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Authors: Paul Griffin

Stay with Me (15 page)

BOOK: Stay with Me
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Except maybe it’s better she doesn’t.
I look out the kitchen window, up to the sky. Across the street, a pair of sneakers strung over a power line turns in a hot wind that smells of ozone. The rain comes.
 
(Tu esday, July 21, night)
CÉCE:
 
He’s late.
I’m waiting out in front of the restaurant. I keep replaying it: tomorrow, sunrise. Waking up with him in that double bed down in the basement. The light is good down there then. Clean. Boo will worm her way into our cuddling. She’ll wake up with me every morning from now on, and I’ll walk her around the reservoir. I’ll lose weight and be able to eat more cheesecake.
He’s never late. ESP. Push comes to shove, it isn’t real, right? C’mon. Probably had to do something for his father. Haul trash, mop the halls, sweep the stairs.
Half an hour late. Why didn’t he let me get him a phone? I was going to add another line to mine for ten bucks a month, and the phone comes free, but he said no. I head into the kitchen to tell Ma I’m going over to Mack’s. Everybody’s bunched around Vic’s laptop. Vic downloads tomorrow’s crossword every day at about this time.
They’re not looking at the crossword. They’re looking at me. They’re pale.
I step closer, and I see they’re on the breaking news link, local edition.
“Oh Céce,” Ma says.
Vic almost catches me as I pass out.
 
 
(The next morning, Wednesday, July 22, the forty-first day . . .)
 
He was inside me. Moved in me. I felt him so clearly. His pulse. The sting of his desperate heart. Marcy told me it would hurt, but it didn’t. It was perfect from the first stroke. It was blindingly clear to me: We were born for no other reason than to be together. He made me shake. I was a mess, but he didn’t mind. He was shaking too. He draped me, his torso overtaking mine, gently, softly, our lower bellies brushing where the hair lightens. The throbbing was so sweet I saw colors I didn’t know existed, and they shimmered to our rhythm, all kinds of gold, like sunlight through leaves. After: He held me, and I could cry in front of him and feel stronger for it. I was a seagull driving for the full moon. But now wires lasso my joints and pull me to the floor. A puppet flattened, chained to the dustiest ground.
 
They’re calling him the Soda Can Killer. In the print edition, he comes up just before page six, where the gossip columns start. His mug shot looks nothing like him. He’s not so much looking into the camera as looking through it, at something far, far away. He doesn’t seem at all surprised. He looks tired and, oddly, relieved.
Oh my god. It’s really hitting me now.
Mack Morse killed a man.
He hasn’t called me. He’s just gone. I’m dragging the pictures across my phone screen. Scrolling through smiles and touching and hugging Boo.
My Boo.
That man. Larry. How could he? How dare he? If he wasn’t already dead, I’d claw him blind.
I need Mack with me so bad now. To keep me from wanting to break everything I see, windows, the TV, the bones in my hands, creaking.
I have to salvage what’s left of us. I have to hold her one last time. Hugging the pillow doesn’t work. Hugging myself hurts worse. I need her. I need Boo.
 
