29
Girl of the Long White Limbs
In the black hours of the night, a little south of Amherst, a park ranger was patrolling a seldom-traveled road that penetrated into Mount Holyoke State Park. The forest here was very tall. The land swelled like a giant wave in the misting darkness. The unpaved road led uphill into the high land. He drove slowly, bumping over rocks. His headlights picked up something white at the base of a tree. He approached, then stopped and backed away and called the police. A state trooper drove to the scene at midnight. The ranger in his green coat stood by, holding his radio. The oceanic darkness contained the glow of their flashlights, revealing the profound massiveness of the landscape as it unfolded around them, miles of trees, descending in tiers and waves. The ranger said, “There,” and pointed at the naked white form that lay beneath the leafing tree.
It was the kind of instant frame you could get at CVS—a translucent plastic cube into which she had slipped her pictures. The cube rested on the dresser in her room at home along with makeup she no longer used and an old hair dryer whose cord was wrapped around the handle. Tom picked it up, felt its weight and scrutinized it. The photograph she had put beneath the plastic glass was one that he had taken. It dated back to her time in junior high, when he’d been unemployed. It showed his daughter running track with a number on her chest. She was in motion, coming out of the woods, mud on her socks, one knee rising, the other foot kicking off the sod—a competitive moment. She was in a thinning herd of other runners, all young.
When the call ended, he put the Lucite block down on the dresser. He texted one of his crew and told them what he needed them to do today. He would not be coming in. Then he drove to Boston Medical Center. He found himself in a desolate area of unoccupied brownstones with boarded windows and no stores but liquor stores and a soul food restaurant. The hospital lobby was a vast modern cavern of soft gray light and quiet sounds.
The detective put a hand on Tom’s arm—“Let’s go down here”—and guided him to the silver elevator. They went downstairs. He told him to stand outside the window of the morgue while the orderly, a tan quick-moving man with a lined, sun-spotted forehead, on the other side of the glass lifted up the sheet and displayed the girl, her reddish-gold hair cascading over her white shoulders on the steel table and her mouth open.
Tom identified his daughter. The detective took him back upstairs. The father went outside and sat in his truck and looked at the Grateful Dead skull she had given him, a plastic skull glued to his dashboard—while the city traffic fled by, car after car after car.
Corey watched the breaking news on the minimart’s TV. A wooded mountainside filmed from a helicopter, a winding dirt road cutting uphill through the trees, strewn with chunks of tumbled rock: The missing student had been found. His mind asked, Can that really be her, the person that I know? How can she have flown away from here and alighted on that mountain?
The victim’s body was processed in the gleamingly modern Boston Medical Center. An orderly took the white-sheet-covered cadaver downstairs in a freight elevator and rolled it into a tiled room in the basement. There, a forensic pathologist, wearing a wet green rubber butcher’s smock, scrubs, goggles, gloves and face mask to protect him from flying infectious biomatter, his torso crossed by straps holding his air tank and bone saw, hoisted the woman from the woods onto an inclined stainless steel table with a drain in the footwell. It was a loud dirty setting that more resembled an auto body shop than one’s image of a hospital.
Her body was 5 feet 10 inches tall. Her rigor mortis had broken. The skin on her face looked granular, yellowish, crusted, infused with a flush, which was turning purple—a mixture of human clay and blood. Her tongue was grayish purple. The papillae stood out like the grit on heavyweight sandpaper. Purple stippling showed on her cheeks. The pathologist folded down her eyelids and discovered bright red bleeding—a common sign of strangulation. He noted severe contusions encircling her throat. The bruises overlapped, as if the same hands had let her go and repositioned—almost as if she had been strangled by many hands. She had bleeding in her eyeballs. Her eyes were cloudy. The pupils had turned black in the air. She had what looked like a sprinkling of parmesan cheese at the corner of her mouth: blowfly eggs. On her lower belly a greenish blue streak was beginning to spread. Her intestines were liquefying. Her cadaver gave off the smell of methane, putrescine and cadaverine.
