down at her, looking both confused and vaguely annoyed.
He said, “Yes?”
“It’s Lucy.”
“I’m sorry, what do you want?”
“I just wanted to see your book. The one you told me about.”
“You followed me to my room to see my book?”
“Yeah. It sounded good.”
“Look, maybe I’ll see you downstairs tomorrow, and if you buy one of my books, I’ll even sign it for you. How would that be?”
Lucy furrowed her brow and made what she hoped resembled a wounded expression. “Why don’t you like me, Mark?”
“I don’t…dislike you, I don’t even…”
She put her face into her hands and pretended to cry.
“Jesus.”
“You’re the first real author I’ve ever met. I don’t know anyone here.”
“Where are your parents?”
“My mom’s in our room watching ‘Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.’”
He sighed. “If I invite you in-and only for a minute-will you stop crying?”
“Yes.”
“All right, come on in, Lucy.”
Lucy wiped her face and followed Mark into the hotel room. His suitcase lay on the bed, open but not yet unpacked, and Mark was bending over a cardboard box and trying to tear open the top.
“I brought twenty copies of A Death in the Family.” He pulled a trade paperback out of the box and handed it to her. Lucy thumbed through the pages, skimmed the flap copy on the back.
The cover was of a gravestone, the book’s title engraved into the stone above the author’s name: Mark Darling.
“Is anybody else sharing the room with you?” Lucy asked.
He tilted his head slightly, like he couldn’t comprehend the question. “No, just me.”
“I need to use the bathroom.”
“Right through that door.”
“Would you sign this for me while I pee?”
“Um, sure.”
She gave back the book and walked into the bathroom and closed the door.
“Write something good!” she called out from inside.
She did have to pee actually, and when she’d finished, she flushed the toilet and washed her hands and took all of her clothes off. She folded them and stacked them on top of her black Chuck Taylors on the toilet basin under a towel, then turned her attention to her handbag.
The marble of the sink was cold against the soles of her bare feet. She walked down to the end and crouched down beside the door.
She’d been in the bathroom more than five minutes already, and she crouched there another five, her legs beginning to cramp, before Mark’s voice passed finally through the door.
“Lucy?” he said.
She brought her hand to her mouth to suppress the giggle. She’d imagined this a hundred times, and something about the moment finally being here struck her as funny and surreal. It was the strangest thing. Her body felt all tingly, like whenever she had been around Bobby Cockrell, the first boy in high school she’d had a major crush on.
“You’ve been in there awhile,” Mark said. “Everything okay?”
She didn’t answer.
“Lucy, I need to get back down to the lobby.”
Silence, Lucy smiling.
“I’m opening the door, all right? Are you um…are you decent?”
She watched the doorknob turn and the door ease open.
Mark’s head appeared.
“Lucy?”
She was right beside him, well within reach, but he didn’t see her. Kept looking at the toilet, and then the shower, as if trying to piece together how this girl had vanished through the walls.
Lucy reached out and pulled the blade of her dead father’s Zwilling J.A. Henckels straight razor through his windpipe in a quick, delicate swipe and the blood from his carotid artery sprayed her face and she squealed with delight as Mark clutched his throat and stared wild-eyed at her.
He staggered over to the sink and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and all of that blood pouring out of his throat down the front of his white Oxford with a kind of disbelief, Lucy giggling as Mark tried to physically squeeze the opening in his neck back together but the blood kept coming and he gave up and started toward Lucy with a madness in his eyes but the floor was slicked with his blood and his feet shot out from under him.
He slammed flat on his back and his head cracked against the tile.
Lucy slid off the sink and stepped carefully across the floor, dodging the bigger pools of blood and watching a puddle widen around Mark’s head, his eyes already beginning to glaze and his hands at his side.
She stood there watching him bleed out and when he finally stopped twitching and blinking, she set the straight razor on the sink. Lucy weighed eighty-three pounds at her last physical, and she figured Mark had at least a hundred on her, but the shower wasn’t far. She only had to drag him over a two-inch lip and the blood on the floor provided decent lubrication for the job.
When she’d crammed him into the shower, she closed the glass door and looked at the bathroom.
Blood everywhere. Spots and spatters and streaks on the mirror, the walls, even the ceiling.
What a mess.
What a beautiful mess.
She got down on her knees and flattened herself across the tile and rolled through the pools of blood which were sticky and cool and gave off a dank metallic smell like a thunderstorm coming.
Lucy stood for a long time watching herself in the mirror, kept thinking it looked like she had the most lovely body art imaginable, how she wanted to walk naked through the lobby just like this and soak in the stares. What would Andrew Thomas think to see her like this? She suspected he might love her.
The blood was growing cold and beginning to congeal on her skin when she slid open the shower door and stepped inside. Bending down, she pushed Mark up against the wall and curled up to him, her spine against his chest. She draped his arm around her and closed her eyes and went to sleep.
Woke in the middle of the night, cold and shivering. Turned the shower on full blast and let the hot water pound the blood out of her hair and her face. She collected her clothes from under the towel atop the basin-not a drop of blood on them-and grabbed the robe off the back of the door and slipped out of the bathroom.
Mark’s wallet sat on top of the television, and she went through it and pocketed two key cards and two hundred in cash. She dressed and left the room. Rode down to the lobby which was mostly empty now save for a handful of die-hards who’d persevered beyond last call to sing drunken show tunes on a leather couch.
Outside, the autumn air was cool and scented with the spice of a city she did not know.
Wind blew between the skyscrapers.
The sidewalks were empty.
The streets were empty.
It felt strange to be out here alone, no sound but her footsteps on the pavement. Impossible that her father’s funeral had happened today. She wondered if there were people still at her house comforting her mother and brother, or if they had all gone home.
The glow of a payphone caught her attention on the other side of the street.
She ran across to it and dug some change out of her wallet, dialed the number.
Her mother answered on the fifth ring in a tired voice gone hoarse from crying.
“Hello?”
