Crime Plus Music (9 page)

Sure, I wanted to make her suffer. But I didn't want her to die. She was my best friend, after all. A friend like no other. I swear, I always believed we would lay down our lives for each other if it came to it. And I guess I was right, in a way. She laid down her life rather than destroy my marriage.

When the sentence came down, it hit me like a physical blow. I swear I doubled over in pain as I realized the full horror of what I'd done. But it was too late. The sacrifices were made, the chips down once and for all.

I saw the way she looked at me in court. A mixture of pity and blame. As soon as she heard those witnesses, recognized the conviction in their voices, I think she knew the truth. With a long blonde wig and the right clothes, I could easily be mistaken for her.

There was an excuse for the witnesses. They were a ways off from Kenny and his killer. But there's no excuse for Ruthie. She was no distance at all from Billy Jean that afternoon I saw them by the lakeshore. She could not have been mistaken.

Why didn't I confront her? Why didn't I walk away? I guess because I loved them both so much. I didn't want to lose the life we had. I just wanted Billy Jean to suffer for a while, that was all. I never truly thought he would have her hanged.

J
ESS
TURNED
FOURTEEN
TODAY
. S
HE
'
S
not old enough for the truth. Maybe she'll never be that old. But there's one thing she is old enough for.

Tonight, there will be two of us standing over Billy Jean's grave, our long black veils drifting in the wind, our tears sparkling like diamonds in the moonlight.

ME UNTAMED

BY DAVID LISS

S
HE
COVERED
THE
BLACK
EYE
with makeup, but I could still see it was there, something alien and unaccountable. Like a vandal's scrawl across a museum painting, the dull outline of her bruise was an outrage. Carla smiled and greeted everyone good morning, defying us to say a word, to let our eyes linger too long. It was, I supposed, how she protected herself.

Jim Baron, the senior partner in the practice, met my gaze and flicked his head toward Carla as she walked past with a stack of case folders under her arm. Carla was getting ready, as we did every Tuesday and Thursday, for surgeries—no office visits on those days, just procedures. The practice felt a bit like a gastrointestinal assembly line, and sometimes I hated how we moved patients in and out, hardly taking the time to look at them, but Jim cracked the whip. It was volume, volume, volume as far as he was concerned. We were there to heal, not to socialize, and the more healing, the better.

Maybe we didn't linger with any patient long enough to know one's face from another's, but they looked at ours, and I knew what Jim was thinking—that it was a good thing this one was of the practice's surgery days. People would be too occupied with their own fears to notice that one of the masked doctors, not even the lead doctor, had a bruise around her eye. Jim was thinking we'd caught a break. No one wanted a victim, someone who would let herself get smacked around, noodling around inside some of the most intimate parts of their body. One quick gesture toward me, a nod of his head, was like a lecture: get her to straighten out her personal shit.

I went into the break room and had the gigantic machine, clanging and hissing like some steampunk contraption, make me a black coffee. It was scalding, which was how I liked it, and I took painful little sips while I had it make Carla a skim-milk latte. I then brought it over to her office, where she sat with her desk lamp on and overhead off, reviewing the day's procedures.

“You looked like you could use some caffeine,” I said, closing the door behind me.

She smiled. “I can get my own coffee, Mike.”

I knew she was glad I'd gotten it for her, though. A little kindness doesn't erase someone else's cruelty, but maybe it soothes it a little. “Just being friendly.”

We sat in silence for a long pause. Carla had just started at the practice where I'd been working for four years. I'd helped her land the spot. We'd met in medical school, though she'd started several years behind me, and I'd taken her under my wing. I'd always been something of a mentor to her—a big brother, she liked to say. Now here she was, with an office just down the hall from mine. We were both doctors and that made us equals. I was three years divorced and Carla was married to a guy who, apparently, liked to hit her in the face. That made us something else.

Full disclosure: I'd never thought of Carla as a little sister. If anything, my kindness toward her, back in the early days, had been kind of parental, maybe avuncular. She had been this clueless, desperate thing, and it had made me feel a little more wise and doctorly to help her out. I was newly married, and she hadn't interested me sexually, not at all, but over time, Carla had gotten under my skin with a slow creep.