Her back and shoulders looked as if she had been lying on a stove: Her skin was a deep brick-red color, like a bad sunburn or the purple hide of a rhinoceros—postmortem lividity. The examiner pressed the redness with his finger. It did not turn white but remained red. Her red blood cells had seeped out of her veins into her skin, permanently changing her color. In the redness, there was a muddy greenish-brown scaling. There were two sweaty white patches on her back where her weight had lain. They resembled hives. The sweatiness was the beginning of skin decomposition. Mold was growing on her skin.
The pathologist took out her lungs, heart and liver and weighed them. When he cut open the top of her skull to inspect her brain, he saw a highly visible dark purple mass, like a black plum, in the middle of her red-and-white brain—evidence of intracranial bleeding. He flayed open the marbled meat of her upper body and found dark red bruising in the strap muscles of the neck. In the soup of blood of her larynx, he found the hyoid bone broken.
The pathologist X-rayed her for broken bones and foreign objects and took samples of her blood, urine, vitreous humor—the fluid from her eyes. She had multiple bone fractures. She had alcohol in her system, which had decomposed to aldehyde and sugar. He took her hair. He swabbed her body for sperm and prostaglandins. He fingerprinted her. Under her fingernails, he found shreds of bloody tissue, which he sent for DNA analysis.
Leaving her on his steel table beneath the roaring vacuum hood, he unhitched his breathing apparatus, peeled off his gloves and went upstairs to his computer and began to write.
Her death was a homicide. She had died from blunt force trauma and strangulation.
Her toxicology report detected chloroform.
Her funeral was held at an Irish funeral home down the street from a car care center. A crooked sidewalk went by small houses, brick stoops with loose mortar, and scraggled hedges to the wide white sign and black script, like a letter written in 1776 with quill and ink. It faced the redbrick Quincy firehouse. Tom wore black shades at the service and stood with his thick hands clasped one over the other beneath his belt buckle. His graying hair hung to his shoulders. The coffin that Molly rested in was made of mahogany, planed, finished, inlaid with gold. The well-designed lid created a hermetic seal according to the funeral director. It stayed closed. Underneath it, a soft silk lining pillowed her body. Tom spent over fifteen thousand dollars on her funeral. His relatives came from New Hampshire. Women in his extended family brought yellow flowers shaped like trumpets. At the end, he was one of the six men who carried out the heavy shining coffin to the hearse.
Corey hadn’t been invited. From across the street, he watched them carry out the coffin.
The news reported that a cell phone had been found lying in the trees off Route 116, less than two miles from Mount Holyoke State Park where Molly’s corpse had been discovered. The police recovered the SIM card. Valuable information was on the card. They wanted to know who had called her. It led them to a Cambridge man named Adrian Thomas Reinhardt.
The Massachusetts State Police homicide unit attached to the Hampden County District Attorney’s office was handling the investigation of Molly Hibbard’s murder. The district attorney and his investigators appeared on the news and said that they were moving forward.
But nothing happened next. As the weeks went by and April became May, the case vanished from the news and the drive to prosecute it seemed to stall, leaving everyone who cared about it in a state of suspended animation. A popular theory for why this happened was that Reinhardt was a wealthy kid from Cambridge who was taking nuclear physics at MIT, while the victim was a Quincy sheet-metal worker’s daughter.
The papers said that MIT was expelling Reinhardt pending the outcome of his case and that his mother had retained a criminal defense attorney to defend her son.
In a statement to detectives, which the public didn’t hear, Reinhardt claimed that any record of a call to Molly Hibbard’s number which had originated from his phone was either the result of a misdial or had been made by someone else.
Any idea who? investigators asked.
Adrian said: A youth from Quincy, like the victim, who’d been obsessed with her, named Corey Goltz.
Ten days after the news broke of Adrian’s entanglement in the case, one night quite late, Corey’s phone rang when the lights were out and he was trying to sleep. Earlier the waves had been washing the shore, but at some point, the wind had dropped, the tide had turned, and now the house was silent. He picked up the buzzing Samsung. The voice on the other end began speaking without preamble.
