Hard Time (13 page)

He was talking. I could tell from how he’d move, then pause. He shoved his free hand in his pocket. I thought about grabbing his coat and bringing it out to him, chose not to. He nodded, shook his head. Looked down the street. I tried to imagine the conclusions I’d jump to about him, if we were strangers. That man beyond the glass, making a desperate phone call in his tee shirt, in the frigid winter air. A guy chasing drugs, maybe? Or a girl?

Suddenly he was gone, out of frame then coming back through the door, phone in hand, still lit up. He sat back down across from me and held it out. On the screen it said,
Kristina.

“Go on,” he said, giving it a little shake.

I took it, my warm fingers brushing his icy ones. I held it to my ear and said, “Hello?”

“Yeah?”

“Sorry,” I said, shooting my companion a look. “Eric just gave me his phone. He didn’t tell me who you—”

“I’m Kristina.”

“Oh. Hello. I’m Anne.”

“I know who you are.” She sounded bored and aggressive at once, that rusty voice suggesting she was probably taking long drags off a cigarette between sentences. “Eric told me all about you.”

“Oh,” I said again, stupidly.

“I’m his big sister. He tells me everything. You want to know why he beat that asshole down.”

I swallowed. Did I? I wasn’t so sure anymore. “I’m guessing he did it for you.”

“That shitbag didn’t get any less than he deserved.” She still sounded bored, but I sensed tension behind the tone. A tough girl trying to act hard, to cover up the fact that she felt something.

“I don’t know what Eric and I are,” I admitted, eyeing him. “But we can’t be anything if I don’t know what made him do such a terrible thing.”

A sharp, mean little laugh, one that had me picturing Kristina with a forty at one elbow, a shirtless man passed out on a threadbare couch in the background. Single-wide. Camped in some weedy lot where American dreams went to die.

“You want to hear about the terrible things men do,” she said through a cruel sigh. “Oh, I could tell you all about that. But it’s none of your goddamn business what happened to me. I told my brother and I told that bitch judge of his, but I sure as shit won’t be telling you. Just know there’s ways a man can hurt you, ways that don’t leave marks on the outside. Ways that make a tire iron look honest. That clear enough for you?”

My throat hurt, but she couldn’t see me nodding so I croaked, “Yeah. That’s pretty clear.”

When she spoke next, her tone lost some of its ragged edge. “You think whatever you want about me. But my brother’s a good man. Maybe the only good man to ever come out this place. I don’t know who you think you are, but I can guaran-fucking-tee you, you’d be lucky to deserve him. Not the other way around.” And she hung up on me.

I stared at the phone as her name disappeared and the call duration flashed. Eric reached out and pocketed the thing.

“She’s not a woman whose business you just go around sharing,” he said mildly.

“No. I gathered that.”

He cracked a smile. “She’s wild, my sister. Same as our father.”

“I’m surprised she didn’t do the beat-down herself.”

His smile wilted. “She would’ve. ’Cept he broke her arm.”

My body went cold. “Oh.”

“I’m done dwelling on all this,” he said, sitting back. “But there you go. Whatever she said, that’s all you’re ever gonna hear about why I did what I did. It wasn’t a choice to me. It’s not a question of whether it was justified.”

“Looking back, do you wish you’d killed him?”

“No,” he said. “I’m glad I didn’t kill him.”

I blinked, surprised.

“It was worth five years, showing him what happens when you fuck with my family. But no, he’s probably not worth my sister feeling like I’d forfeited the rest of my life in order to see that guy dead.”

“Did he get put away? For what he did to her?”

“No, for other shit.”

“Not in Cousins, I hope.”

He shook his head. “They wouldn’t allow that.”

“Good . . . Did you know him? Before?”

Eric nodded. “Oh yeah. I knew him. He and my sister had been something, once upon a time. We cooked out together, went down to the lake, worked on cars. My mom let him crash on our couch one summer, when I was maybe sixteen.”

I shivered. That was so much worse to me. For violence to be lurking in someone you thought you knew. It made you question everything. Your own judgment and intuition, why you didn’t see it coming, and if it was your own fault, in a way.

“You trusted him, then?”

He shook his head. “Not by the time he did what he did.”

“No?”

