I didn’t kill her. I didn’t.
I struggle to stay upright and you weren’t kidding. This isn’t the Grand Fucking Forest—the first part of the trail is paved, thank God—and it helps to have you with me as I climb, as pavement gives way to rocky terrain. My thighs burn—Sorry, Seamus, but this is harder than a Murph—and the endorphins kick in and I am angry. I am sad.
I didn’t kill her. I didn’t do this.
But my heart is thumping faster and louder and my forehead is a sweaty foul place and every time I put one foot in front of the other, I am steadier, my muscles are adjusting. But then I am angrier by the second. An anger that taints every endorphin in my body.
I didn’t fucking do this, Mary Kay. I didn’t.
I pass a chain-link fence, I’m getting there, and the black rocks work against me, unstable enemies on the floor of the forest trying to take me down with every step, and I am deaf with pain until finally the trail bends and to my left I see the abyss—not as deep as I expected but deep enough—and I break away from the trail. I’m a gentleman and I try to carry her but it is steep—you were right—and eventually I just can’t hold on to her any longer.
“Sorry, Melanda.”
I drop her body and let it roll down into the core and she loses her duvet along the way and it all comes back to me, the horror of what she did.
I run down the hill to wrap her up. I don’t like an open casket.
The ground is wet and loose as you said—I’m telling you, Joe, don’t walk off the trail—and I dig into the earth with a trowel—thanks again, Cooley Hardware—and my bare hands. I remember pottery in third grade and a field trip to the beach when I was eight—nine?—and I dug and I dug but I didn’t find any crabs. I dig like a dog, like a child, like my son, like a young Melanda by the sea, sunburnt and full of hope for her future, resembling a young Carly Simon, assuming they were on the same track in life and there is dirt in my fingernails and the dirt is tainted by blood.
I didn’t do this, Mary Kay. I didn’t do this.
I help Melanda into her bed and I cover her with muck and large fat orange leaves. She would want to be here. She wanted to give back to the community—the future is female—and her incubator will come to fruition. I can’t help but feel proud of my work. I laid her to rest and she’ll fertilize the land she loved so much that she couldn’t leave it behind.
And this part, this I did do. This resting place is my work, my empathy, my sweat.
I kiss my hand. I touch a leaf. “Sweet dreams, Ruby. Watch in peace.”
I wipe my hands on my shirt, my shirt I need to burn, and then white light blasts me and it isn’t lightning. It isn’t nature. It’s man-made light. And where there is man-made light, there are men.
“Say cheese, Goldberg.”
21
I know that voice and the Strawberry Killer followed me. He’s alone. I’m alone. And this is the dark version of the poem about the second set of footprints in the sand, when God is carrying the lonely, besieged man on the beach. The Strawberry Killer didn’t save me. He followed me. He’s armed with a camera and a flashlight and a gun and this is what I get for caring about Melanda so much that I forgot to watch my back. This is what I get for trying to let her rest in peace. I reach the trail and I’m out of breath and is this how I die?
“I didn’t… This isn’t what it looks like,” I say.
Even I know that’s a stupid thing to say but this is why people say it in the movies so fucking much. Because it’s true. The Strawberry Killer points his gun at me. “Turn around and put your hands behind your head, my friend. One step at a time.”
That’s what a cop would say but a cop wouldn’t call me his friend.
I look up at the starry sky and as I take a step forward, I feel the press of metal in my back. We pick our way down to the parking lot over divots and ruts in the path. Is this it? Is this how it ends? Does Love win? My foot lands on a stone and I lose my balance and the Strawberry Killer seizes my shoulder. I fall back into line, marching in the dark. Am I going back to jail? I want to marry you but this soft-shouldered preppy goon is going to bury me, isn’t he?
Finally, the parking lot comes into view, just two shadowy outlines of cars. I want to make a run for it but the road ahead is wide and I am a fish in this motherfucker’s barrel. Then, before I can paint a full picture of us in my mind, before I can take one good shot at an escape, the back of my head explodes and all the Christmas lights in the sky disappear at once.
* * *
I wake up with a lump on the back of my head and my throat is dry. It’s dark, too dark to see but I’m not knocking on a door to heaven. I smell old blood and I taste donuts and I wanna go home but I am home. I am in my Whisper Room and the welt on the back of my head throbs.
I am groping in the dark and I might be bleeding. RIP Melanda only just died—am I next?—and no I’m not next. You need me right now. It’s been hours—has it?—and you must have read her fuck-you message by now and you must be devastated, tearing at the walls, desperate to see me and I am on my feet. I knock on the bloodstained glass wall—Gently, Joseph—and my cry in the dark is met with singing—Some people call me the space cowboy—and the Strawberry Killer is the kind of asshole who knows all the words to that preppy ditty. SK is playing my guitar in the dark—trying to anyway—and I pound on the glass like RIP Melanda and the guitar stops and the lights come on all at once.
His hair is slicked back—no Figawi hat down here—and he shakes his head. “My, my, my,” he says. “Looks like someone’s got some cleaning up to do.”
It’s not my blood and it’s not my mess and a woman died in here and look at her note. Single White Female. It’s almost like she knew this was coming, like she knew I’d need a reminder that I’m not psychologically damaged like her.
“Okay,” I say. “I think there’s been a big misunderstanding.”
“So you didn’t just dump a body in the mud, my friend?”
Yes but no, and Mr. Mooney would tell me to know my enemy. “Who are you?”
He waves like a bougie hippie at Pegasus on open mic night. “Oliver Potter,” he says. “Any requests?”
I don’t make a request and I don’t like the joke and he thumbs my guitar and he’s a full-blown Angeleno, Mary Kay, ice water in his veins, smug as Patrick Bateman with an American Psycho thin-lipped smile. He’s laughing at me—who tuned this guitar?—and I need to focus.
I’ve been here before and I got out before—You set yourself free, Joseph. I just turned the key—and he strums and the feedback zings and he covers the mic and winces. “Apologies, my friend.”
A real psycho wouldn’t be so considerate; Oliver is just someone who aspires to be a psycho. He has a Glock—a gun in a barrel, a barrel in a gun—and my weapon is superior: my brain.
“So,” he says. “Walk me through it, Goldberg. You kill off the stage-twelve clinger bestie…” Lie. I didn’t kill Melanda. “And then you win your little MILFy librarian over with a six-string? And then you set a jealousy trap and just like that, boom, you’re back in Pac Pal with Love?”