“Who’s this?” he interrupted. But he knew it was Adrian and sat up on high alert.
“I guess you don’t remember me. I guess I’m pretty forgettable.” Adrian’s voice sounded strange, as if he had a cold or had been weeping.
“Why are you calling?”
“Oh, I guess I don’t have an official reason. I could probably hang up again and the world would keep turning at the same speed around the sun.”
“Where are you?”
“At school. It’s going well. I’m still learning things. I’m taking gauge theory. I’m going to pass my finals. That won’t be a problem. I’ll probably be doing a summer internship.”
It struck Corey that these were fantasies or lies.
“I’ve got a problem, buddy.”
“Is it something to do with your mother?”
“Someone killed my friend.”
“That sounds very traumatic.”
“I got a feeling you know all about it.”
“I can’t know about something unless it’s been communicated to me.”
“It’s been on the news, Adrian.” Corey was standing in the dark, his heart pounding down to his legs.
“There must be a thousand things on the news every day that aren’t true.”
“Adrian! They say you’re a suspect! You did something to her!”
“You have your facts wrong. If I were a suspect, I’d know it. The police have talked to me, but that doesn’t mean they think I’m guilty of anything.”
“So you do know what we’re talking about!”
“As I was saying, they talked to me. They asked these questions: a, b, c, d…I said, let’s look at these questions logically. Here’s where there’s a fact or phenomenon you may have missed—just like with any scientific hypothesis. And it must have convinced them, because obviously they’re not going to let a murderer run free on the streets. It was just providing information. It’s like in any scientific observation you can’t gather enough information from one point of observation, so you have other points of observation, and then you check the data to see if it matches.”
“This isn’t science class, this is life, Adrian.”
“Well, what use is science if it doesn’t work in life? I mean, that’s what it’s for—using facts and data and reason and trying to invalidate or confirm a hypothesis. If anything, I’m thinking the cops are going to get around to talking to you.”
“Adrian, they’re not just talking to people at random. They’re talking to people for a reason. They think you killed her. And that’s because you did, didn’t you?”
“I’m sorry you think that. Killing a woman, that would be immoral.”
“You’re a fucking liar.”
“Let me think about this. No, I’m not lying. It would be immoral to kill a woman, just because—for whatever reason. I mean, we could debate about some counterfactual situation where she’d done something to you first, but unless it was like some really extreme case of child abuse, say, it’s like, you’re not going to justify that.”
“Are you telling me the news is making up the fact that you’re a suspect?”
“I’m not telling you anything. I haven’t seen the news you’re talking about. All I know is there’s this crime—this tragic thing that happened—and the police are trying to figure out what happened. That’s as much as I know. If anything, you probably know more about it than I do, since you knew her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She was your friend. That’s why the cops are probably going to want to talk to you. It’s like, who’s more likely to kill somebody? It’s somebody who knows this person, who has this nasty mixture of feelings of love and hate for them. What stranger is going to feel that way? Unless you’re talking about a serial killer or something—like some guy who’s been killing people for years, which is obviously not true in my case, and it’s probably not true in your case, unless you’ve been hiding it really well.”
“Are you saying the police were actually asking about me?”
“Your name came up. It only stands to reason. It’s nothing you should be worried about.”
“I’m not worried about it. I hope they do talk to me.”
“What do you think you’ll tell them?”
“The truth.”
“It might be a good idea to have an alibi for the night this happened. You could tell them you were hanging out with me. That’d be a good idea! Think about it! We could tell the cops we were at your house in Quincy. If we both stuck to that, they wouldn’t be able to do anything to you, no matter what evidence they turned up.”
“What the holy living fuck are you talking about? I’m not going to lie to the cops. I don’t need an alibi, I’m innocent. Innocent people don’t need alibis. You’re the one who needs an alibi. You killed her, Adrian.”
“No, I didn’t. My conscience is clean on that score.”
