips hesitated in midair. “You don’t think that’s weird?”

  He unclipped a key from the ring and pressed it into my palm. “Looks like you need it. He’ll make you feel better. I bought him some Party Mix treats. Feed him with caution, that stuff makes him crazy.”

  ***

  Nicholas wound frenzied figure eights around my legs as I stepped into Kyle’s apartment half an hour later. I stooped to pick him up, slinging him over my shoulder like a stole. Air whooshed out of his lungs, but it wasn’t long before his plaintive yowl spiraled down into purrs.

  I had to laugh, seeing all the cat toys Kyle had apparently bought littering the apartment. A cat bed sat thoroughly unused in the living room, a plush cat tower carpeted with black fur sat in one corner, brightly colored mouse toys dotted the floor like a design from some artist on LSD. He must have bought out Petco.

  “I missed you,” I crooned, rubbing the space between his eyes the way he liked. His answer came in the form of a yawn which smelled strongly of fish.

  Skirting cat toys, I made my way to the sofa and sank into it, Nicholas struggling in my arms.

  It was an odd feeling, being in Kyle’s place when he wasn’t around. He didn’t think much of housekeeping, judging by the jacket
s draped over his kitchen chairs, the shoes cast aside by the front door. T-shirts on the coffee table. A film of spidery dust on the picture frames in the foyer, a heavier layer than the last time I’d seen the photos, when Kyle had pointed out who was who, his best friend, his old college roommate, his dead relatives. I had a strong urge to wield a can of Lemon Pledge, run a vacuum, but it didn’t look as though he owned one. Caroline would psychoanalyze my urge to organize, tell me it all boiled down to control, or more specifically, my lack thereof. I couldn’t control the mess she’d made, but I could control the debris field that was Kyle’s apartment. But even I had enough sense to know that would be weird.

  This was the only man’s apartment I’d ever been inside. He’d obviously cleaned before my arrival to watch the first Karen Stone special. The state of the place now had me hoping he wasn’t as disorganized when it came to his work as he was in regards to housekeeping.

  Something stabbed me in the thigh and I shifted on the couch, blindly groping between the cushions, my fingers closing around something cold and metal. It was an earring, I found, when I pulled it out. An ugly, tacky thing, one those overlarge hoops with cheap rhinestones of varying colors. What skank did this fall off of, I wondered, but it sounded like Caroline’s voice. What, had it tried to commit suicide?

  “Who does this belong to?” I asked Nicholas idly, spinning it by the pointy end. “Looks like you’ve got a new stepmom.”

  I didn’t know why an earring should piss me off so much. Just a vulgar hunk of metal that had previously been impaled through the fat earlobe of a tasteless bitch who apparently thought little of Russian names. I had the sudden, overwhelming urge to hunt down a bottle of hand sanitizer. God only knew what kinds of germs festered in Crystal’s ears. Crystal, with her mean laugh and makeup laid on like layers in sediment.

  Why would any man waste time hanging around a woman he clearly couldn’t stand all that much? Apart from the obvious. It looked like she gave the milk away for free quite frequently, especially taking the hooker heels into account. I hoped he used a condom to ward off the cocktail of STDs swimming around in her veins.