Darling (16 page)

He didn’t understand it. Why would she have gone out with him so many times if she didn’t like him? Why would she have let him grope her? It didn’t make any sense and filled him with bitterness and resentment when he thought about it. The only conclusion he could come to was that she really didn’t like him that much, that she just passed the time with him. Used him. Maybe to make her feel better about herself, maybe to make some guy jealous. Who knows? Whatever the reason, the experience left him with less confidence to speak to women than he had ever had (which was never much) and he hadn’t so much as asked for a phone number since.

As he drove down Emory Highway, picking up as much speed as he could before the road twisted and curved out of control, he wondered if all women were like that. He reasoned that most probably were, but not all. Look at his mother, or his sister, or Eileen, for that matter. He wished he could find a girl like Eileen.

She was great. Funny, laid back, beautiful. She didn’t talk down to him or treat him like he was retarded. And she didn’t want to go out and party all the time, wasn’t into the bar scene and the club scene and taking ecstasy and drinking beer until she passed out. No, she was too classy for that. She liked to do the same things he did: watch movies, play cards and board games, hang out at coffee shops. After his driving lesson they had spent the afternoon in a coffee shop, talking about their favorite movies. He remembered how the sun shined in the back window and lit up her hair from behind, like something out of a Spielberg film or—

Do I have a crush on her?

He noticed how sweaty his palms had become on the steering wheel, how dry his mouth was. He wiped his hands on his lap, one at a time, and swallowed.

It made him sick to his stomach. What was he doing with a crush on Eileen? She was dating his best friend, his roommate for Christ’s sake. Did Dennis know? Oh, shit. Could he tell? Did he know before Mike even realized it himself?

Could Eileen tell?

He felt nauseous again and rolled down the window. A cold breeze had settled into the valley for the past few days and made him feel somewhat better. It wouldn’t last, he knew; the weather report said that the weekend was going to be another scorcher. But he was glad it was here now.

He took a curve a little too fast and lurched back into his seat.
Get your mind off of Eileen and onto the road.
This was ridiculous, this stupid little crush of his. It was juvenile and childish. He was an adult now, damn it. Why couldn’t he act like one?

He chastised himself for how predictable it all was. He was usually jealous of Dennis. His physical ability, his charisma, his sheer will and determination to tackle things head on instead of cowering away from them. Why wouldn’t he be jealous of his friend’s girl, too? It fit perfectly with the part that he ended up playing, didn’t it? He was the sidekick, the comic relief, the surrogate little brother, the ward. A Hollywood screenwriter couldn’t have done a better job of mapping out his life, creating a neurotic, anxiety-ridden geek who couldn’t grow up and get a handle on his life.

Even the building he lived in. Look at it there, rising out of the hill like some kind of giant mental ward. That’s where he belonged, wasn’t it? Would that make these winding roads symbolic of some kind of twisting in his mind? Would that mean—

A shape darted in front of him. He slammed on his brakes, his tires squealed, something went
thump
. Then an awful series of sounds in quick succession—
crackcrackcrack—
and he felt something under his tires. He came to a
stop and sat there, breathing hard, replaying it in his mind.

What just happened? Something
had
run out in front of him. Maybe it was just a possum. Yeah, a possum, that’s all. They keep coming out of the woods and wandering around down here, that’s probably all it was. It couldn’t be one of the kids that lived in the building, chasing a ball across the driveway at night, not noticing the headlights until they came around the curve and—

Why wasn’t he paying more attention?

He put the car in park and opened the door. His seatbelt unclipped and whipped back into place on the seat. He leaned out and twisted around, afraid he would see a shoe or a ball cap or—

Nothing.

He sighed. Maybe he didn’t hit anything after all. But that thought didn’t have any weight; he knew he had hit something. He had felt it. He had heard it.

He stepped out of the car.