“I know you. You did it.”
“You’re just jumping to conclusions.”
“How else would you be mixed up in this? You had to have done it.”
“Well, there is one other way I could be mixed up in it: if I knew someone who was mixed up in it.”
“Who? And you better not say me.”
“I wasn’t going to say you. But it would explain it if something happened and I’m innocent and this other person is guilty.”
“Who the hell are you talking about?”
“You’re going to be mad, but it’s someone you won’t like. You’ll probably feel that competitive jealousy.”
“No, I won’t.”
“It’s your father.”
“What about him?”
“He would be the reason this happened.”
“When you say this, you mean the reason Molly’s…”
“The reason she died. Yes.”
“Did you see him kill her?”
“No. I didn’t see that.”
“Did he kill her and he told you?”
“All I can do is provide the data that I can collect from my observation point, not the data from another observation point.”
“Adrian, you better tell me.”
“I can tell you that I was friends with your father for a long time, and if I owe you an apology for that—I guess I do.”
“So, you and my father: What did you do?”
“I didn’t say we did anything.”
“Did you kill Molly?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t say you didn’t either. So did you or didn’t you?”
“I would ask you to stop trying to get me to say something that won’t make any difference to a person if she’s dead.”
“You did it. Oh my God.”
“I haven’t confessed or anything. Those are your words. If you’re planning on telling anyone about this conversation…”
“I’m not interested in telling anyone, you sonofabitch!”
“That’s a noble response. I’d expect nothing less than that nobility from you.”
He stared at the wall without seeing it. The lights were out in the house and there was nothing to see. He stood in the center of the house without turning on the lights, the phone dead in his hand, his head alive with imagery, the whole history of him and Adrian pouring through him like a river. And his commentary on that history going round and round in circles and following that river down a hole.
I was fascinated with him, he heard himself think. I admired him, yes. What did I want? Big muscles? A’s in math? I wanted to learn his secret. He was outside the struggle of life like the Buddha in a flower. He pursued self-strengthening without anxiety, feeling only entrancement. I wanted his calm and blissful self-involvement. I knew, I knew, I knew he was playing chess with my father. And I ignored it, because I coveted a secret. A secret I have since learned doesn’t exist. All because I was afraid to go to basketball practice like everybody else—like Molly. Who now is dead.
And Corey saw her standing in the cluster of athletes in the echoing court, breathing hard, wiping her face with a towel, reaching out to him with her sweating hand.
Another wave of loathing convulsed him for Adrian’s cowardice and misogyny: He was a malformed male who aimed his rage at women. Corey swore he’d go to the police about him in the morning.
But Corey was a coward too. He was very afraid and horrified. The morning came and he didn’t go to the police.
Tom had been drinking straight for days on end, going to work, drinking in his truck, drinking continuously and staying drunk as the days turned into weeks. His bosses told him he could have all the time off he needed. He said he didn’t want any. They gave him paid leave; they let him keep the Ford. He had taken leave for his daughter’s funeral. He didn’t talk, he drank. He drank and was drunk behind the mask of his Viking-face, behind his black sunglasses, behind the straight line of his compressed mouth, his puffy dimpled cheeks and the gray biker beard that reached the chest of his Harley-Davidson shirt. He fell unconscious in his truck one night. He kept drinking when he woke up. His friends developed theories of how and why the DA was corrupt and spoke of advancing their theories in the media. “It’s a buyout,” they said to Tom. They spoke of how to get the bureaucrats to act: from threatening lawsuits to taking pictures of them cheating on their spouses. If they couldn’t get the wheels of justice to turn, the next question was, what could be done to the guilty party, this Cambridge boy, to punish him in vigilante style?
Silent Tom kept pouring alcohol down his throat. One morning, when he was already drunk for the day, he broke his silence to call the state police and ask, “Why haven’t you arrested this kid?” A detective told him they were working on it.
