“No guns,” I tell her. “You know Chekhov’s rule.”
That old theater maxim: if a gun appears on stage in Act I, it must go off in Act III.
“Don’t worry, I’m not here with Chekhov. I’m here with you.”
. . . . .
“We never found those photographs,” she says. “Clyde and I tossed his house but couldn’t find a damn thing. That’s why we burned it down, you know. We wanted to scare him, sure, and I wanted to hurt him, but what we really wanted were those damn photographs. After the police let him go, I was terrified they might surface, that he’d mail them to my parents, or to you, or that he’d spread them all over school like he’d threatened. God knows what he did with them. We couldn’t find them, that’s for sure. So we burned down the house. Those flames were fucking beautiful.”
. . . . .
“I did tell you what was happening, once. You were asleep. It was a few weeks before everything…before Sarah …”
Drowned. Amy still avoided it.
“We were at your house, getting ready to watch a movie, and you went into the kitchen to microwave the popcorn. I was on your bed, listening to the corn pop, and suddenly I smelled it burning. I ran into the kitchen and you were face down in the sink, totally sleeping. It was funny—your head was in a pasta bowl, and I started talking, telling you everything. Somehow it felt good—I thought on some level you might hear me, even if you’d never realize it. I told you everything, then ate all the popcorn, even the burnt ones.”
. . . . .
I wait in the car while Amy hits the liquor store and finds a restroom. It’s one of those times when I wished that I smoked; how great it might feel to strike that match and light up, inhale a little death and blow white dragon-trails out through my nose. Instead I play with my phone and text Kelly a simple message: Miss you. The moment I send it, it feels like a betrayal of Amy. And of Kelly, too.
Amy pops back in the Porsche with a fresh bottle of Schnapps and a bag of Tostitos. “Never underestimate the pleasure of an empty bladder,” she says, and tosses me a Slim Jim.
“You expect me to eat this?”
“Protein,” she says. “Slim Jim’s are manly. What—you don’t like petrified beef?”
“Maybe later.”
“We’re in the Midwest, Donnie. The last good slice of pizza was two hundred miles back.”
I’m pretty sure she’s busting me, but with Amy you never know. She refills the flask as I restart the engine.
“I’ve figured it out,” she says, checking her face in the mirror as I pull back onto the road. The GPS tells us we’re ten minutes from Ronan’s street. “I know how we should play it.”
I stay in the right lane, thirty miles per hour being fast enough when you’re headed toward a reckoning. Amy stares out the front windshield, her hand unconsciously tugging at the seatbelt.
“I want him to feel exposed, humiliated,” she says. “Scared, too. Exactly how I felt when he took those photographs. He should know that feeling. Donnie. Even if it’s only for a second. So here’s what we’re going to do.”
The way she explains it, everything sounds simple. “And then we drive back home,” she says.
I have my doubts; it’s a terrible idea, certain to backfire, but it’s Amy’s truth, not mine. It’s her reconciliation. All I can do is be there.
“Will that make it better?”
She takes a final swig from the flask before we pull onto Ronan’s block.
“It won’t make it worse.”
. . . . .
Davenport Drive—Michael Rooney has done well for himself, better than a certain Mr. Ronan could have done teaching high school Drama in Ocean County, New Jersey. Manicured lawns and stately two-story homes, a maple tree on every lot, the driveways filled with BMWs and Lexus SUVs—a block where no one cuts his own grass, let the Mexicans do it on Tuesday morning while Mom and Dad are away at the office, while the nannies take the children to the park and the retirees wait at the club for their scheduled tee times. Each lot is at least an acre, a far cry from the cereal box yards of Holman Beach. This is what America looks like, to people who don’t know what America really is, I think. Not the 1%, perhaps, but somewhere between percentages four and five. Maybe I’d be living somewhere like this if I’d taken that job writing Diapers 4. I can see it in Amy’s face as we inch down the road toward Ronan’s house, number fourteen. She’s been stuck in her grandmother’s run-down Cape Cod for sixteen years, probably another sixteen or more to go, working at the Mall for a crap salary, while this rapist bastard rolls around in some tony McMansion. When she points the gun, will she make him drop his Tag Heuer before he drops his pants?
“I wonder what he does,” she whispers.
“Real estate, I think.”
“I hate real estate.”
It’s Saturday, late afternoon, the neighborhood quiet except for two kids kicking a soccer ball on a side lawn. A dog barks, somewhere, and the house numbers diminish as we drive: 22, 20, 18. Amy reaches into her bag, the handle of her grandfather’s gun protruding like a snake. One more house and we are there, 14 Davenport Drive, chez Michael Rooney, so unlike the rented bungalow where he’d lived in Holman Beach, where he’d once seen a loose joint in a sixteen-year-old girl’s purse and pounced.
“Are we really going to do this?” Amy asks, her way of passing responsibility. You could have stopped us. But it’s too late for that.
“The gun isn’t loaded, right?”
“I’m not going to kill him,” she says. “Humiliation—that’s all I want.”
And then, voila, we are there, number 14, if not the finest house on the block, then
