August 1, 2017
The night was too short and the hard work of digging had left her awash with endorphins. Of course the thing to do, once she’d finished, was get the fuck out of there. Yet she found herself in the driver’s seat with the door open, easing her boots off and pushing her bare feet into the icy sand. Bliss entered her soles and traveled up through her calves, and for a strange, indeterminate time she sat there with her eyes closed and her knees apart, receiving the earth’s cold benediction. She hadn’t known murder would be like this. She’d imagined suffocating disgust at best. At worst a continuous raging fever of guilt. At any rate not this curious sensitivity, as if her innocence had been renewed at the cellular level. The desert understood. The masculine silence kept her company without judgment. The constellations absorbed her crime as the ocean would a tear. It was awful, how clean she felt.
But not all her wits left her. Dawn was coming. Whatever allowance this had been, it was over. She tossed the suede boots onto the passenger seat, accepting as she did it that it was a risk, grains of sand, some egghead with a microscope pinning down the exact square of earth, uniquely identifiable thanks to some geological quirk she didn’t know about—but she couldn’t care. It was enough that she was moving. She put the shovel back in the trunk. Took a last survey of the burial site. Began to tell herself it was completely undetectable—then dissolved a second time into indifference. She really couldn’t care. This new innocence courtesy of guilt was, she understood, dangerous. It would get her caught. Tried. Convicted. Sentenced to death. Well, que será, será. She was very tired.
She expected disaster all the way back, sirens, a helicopter, the quivering searchlight, the moment of terrible stardom. But it didn’t come. The desert lightened and she felt as if the night were a friend she’d lost. Tears welled and fell. She was, she admitted, probably losing her mind.
The house was empty when she got home. As determined. The endorphins had subsided. Now there was the purged feeling, as after a childhood afternoon of wild play and compressed dramas. She remote-opened the garage door and eased the Volvo inside. Got out and went around to the trunk, but for a moment couldn’t open it. She leaned the heels of her hands on it, waiting for the next reserve of energy to kick in—the last reserve for this night, she knew. If she didn’t get done now what she needed to get done there was no telling how long it would be before she’d have it in her again.
A few minutes passed. Her mouth hung open, a little spittle fell and pooled on the gleaming trunk. Spit was a thing sex had appropriated. Larry had spat on her, many times, after the first time, after he’d established he could fuck her. That first time he’d done everything as if with his mind elsewhere, as if he wasn’t seeing her. Even then, young as she was, she’d thought he was trying not to see himself doing what he was doing so that afterward he could pretend he hadn’t done it. He’d kept his eyes closed. If a tree falls in the forest … But later, once he’d got past all that, it was as if he couldn’t see her clearly and vividly enough. As if he couldn’t find enough things to do and watch himself doing. The first time he spat on her it had seemed involuntary, or at least unpremeditated. It surprised both of them. Then it became something he did every time, sometimes holding her head still so he could be accurate, get it into her eyes or nose or mouth. It was only later she understood spitting was something sex had appropriated. Lots of guys paid to spit on her, or paid her to spit on them. There was nothing, her working years taught her, that sex couldn’t appropriate. By the time she was rescued she was saturated with pornography. Sexual omniscience like a dirty overcoat sewn to her skin. At nineteen.
What’s your name, honey?
Sophia.
You’re just about the cutest blond thing I’ve ever seen.
She straightened. The garage smelled of turpentine and new steel. She opened the trunk. She wanted to do it quickly. Not just because she was worried the last energy reserve would run dry too soon, but because she didn’t want to spend time handling what she’d brought back from the desert.
In spite of which she couldn’t stop herself pausing with the plastic bag in her hands, feeling its weight, tracing the padded outlines of its contents. Your curiosity was indefatigable, it turned out. As was your sense of comedy. The absurdity of objects divorced from their natural contexts. Why medical students played pranks with cadavers, presumably. And if I laugh at any mortal thing / ’Tis that I may not weep. Byron. Another bit of educational currency. It was only ever fragments. She’d missed the window in childhood for the structural groundwork, the big building blocks of learning that would have allowed proper cohesion later on. Instead she had a whirling miscellany, party pieces, novelties, tidbits.
Well, it didn’t matter now.
There were two freezers, one upright in the kitchen, for daily use, small items, and one in the utility room, chest-style, for big joints of meat, some of which, she knew, had probably been in there long past even deep-freeze safe limits.
It took her half an hour to empty it, place the plastic bag in the bottom, then refill.
And that really was the last of the energy gone. Burning the scrubs, the clothes, the props, it would have to wait until tomorrow.
In the shower, simple soap and water sloughed the last vestiges of her violence and she emerged as if prosaically reborn. The soft white towel she wrapped around herself might have been woven by angels. She had thirty-six hours yet of solitary freedom. She was very hungry. She went back down through the clean spaces of the house to the gleaming kitchen. Made herself a cup of black coffee and devoured random food from the fridge: a roast chicken leg; a peach yogurt; a slice of leftover quiche. She ate in blank animal need, standing at the window watching birds flitting to and from the feeders on the sunlit lawn.
Naked, she lay on her bed, limbs spread as if for tanning, though in fact it was the house’s cool conditioned air that moved over her like a beneficent spirit. She felt a great tenderness toward herself, a sympathetic exhaustion that tingled from her eyelids to her fingernails. The closed curtains showed pearly blue dawn light. Sleep was very near.
The first part of her giant labor was over—but she knew the worst was still to come.