After work that evening, Tom and his crew parked their trucks behind a Dedham strip mall, sat on their tailgates, talking, tossing their words at the cinderblock wall like dice. Tom’s big hands hung like deadweight in the belly pocket of his sweatshirt. Under tension, the fabric stretched down from his square shoulders. His beard thrust out from his chin like a plant that lived on runoff from the scooped stone of his face. He was wearing black wraparound shades, which doubled as safety glasses.
“You hear anything new from the cops?” one man asked.
“No.” Tom stalked away and kicked his boot on the asphalt.
The talk lagged and resumed. A man came back from the liquor store with beer. Victor said he didn’t want any; he was driving. The men shared out the beer. Tom took a flask out of his pocket and drank it off like water.
One man said quietly, “I’d be afraid to do that.”
Tom said, “I’m not driving a lift. All I gotta do is stand down here and go ‘Make sure it’s straight.’ And if they bust me, I’ll accept the consequences.”
“I’d hate to see you get in trouble. You’re one of the good ones.”
“One of the good ones…,” Tom muttered.
“We don’t want Vizzer running things. We don’t want to get Vizzered.”
“I used to drink my ass off and I always showed up in the morning.”
“Vizzer took Sean on a job to Connecticut. They went to play Golden Tee Golf at four dollars a round. They were doing Guinness Nitros. He fires down a growler every time Vizzer does. He got so drunk, he said, he couldn’t remember his own name.”
Tom walked away and kicked his boot on the ground again. “Growlers. Uh-oh.”
“Sean said he was so drunk he forgot his own name. He got Vizzered.”
Tom circled over to an electrician who was smoking. The man palmed his smoke to him. Tom hit it and handed it back, palm up, at the level of his waist. Exhaling smoke, he went to his truck. The men watched him. Tom got the bone-handled knife out of the cup, cut a zip tie that was binding a coil of extension cord and kicked the cut plastic loop away.
“Let us know if we can do anything, Tom.”
“We shouldn’t let him drive.”
He had gotten in his truck and was sitting, slumped behind the wheel.
Victor walked over to him, saying, “Thomas…”
“They’re investigating,” Tom slurred. “They’re doing their job like we do ours.”
Several weeks after the funeral, on an evening in May when it was still cold, Corey went out to Houghs Neck and knocked on Molly’s father’s door. No one answered.
He stood facing the door a long time. Dusk blurred everything around him.
Finally he went in.
A scene of clutter met his eye wherever he turned—washing machine, toolboxes, extension cords, rolls of sheet metal, fishing rods, cases of Dasani water, boot prints on the carpet, piles of clothes, a Grateful Dead ashtray cupping the butt of one of Tom’s cigars, junk mail on the seats of chairs, beer bottles, CDs—Martina McBride’s White Christmas on the kitchen counter. He found Tom sitting on the couch in front of the TV wearing old-man reading glasses, plaid pajama pants and a UMass sweatshirt as a memorial to his murdered daughter. His long, cinnamon Viking hair was undone. Shot with gray, it spread from his head out to his shoulders. The TV was off and the screen looked like a polished black gravestone.
Corey said hello, put out his hand and waited. Tom said, “Oh, you’re shaking hands—okay.” He reached up and shook Corey’s hand and didn’t break it.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“Corey, it’s a hard thing…I’ll tell ya…the thing about Molly is, she was a good person. She was never mean to anyone.” Tom began talking about having had to identify his daughter’s body. “It’s something nobody should have to do. They told me it was her,” he said, as if he hadn’t seen her body for himself.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. You’ve got nothing to say sorry for. I know you went through your thing too.”
Corey moved a flashlight off a chair and took a seat and leaned towards Tom to speak to him. As soon as he sat down, Tom got up and went to get a beer. He opened the bottle with his Leatherman. He began going through the mail on his kitchen counter, throwing letters aside.
“This one’s from her school. They want to let me know she’s absent. That’s a good one.”
He tossed it at the trash can.
Corey got up and followed Tom to the kitchen. “Are the police going to do anything?”
“They know who did it.”
“Are they going to put him in jail?”