Eric held my gaze. “You’re from a real nice place, aren’t you?”

“We weren’t rich or anything.” Not by Charleston standards. By Darren standards? By that curve, I may as well have grown up in some gated paradise.

“I’m not from a nice place,” he said. “Little nothing-town called Kernsville, an hour east of here. And there’s a plague out there, the way plagues spread through dirty places hundreds of years ago. Only this one gets brewed up out of cough syrup and it’s a pipe or a needle that bites you, not a rat. You follow?”

I nodded.

“I’m not saying what I did was any kind of mercy or anything. But if some infectious animal was going around biting people, nobody would hesitate to put it down.”

“And he’s still in prison now?”

He nodded.

“Is there anybody you have to answer to, back home? Friends of his?”

“No. He’d fucked just about everybody over in one way or another, by the time he got locked up. If he gets out someday and wants to get back on me or my family for what I did to him, he’ll be marching up alone. If he’s got any uncooked brain cells left in his head, he’ll find himself a new town to infest.”

We were quiet for a time, the space between us filled with strangers’ arguments, with hard rock and laughter and the tinkling of bottles and glasses.

I had my chin dipped, attention on the table, and Eric angled his head low to catch my eyes.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“You look sad.”

“I guess I just wish you regretted it,” I said quietly, the words surprising even me.

“I can’t. It was the right thing to do, no matter how wrong the law says it was. I couldn’t live with myself if I hadn’t done that. There’s natural laws that trump the ones you might get arrested over.”

I turned that around in my head. I tried to imagine what my father would have done, if he’d heard about Justin bursting my eardrum, knocking his daughter to the floor, breaking her heart so badly she walled it off for the next half a decade. He served the state. The law. But if he’d known . . . If he’d gone after Justin, hit him as hard as that hand that had struck me . . . I loved my daddy as much as a girl can, but if he’d done that, I’d have hugged him harder than I ever had in my life. Loved him even more, to know what he felt for me went that deep, that it weighed impulse against reason and said
fuck you
to the latter. I’d not given him a chance to make that decision. I’d protected him, because deep down . . . maybe I knew which he’d have chosen. And Justin wasn’t worthy of endangering my father’s job. He wasn’t worthy of breaking my father’s heart, either. Not on top of mine.

I eyed Eric’s bottle, still full to the neck. “Are you allowed to leave Darren without your parole officer’s permission?”

He nodded. “Yeah, just can’t leave the state.”

“Let’s go somewhere.”

“What, now?”

“Yeah. Let’s drive someplace. Somewhere quiet. With water.” Like that lake he’d mentioned in our letters, the one I’d imagined us beside so, so many times.

He gave me a look I’d expect from a protective friend. “You want some freshly sprung con to drive you out to someplace quiet?”

“I do.”

He mulled it over a moment, then stood. “All right, then.”

We abandoned his barely tasted beer, my half-drunk cocktail. We abandoned the neon lights and sour smell of the bar and the warmth, pulling on our layers outside the exit. He led me half a block to an old silver truck, went around and unlocked my door.

“Keep your gloves on,” he warned, shutting me inside. He climbed into the driver’s seat. “This piece of shit’s heater’s been broken since before I got put away.” He reached behind his seat for his cap. I donned my scarf and the engine stuttered to life.

“Where’m I taking you?” he asked, easing us away from the curb.

“How far is that lake you told me about? The one you missed when you were locked up?”

“Forty minutes maybe.”

“Let’s go there.”

“If you say so.” He made a U-turn and aimed us toward the highway.

We drove without talking for a long while, until we exited onto a lonely route, leaving industrial Michigan behind, slipping into hibernating farmland, then woods.

His voice shattered the silence. “Why d’you want to see this lake so bad?”

“I’m trying to understand you. I want to see the place you told me about. It seems like . . . It seems like the place that embodied everything prison took away.” And the place where he’d brought our bodies together, in those fantasies he’d written out for me.

“It won’t be anything like what I miss. Frozen, dark. Snow all over.”

“It’ll just have to do.”

I sensed his nod in my periphery.

