Murder in the Rough

by Otto Penzler

  He couldn’t resist any longer. “Rachel, come here,” he said, his words a croak.

  And then he was holding her; her arms tight around his neck, her cheeks wet, her knees pressed against the dash. How long had it been? Maybe ten years since they’d shared more than a quick embrace of greeting or good-bye. She moaned now against his neck, and he rocked her, rubbed the small of her back—even under her sweater, she was as lithe as always. Some man had held this back, not too long ago. No: a boy. Some stupid lucky twenty-year-old boy. Whoever he was, he’d felt her back, too. All of her.

  And then Pete was crying, too. He felt for Rachel—he’d never been able to bear her misery—but mostly he cried because Rachel’s breath against his ear made his skin prickle, because he could think of nothing, while she was in his arms, but his memories of her. How much he’d always wanted this, how he’d missed it. Her. Because losing Maya hadn’t just been about the end of his marriage; it meant he’d spent a month remembering he’d lost Rachel first. He was alone, and Rachel was alone, and yet he knew: even if Rachel wanted his embrace now, she’d trade it in a bare second for the embrace of Allen or her lover or Jesus—whose arms, apparently, she was missing, too. Pete might as well not even exist, and yet exist he did, his body a lead weight around an empty hole.

  Because he could feel no worse, he said, “Tell me.”

  And after a moment Rachel did, whispering as though Allen himself was crouched outside the car:

  The boy was a student at a small Bible college in Georgia—“just like Allen was,” she said, and if she meant any irony, he couldn’t detect it. She’d never met him before. He was new in Clarksville, staying with an uncle for the summer, working as a caddie outside of Wakefield, a county over—Pete knew where: a semiprivate course he’d once played with a college buddy. He remembered the caddies there: a bunch of fit, smirking Young Republican types. The boy, she told him, studied in the same bookstore where Rachel shopped—where she went, a lot of mornings, to sit in the café and eat a muffin and read the newspaper, because Allen was gone and she sometimes got lonely—

  And Allen’s where?

  Allen was on a mission to Africa. Building a hospital in Liberia. Pete remembered—their church had been planning this for a while; Rachel had mentioned it last summer, the last time they’d spoken. Allen had been gone now seven weeks; he was due back on the twentieth. Rachel had planned to go with him, but in the end she’d stayed in Indiana because she needed to earn credits for her license, and—

  “And… oh, Pete… I didn’t want to go. I could have done those credits during the year, but I didn’t. I knew Allen was going to Africa, and I just got more and more upset, and—and things weren’t great, you know, with us, and—oh, I know it’s awful, I know how prideful it is, but I wanted him to have to choose between staying or going. I wanted him to choose me—or—or maybe I didn’t, I might have just wanted him to go alone, I don’t know—and I thought at least we’d fight, but he just nodded, and—”

  “You should have called me,” Pete said, his voice hoarse.

  “I was scared,” she said. He wanted to ask her, Of what? so badly his throat clenched. But he didn’t.

  Allen was in Liberia and Rachel was alone, and she kept seeing the nice boy at the bookstore coffee shop, and for a couple of weeks all they did was smile at each other, exchange pleasantries. She knew right away he was a Christian, and they talked about that, and had a lot in common, even though she was Church of the Harvester and he was Southern Baptist. And then one day she started crying. She was sitting two tables over from him, holding her coffee, and she just lost it.

  “Why?”

  A shudder went through her shoulders.

  “Allen was supposed to call me the night before—it’s not easy to call from there—but he hadn’t, and it wasn’t the first time, and I was thinking, I don’t know—”

  And anyway, the boy was there, and saw her, and came over to her to ask what was wrong—

  “What’s his name?”

  Rachel looked up from his shoulder, stricken; her face fell into itself. “I can’t say it,” she said.

  “You can’t say his name?”

  She shook her head. “I can write it down.”

  Rachel sat up and gazed at the fog swirled on the windshield. Outside, the rain had slowed. She sighed and said, “I don’t want to tell you all of it. And that feels… I’ve always told you everything, I know, and if I don’t tell you, it feels like I’m cheating on you, too. I know that.”