Tom said nothing. He drank his beer off and walked back to the couch. Corey got out of his way. Tom’s whole body seemed to sneer—a brooding, massive statue of a man who didn’t speak.
“Who are they saying did it?” Corey asked.
“Some kid from MIT.”
Corey watched as Tom pulled his toolbox over to the couch. It was unclear what he planned on fixing. He stirred his big hand in the tools and found a drywall knife and began to change the blade. He snapped in a new razor and screwed the handle back together.
“Was it dull?”
Molly’s father didn’t answer. The inside of the toolbox was reflective yellow, the outside black, nature’s warning colors, the same pattern as a Gila monster. He tested the knife, pushing the razor in and out with his thumb, and dropped it back in the ballistic yellow tray.
Corey cleared his throat, “Tom, I need to tell you something. I think…I knew him.”
“I heard he was a friend of yours.”
“He wasn’t my friend.” Corey approached the older man. “Molly was my true friend,” he said. “You were.”
Tom stood up and walked away. Corey stayed planted where he was, looking at the dirty carpet. He heard Tom in the bedroom. The floor creaked. A drawer slid in a wooden track in a chest of drawers.
Night had fallen. The house was dark. Corey picked up the Maglite and clicked it on and off and wondered if he should leave. Something told him he should leave.
Tom walked out of the bedroom in work clothes, boots and jeans, Harley-Davidson belt, Leatherman on his hip, the UMass sweatshirt on his chest, his hair undone. He snapped a woman’s elastic band around it and gave himself a ponytail on his way out the door. The Ford pickup vroomed to life in the garage. Corey went out to the garage with the heavy flashlight in his hands. The truck was idling.
“Should I come?” Tom didn’t answer. Corey climbed aboard.
Tom put the truck in reverse, hit the gas and shot them backwards, bouncing over the curb into the street; braked—they jolted to a stop—changed gears, and shot them forward. They drove over the hill and down Winthrop, splashing houses with their headlights. The wide truck seemed to fill the entire road yet somehow didn’t smash the rare car coming the other way, which slipped by like a skiff under the gunwale of a barge. Then they were flying through the open blackness of the seashore under amber lights set on high masts above the street.
They stopped in Dorchester and bought a case of beer at a package store. Tom opened it in the parking lot and handed him a can.
“To my daughter.”
Corey thought they were going to drink together, but Tom poured his beer out, foaming on the asphalt, then crushed his can and picked it up and whipped it at a dumpster. The tiny discus disappeared into the night sky and somewhere distant clattered to the ground. He climbed back in the Ford and turned the engine on.
“Coming?”
Corey poured his own beer out and climbed in with Molly’s father.
Now they were driving north on the highway, Tom drinking from another can.
“She never asked me for anything. I wanted to see her make the most of herself. And then this reject comes along and kills her, this Adrian character, this friend of yours.”
Corey said nothing. He shook his head. They were coming up on Boston. They drove into the concrete tunnel under Chinatown, lit up laser green, curving like an endoscopic view. The truck got sucked through arterial ducts and came out on Storrow Drive. Tom took the bridge across the River Charles and now they were in Cambridge with the CITGO sign in Kenmore Square behind them.
They had started up Mass Ave. Corey saw the lights spreading their glow upward on the walls of the university’s Parthenon-like main building.
“This is MIT.”
“This place is a reject school.”
“I could show you where he lives.”
Tom didn’t answer. They were tearing past the campus to the bars and art supply stores and dance academies in Central Square. They passed the Middle East. Corey looked and saw the homeless people sitting on the granite planters outside the all-night CVS.
Traffic pressure kept them going up Mass Ave. Tom blew a light. Now they were coming up on Harvard. They passed the brick wall around the college.
The traffic slowed. They came to a stop a furlong from the square, facing the redbrick amphitheater of the T entrance, the illuminated shops, the crowds passing in front of lighted windows, the Coop with its crimson flag.
“I hate driving here. It’s all one-ways.”
They waited at a light, the big Ford idling.
