She wondered if Vega was trying to drive her mad, too, and she felt so near to abandoned shrieking, so near to violent shudders and agonized pleas for help, that she thought her heart and bones would crack from the pressure. If that was what Vega was after, it wouldn’t be long before she had it.
And still they sat on and on and on. And Beth thought of her children. Perhaps now, at long last, they’d be happy. She couldn’t shame them anymore. No rotten little detective was going to follow her around New York or any other town, taking notes on the girls she met and the food she ate and the money she spent, and then sell his pitiful information to her rich uncle.
And Charlie. Would he care? How would it strike him? Would he mourn her? In her deepest heart she knew he would, and that made her more frightened, more miserable.
The phone rang with a shattering clamor that drew a small scream of suppressed hysteria from Beth. She looked at Vega with wide eyes, and Vega said, “Answer it.”
It was Beebo. “I meant to call earlier,” she said. “I know it’s late.” Beth looked at her watch. It was past two. “I got stuck at a party, baby, you know how it is. Am I forgiven?”
“Of course,” Beth said. God, what can I say, how can I warn her? She looked slyly at Vega, but the look on Vega’s face told her the gun would speak instantly if Beth spoke too much.
“Well, that was easy,” Beebo laughed. How warm her voice was! Close and relaxed. Beth yearned for her. “I expected to get a lecture. Or hurt feelings at the very least. How about coming down for dinner tomorrow? We could take in a movie or something.”
“Tomorrow? I don’t think I’ll be able to,” Beth said, putting all her hope into the double entendre, but if it was innocent enough to get past Vega it was obviously too vague to alarm Beebo.
“Okay, the day after,” Beebo said, unperturbed.
“I don’t think I’m going to be around,” Beth said and Vega sat up in her seat and aimed the gun at her and Beth nearly fainted with fear. She would have laughed at their histrionics if she had seen them in a movie, but this was actually happening and just the terror of it nearly squeezed the life out of her.
“You’re not going out of town, are you?” Beebo said.
“No.” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
“You are mad at me,” Beebo said.
“No! No, I swear!” Beth protested with such vehemence that Vega motioned her to hang up and she did, abruptly, without so much as a goodbye. She hoped her strangeness on the phone, if nothing else, would alert Beebo somehow. If only Beebo didn’t suppose she’d been drinking and was acting silly. And she experienced a flash of truly passionate yearning for Beebo, her physical presence, the strength and safety of her arms.
The hours went past with ponderous slowness and Beth tried to value them, to treasure each moment that she was still alive. And yet each moment struck such fear into her that she found herself crawling with it.
Every ten or fifteen minutes she would say Vega’s name, or ask her to leave, or offer her a cigarette. It didn’t matter that her words were useless. It mattered that she was still able to speak and understand herself. Every leaden moment made life dearer to her. Her thoughts skipped sporadically from Laura to Nina to Beebo, to the others she had met in the swift passage through the enormous city. They ranged over her college days, over the exotic greenery of California and the face Charlie showed her when she left him, standing alone at the end of the drive. And the Scootch, and Skipper with a skinned knee. And her aunt and uncle. And Vega. Vega herself, chic and smooth and so desirable when Beth first knew her. And in between the fragmented pictures of her past, the people she knew, came moments when her heart froze and her mouth went desert dry.
She was still lying on the bed in a bath of sweat and anguish when she heard Vega rise at last. The first tired light of dawn was showing in the windows. The rain had stopped. Beth noted this with surprise, for she had not heard it steal off. She stiffened all over, seeing Vega approach her.
Vega turned off the bedside lamp that had shown them to each other throughout the dark hours and they appeared to each other then as silvery shadows.
“No, Vega, no, Vega, no-no-no-no-no,” Beth said in a sort of singsong, nearly hypnotized with fear.
“I want to know how you’ll take it.”
“You’ll wake everyone up. They’ll catch you.”
“I want it that way.”
They gazed at each other. Communication was no longer possible between them and Beth finally shut her eyes, unable to look at the gun any longer. She wept, “I want to live. That’s all I want in the world. Just give me that and I can work out the rest.”
“I wonder,” Vega said. “I’d like to see you try.”
After what seemed an age to her warped sense of time, Beth reopened her eyes. Vega stood stock still where she was, at the side of the bed. The light from the windows was brightening around her.
“Have you suffered tonight, Beth?” she asked.
“Horribly.” Beth choked a little trying to answer.
“Will you ever regret what you did?”
“I do, I have, since the day it was done.”
“Did you ever love me, I wonder?” But she held up her hand to Beth and said, “Don’t answer, I don’t want any more lies from you.”
There was another dreadful silence and now the minutes were flying,
