What about me.
“I’ll hunt you down,” I said, “not even knowing that’s what I’m doing, and then when I find out, I’ll hand you over to the man who kills you.”
She snuggled closer. “At least tell me it’ll be painless, sweetie.”
“No,” I said, “it will be horrible. For both of us.”
“Why, John? Why do we have to end up that way?”
“We don’t have to,” I said. “But we will.”
“And it’s too late for us to change?” she said.
“For you it is,” I said.
Chapter 30
I spread the paper out on the table, flattened it down with both hands, and we stared at the photos. They’d run the same shot of Miranda, only now a photo of Susan was next to it, and next to that, one of me. I’d ended up in the paper after all.
It was a longer story this time and got more prominent placement, filling page three and continuing on page seven. The headline said, “New Attack Leads to Breakthrough In Stripper Murder.” I left my mother to read the rest of the article.
“I had no idea,” she said when she finished. “Rachel seemed like such a nice girl. Susan, I suppose I should say.”
“She is a nice girl,” I said. “She just had a lousy job.”
“And Miranda, too. How do these girls end up doing something like that?”
“How did I end up doing what I do?”
“That’s completely different. You help people.”
“That’s what I used to think,” I said.
“Do you really mean to give it up?”
I drank some more of her hazelnut coffee and thought about how much can change in a week. I nodded.
“Leo will be awfully disappointed.”
I thought about it. He would be. I remembered him warning me to be careful when this whole thing started. I’m too old to start again with some other kid. And he was. But I just couldn’t do it any more.
“He’ll manage,” I said.
“Well, you have to decide what’s best for you, John. I just don’t know, going back to school at your age… “
“I’m twenty-nine,” I said. “I think I’ve got a few years left in me.”
“What are you going to study? Poetry again?”
“I don’t know yet. I just need to do something other than what I’ve been doing.”
“Have you told Leo yet?” she asked
I shook my head. “You’re the first.”
Was it a good decision? I thought about it as I rode down in the elevator. Maybe not. I wasn’t sure what I’d study, or what I’d do afterwards. In spite of what Miranda had said, I didn’t see myself as a professor, and God knows I didn’t have the stomach for politics. But there would be something for me, and whatever it was, it would more or less have to be a step up.
It was a sunny morning, but a cold one, the kind where the wind rushes through you, burning every pore. Outside my mother’s building, a week’s worth of accumulated trash was stacked for pick-up at the curb, most of it in heavy black plastic bags cinched with wire, but some of it just lying out in the open. There was an upended mattress and next to it a narrow bookcase. There were a few stacks of paperback books that looked like they’d been rummaged through. I saw the cardboard hatboxes from Mrs. Knechtel’s apartment and one of the framed posters, and that’s when I realized what I was looking at. They must have finished cleaning her apartment out over the weekend. This was the accumulated stuff of a life, left out for any scavenger who saw something he liked and for the garbage trucks that would cart away the rest.
I walked past the pile, then stopped and came back. I’d only seen it out of the corner of my eye, sitting on top of a rolled-up carpet, half hidden behind one of the garbage bags. I wasn’t even sure that I had seen it. It seemed impossible. But yes, there it was, still in its dusty, wretched cage, plastic beak and wire feet and all, looking much the same as it had ten years earlier when I’d left it on the rim of the sink in the garbage room. The decade hadn’t left a mark on it. I stared at it, dumbfounded.
How…? Mrs. Knechtel, I thought. Maybe she’d been the one who threw it out in the first place, and when she saw it again ten years later, sitting on the edge of the sink, she couldn’t just leave it there. There is such a thing as loyalty, after all, and nostalgia for better times, and a sense of duty to the things of your past, even if they’re not quite as beautiful as you remember.
We stared at each other for a good long while, the bird and I. I felt ridiculous picking it up off the carpet. I didn’t care. I took it home.