She wasn't beautiful, maybe not even pretty with her long nose and weak chin and almost imperceptibly uneven teeth, and straw-colored hair pulled into ponytail, but there was a thing about her—a kind of liveliness and humor that transcended traditional notions of beauty. Also, she had a trim, athletic body that she rarely showed off, but I knew was always lurking under her skirt suits or scrubs. In the last, uneasy days of my marriage, my then-wife had accused me of being in love with Carla, but that wasn't true. Maybe it was even completely false, but there was a thing there, maybe more for her than for me, and I liked the charge that hung in the air when we met in the hall or went out for lunch or sat in my office with the door closed.

I could no longer say that I didn't think about Carla, but now she was married, and I wasn't going to be like my ex-wife and play fast and loose with the rules. That had always been my position, anyhow, but now I began to think of my morals as a bit more plastic. It was better to live within a range of options rather than sticking to one point inflexibly. I'd met Carla's husband a bunch of times—a big guy who owned a sizeable portion of a local roofing company. He did pretty well, but he he'd always seemed sort of a brute, maybe a little beneath her. Maybe a lot.

“Carla, if there's something you want to—”

She smiled—tight lipped and broken hearted, shyly concealing her teeth. Her eyes sparkled with sadness and maybe gratitude. I don't know. She looked about perfect to me in that moment. “There isn't. I just need—I need to get some work done.”

“If Steve is—”

She cut me off. “Steven,” she reminded me, her face as devoid of expression as a human face can be. Less readable than a mask. Steven, I was reminded, did not like nicknames. He didn't like people who refused to own guns or eat pizza without pepperoni. He did not think highly of electric cars. He didn't like doctors, who thought they were smarter than everyone else.
This little lady's the exception!
he would bark.
You, Mike, are not
, was implied. Every time I was forced to have a conversation with the guy at a party or barbecue, all he could talk about was how much money he was making—more than a doctor!—how he could only do one thing at a time. He wasn't like some con man who could schedule eight patients for the same time slot. What he did, he explained to me, was honest work. He didn't spend his days with his thumb up his ass, or, he would say with a grin, up someone else's.

“Whatever his name is,” I said, “you can't put up with him hitting you.”

She looked away. “I never said that.”

“Carla, come on. You don't have to.”

She sighed and pushed some hair from her pale hazel eyes. She forced another false smile, and she was as close to objectively beautiful as she was ever going to get. It broke my heart a little. “You'd think, taking all those martial arts classes, I'd be able to look after myself.”

“You don't have to do everything by yourself,” I told her, keeping things vague, because I had no idea what I was supposed to do here. “Your friends can help you.”

She shook her head. “You don't understand.”

“I know that,” I said. “I know that for sure, but I don't have to understand in order to help you be safe.”

She shook her head. “Life is funny, you know. We spend all these years learning about how the human body works. We have this authority, and we advise people on decisions that affect lives. Sometimes we make calls that affect whether or not people live or die. You'd think with all that, we could have more power in our own lives.”

“Carla, you do have power,” I said. “Whatever you want to do, you can do. I can help you.”

“You can't,” she said.

After I left her office, I thought about that. I'd taken her words to mean that she didn't think that anyone could help her, but maybe that wasn't it. Maybe she'd meant “
You
can't.” Maybe she didn't think I was up to it, and maybe I wasn't, but I wanted to be the sort of person who was. And I knew she was right. I was a doctor and that meant something. I was not going to let her suffer.

I'
M
A
LITTLE
ON
THE
short side and I've been losing my hair since high school. I shave my scalp pretty close these days and make up for the absence with a neat little goatee. I wear glasses because contact lenses make my eyes tired. I could change some things around, knock a few years off my appearance, but my patients think I look like a doctor, like someone they can trust to advise them. They are almost all older than I am, so conforming with their idea of the platonic doctor saves us all time. Maybe it even saves lives. If people are more inclined to listen to me, to do what I advise, they just might live longer. That's the kind of position I'm in.

I run regularly and hit the gym three times a week, and I'm in pretty good shape for thirty-nine, but I know that once I hang up the white coat, I give off a harmless vibe. Strangers on airplanes always guess that I'm a university professor because I strike them as bookish and introverted. One guy once called me dweeby, right to my face. I wanted to bloody his nose for that, but I just laughed agreeably, which maybe proved his point.

I know that the people in my life, those who know my story, think I'm weak and that's because of my ex-wife. It turns out that while I was logging long hours and earning the money that paid for our nice house and our exotic vacations, she was cheating on me with the guy from Home Depot who was redoing our kitchen. Maybe it was more than just animal attraction because she's living with him now. On an abstract level, I get that. Emotions are tricky things, and often beyond our control.