  That, and being married to Allen for ten years. That had always felt a lot like cheating, too. Pete ran his hand over his scalp.

  “Did he ever hurt you?” he asked.

  “No! No. If anything, he was a gentleman. He’s—” She reached for a tissue and wiped her nose. Her next words were full of a disgust he’d never heard from her before. “He didn’t—I went to him as much as he came to me.” She glanced at Pete. “He’s very pretty. I was… weak.”

  “Rachel—”

  “It—it only happened a few times. And each time I felt so terrible after, I couldn’t even remember why I’d—why I’d ever… and so I’d meet him and just cry and cry.” She threw the balled-up tissue onto the floor. “I can’t even remember the last time I wasn’t crying.”

  Pete offered her his hand, and she took it. His left hand. He felt her touch the space where his ring had been. Did she pause there? He couldn’t tell.

  “Just as I was about to tell him we had to stop,” she said, “he told me—he told me he was in love with me. He wants to leave college and run away with me.”

  Pete closed his eyes.

  “I told him no,” she said, looking up. “Of course I told him no. But now”—her voice cracked on the next words—“now he’s threatening me. He left a letter under my windshield wiper. It was there when I came out of the store.”

  “What did it say?”

  “It said—it said he wanted to see me. And that—and that if I didn’t meet him, he’d write a letter to Allen when he gets back. He said he knew I wasn’t happy. He said—he said he was doing it for my own good.”

  Pete’s mouth was dry. He’d drawn up plans along those same lines, back when he and Rachel were entangled. When she insisted she couldn’t leave Allen, that a life with that cardboard piece of shit was going to be better for her than whatever Pete could offer. Pete had spent sleepless nights imagining visits to Allen at his little college out in the Pennsylvania countryside. He’d knock on Allen’s door and push Allen back and say, Look. You don’t love her like I do. If you love her at all, you heartless sociopath. Let her go. Or: I’m taking her. We’re not coming back.

  Even an imagined Allen was insufferable; he sat in a chair and folded his hands and smiled and looked right through the back of Pete’s head. God leads, Allen said. We follow.

  Pete made himself think of Rachel instead. As much as he didn’t want to picture the boy, her—the two of them—he tried. The need that drove her to him, the guilt that must have swum up. The sounds she’d have made—no. No. He imagined her reading the boy’s note, there in the parking lot. Her fear. It would be all she could do to live with the idea that she was unfaithful. A sinner. But for Allen to know, too—that territory, to Rachel, might as well be outer space. Her panic would be total.

  “I don’t know what to say,” he told her.

  If only she’d called him when she was lonely, and not after…

  He made himself say, “Maybe—”

  She turned to him, too fast.

  “—maybe you should be honest with Allen,” he said.

  Her face fell. “No,” she whispered. “Oh no.”

  “Do you want to be with him? What are you protecting here?”

  “Allen’s my husband.” She said this in the pious, good-soldier tone that had always made him want to shake her. “We made vows.”

  “Rachel, he also vowed to keep you happy. I was there, I heard him.”

  That was cruel, he knew. Her eyes fli
ckered to meet his, then away. Neither of them had talked about her wedding since it had happened.

  “I do love him,” she said, “and—I can’t. I can’t tell him. He can never know. You don’t know him, you don’t know what this would do to him—”

  “Given all that he’s done to you, I don’t really give a shit.”

  Her cheeks were flushed now. “Well, I do. We’ve always fixed things. Always. And I’ve been so unfair to him already.” She glanced meaningfully at Pete, just enough to shrivel his insides. “I just want this to go away. I want to start over. I just—”

  She tried to pull her hand back, but he said, “Hey. Hey,” and pulled her closer—and then she collapsed against him again, sobbing. “I know,” he said. And even though he wasn’t, he said, “I’m sorry,” and brushed his lips against her hair, softly enough he didn’t think she’d be able to feel it.

