A Beast Without a Name, page 18
I looked at Abby’s face: old, raw, sad, maybe almost fully genuine. Her tears, and I’d never know her to cry. Her fingers as they touched the glass wall between us. As if, maybe, they were desperate to touch mine.
“Can you help me, Donny? It would destroy my father to see me like this.”
Think how I feel was the first thing on the tip of my lips. The second, once I got a look at the bail amount, was: Where did you get the idea that I have that kind of money? That I ever had it? I’m here on partial scholarship, and barely hanging on here with it.
So of course I said I’d take care of it.
Would you take care of it, she’d said. Not could. Would. Because she believed in me, believed that I had what it took to come through. That was enough to ensure I would, whether or not I could.
I scrambled for the next several sweaty and sleepless hours. Spoke to a bored bail bondsman. Shook awake some friends. Stretched out some already strained friendships. Slipped into my mom’s house before dawn and slipped some bills out of her purse. From my stepdad’s house, stole a small stash of cash I’d discovered in high school when I discovered his basement pile of Asian porn. Stopped by a few pawnshops with a few items of electronics, some of which were even mine. Shook out a giant jar of loose change I’d been piling up since sophomore year, and rolled every last nickel, dime, quarter and penny by hand. Sprinted to the bank just before it closed to cash in some savings bonds my grandmother took out in my name at a time in my life when girls, even girls like Abby, were still nothing but nothing to me.
By late Saturday, I had it. And as I hauled ass back to the jail, I felt pretty damn heroic.
I would step in. Take over. Take care of her. Take care of this Aleksei fuck, who I pictured as some Eurotrash slickster with disco chains and a shiny fake Versace shirt open to his chest who’d fold like a church-basement chair the minute he was confronted with classic American resolve. She’d see me in a whole new light. Not just as her study buddy or her happy-hour sidekick or her worshipful once-in-a-while shoulder. No longer just the Jughead who, she once said, made her laugh until her balls ached. Now she’d see me as a man. A man who stepped up and took care of shit when it hit the fan blades and flew all over a life. The command-presence kind of man she seemed to care about catering to the most.
Finally, just before sundown, Abby was free, and in my car. I would take her home with me, I told her. We’d be together. I’d handle everything, even though I had nothing left. I said it over and over, every which way I could think of, babbling from sheer exhilarated exhaustion, believing that I could make her believe that I was the strong man she’d been looking for all her life.
She didn’t nod. Didn’t say anything. For several minutes, didn’t do anything. Then she said, “Can you drive out to the lake?” Lake Whatcom, where we’d kayaked sometimes on late spring mornings. There was a dirt road, full of summer cabins, all boarded up and bundled up under a shroud of sodden leaves for the coming winter. There was a gate, but she knew the combination to the lock. Of course she did, and I wondered for only half a second what she did, and who she did, to get it. There was a dock, and a private place to park in front of it.
She put one hand on my leg, high on my thigh, and my bloodstream seemed to heat to one hundred and eighty degrees.
She stared across the lake as the last of the day’s gray light started to slip behind the treetops. Then she turned to me with a strange lunar gaze that I decided to see as lust and slowly unbuttoned the top of my pants, then tugged at the zipper. Then at my pockets until I sat up and shot the seat back and let her shrug my pants to my knees, hardly daring to breathe. The air seemed full of glass shattered into dust as she took me in one hand, and lowered her head to my lap.
When she was done—when I was done—she panned me again with that peculiar moonscape face and finally spoke. An address. A safe place, she said. Told me to take her there. Told, not asked. I almost thought to argue, but my will to fight felt as wilted as my erection. I didn’t have it in me any longer.
I did what Abby told me to do. Stopped in front of a gate and a keypad, to which she gave me the code in a washed-out whisper. Pulled up to a waterfront condo. Watched as a bedroom curtain twitched and a gray face peered out.
I felt the fine hairs on the back of her hand as she brushed my cheek. She never met my eyes, not even as she stepped out of the car. Her only words, in a voice so small I could barely hear it: “You’re my friend.”
