Ladies' Night (21 page)

~ * ~

Elizabeth lay in the empty street, one arm flung across the yellow line.

You had no reason
, she thought,
no reason at all to do this to me
.

The chest wound gave her no real pain. There was only a heaviness and a dull chill spreading through her body. She felt a bitter resignation.

I only wanted help
, she thought. Men, cops — they were supposed to give it to you.

It was wrong to depend upon anybody.

She lay back on the pavement and listened to the sound of her breathing. She stared up at the sky. The moon was still there — pale white against the grey-blue dawn. A full moon, looking scarred and small.

What was it Tom had said?
The moon's a woman
.

But she couldn't remember why.

A car rumbled past her. The pavement trembled to her left but she hardly noticed. She watched the moon fade slowly into the brightening sky.

~ * ~

The car had been easy to find. It was an old '77 Chrysler lying halfway up on the curb on the northeast corner of 68th Street. Phil told him to turn away while Dan lifted the driver off the seat and set him down on the sidewalk but Andy saw him anyway. The man had hardly any head left at all.

It didn't bother him.

Nothing much bothered him now.

Not even seeing Elizabeth lying in the street as they drove by. At least not at first.

He turned in the back seat and watched her through the rear window.

It looked like maybe she was still alive. He thought he saw her moving.

It was awful hard to kill them.

"Where are we going?" he said.

"George Washington Bridge," said Dan. "Radio says that's clear and I got people on the Jersey side."

Lizzy got smaller and smaller, disappearing, her body just a small dark spot blocks away.

"Dan?" he said. "I think that was Lizzy on the street back there. You know, she lives next door?"

Lived
, he thought.

"Yeah?"

Dan looked at him. Then shook his head.

"I'm sorry, Andy. I keep saying that to you, you know? I'm sorry." He wondered if it were possible.

That Lizzy might not . . .
be changed
.

He wanted to tell them to go back and see just in case. He guessed he really had loved Lizzy. And now to think of her just
lying
there . . .

But he'd loved his mother too. And Dan and Phil said that all of them were changed now. That was all they'd seen all night long.

He felt so all
alone
. He felt it like a physical pain squeezing at his chest. He wanted to cry. He kept seeing his mom and dad. Not like they were but like they had been. Like they were still there somehow. He was just
this close
to crying all the time.

"Couldn't we go back?" he said. "I think I saw her move. I think she's maybe alive."

He saw Dan and Phil exchange glances.

"You better forget it, Andy," said Dan. "You know how they are. You want to see her that way? Besides Phil's in pretty bad shape here."

He knew it was true. The man had lost a lot of blood and he was pale and you could hear his breathing.

So he didn't insist or anything. He just began crying. He couldn't help it. He was thinking about Lizzy and about his mom and dad, and he did it as quietly as he could, not wanting them to think of him as just a kid — and after a while he guessed he just started to accept it, felt his sadness yield to something else inside because he'd seen what his mom was like and that was how they all were, all the women.

At the bridge they stopped and the Guardsman checked their car and then waved them through.

It was over.

On the Fort Lee side a pretty big crowd had gathered behind the Guard troops as the cars came across the bridge and some of the people standing there were waving and smiling as though they were heroes or something, which was pretty stupid. And some of them were women. And this one woman who was young and pretty with long dark hair, sort of like his mom had looked in some of the old photos they'd had, leaned in the window of the Buick and smiled at him, a sympathetic smile but like she was happy for him too, and of course by then they'd already surrendered up the pistol to the Guardsman at the entrance to the bridge, which was probably all for the best Andy thought — because more than anything else in the world he'd have liked to kill her.