Among the Dead and Dreaming. Samuel Ligon

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ slipping the same way Cash felt her slipping—how easy it was for her to disappear—and I said, “How come you never talked to the cops about what happened? How come they didn’t track you down?”

      “How would I know?” she said.

      “How come you didn’t go to them then?”

      “I don’t have to answer to you,” she said. “Or anyone. I’m sure Cash told you that, too—that I don’t answer to anyone—so if you think for one goddamn minute. . . .”

      I pulled the phone from my face, her awful sounds coming through the receiver into the air of my mother’s kitchen. I think that’s what sealed it more than anything, just the mouth on her—that queen bitch tone—like I was less than nothing, and she’d just been putting up with me in my time of pain and suffering. That goddamn filthy mouth on her.

      I lowered my mother’s phone to the cradle, holding everything tight, and stood from the table, pouring myself a cup of coffee with Jack on top. I walked my mother’s house and tried to hold myself together.

      The way she pretended not to know me, not to know Cash, fed this burning in me, hot and fast. But I didn’t want to believe, even though I could feel how off she was in her voice. I didn’t want to know, even though the guiding hand was trying to show me. So I fought it, the last time I fought it, because of what it proved to me over the next few hours and days, and then I never fought it again.

      I knew the only way was to test her. And if she was true and it hurt her, we’d get over the hurt together and I’d make everything right. But if she wasn’t true . . . I knew I’d feel so stupid for not knowing all along—what I learned at Huntsville—that it’s almost always somebody close that’ll kill you, my wasted worry nearly blinding me, the way she could turn on me after all my sorrow.

      I poured another drink and dialed again. She answered and I sprung the test, because there was no other way to know for sure. “I know you killed Cash,” I told her with gravel in my voice, praying it wasn’t true as I placed the phone on the cradle, still trying to hold everything in.

      I took a drink and then another, trying to calm myself. I still didn’t know anything, even as I was starting to know in my heart, everything she took from him and me, everything clear and burning, shown by the hand. It was all too sloppy to be a Mexican drug gang. They would have made goddamn good and sure he was dead. The fact that she never went to the cops, never went to the funeral. All the lovesick talk in his address book. How she was probably using my sorrow against me. That was the worst of it.

      I called again, praying I was wrong, but finishing what I started, already two steps ahead of myself, because if she was involved, I’d have to learn her level of fear—if she’d go to the cops, if she had a man who’d try to track me.

      “I’ve been in prison fifteen years,” I told her, “thinking about you. Cash told me who to look for.”

      She tried to interrupt and I told her to shut up. “I don’t care for the cops,” I told her, “but I’ll go to them if I have to. I’ll call them right now. I know you killed him.”

      I listened to her breathe, a sort of hiss, like air from a tire, and I waited, letting out rope in the silence.

      “What is it you want exactly?” she finally said in this muted, broken voice.

      I felt the beginning of my release, every muscle in my body settling, even as I felt the burning.

      “Is it money?” she said, the guiding hand of fate fingering her once and for all and forever as the killer.

      I was blind for a second before everything became red ringed and perfectly clear in the center.

      “What is it you want?” she kept whispering. “What is it you want?”

      “What do you got?” I asked her.

      “Nothing,” she said, crying and sniffling, but trying to stay quiet, trying to hide it.

      “I guess you’d rather talk to the Austin police,” I said. “Or the Rangers.”

      “No,” she said, and then: “Ten thousand.”

      As if there’d never been a thing between us.

      I hung up on her. Called back.

      “Twenty thousand,” she said. “Please.”

      I hung up and let her stew. Days passed as the hand worked out what would become of her.

      “Let’s start with an even fifty,” I finally told her.

      But money would never be enough. There’d have to be other payment too, worked out by the hand. I looked at her pictures in the Goat at night—waking up, it felt like, coming back to life after all my wasted years. I gave Billy one week notice and bought a plane ticket to John F. Kennedy airport, figuring I’d wing it until I spent some time with her. Now that I knew what she’d done to Cash, her betrayal and denial, I felt good doing right by him and our mother. It was like I could finally breathe on the outside free—a pure, true instrument of the hand.

      10

      Alina

      It’s so unfair that it has to be Kyle when there are all these awful people whose deaths would make the world a better place, like serial killers and rapists, all the horrible people who hurt people, and I can hardly even believe any of it until I see her at the airport and fall apart completely, because it’s so unfair that I’m never going to see him again, unless I believe in heaven, which I don’t think I do believe, but maybe I do, though I don’t think you can just decide to believe in something like that.

      Mom doesn’t look that horrible is what rubs me so wrong in the car on the Cross Island, like she’s only comforting me and hasn’t been crying for days. She tells me again what happened—a motorcycle accident on the Ocean Parkway, which I already know, and this rich woman, Cynthia, who my mother obviously hates, which is weird because she doesn’t get jealous, and I’m like, “He was cheating on you?” not sure if I hope he was or hope he wasn’t, and she’s like, “I don’t think so,” but it’s so obvious she’s lying.

      “Was it over between you, then?”

      “Why do you say that?”

      “Why was he with that woman?”

      “I told you, they were friends.”

      “And you didn’t like her.”

      “I didn’t know her.”

      Everything she says is a lie. For the first time, I can recognize it, and that feels kind of cool, just that I can tell, but also horrible, and then I remember I’ll never see Kyle again, and I wish it was me instead of him, or me with him, the two of us dead together, since my mom hardly even cares that he’s dead. She was at school with me for two nights and then I was alone two nights, with Cassandra, my roommate, who seems really nice, but I was also missing home and my mom and Kyle, even knowing he was coming to Interlochen next week, our secret, unless he told her, which I know he didn’t because I’d be able to tell, but now he’s dead and I’ll never see him again. She tells me about this lunch we have to go to with the families—right this second, so I’m not even going to drop my stuff СКАЧАТЬ