The Burnt Orange Sunrise

“I
AM ONLY GOING
to tell you this one more time,” she said to him in a quiet, determined voice. “That mean old woman just has to die. You know it, I know it, we both know it. Do you get what I’m telling you?”

“I get it,” he responded irritably. “I’ve gotten it every single time you’ve said it, and this is, like, the third time.”

She watched him carefully as they idled there in the Old Say-brook train station parking lot, hearing the icy pellets go
tappity-tap-tap
on the roof of the car. “Well, what
do you
say? That’s what I want to know.”

What he said was, “We should get back before the roads get any worse.” Though he made no move to put the car in gear. Just sat there behind the wheel, his gloved hands gripping it loosely. “We’ll be missed.”

“Not until we talk this out,” she insisted, staring out at the floodlit rail platform, which gave off a ghostly yellow glow in the frigid night.

The dashboard clock said it was only a few minutes past nine. It might as well have been three in the morning. Absolutely no one else was out. It was a weeknight. The wind was blowing. A steady frozen rain was falling, and it was supposed to turn to snow overnight. There were only a half dozen cars in the parking lot, left behind by Amtrak passengers who would be real unhappy when they returned in a day or so to find them encased in an impenetrable shell of ice. The station was a tiny one, situated almost exactly midway between New York and Boston on the Northeast Corridor. The much-hyped high-speed Acela did not even stop here. Only the occasional local train, none this time of night. The station office was
shuttered. Old Saybrook was a shoreline town popular with summer people. During the warm, sun-drenched months, this parking lot was a joyous, bustling place, a place for animated helios and rushed, giggty good-byes.

Tonight, it was a cold, dark place to talk about murder.

A few businesses were clustered around the parking lot. A dry cleaner, newsstand, a health club. And the Chinese restaurant where they had just eaten. They had been the only customers in the place. She’d had beef with broccoli. He’d had moo shu pork. Also two beers. She could smell the beer on his breath as they sat there with the engine running, the car’s interior growing warm as the heater took hold.

He had been maddeningly quiet all through dinner. She was the one who did all of the talking. And all of the thinking. This was not something new.

“More than anything, I hate what she does to you,” she said, trying a new approach.

“Me? What does she do to me?”

“It’s what she doesn’t do. She doesn’t appreciate you. Doesn’t listen to you. Doesn’t
know
you. She just takes you for granted, like you’re her loyal hound.”

He stuck out his lower lip like a hurt little boy. Sometimes he seemed so very young to her. Except, God knew, he wasn’t anymore. Neither of them was. “That’s something I’m used to. Doesn’t bother me. I don’t expect her to respect me.”

“Well, you should. And you shouldn’t have to put up with her. Neither of us should.” Her eyes studied him expectantly. Still no reaction.
Nothing.
“Look, I’m just being honest, okay? Once the old lady’s gone, we’ll have everything we’ve ever wanted. And that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

“True enough,” he allowed, following her lead at long last.

Always, it was up to her to take the lead. Always, it had been this way when it came to men. And she was fine with it. Really, she was. Way back when she was a schoolgirl, she’d been utterly floored when her class had read
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen. What an impression that awful book had made on her. Those five sisters sitting
there all pure and dewy-eyed and silly in their white frocks, tender young breasts heaving as they read their sonnets and waited and waited for some kind, handsome young lord to ride up on his horse and sweep them away, one by one.
Not going to happen to me
, she remembered saying to herself as she whipped through the pages, shaking her head in disbelief.
Never, ever going to happen to me. Whatever I am going to get in this life I will get because I go out and get it myself.

Especially men. Men didn’t decide things. Women did. This was something she had known since she was very young, and saw how they would respond to her. How she could get anything she wanted if she simply smiled at them a certain way. Men were easy. Men were slow. She’d made the first move with virtually every one of them she had been with in her whole life. If she’d waited for them to make the move, she’d still be waiting, book of sonnets in hand. And she had zero tolerance for those women who complained that they couldn’t “find” a man. Bull. Any woman who really, truly wanted a man just had to go and get him. So what if he wasn’t, strictly speaking, available at the time? If there was one thing she’d learned in life, it was this: No man who is genuinely worth having is ever actually out there on the open market. He always belongs to someone else when you first meet him. You just have to take him away from her, that’s all. He isn’t going to be handed to you.