Corey said, “I can show you where he lives. His mother’s house is right down there on Mount Auburn.”
When the light turned green, Tom hit the gas and hooked downhill, leaving the square, and turned up along the river.
“It’s that way.”
They accelerated. Corey saw Adrian’s house go by and said they’d passed it.
They stopped at the edge of Belmont and drove back slowly.
“That’s the house.”
“The lights are out. No one’s there.”
“Look over there, at the traffic island.” Far ahead up the road, Corey pointed at a figure in the trees.
“Is that him?”
“That’s somebody.”
Tom cruised past.
“That’s him.”
“I see him. He’s hitting something.”
“I know what he’s doing. He’s hitting a punching bag.”
“He does it in the dark?”
“Yeah. He does it at night.”
“Are you sure that’s him?”
“I know that’s him.”
Tom hit the gas again and they were speeding up the road along the river, the white centerline disappearing under the hood. They took a turn and Corey fell against the door. Now they were racing back.
A block from the traffic island, Tom pulled over, turned his lights off and started crawling forward, looking in the trees.
The figure on the traffic island was tilting against a hanging, swinging object, which was swinging from a tree. It was too far to hear the impact of his fists, but he was hitting it. He and the object, the punching bag, swung together and apart like two pendulum-magnets in a physics experiment. Passing traffic caught the scene in their headlights. The forms went from black to color. The punching bag turned blue; the figure’s black fists appeared in red boxing gloves.
“That’s him for certain,” Corey said.
“What is he, a boxer?”
“Not even. He just hits that thing because he’s angry.”
“What’s he angry at?”
“His mother.”
Tom looked over at him. “Let me see that.”
Corey gave him the Maglite.
“A cop hit me in the mouth with one of these when I was a kid.”
“Why?”
“I broke into a warehouse with my brothers.” Tom hefted the flashlight. It was filled with D-cell batteries and heavy as a club. “I’m not a nice boy.”
The two of them fell silent. Tom put the flashlight aside. He opened another beer and drank. A streetlamp cast a gray light through the windshield, painting the shadow of the dreamcatcher across his face, a leather trampoline.
“Do me a favor. It’s time for you to hop out.”
“I can stay.”
“You know how to get home from here?”
“Yeah, I’ve got the T.”
“Go home.”
Corey got out.
“Is everything okay?”
“It’s fine. Go home.”
“I’ll see you back in Quincy?”
Tom leaned over and pulled his door shut from the inside, leaving Corey out on the street looking at the idling truck. Released by distant traffic lights, cars drove by them in waves.
Tom touched the throttle and started rolling forward.
Corey backed away.
He jogged to Harvard Square and caught the Red Line to the city. After downtown Boston, the train went on, half-empty. A guy in a demo company shirt dominated one end of the car, standing with his foot on a seat, wearing his safety shades and flexing his arms from the overhead grab bar, as if he were about to do a chin-up, while Corey sat staring at the floor.
When they got to Quincy, he walked out through the portcullis of the station into the open air. A bus was leaving and he caught it. They went downhill past his high school. When he disembarked, he smelled the ocean. He went inside his house and shut the door and put the light on and kept it on all night.
Adrian untied the punching bag. It dropped to the ground on the tree’s roots. He picked up the heavy, tight canvas and leather sack of sand on his shoulder and began picking his way across the dead grass to his mother’s house.
The white Ford broke from around the stand of trees and shot down the roadway. The distance between the pedestrian and the vehicle collapsed: one Mississippi. The long gleaming body of the truck hit the curb and bounced like a crocodile leaping over the sand bank into the water: two Mississippi. The pedestrian sensed something and turned. The truck touched Adrian’s body. At impact, the Everlast heavy bag jumped up and fell under the truck’s front tire, which ran over it. At the same time, glass and plastic and halogen dust exploded from one of the headlights and spilled across the pavement. When the truck touched Adrian, he flew up in the air, cartwheeling, elongated by centripetal force. His sweatclothes pulled away to the extremities giving a flash of exposed midsection. His body flipped three times, flung in such a way that the legs flew up and struck the head and arms. It went through an arc as high as a second-story window at its zenith and a horizontal distance of forty feet in three-quarters of a second. Weighing two hundred pounds, he had absorbed the momentum of a three-ton truck traveling fifty miles an hour. Being thirty times lighter, he flew away from it like a jack-in-the box. His body hit the wall of his mother’s house and dropped, falling into the path of the truck, which had kept coming. In the last instant of the crash, the vehicle struck Adrian a second time and buried him into the wall.