  “Oh, Pete.” Her voice was soft, broken, tender. For all its hopelessness, there was love in it still. She’d never convince him otherwise, no matter what she’d been able to convince herself. She’d told herself she wanted to cry about Allen, but there was a reason she’d called him. A reason they were sitting here. This wasn’t the first time she’d cried out love to Allen and then fallen into Pete’s arms. Not by a long shot.

  If she was ever to admit anything to him, it would be now: I’m so sorry. I made a mistake. I don’t want to make any more. I love you and I’ve always loved you—

  She took a breath and said, “I’m sorry, too. I’m not forgetting what—what happened with us. I won’t ever forget. I know it probably hurts you to hear this.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it does.”

  “Especially now,” she said. “It’s not easy for me to do this to you. I hope you can believe that.”

  He sighed, nodded.

  “And I hope—I hope you’ll forgive me for what I’m going to ask you. But I don’t think I have any choice. Please understand that.”

  She met his eyes, and he saw then: he’d misjudged her. Of course he had—the Rachel he’d always known would never have fallen into this trouble in the first place. And when the trouble had happened, she’d sat and thought and thought, and she hadn’t called Pete just for comfort. He had no idea what she’d ask, but she was going to ask for something. And already his hopes began their long, slow sink.

  She began to speak, softly and carefully, and he listened.

  “We can’t do this,” she’d told him—of course—the day after he spent the night in her bed. “Pete, we can’t. I feel awful.”

  She’d taken a long shower after they woke, and all the while he sat at her breakfast table in the kitchen, reading the newspaper and eating a bowl of her Miniwheats and playing with her cat, inexplicably named Terrence. He’d done his level best not to think about the night before—but of course he did, and he spent several minutes staring in disbelief at the sight of himself in his boxers at Rachel’s breakfast table. He stood and did her dishes—and then, to his horror, listened as the phone rang, and her machine picked up, and the voice of her fiancé filled the room.

  “Hey, Rachie,” Allen said. His voice was deep, polished, like a radio announcer’s, under a sheen of pure country twang. “Just had a minute to myself and thought I’d call. I’m surprised you’re out. Isn’t this study time? You and Terrence?” Allen laughed. “Hey, kitty kitty. Well, anyway. I’ve been thinking that I should apologize about the retreat—not about going, because it’s been awesome—but I know it made you sad that I did. I prayed on that, and then I made some calls and freed myself up next month. The weekend of the fourth. I hope that makes you happy. I love you. God bless you.”

  Pete looked at the mug he was drying. He set it carefully on the counter.

  Never mind what had happened the night before. Never mind the instant, oily hatred he’d felt for Allen’s voice. Rachel was engaged. At no point last night had she said she’d leave Allen—if anything, she’d only set aside her guilt for a few hours’ time. Pete heard the shower stop.

  Rachel walked slowly into the kitchen a few minutes later, wearing a long bathrobe. Her eyes were wide and sorrowful. Don’t see the message, he thought, please—but she did, right away.

  “Was it Allen?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll listen to it later,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “We can’t do this,” she said.

  She kept stammering, clutching her hands in front of her. The cat slunk across the counter to her, and she picked him up, cradling him in front of her breasts. Pete barely heard what she said, but it was predictable enough: she loved Allen, they were enagaged, she didn’t—

  A different Pete might have left her then, slunk catlike away, but he was still tingling from her touch. He remembered the way she’d looked at him. How she’d asked him to stay. What she’d said the night before, leaning against the same counter. He walked to her and took the cat from her and dropped it on the floor. Then he cupped Rachel’s face in his hands. Her wet hair was cool on his skin and smelled of green apples. She stopped talking and closed her eyes, leaned perceptibly forward. He kissed her. “We can’t,” she said.

  “Rachel,” he told her, “we sure can. That’s not the problem.”