Life isn’t going to be handed to you.

Which was what brought her to here and now—this car, this night, this move. Because time was running out for her. She wasn’t getting any younger. She still hadn’t gotten everything she deserved, and it wasn’t fair. No, it wasn’t. Especially when she thought about how many opportunities she’d let slide on by because she was waiting for something better,
someone
better. Especially when she looked at what all of her friends had. Compared to them, her life still constituted a total failure. And the window of opportunity was sliding shut faster and faster. And when she allowed herself to think about it, she felt an overwhelming sense of desperation that bordered on outright panic.

She needed this. This was her chance. Maybe her very last. And she was not about to let it pass her by. Trouble was, she couldn’t do it alone. She needed him on board. Him thinking it was going to be about the two of them.

“Once the old lady’s gone,” she repeated slowly, “we’ll have everything we’ve ever wanted.”

“I don’t disagree.” After a brief silence, he added, “As long as there’s a we.”

So that was it. He sensed something.

“Why wouldn’t there be?”

He looked over at her, swallowing. He did not have an intelligent face. He did have a gentle one. He was really very sweet. Not many people knew this. “You tell me.”

“What’s bothering you?”

“Money changes everything, that’s what.”

“Well, it won’t change us. We’re together in this. We’ll always be together.”

“How do I know that?”

“Because I just said so, that’s how. Have I ever once lied to you?”

“No, you’ve never lied to
me.”

Meaning he thought she had lied to other people. Okay, maybe she had. But never him.
Or
herself. She was always honest with herself, and that was crucially important. Because the people who lied to themselves were the ones who did the real damage in this world and ought to be punished. As long as you were straight with yourself, you could look right in the mirror and say,
This is not wrong.

“What about
him?”
he wondered, gazing at her accusingly.

“Not to worry, I can handle him. That poor man thinks he’s in love.”

“And you?”

“What about me?”

“Do you love him?”

“God, we’ve been over this a million times,” she said, her voice rising with exasperation. “I don’t even like him—you know that. He’s just a means to an end.”

“How do I know that’s not what
I
am?” he demanded. “How do I know you don’t say the exact same things about me when you two are in bed together? How do I know that?”

“Everything I do, I do for us,” she responded patiently. “You know this.”

“Do I?”

She reached for his gloved hand and squeezed it. “There’s only one man in my life, and that man is you. This won’t change us, I swear. We’re for keeps.”

“So what’ll you do about him?”

“I can manage him.”

“How?”

She saw a glow now coming from the west, growing brighter and still brighter. And then a sleek, low-slung silver Acela rocketed past on its way to Boston. As it shot by, she could make out snapshot glimpses of figures seated at the windows, snug and warm. People who were going somewhere while she idled here in this car, going nowhere. And then the train had gone by and there was only the silence and the darkness and them.

“That’s no concern of yours,” she said, chewing fretfully on her lower lip, terrified that he was getting cold feet. He had to feel right about this. Since he was a man, that meant he had to feel it had all been up to him to decide. Only then would he get behind it.

“Well, what if they catch us?”

“They won’t. Why would they? She’s old and sick.”

“They won’t do tests or anything?”

“You mean like an autopsy? They only do those if there’s something fishy about how a person dies, which there won’t be. Trust me. Or if the family requests it, which they obviously won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because everyone’s
waiting
for her to die, silly.”

“So why don’t
we
just wait?”

“Because we can’t.”

“Why not?” he persisted.

“Because she can’t get away with what she’s doing to us.”

He sat there in silence for a long moment. “Well, no one lives forever,” he finally conceded, his voice hollow. “We’re all going to die soon enough. Each and every one of us. We’ll just be kind of easing her along. I guess that’s one way you can look at it.”

“Please don’t get all gloomy on me. You know it makes me crazy.”

“I’m not, I’m just… We’re talking about taking another human life.”