Everyone's Dirty Little Secrets (21 page)

“
That’s the secret,” she tells him.  “
Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“
For sure,” he promis
es her.  “How do I find out?”

“Buy me another drink,” she insists.

He is happy to oblige.

It’s all he has money for.

But it proves to be enough.

An hour later,
they’re in the passenger’s side of her car
,
his face buried
in her chest
.  H
e can’t breathe, but he finds that
only drives him crazier, the lack of oxygen - until he’s actually truly gasping for air. 

H
e has to pull his head free to breathe, looking up at her
. 

It
doesn’t feel right – he
doesn’t know who this person smothering him even is
. 

But he knows she doesn’t look like Jaime at all
to him anymore
. 

H
e
’s
suddenly boiling with rage, blood pounding in
disgust at the way she’s grinding against him and moaning l
ike some frat party prey
pretending this
is first lo
ve or something, not the
coupling
of a pair of barnyard animals that it really is.

He
finds himself clawing for her mouth, tired of hearing her, wanting to silence her, wanting this to end.

She’s not going to die alone.

He can promise her that.

*****

Siobhan’s funeral hits Dodge like a slap to his face.  A punch to his gut.

He hasn’t been feeling well the last several days.  Understandably.  But it’s suddenly different now.
  He has to confront the reason for real.

Funny how lying to the police can keep your mind, and heart, off what’s really going on.

There’s nothing like a funeral to make you stare reality in the face - especially when that face is the cold, unresponsive - vacant
- stare of the person
whose life you know best.  Whose life you shared.

Now, the police, the plots, Jaime - all of it
- mean nothing to him anymore
.

Listening to a priest drone
on, Siobhan’s mother standing at
his
side,
betrays the brutal meaninglessness of life for Dodge.  He knows he’ll likely never see Siobhan’s parents again - that the only bond he had with them is being lowered into the ground. 

He remembers the first time he met them.  They were more like objects than people
to him
- Siobhan dragging him home for Easter - how awkward it felt going from the freedom of their college dorms to being
a guest in her parents’ home.

H
ow real that had felt, compared to anything now. 

So real he was crawling underneath his own skin the whole time - playing the good, young, new boyfriend, wanting her parents to trust him, to feel good about him, feeling
like a fake doing all of that. 

K
nowing that all he wanted was to
have sex with their daughter every waking second
, and knowing he wasn’t fooling anybody - until the second night he was staying there that weekend,
she slipped into the guest room despite her parents’ rules.

So, sure, he felt true love for the first time, even if only for a moment, but it was clear from that moment on that they meant more to each other than anything else ever would.  Eventually that would mea
n more than just breaking rules to have sex
- it would mean helping her through her father’s death, movin
g here to
help her launch her career, and eventually her own business
.

G
iving up his career plan
so she could do what she always wanted to do - rule the roost.

But maybe that makes it sound worse than it was, Dodge thinks.  He was happy - he h
ad no responsibilities.  H
e didn’t have to scrape and fight to find work to prove he
was a capable journalist -
he was instead free to pursue writing what he wanted. 

And maybe Siobhan thought it was crazy that he fixated on
the most ridiculous things - like quantifying how the imposition of order amplifies the inherent chaos of the universe - but maybe she was delighted too to foster that passion in him, to rebel in her own way while also upsetting the whole gender dynamics of the corporate workplace.

In their own way, without ever obsessing over the
pie-eyed romanticism of the whole idea, they were what people mean when they say soul
mates.  People whose flaws define their relationship, and their attraction to each other, as much as their strengths.

Dodge knows there is no language, no poetry, to soften this.

The only woman he
ever loved
is gone.  And not of old age, or cancer, or some car accident - she’s gone by the sword - literally - in a tangle of adultery and simple, brutal misunderstanding.

Dodge doesn’t know what she was doing at Dressler’s.  But he thinks she found
out
about him and Jaime
- something that was merely thirty
minutes of transgression over
a whole life together.  But i
t may
have catalyzed this whole mess just the same

And, if so, Dodge knows he deserves it - that he deserves to suffer - and he embraces that suffering - that the sobs wracking him, swaying over his wife’s grave - are real.

That the loss of her, a
nd
of her love, is more overwhelming
than even the joy they knew together.

Dodge can’t believe the police approach him only moments after the last shovel full of soil is thrown, buried in
the ground and walked away from
.  As much as it feels impossible to be separate
d from her
, some understanding of the reality, and the finality,
of death, seems to finally sink
in.

T
he only thing he can do is walk away from her grave, because there is
simply nothing else left to do, or gain, there
.

Leaning against the hearse, the driver waiting to take him back to the funeral home, Dodge watches Broonzy shamble toward him.

“Really, Broonzy?” Dodge asks.  “You’re harassing me here, now?”

Broonzy looks genuinely human, but his demeanor still betrays the hubris of all police work - that whatever is important at that moment to them is more important than anything else.

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,”
Broonzy tells him.  “You’re going to want to know that you weren’t ID’d
as
being with them doped up chicks
in Amsterdam when they died.”

Dodge just stares at him, trying to comprehend the implications - mostly, if this makes him a suspect in his wife’s murder again.

“So what’s happening here
?” Dodge asks. “What’s going on
?”

Broonzy just stares with his head cocked, one eye squinted at him.

“That’s the thing,” Broon
zy explains.  “Don’t nobody
know the truth
of what’s going on, really
. 
Maybe you
, if anybody
.”

“
Truth’s bigger than everybody, Broonzy – nobody ever knows it,” Dodge tells him.  “I really
don’t know h
ow any of this happened
,” he promises.

Not unless he wants to admit all of the little d
ecisions, little lies, little secre
ts
that set all of this suffering into motion
.

All of this murder.

*****

Chuck knows two things.

One - he better clear town - maybe for good - before anything catches up to him.

A d
ead C
raigslist girl
will not go unnoticed.

Especially if no one takes her ad down.

In this town, at least.

That’s the other thing he knows - he wants to find
another woman soon, to hold her
against him, until
he
c
an’t take it anymore, until he
explode
s
,
and blast
s
the life right out of her eyes.

He can’t describe thi
s feeling – the risk, the thrill
.

Just that all he wants is to feel it again.

And
he knows where he’s going to look for it.

Las Vegas.

What happens there stays there, he hears.

He hopes.