The breeze kicked up around him, blowing his hair, sneaking into the creases between his work vest and his thin T-shirt. He shivered and looked around. He didn’t see anyone and the night was quiet. Grass and leaves rustled as the wind blew through the yard, a faint electric hum issued from the streetlights positioned every few yards up the drive, the Saturn’s engine whirred, but he couldn’t hear anything else. No crickets chirped, no dogs barked, no one whispered about seeing a car hit someone.

He glanced up the drive, wondering if he would see lights coming on, if someone would scream and run down the path. The only lights were the ones he had seen when first glancing at the building and the doors stayed shut.

His headlights shot up the drive and onto two trees growing close to the path. He had never noticed them before and was glad; they were gnarled and twisted, growing together toward the top, their limb intertwined and covered in the strange webbing that caterpillars left behind when devouring plants. They were sentinels sent out to watch for this kind of tragedy, to witness when an inevitable accident like this occurred and report it, to indict the responsible party.

But tell who?

The building.

He looked away from the trees and tried to get a grip on himself. He took a few steps toward the back of his car and gasped when he saw a pool of red liquid.

He laughed when he recognized it as his brake lights reflecting off of an oil stain. The laughter gave him confidence and nearly erased the dread that he had been feeling since stepping out into the night. He strode to the back of his car—

And threw up onto the pavement.

Under his back tire was Lucy, her torso crushed, her back broken. It inverted at an odd V shape along the spine, bending in a direction that backs weren’t meant to bend. Her hind legs had disappeared in a pool of red and black mush spotted with reddish-blond fur. Her gore-covered snout hung open, her tongue dangling limply onto the pavement, and her glassy eyes stared off into the sky, searching for whatever star her soul planned on traveling to.

What had made him vomit was the point of the V, her abdomen, which had burst open and spilled her insides all over the driveway.

He stumbled backwards and collapsed onto the curb. His muscles trembled. He realized he was crying. He had never killed anything larger than a fly before, especially not a sweet dog like Lucy. He loved dogs. And Lucy had never done any harm; all she ever did was wag her tail and rub her wet nose on the back of your hand until you petted her. She’d whine and nuzzle closer to you, just wanting to be loved. That was all she ever wanted, was to be loved.

And he killed her.

He didn’t know how long he sat there crying. Finally he heard a car engine and he jumped up, knowing that the car was going to be speeding up the driveway, knowing that it was going to be the Turners returning home and that little Joey would jump out of the backseat and scream and call him a murderer and—

Headlights zoomed by the driveway and disappeared around a bend.

He wiped his eyes with the back of his hands. He had to do something. If he sat here much longer he would be found, and then how would he explain it?

Accidents happen.

Yeah, they do. But people still get blamed for them.

People still get beaten up by angry fathers, sued by distraught mothers, ostracized by a building that thinks you’re a
dog killer
, while your roommate is a
hero
. Dennis saves one kid; he kills another’s dog. How’s that going to look?

He could hear people whispering around the pool already.
There goes that Mike kid. Killed poor Joey Turner’s dog, he
did. The Turner kid just hasn’t been the same since. He loved that
dog more than anything. His parents are going to have to put him
in an institution because of it. Too bad that Mike kid isn’t more like
his roommate; Dennis is a stand-up guy. You’d think some of that would have rubbed off on him by now.

He had to get rid of the dog. He stepped around her, popped open his trunk, and tugged at an old sheet that Eileen had left in there. A giant metal gas can pinned it to a corner and he struggled to yank it out. He also had a few bags of groceries; he had stopped on his way home to buy his share of things. He pulled out a box of garbage bags, ripped the top open, and jerked one out. It stuck to the roll and he had a hard time breaking it off. It didn’t help matters that his hands were shaking and his palms slick. He finally got it off and ripped it in two. He wrapped his hands with it and bent to pull the dog out.

What was he thinking? His tire was still on it.