We passed a sign that advertised parking for a public beach, but a metal gate kept us out, so we drove on. A mile later he slowed to an ice-crunching halt along the roadside, and through a gap in the pines I could see a satin ribbon—the near-full moon on the lake, on a frosted plane the wind had blown bald. Eric shut off the engine and killed the headlights. It was the darkest place I’d been in months. No streetlights, no houses winking in the distance. Just the moon. By its glow our breath steamed in the cold truck cab.

“This is nothing like what I miss,” he reiterated softly, in a tone as black as grief.

“I’m sure.”

“This is like visiting your grandmother’s grave and pretending it’s the same as seeing her again.” I saw him swallow, saw him blink. His face was white and jet and silver, a daguerreotype.

“Why are we here?” he asked, so quietly it could’ve been my imagination, if not for the puff of his misty breath.

“I need to see you. Here. Away from Darren or Cousins or any other place full of bricks and barbed wire and all that depressing stuff.”

“Snow depresses me.”

“Not me.” I reached for his gloved hand with mine. We rested them on the seat between us. The most we’d ever touched, and even through all the layers, I felt him.

“I love the snow,” I said. “The fluffy kind, anyhow, not the brown slush. We never had any real snowstorms where I’m from, not except for Hurricane Hugo, and I was real tiny for that. But I remember it. It was the most magical thing I’d ever seen.” I squeezed his hand. “It was like the world had been covered in sugar.” Sugar, like he’d imagined tasting, if we ever kissed.

“I hate blizzards,” he said. “Meant I couldn’t escape the fucking trailer I grew up in. Not the way I could in the summer.” He sounded bitter. Bitter now, about this. Never about his sentence, or about the years he’d lost, about any promises he’d read into my letters, ones I’d broken when I turned him away.

I stared at the moon’s reflection, smudged across the ice. “Try to see it through me. The way your letters made me see sex through you. In ways I hadn’t felt in ages.”

I turned and caught his features soften at that, watched black lashes lower against white skin. When his eyes opened, those brown irises were obsidian-dark and shiny.

“It’s not all bad,” he conceded, staring at the lake. “It’s clean, anyhow. And quiet. And . . . open. And it’s good to see so many stars again.”

“It’s so still.”

He nodded, then whispered, “And you’re here.”

I shivered, the sensation strangely warm in the icy coldness. “I’m here.” In an isolated place, with a dangerous man, without informing anyone where I’d gone. Yet I felt nothing resembling fear.

“I took you somewhere,” he added, even more softly. “Someplace you wanted to be.”

I shifted, collapsing the cup holder tray into the dash so I could turn and rest my bent legs on the bench seat. “You took me all kinds of places, in our letters. Places I worried I might never want to go, ever again.”

He turned, too. “I really did that?”

“You really did. Whatever my letters meant to you, stuck inside those walls, I swear yours meant just as much to me. Stuck in my own little lonely box.”

“Not possible.”

I smiled at him. “You’d be surprised.”

For a long moment we watched each other’s faces, two pairs of eyes studying, recording. Then his gaze dropped to our hands, resting on the seat. He slid off one glove, and I did the same. Grazing my fingertips along his palm, I felt his warmth for a slim second before the air stole it. Like a child, I fanned my fingers to measure my hand against his, then he zippered us together, squeezing softly. We held tight until body heat came out of hiding to curl up between our palms. His next breath flared, giving away the fire burning behind that cautious expression.

“Tell me what you’re after,” he whispered.

“I’m not after anything. Only this.”

“Tell me where we stand. Are we those two people from the donut shop, or those two people who wrote those letters to each other?”

Good question. “We’re someplace in between, I think.”

His brows drew together—only the subtlest little movement, but it told me everything. It wrote all his hope and regret and need across his face, clear as black ink on a white page.

“I haven’t been with anybody since I got out,” he murmured.

“You said.” Yet the hot little spark those words gave me was strong as when he’d first told me.

“And you don’t think I’ve changed, from who I was when I got put away, but I have. I don’t want to go back to being who I was before I went in. Who I was at twenty-six. Who I was back in my shitty hometown. I want to be somebody who deserves to be with somebody like you.” He flexed his fingers between mine. “And not because you’re sweet and pretty and seem like, I dunno. Like some good girl or something, all clean and shiny. Like you’ll fix what’s wrong with me, with your purity or some shit like that.”