  So began their pattern. They spent the same amount of time together they always had. They studied together, went to movies together. They sat on Rachel’s couch. She stared at him, laughed nervously at his jokes. She’d make some of her own: “How about tonight we try not to kiss?” And then he’d say, “Okay,” and lean across her folded legs and kiss her, and she’d resist for a second and then make the sound he loved—a sigh of nearly pure pleasure—and dig her nails into the back of his neck and pull him toward her. And an hour or so later she’d push him away from her breasts or pluck his hand from the smooth warm inside of her thigh and say, “We can’t. We can’t. It’s so wrong.”

  He learned to avoid certain questions. Like: What are we doing? Or: Do you love me like I love you? He thought he knew the answers to them, but not with enough certainty to bring them into the open. And anyway: apart from her guilty tears at two, three in the morning, the rest of his time with her was near bliss—better than music, better than drugs.

  They didn’t have sex, but he’d begun thinking the odds weren’t entirely against it. She knew the motions, anyway. She knew to press against Pete’s erection; she knew to wrap her legs around his thigh when they kissed and rock gently back and forth, eyes closed, her fingers laced with his. And she’d begun asking him questions about his own past, curled into his side in the dark morning hours:

  How many women have you slept with? Five. Did you love any of them? Two, I thought. What about the others? I don’t know. We just kind of—agreed on it. Sometimes we were both pretty drunk. Does that bother you? It does now. Why? Because I love you. Why does that make a difference? Because I know what love’s like now. What I was doing with those girls—it’s just not the same. But you—you liked it? Yeah! Of course. Even though you didn’t love them? Rach—sex feels good, that’s just all there is to it. How good? How good? Seriously? Yeah. Better than anything, really. Don’t you know? Pete! You know I haven’t— No, I mean… haven’t you ever had, you know, an orgasm? No. Allen and I don’t, we don’t— Not even by yourself? No! No, that’s a sin. But when we’re… when we’re fooling around, you get close. I can tell. I think so. Rach. Pete—oh, Pete, no. Let me give you one. Pete… I can’t. It’s okay. Oh, Pete…

  He learned to do it through her pajama bottoms. And when he remembered their time together, sometimes those moments seemed the most appropriate of his memories, the most symbolic: his fingers seeking her out, separated from her most private place by a piece of fabric so soft and thin it might as well not be there at all—but which, by being there, made all the difference in the world.

  But all the same he loved to lie beside her and feel her thighs part, feel her hand touch his, guide it to her; he loved to listen to h
er gasps come quicker and quicker; loved the moment she lifted her head off the pillow, eyes shut tight; loved to feel the muscles in her stomach tighten. He loved to hear her whisper his name.

  “You’re so giving,” she’d say, panting.

  “My pleasure,” he’d tell her.

  “I want to make you feel like that.”

  And she’d rub him through his boxers, slowly—she was afraid to touch him too hard, even though he’d told her it was all right. He learned to close his eyes, to concentrate on her caress. It took a long time, but that was fine. He’d lie still, Rachel’s hair falling across his face, and forget that in the morning she’d tell him all over again, We have to stop, that she’d remind him once again Allen was coming to visit—in two weeks, in a week, in two days. Pete learned not to think of it, to feel only the delicate moment in which he lived: the softness of the bed, Rachel’s weight across his thighs, the soft touch of her hand, her breath, the feel of his own release building and arriving—and Rachel’s gasp of delight, of pride; he breathed her smell in deep and told himself it was love, it was like nothing else, and that love like this couldn’t help but survive, no matter what was coming for them.

  He told Rachel yes.

  As Pete drove home from the diner, he wondered why—why the fuck he’d ever agreed to such a terrible, crazy plan. He loved Rachel, it was true, but she lived in an entirely different universe than his. They’d made that clear enough to each other over the years, hadn’t they? He should have told her no. For her own good, maybe even for Allen’s, he should have told her he was sorry, let her go. She wasn’t going to come back to him—he knew that, of course he knew it. She’d chosen against him years ago. He knew this now and he knew it when she asked him her favor, and still:

  He’d said yes.

  She’d whispered the idea to him, nestled in his arms, while he listened in growing disbelief:

  She wanted Pete to meet the boy, her lover. To visit him where he worked, where no one knew her or Allen.