She never answered my calls, my texts, my chat messages. Letters in the goddamn U.S. mail, even. They went nowhere, and then they went back to me. Never answered the door of the last address I had for her when I knocked on it five or six times, or was it fifty or sixty? She’d disappeared into some dead-letter office of the heart. Even after the charges against her were dropped. Something about missing evidence, and diplomatic immunity, and missing witnesses they suspected were somewhere in Canada. Again, that sense of forces too big for me to comprehend working in her favor. Like protecting like.
I was angry, but what is anger in the face of love? Anger soon soured into self-pity, and then into curdled sadness, and then into a sallow mist in the back of my mind and the basement of my heart, as I went to work and then somehow became work and then somehow met somebody at work who seemed to want to be with me even if she was the one who preferred to be the strong one because, I suspected she more than suspected, I was not. And she wasn’t wrong. Abby had taken away the best of me—or had it been thrown away and had I not bothered to look for it?—and Thuy had staked a steel-plated claim on whatever was left. I couldn’t say with any clarity. After graduate school, life became a numb blur. I was a lab monkey by day and a neutered housecat by night.
Though, once in a while, on one of my many nights of stark raving wakefulness, often on the couch to which I’d banished myself after one of our egg-timer coital appointments so Thuy could sleep, I wondered if what Abby actually said was, “You were my friend.”
It seemed that I would never know, and not knowing was a slow death.
As long as I’d known Abby, going back to our freshman year at Western, she’d been vague about the places she called home.
She was always subletting or housesitting or houseguesting, and those housesits and houseguest situations and sublets were always on some sandy shore, and always from some silver-pompadoured friend of her father’s or some well-connected fellow she’d met during her frequently infrequent stints as a restaurant hostess. There was always some comp deal, a gift or a loan, open credit lines and charge cards. Lots of new clothes after long weekends out of town. Nice cars that weren’t quite hers and weren’t quite not.
I never quite got the full picture between caption-free pictures on social media and captured bits of peripheral chatter when we had the occasional lunch or happy hour. But I soon came to understand that this was how beautiful people lived, on a boundless stream of gold-plated goodwill staked on unstated promises. And that the rest of us were grinders who made do with grubby second rooms in old shitty apartment buildings or, God forbid, shared dorm rooms for half of junior year while trying to work our way off the work-study program, studying bloodborne pathology late into the night almost every night.
But this time I had an address. And I arrived around four in the morning, after a harrowing, headache-inducing drive through a rolling rainstorm up and down Chuckanut, the mountainside drive along north Puget Sound that, on a late fall night like this one, looked more than ever like something out of a sinister 1940s’ movie, Dark Passage or Out of the Past, something like that.
The house was as low-slung and sleek as a sports car—of course it would be sleek, being associated with Abby—and I sat in the drive for a long moment and stared at the half-shuttered moonlight glancing off its acres of glass through a bridal train of trailing mist. I was afraid of what I would betray when I saw her.
I was off-center for another reason, and it took that long moment for it to come to me: Nice or not, late fall in the cold and rain was not an Abby sort of scene. She always said she could stand Bellingham only in July and August. She was a woman of warm summer breezes and wind-snapped spinnakers and seaside nightlife, always disappearing for the few months in the summer or a few weeks in the winter. Or even in the middle of a semester, to St. Barts or St. Maarten or Sagaponack or Sanibel Island, always with some sketchy-sounding job like “club hostess” or “brand ambassador,” always with vague stories later about what she was doing and who she was doing it with.
What was she doing here, now?
Somehow she managed to skate by in her classes despite these disappearing acts, and sometimes—OK, more than sometimes—that was with my help. Some of my best memories of college were of her breezing into my place with a bodacious tan and big boxes of takeout teriyaki and a bottle or two of something pretty amazing, and helping her catch up till well past what my mother used to call the test-pattern hour.
