'We had a little dog. Just a mutt. He was Jimmie's dog but everybody
loved him. And we had a staircase in the house just like the one in
this one. And the hall was dark. Jimmie ... he didn't see the dog
lying by the stairs. I ran for him but he went down ... and the rest
is all just sounds for me. The dog yelping. My father screaming
behind me. Jimmie falling down the stairs. And then something loud
and wet like if you dropped a ... melon. I guess passed out.
'Jimmie died in a coma. My mother knew everything by then. We got rid
of the dog. You just couldn't have him around anymore. My father was
sober for about a year, all told-'
She leaned back hard against the seat, exhausted.
I watched her awhile, saying nothing, wondering if she was more
comprehensible to me now, wondering if it helped anything.
She was silent for a moment, and then she laughed. In the laugh you
could see how some of the toughness was made.
'Just now my father, who I suppose has had a couple martinis, had the
temerity to put his hands on my shoulders and kiss me on
She looked at me and her eyes held that same indifferent cruelty I'd
seen that day at the beach, looking down at Steven from that rock,
naked and terrible.
'He doesn't touch me. Not ever. I touch him if I feel like it, but
nothing else is acceptable. And every time he forgets that, I make him
pay. Every time.'
I knew a girl once who was rumored to have slept with her father. A
local girl. She was a pinched, starved little thing with frightened
eyes who held her books tight to her chest and ran on spindly legs from
class like something vast and evil was always in pursuit. Sitting next
to me now was the opposite of her, tempered maybe in the same waters
but unbroken, raw and splendid with physical health and power. This
one had turned the tables, pursuing the pursuer with a ferocity that
probably would have amazed that other girl, but that she would have
understood thoroughly.
I wondered, though. I'd met the man. To me he was just ashadow.
Insubstantial, insignificant. And I wondered if in that place within
where we're all blind and dumb to ourselves, the cat wasn't chasing its
own flayed and miserable tail.
'Let's drive,' she said.
I started the car. Since we'd met, how many times had she said that
now? Let's drive. Let's just drive. It never mattered where. Slice
a fissure of black macadam through time.
Drive me.
Orders from the lost to the superfluous.
And I think I saw, glimpsed where I fit in then. Where Kim and Steve
fit in too.
We were just diversions, really. Bodies of water suitable for a brief
immersion. I diverted her into passion. If we were lucky, orgasm.
Steve and Kim into something that looked like friendship but was
probably more like continuity, habit. Company. There was nothing--not
even herfatherorthe memory of her brother--between Casey and Casey. Not
anymore. She'd expelled everybody else. Maybe it's like that for all
of us. I don't know.
I know we all are lonely. Locked off from one another in some
fundamental secrecy. But some of us declare war and some of us
don't.
This isn't a value judgment upon Casey. I'm sure she had her reasons,
that for her it was the only strategy. I don't think she came to it
out of any elemental cruelty.
But war is still death. Death made unselective and infectious.
Tonight she'd repelled a minor invasion. But it had cost her. A piece
of her father, a piece of me. And something of herself too. She was
dying. She would always be. Casey could survive, but not intact.
There were some rules she couldn't break. And the best of her was as
vulnerable as the worst.
I drove. Silence thick around us. Eyes fixed to the road in the
headlights as though eyes and lights were one and the same.
I knew she did not want sympathy. I knew she'd talked it through and
then had wrested the confidence back from me again and thrust it away
inside her. In the morning there would be broken windows. The only
evidence that it had ever happened.
I drove. Slow through the little towns and back roads and fast -very
fast- over the long rolling hills between. We saw a doe frozen in the
headlights along the side of the road. The clouds had cleared away and
the moon was bright, the sky filled with stars. I felt like I had a
destination, a purpose, but of course I didn't. The purpose was just
the feel of motion, the car cutting through the night.
We went up through Eastport and Perry and Pembroke, turned south and
drove to Whiting. I was hardly aware of the circle moving in on
itself. To me they were just towns, all familiar and alike.
It was two in the morning when we started heading back to Dead River.
The roads were empty. We hadn't seen a car for miles. At West Lubec
we went over a wooden bridge. We passed a little country church, bone
white and bleak with disrepair.
'Stop here,' she told me.
, ..
' ,
I .
She got out of the car and walked toward the church. I followed her.
Beneath the bridge the crickets and frogs were a single texture of
percussive sound.
The door was fastened with a single Yale lock. Perhaps there was
nothing inside worth stealing.
The white paint was chipped and flaking. She pulled a long strip of it
off the door. The Yale lock was rusted. I flipped it with my thumb.
