head and pulled a blanket up to her neck and I kissed her. We were sixteen the first time we kissed and never had made the decisions that brought us here. I lowered my face onto her stomach and it went through me like cold blades.
There was a sound in the air, like a tea kettle reaching steam. For a minute I thought it was the sirens, but there were no sirens. It was just this awful high-pitched piping sound, a screaming coming through the walls, closer and closer until it was drilling into my ears. It made me sick and I ran from her, into the kitchen, where I bent over the sink and heaved until my legs gave out.
Time was no longer slipping. At this point it was scattering like sheets of dirty newspaper in a high-velocity wind tunnel.
I lost track of things. A lot of things.
What I remember next is being in the upstairs bathroom. I was looking up at the paintings of the rabbits on the bathroom wall, Stacey’s rabbits, the morose paintings she loved, God knows why, and then I was reeling away and running into the hall, back down the stairs and I might have been screaming for somebody to help me. I needed to call somebody. The little red Motorola she had given me for my birthday was sitting on the dining-room table, not fifteen feet from the sun room where I had been working all afternoon. I rarely checked this phone. I was always busy checking The Leash. That’s what she called the BlackBerry phone Ghost, Inc. used to communicate with me. I opened my red cell and started to dial 9-1-1 and that’s when the little voicemail envelope popped up on the screen.
You have one voice message.
I stood there wondering if I could go back in time. I was afraid to turn around and see her on the couch. Everything in me slowed and I listened to the message she had left me at 9.12 a.m., almost ten hours earlier.
I don’t know why she hadn’t called the home phone. Maybe she was in a panic. Maybe a darker thing inside her didn’t really want me to answer. But she left me the message, probably sitting in her car, right before she backed out of the garage. She had to have been sitting there, because she never got past the alley and if she had been in the house she would have talked to me face to face. I’d have heard her crying. She was crying so hard and I was sleeping on the couch, less than a hundred feet away from her. Did I hear it ring? I might have. I might have heard it and rolled over, pulling a pillow over my head and going back to sleep while she was begging.
‘Where are you? James, where are you? You’re never home and I’m so scared, I can’t, I can’t, I don’t understand what’s happening any more. I . . .’ Her crying faded for a few more seconds and then the message ended.
She must have started to back out then. I don’t know who or what gave her pause. All I know is who didn’t stop her that morning, the night before, and all the nights when she was drifting toward oblivion - the man who had made a vow to protect her for the rest of her life.
So, my wife didn’t really leave me, is the thing to remember. I left her, not the other way around.
I left my little rabbit all alone.
The detective who worked Stacey’s case, Tod Bergen, took me for a drink a couple weeks after. He was a burly guy with tight hair and a pink face behind clear-framed glasses, a near-albino you might find managing a Swedish furniture boutique. He was a good cop as far as I could tell, and a smart one. He’d been on the job for sixteen years, said this kind of thing happened in Los Angeles more often than anyone wanted to admit. Ten million people. Too many cars. Enough pedestrians and cyclists thrown in to keep things interesting. You’d think with so many people crammed into so few square miles, there’d always be a witness.
But this was not so, Bergen explained while I sat beside him at the bar, numb and mute with contempt for everything that breathed. ‘Last year we
There was a sound in the air, like a tea kettle reaching steam. For a minute I thought it was the sirens, but there were no sirens. It was just this awful high-pitched piping sound, a screaming coming through the walls, closer and closer until it was drilling into my ears. It made me sick and I ran from her, into the kitchen, where I bent over the sink and heaved until my legs gave out.
Time was no longer slipping. At this point it was scattering like sheets of dirty newspaper in a high-velocity wind tunnel.
I lost track of things. A lot of things.
What I remember next is being in the upstairs bathroom. I was looking up at the paintings of the rabbits on the bathroom wall, Stacey’s rabbits, the morose paintings she loved, God knows why, and then I was reeling away and running into the hall, back down the stairs and I might have been screaming for somebody to help me. I needed to call somebody. The little red Motorola she had given me for my birthday was sitting on the dining-room table, not fifteen feet from the sun room where I had been working all afternoon. I rarely checked this phone. I was always busy checking The Leash. That’s what she called the BlackBerry phone Ghost, Inc. used to communicate with me. I opened my red cell and started to dial 9-1-1 and that’s when the little voicemail envelope popped up on the screen.
You have one voice message.
I stood there wondering if I could go back in time. I was afraid to turn around and see her on the couch. Everything in me slowed and I listened to the message she had left me at 9.12 a.m., almost ten hours earlier.
I don’t know why she hadn’t called the home phone. Maybe she was in a panic. Maybe a darker thing inside her didn’t really want me to answer. But she left me the message, probably sitting in her car, right before she backed out of the garage. She had to have been sitting there, because she never got past the alley and if she had been in the house she would have talked to me face to face. I’d have heard her crying. She was crying so hard and I was sleeping on the couch, less than a hundred feet away from her. Did I hear it ring? I might have. I might have heard it and rolled over, pulling a pillow over my head and going back to sleep while she was begging.
‘Where are you? James, where are you? You’re never home and I’m so scared, I can’t, I can’t, I don’t understand what’s happening any more. I . . .’ Her crying faded for a few more seconds and then the message ended.
She must have started to back out then. I don’t know who or what gave her pause. All I know is who didn’t stop her that morning, the night before, and all the nights when she was drifting toward oblivion - the man who had made a vow to protect her for the rest of her life.
So, my wife didn’t really leave me, is the thing to remember. I left her, not the other way around.
I left my little rabbit all alone.
The detective who worked Stacey’s case, Tod Bergen, took me for a drink a couple weeks after. He was a burly guy with tight hair and a pink face behind clear-framed glasses, a near-albino you might find managing a Swedish furniture boutique. He was a good cop as far as I could tell, and a smart one. He’d been on the job for sixteen years, said this kind of thing happened in Los Angeles more often than anyone wanted to admit. Ten million people. Too many cars. Enough pedestrians and cyclists thrown in to keep things interesting. You’d think with so many people crammed into so few square miles, there’d always be a witness.
But this was not so, Bergen explained while I sat beside him at the bar, numb and mute with contempt for everything that breathed. ‘Last year we
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