Vic drives me over there, to the roof. Yellow tape everywhere. A cop sits on a folding chair out front. “You can’t go up there,” he says.
“I have to,” I say.
“Why?”
“Boo.”
“Boo?”
he says.
“My dog. Her body. I have to bury her. In the park.”
“
Bury
her?” the cop says. “You can’t bury a dog in a park.”
“The graveyard.”
“Miss—”
“You don’t understand, Officer. That’s
my dog
up there. I have to take her to her final resting site. My boyfriend’s secret place.”
“Your boyfriend?”
Vic hushes me and steps in. “Listen,” he says to the cop. “You know Detective Escobar, right? He’s one of my longtime customers—”
“Look,” the cops says. “I can’t let you through the tape. And anyway, the dog’s not up there.”
“Then where is she?” I say.
“They took the bodies. That’s all I know.”
I’m ripping the tape, heading up there. I have to see. To be sure they didn’t just leave her there. I have to take her to his hideaway, our hideaway, where he buried the others, the ones he tried to save, the ones that didn’t make it. That time he showed me. Beneath the pines. He marked their graves with smooth stones. I know it was wrong, but I couldn’t keep my hands off him. I pushed my mouth down on him right there, I wanted to taste him so bad. He kept saying “Not here,” but we did. Right there.
The cop is yelling, but I don’t hear him. When he grabs my arm, I spin into him and shove him off and scream, “Don’t touch me. Don’t. You. Fucking.
Touch
me.”
He and Vic drag me out and put me into the Vic-mobile. They hold my arms down, because if they don’t I’ll start smashing them on the dashboard again. The cop calls an ambulance, but by the time they get there, I’m spent, too tired to cry. They ask my name, where I am, and the day of the week, and I give them the right answers. The one guy says, “She’s okay.” I laugh myself into a coughing fit, because that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in the longest time.
 
A few hours later, we’re in an old courtroom with a high ceiling. Marble floors, dark oak, ornate moldings everywhere. But the windows are dirty. The lights are dark with bug cake. A thick filthy cobweb rope swings from the ceiling. The fans don’t do any cooling, but they make a lot of noise.
Vic’s detective friend knows a guy at the Department of Juvenile Justice. Mack is supposed to plead today sometime, could be anytime, depending on how full the blotter is.
It’s full.
The place is packed. Me, Ma, and Vic are shoved into standing room only, way in the back. We bob and weave and go tiptoe to look over the crowd, but I can’t see any sign of Mack. Every three minutes or so, the judge says, “How do you plead?” And some lawyer says for his client, “Not guilty, Your Honor.”
Everybody’s so mad in here. The heat. I have to step out for air. Ma comes with me, out to the courthouse steps. I try calling down to Anthony again, to tell him about Mack, but he’s still in a communications blackout.
I still haven’t heard from him. Mack, I mean.
“When’s he gonna call me, Ma?”
“He’ll call you, sweetie. Just give him a chance. He’s probably . . . We better get back inside.”
“But what if he doesn’t, Ma? What if he doesn’t call?”
And what if he does? What can he tell me, and what can I say? I keep seeing them, the words in the newspaper. What he did. The same person who clubbed somebody to death told me he loved me?
 
An hour later, the judge says, “Macario Morse, how do you plead?”
“Not guilty, Your Honor,” Mack’s lawyer says. He’s the same court-appointed attorney a lot of the others have. I can barely see Mack from back here. They gave him a clean T-shirt, but his jeans are spattered with dried blood.
He said I muted the hissing, but I’m really starting to wonder now: If I was with him, could I have saved him from himself? How do you do that, take a baseball bat to somebody’s skull? His hands, once so gentle on my body, are fists now.
The judge is saying, “Bail recommendation?” when Mack cuts her off.
“Your Honor?” he says. Mack’s lawyer tries to hush him, but Mack says, “I did it. I killed him.”
The judge takes off her glasses. She nods to Mack’s lawyer. “Is your client on medication, legal or otherwise?”
“I don’t do drugs, ma’am. I don’t drink either. I know what I’m saying, and I’m saying what I mean. I’m guilty. I don’t want a plea deal either. I want to pay in full. He murdered my dog, I murdered him, eye for an eye, like that. He paid his due. What’s mine?”
The judge gets mad and calls the district attorney and Mack’s lawyer to the bench and gives them an earful.
Mack calls to the judge, “I want fast-track sentencing. That’s in my rights. Give me fast-track.”
I turn to Vic. “Why is he doing this?”
“Shh now,” Vic says. “Easy, Céce. Deep breath.”
“Why isn’t he fighting this? Larry murdered Boo. All the newspapers said it: mitigating circumstances. I don’t, he’s, it’s like he
wants
to go to prison.”
A security guard tells me to quiet down, but mine is just one of many pleading voices.
I turn to my mother. “We could get him a lawyer and help put together an explanation for why he lost it. I know everything about him. I could help him with his case. He
needs
me, Ma. I can’t desert him. I swore—”
“I demand fast-track,” Mack yells.
The judge writes something in her file and waves her other hand without looking at Mack, and the bailiffs sweep Mack away.
 