Sometimes she’d announce a break in the middle of a calculus problem, and we’d put on music and we’d dance. Badly, hilariously, shamelessly, serendipitously. She’d call out a word or a phrase at random, and I’d make up a dance for it: “Donny! Do The Spatula! Now do The Instant Oatmeal! Now try the Dri-Weave With Wings!”
We’d just about rupture our pancreases laughing as we collapsed onto my big beanbag chair. Sometimes we’d lay there, almost touching, barely breathing, and watch classic movies until the sun came up. She loved them, especially the women: Lizabeth Scott and Barbara Stanwyck and Gene Tierney and Ida Lupino and Veronica Lake. Once we’d gone out to breakfast after an all-night moviethon, arguing the whole way about whether Violet got the shaft in It’s a Wonderful Life. I told her she took Violet’s side because she was Violet, and she went silent for a long moment. And then said that I was right.
Of course I’d wanted to kiss her, and of course she knew it. So of course I didn’t, because of course I couldn’t.
And then the second thing struck me, speaking of things that weren’t an Abby kind of scene: that giant gold-flake Escalade parked in front of my ten-year-old Elantra. The Abby I knew liked her rides small and sporty, slightly old-school and European: Porsches and Triumphs and Ferraris, that sort of depressed-heiress thing. Cars she sometimes referred to as sex on wheels or mobile midlife crises. Cars like her father and her father’s Cialis-ad pals drove.
This one, I thought, looked like something a Russian mobster in a movie would drive. For the first time in seven years, the name Aleksei shot into my mind. What the fuck was I walking into here?
I opened the car door. It didn’t matter. Abby asked, so I came. I was what she needed. What, in her midnight hour, she cried out for.
The pool of blood spread at least fifteen feet in every direction, and had darkened and dried into its own matte-finish floor. It looked weirdly appealing under the warm track lighting, with thousands of tiny seams that looked like the tasteful wire brushing you’d see on high-end stainless-steel surfaces. Sealed within it was a languid fan of long black hair, still lustrous and lightly curled. Like something you’d see on a Michelangelo ceiling.
It was almost mesmerizing enough to overlook the body at its center, frozen in what looked like the middle of a freestyle stroke, and the multitude of bullet holes that ran from its navel to nearly the nape of its neck.
A curl of cigarette smoke slid past my face and snapped me back to the moment.
“Tell me what happened.” I turned to Abby, leaning against the kitchen doorway, hand up, fingers out, Salem Light smoldering. Dark circles around her eyes. Give her fifteen pounds and a pair of oversized sunglasses and she’d look like a deliciously depraved Joan Didion.
Seven years hadn’t stolen her beauty, but it had hardened it, sealed it like wood decking for a stormy winter. She was thinner, tighter, shinier. As if her skin had been stretched out to make her seem so taut that she was about to snap. Which, apparently, she already had.
“He loved me,” she said. “In his way. As I suppose I did him. In my way. But in his culture the love of a woman and the ownership of a woman are the same thing.” She tapped the ash into a wineglass with a brittle snap of her bony fingers. “And nobody owns me. You hear me, Donny? Nobody fucking owns me. He thought me coming back to town to see my father into the ground meant that he—we—could just pick up right where we left off. That I’d be his goddamned squeaky-clean front girl again. That I’d be his girl again, or maybe just one of his goddamned gigaton of them.” She lowered her head and looked at me through a more distant version of those lunar eyes I had seen when I had last seen her.
“I didn’t know it till just before Daddy died, but Daddy got those bullshit charges not just dropped, but expunged. The last thing he did for me before packing me off like an embarrassing pregnancy in Peyton Place.”
“That night at the jail,” I breathed.
“Right. Like I was some fucking working girl. I don’t mind work, but I’m nobody’s working girl.”
“I never knew as much about you as I wanted to,” I said, “but I did know that much.”
“You’re sweet,” she said in a sour voice.
“Anyway.”
“Anyway.” She stubbed out the smoke, savagely, sending a scattering of ash across her black cocktail dress. “I thought at first, the past is the past. I thought he wanted to get together for old times’ sake, say he was sorry about Daddy, something like that. We did have some good times, once upon a time, you know. Like you and me.”