Tom’s foot had been jamming the accelerator to the floor since the development of the crash. When he hit the wall of Adrian’s mother’s house, he was going even faster than when he had hit the boy, about fifty-five miles an hour. The six-thousand-pound truck plowed through the home’s siding, which rolled up like a window shade. Foundation blocks exploded into rubble. The strangely shaped house caved in, and the roof dropped above the impact site. The vehicle hit the slab on which the raised floor was built and a pair of load-bearing beams, which took the impact and tore through the ceiling—like falling telephone poles—before the plaster, wiring, and insulation stopped them, entangling them. The entire house was knocked backwards, the internal wall cracked from floor to attic. The truck was decelerated from fifty-five miles an hour to rest in under a second. It transferred its momentum to the driver. Everything in the cockpit jumped into the air. The cup, the bone-handled knife, the dreamcatcher. Tom’s body leaped out of his seat, hit the windshield with his head, fell back into his seat, and bounced forward onto the steering wheel.
Cambridge Fire Rescue found Adrian inside his mother’s walls. Large fuzzy pink curtains of fiberglass insulation obscured his body. A fireman moved them aside and found the MIT student bent backwards with his legs pinned by the F-150’s still-hot grill. His head was covered in plaster dust like a kabuki dancer’s. Pink strands of fiberglass stuck to his whiskers. The top of his skull had ruptured. An oval of bone was missing from above his hairline, and a pink bubblegum-colored tongue of meat had jumped from his head—like a frog shooting its tongue at a fly. The meat was his brain and it had intestinal coils.
The rescuers lifted Tom out of his driver’s seat and laid his large-framed body on a stretcher. He was pronounced dead at the scene. They covered him with a white Tyvek sheet.
Corey slept badly. In the morning, the sky was full of thick clouds, jockeying for position, as if a new order were being established in the heavens. He walked to the DB Mart. The bell rang when he went in. The paper was upside down; he saw the word deadly but missed the rest. He took a juice from the refrigerator. As he was paying, he caught a flash on the muted TV of an accident scene: a debris-littered sidewalk and police tape. It didn’t look like Cambridge, therefore he was reassured. He climbed the hill, sipping his pint of orange juice. The mass migration of people going to work was draining the town. Soon, the only people left in Quincy were mothers going to the store and workmen driving vans. At ten, he went to the sub shop and bought a sandwich from the Greeks who ran it. The daughter wore an elastic headband like Molly. The mother had blonde hair and a large nose and spoke with an accent. The sandwich was white-meat chicken grilled on an open fire, wrapped in hot pita bread. The news broke in loud on the TV above the drink cooler. That was when he heard “deadly crash in Cambridge that claimed two lives.” He put down his sandwich and picked up his phone to call Tom, and before he could push the button, he stopped himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. He wrapped the half-eaten chicken in the tinfoil and threw it out. Keeping his head down, he went outside. By the end of the day, he had heard the names, Hibbard and Reinhardt, confirming what he knew. After that, he heard the story over and over on the news for many days.
The news came on the TV in the kitchen in Malden. The small television set was plugged into the toaster outlet. Leonard was sitting at his table eating crackers and some gravy he had cooked. With a spoon he dipped up minced garlic from a jar. The screen showed Adrian Reinhardt’s face. Leonard put the cracker in his mouth and chewed. He prepared another bite. The report went to commercial. He forked up an anchovy and ate it with a cracker while the advertisement for car insurance played.