 
(Five days later, Monday, July 27, late morning of the forty-sixth day . . .)
 
He still hasn’t called me.
We’re downtown again, this time for Mack’s hearing. This place is a lot different from last week’s mahogany-paneled chamber. It’s this small shabby room with plastic chairs. No dais this time. Just a wobbly, chipped Formica folding table. This dude slouches behind the table. Cruddy shoes, no jacket or tie. Ring around the collar. No way he shaved today. He’s been texting for fifteen minutes solid. His fingers are flying, but otherwise he’s emotionless.
Mack’s father is here. He’s nodding but not really listening as Mack’s court-appointed lawyer whispers to him. Mr. Morse keeps checking his watch and hissing, “
Shit
. Be
late
again.” I tried to say hello before, but he doesn’t remember me now that he’s sober, or hungover.
This isn’t the trial. There won’t even be a trial, because Mack pled guilty. His sentence won’t come down for months, but today Mack gets to talk about what happened and more importantly, to offer his genuine remorse. That is, if he talks.
The guy behind the table isn’t a judge. He’s a court-appointed interviewer. Based on what Mack does or doesn’t say, the interviewer will make a recommendation to a judge who will decide the final sentence. The interviewer also has discretion to offer an appeal to the district attorney’s office, if he thinks the DA’s penalty recommendation is too severe.
It’s all too confusing. Why won’t they just let me tell everybody about the real Mack? The one who gives away his money to strangers and risks his life to save abused dogs. The one who saves
people
. The one who loves me.
The one who killed a man?
I try not to imagine it. What his face looked like as he swung the bat at Larry’s head. Would I have recognized him? How could that be Mack Morse?
They bring him in. He won’t look at me or Ma or Vic. He’s in a faded brown jumper, hands cuffed behind his back. He knows I’m here. When he came in, he did a double take on me before he dropped his head.
“Mack,” I say, but the guard or whoever tells me, nicely, that I can’t do that.
The interviewer dude keeps right on texting without any acknowledgment that Mack is sitting in front of him. He finishes his text and eyes Mack without a word for a long time. He flips open Mack’s file and takes another long time to study it. Then he closes the folder quickly, takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “So you pled guilty straightaway, without even waiting for a deal offer. What’s up with that?”
“I did what they said, the exact way they said it,” Mack says. “Why waste everybody’s time on jury duty? Lying about big stuff, like murder or love? It makes me sick. You do what you do, and as you reap you must pay for it in full. The Bible says that.”
But what about us? What about what
we
did? What we had. What we made together. Doesn’t he owe it to us to fight for it? To fight for me? Or was our love a lie, then?
“The Bible also talks about forgiveness,” the interviewer says.
“I must’ve skipped over that part.”
The guy nods and nods, and then he sighs. “Are you sorry for what you did?”
“Honest, mister? I’m not all that sorry. You didn’t know Larry. He was evil. Everybody’s playing it up like he was some sort of war hero, but my lawyer told me he had a dishonorable discharge—”
“We’re not talking about the victim here. We’re talking about
you
.”
“Okay, do I wish I didn’t do it? Yeah, I wish, but wishing don’t mean I’m sorry. Wishing don’t mean anything. It’s done, and there’s no going back.” He sounds so different. Rougher. Harder accent. “What? You want me to lie, tell you I’m sorry?”
“I want you to
be
sorry.” The dude pulls his pen and writes in his file. “I have to tell you, at first I thought that the ADA’s petition that you be treated as an adult was extreme, but now, seeing you, I think you’re well aware of what you did, and I think you think you were justified in doing it. You are aware you’re being treated as an adult?”
BOOK: Stay with Me
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