I gave a little bark of a laugh. “Maybe not just like you and me. But…yeah.” It somehow hurt to look at her, and somehow it was easier to study Aleksei’s stiffening corpse.
“Sure,” she said, seemingly unperturbed. “Anyway, he thought he was giving me a gift when he said that this house was in my name. And I saw it happening all over again—me fronting for him, playing the perfect hostess, while he ran coke and Vancouver girls fresh off the boat from China through here for his ‘gentlemen’s parties.’” She made quote marks with her nicotine-stained fingers before fishing another cigarette from a pack on the kitchen counter. “Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, fuck you with a sandpaper strap-on.”
My head jerked at that. Abby was no stranger to creative profanity, but the creative profanity I’d known her to use had a fun, bawdy quality to it; the product of a person enjoying herself and the world in all its wonderful ridiculousness, like I imagined a modern-day Audrey Hepburn would be. Was she really that cynical now? Had the years changed her that much? It seemed impossible to see her now and see the girl who used to say “fuckamonkey!” in playful exasperation over a particularly stubborn calculus problem.
“And so,” I said, looking back at her unwillingly, almost afraid to hear the rest.
“And so, he laughed. Like it was a done deal and me resisting it was just a tiresome scene he had to let me act out. Before he had to ‘take me in hand.’” Again with the finger quotes, and again with the tumble of ash. “‘Take you in hand’ was one of his favorite sayings, like he was fucking Cary Grant putting up with some silly screwball dame until it was time for a man to do what a man’s gotta do, which was put a woman in a woman’s place, because in the end, in this fucking Trumpworld we’re in, it's a man’s world, isn’t it?”
She lowered her head, peered at me as if over glasses. “Can I just tell you that I am so fucking tired of fucking men?”
“I get that,” I said. But I didn’t, not really.
“And so. I said some things. He said some things back. Then his hands started doing the talking.”
I looked back at the body, then again at her. At the dark circles that, upon closer inspection, revealed themselves to be bruises.
“And so,” she said.
“And so,” I repeated. “You need me to help you clean up. Get rid of the body. Because I work with blood. Because, you figure, I know how to do this without leaving traces of you behind.”
She frowned at that. “Well…yes. But not just that. Because you love me, and because I trust you to do whatever needs to be done.”
I swallowed, stared at the floor. “Do…you love me?”
She turned her face to the side a little, while giving me her eyes in full for the first time tonight. “In my way.”
“But I’m here to help clean up.”
“In a way.”
I stood straight. Took a step back. “What do you mean?”
She went silent for a few seconds. Then pointed down toward Aleksei’s bent left leg. “See that there?” She took a few steps forward, toward the edge of the tacky blood pool. “I think that’s a gun. Another gun. Isn’t it?”
The smell was starting to get to me, but I stepped forward too. “Yeah, looks like it. Hang on.” Finally, something I could do. I pulled open a kitchen drawer and found a pair of salad tongs. I bent, stretched, and hooked the weapon by its finger guard. In a moment I had it wrapped in a dishtowel.
“Can I see it?” she asked. I handed it over. She went to the sink, ran some hot water, and wiped the gun clean with another dishtowel.
“What did you do that for?” I asked.
“I need you to handle this for me.” She held out the dishtowel. Her eyes didn’t quite meet mine. After a long silence, I took the dishtowel, and took the gun in my hand. I didn’t know anything about guns except that I knew that I didn’t like them, and I really didn’t like holding this strangely malignant metal fist in my hand.
“You mean, you want me to drop this in the Sound or something?” I asked.
“Or something.”
“I don’t follow.”
She stepped back, crushed out her latest Salem, and fiddled inside a black handbag that perfectly matched her perfect black dress. “I want to explain something to you. Something I’ve wanted to explain to you for seven years now.” She looked away from me, out the kitchen window. “Remember that night when you bailed me out of jail? How you said you wanted to take care of me? Take care of things for me?”