He jumped into his car and shifted gears. The car slipped into neutral and rolled back over Lucy’s body. He slammed on the brakes, cursed, and put it into drive. He pulled forward, driving over her again, and stopped a couple of yards up the driveway.

He jumped out and readjusted the garbage bags on his hands. He raced over to Lucy and, with the car gone, could now see the full extent of the damage. He started crying again, whimpering like he imagined she would have done if he was a second faster with his brakes and just clipped her, just broke her leg and could have taken her to the vet and gotten a cast put on. He saw the extra damage caused by slipping out of gear and almost vomited again. There was a slick tire track of black, red, and green about three feet long going over and through Lucy.

He heard another car going by and froze. He had to act fast. He spread the sheet out next to her and bent over to pull her body onto it. He grabbed her hind legs and tugged, trying not to look, and heard another series of cracking sounds followed by a
squish
as he pulled what was left of her onto the sheet.

He glanced down and her eyes stared straight into his.

Accusing him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

The smell hit him and he turned away and gagged.

He took a big breath, held it, and went back to scooping the larger bits onto the sheet. When he was finished he wrapped her up in it, grabbed another garbage bag, and shoved her inside. His makeshift gloves went in after her. The top barely tied together and he had to fight it so hard he thought it was going to split open. Finally he tied it closed and hefted it into his backseat. He glanced back at where she had been.

The ground was covered in her insides.

He looked around, wishing he had a rake or a shovel or a water hose. He glanced into his trunk and saw the carton of Cokes that he had bought. He took one out, shook it up, and aimed it toward the spot as he opened it. It fizzed for a second and then exploded out of the can, spraying into the mess on the ground and scattering some of it.

He remembered an experiment done with cola in a chemistry glass he had in high school. They had dropped a corroded penny in a glass and marveled as the soda ate away at the corrosion. He didn’t know if that would work with organic material, or even with this much material, but he was running out of options. He emptied the can onto it and grabbed another, and another. He went through six cans before he gave up.

The soda had spread the bulk of the gore around, and trails of fizzy, bloody gunk ran down the driveway. It didn’t clean the mess, and he doubted the Coke would magically eat it away to nothing, but it was getting difficult to tell what the mess was.

If I can’t get rid of it, maybe I can hide it.

He grabbed a jar of spaghetti sauce from one of the bags. He fumbled in his panic, dropped it, and it shattered onto the concrete where Lucy had been.

Good enough.

He took a small tube of hamburger meat and ripped it open along the seam. He squeezed it out and spread it around the drive.

He stepped back. Hamburger meat, spaghetti sauce, cola. A pinkish-green pool of his vomit to the right. It looked like someone had gotten sick, maybe spilled a box of leftovers. But it didn’t look like a dog was killed. Not anymore.

He thought back to the possums and realized that most of this would be gone by the morning, anyway.

He jumped back into his car and tried to catch his breath. He calmed a little with the evidence covered up.

But then he thought of little Joey wandering around yelling for his dog and was overwhelmed by guilt.

Mikey, you did the right thing. That kid will just think she ran off, probably ended up on a farm somewhere where she can run and frolic and someone is taking care of her. He’ll be sad, sure, but not as sad as if he knew she was dead.

He nodded. That felt right.

But what was he going to do with her?

He couldn’t throw her into the trash. What if a garbage man found her, said something to someone, and they came looking for who was responsible?

What about burying her? No, that wouldn’t work, either. He didn’t have a shovel and, even if he did, where the hell would he bury her? Even if he found a place, it could take hours to dig a hole and fill it back in.

What he needed was an isolated, secluded spot he could dump her, someplace no one had any reason to go to. Someplace she’d never be found.

The supermarket.

It made perfect sense. It came to him in a flash; he could sneak back there, wedge the doors open, and toss the bag inside. No one ever went up there, especially not after that Callahan kid’s seizure. No one would even think to look for her behind those closed doors. The place unnerved him, but he didn’t even have to go inside. Just open the doors, leave the bag like some kind of

—offering—