Still, I know what the world sees. She left a successful doctor in a lucrative practice for a guy who works for Home Depot, so clearly I was fucking up. They don't conclude that my ex-wife was a cheater who couldn't stand stability and domesticity, who didn't want kids when I did, and that maybe my silent disappointment chipped away at her own contentment. She told me that's what drove her to Eduardo, and I had no trouble believing it. She didn't do responsibility well. She liked mess and surprise and lighting itineraries on fire. That's how things boil down, but to the spectators in my life, she was a good-looking and charming woman, a trophy wife, and she'd left me for a tattooed wage slave who rides a motorcycle.

I'd never felt particularly unmanly before she left me. As a kid I'd gotten along with everyone, so I'd never had to fight. I'd played violin, and primarily listened to classical music, and the other kids still didn't pick on me. That's how easy I was to get along with. When I started noticing girls, some noticed me back. I got by on my personality, and I always did pretty well. I put myself through all those years of schooling, I paid my debts and helped out my friends. I always felt I was on top of things, but now I found myself thinking all the time about the ways people thought I was lacking. I couldn't keep my wife. I didn't start a family. I'd sold the house, which was too big and full of memories, and was now in a two-room apartment. I was going to be forty soon, and I was living like a kid almost half my age.

Lately I'd begun to suspect that the people who knew me didn't think I was all that competent. Carla, I was now sure, was one of those people.

E
VEN
BEFORE
THE
BLACK
EYE
, I'd been dwelling on this. I dwelled on it all that day, through the various endoscopies, sigmoidoscopies, and hemorrhoidal bandings that made up a typical Tuesday. I needed to be more assertive. I needed to make my life what I wanted it to be. The song—stuck in my head through every procedure—was a prodding and a reminder.

When I was in high school, an older kid I really admired, Charles Randall, had introduced me to all kinds of music—things I wouldn't have listened to otherwise. I'd have stuck with Haydn and Beethoven if he hadn't gotten this idea that he was going to make me cool. He gave me lists, generated mix tapes, dragged me to shows. One of the bands he'd pointed me toward was Beat Happening. At the time I hadn't heard anything like them—they played and sang really badly, the production values were poor and yet somehow it all came together as an engaging and unlikely pop confection with jagged edges, a dessert tray sprinkled with broken glass.

I'd forgotten about the band for years, but a few months before Carla's black eye, I'd been going through my CD collection, looking to get rid of things that reminded me of the marriage. I threw away less than I kept and I put on a lot of music I hadn't listen to in decades and most of it seemed to me better forgotten, but when I put on the Beat Happening CD
Dreamy
something clicked. The opening track, “Me Untamed” felt like a wakeup call. It's guitar and drum driven and catchy, and Calvin Johnson's vocals, flat and base, sound as much like a deathbed convulsion as a performance, but there was an urgency to the song. It was like a revelation. I had been tamed my entire life, by my marriage, by my divorce, by my niceness, by my inoffensive looks. The song, I realized, needed to become my anthem. I wanted to become untamed.

I'd have the song stuck in my head while sitting alone in my apartment after work, watching a baseball game, eating a sandwich I'd bought on the way home from a late night at the office or, as Carla's husband would put it, sticking my thumb up someone else's ass. The song, twitchy and urgent, was a prodding, but it was one thing to determine you wanted to take more risks, live more fully, be a more daring version of yourself, but it was another to know how to do it.

Most of my friends were married and had kids. It wasn't like I could recruit anyone into a dangerous adventure. I had no interest in going out to bars and trying to pick up women. I was a doctor and still of marriageable age, so the reality was I met plenty of women, but that wasn't the kind of adventure I was looking for. I wasn't after sexual conquest, I was looking to assert myself, to become the sort of person who people took seriously. I wanted to be untamed.

Carla didn't think I was up to it. “
You
can't,” she'd said. So maybe it was time to show her that I could.

I
KNEW
HOW
TO
FIND
Steven. That part wasn't hard. He and I went to the same gym, and I had picked up on his schedule, noticing it mostly so as to avoid running into him. He liked to check out how much I was bench-pressing, or if we were in the locker at the same time, he would sometimes glance at me and smirk. Tamed Mike wanted to avoid the scrutiny. The untamed Mike did not give a shit.