The Pact (29 page)

Chris pulled the Kleenex from his ear. “What?”

“I want to try.”

“You what?” He shook his head. “You hate guns. You tell me all the time you don't want to me to hunt.”

“You use a rifle, and they're too big,” Emily pointed out, staring at the revolver curiously, her eyes slightly narrowed. “This looks different.” She sidled closer and touched her hand to Chris's. “So can I?”

Chris nodded, wrapping her hands around the gun. She was surprised at how heavy it was, for such a little thing, and how unnatural her palms felt molded to its sleek, cool curves. “Like this,” Chris said, coming up behind her. He showed her the bead on the barrel, explained sighting a target. She would not let him know she was sweating. Her hands slipped a bit on the metal as Chris raised them, still covered by his, to the level at which she should brace herself to shoot.

“Wait,” Emily cried, pivoting out of Chris's embrace so that she faced him with the gun. “How do I-”

His face had gone white. Gingerly he raised a finger and pushed aside the short barrel. “You don't ever wave a pistol at someone like that,” he said in a strangled voice. “It could have just gone off.” Emily flushed. “But I didn't cock it yet.”

“Did I know that?” He sank down on the ground, his head on his knees, a puddle of limbs and muscle. “Holy Christ,” he breathed.

Chagrined, Emily lifted the revolver again, braced her legs, pulled back the hammer, and fired. A tin can sang and spun, lifting into the air and hanging there for a moment before tumbling to the ground.

Emily herself had jerked backward with the recoil, and would have fallen if Chris hadn't scrambled to his feet to steady her.

“Wow,” he said, genuinely impressed. “I'm in love with Annie Oakley.”

“Beginner's luck,” she said, but she was smiling, and her cheeks were red with pleasure. Emily looked down at her fingers, still clasped around the gun, now as comfortably warm as the hand of an old friend.

It was damp IN the Jeep, the heater fogging the windows and creating a sticky, tropical humidity.

“What would you do,” Emily said softly, sitting back against Chris, “if things didn't work out the way you planned?”

She felt him frown. “You mean like if I didn't get into a good college?”

“Like if you didn't even go to college. If your parents died in a car accident, and you had to take care of Kate all of a sudden.”

He exhaled softly, stirring her hair. “I don't know. I guess I'd try to make the best of it. Maybe go to college later on. Why?”

“You think your parents would be disappointed in you, for not becoming what they thought you'd be?”

Chris smiled. “My parents would be dead,” he reminded her. “So the shock of it couldn't hurt them too badly.” He shifted, so that he faced her, propped on an elbow. “And I don't really care what anyone else thinks. Except you, of course. Would you be disappointed?” She took a deep breath. “What if I was? What if I didn't want to be ... to be with you anymore?”

“Well, then,” Chris said lightly, “I'd probably kill myself.” He kissed her forehead, smoothing a crease. “Why are we talking about this, anyway?” He curled forward, unlatching the rear door of the Jeep so that it flew open, exposing a night spread with stars.

Indian summer was gone, and the air smelled crisp and thin, full of the tang of wild crab apples and the hint of an early frost. Emily drew it into her lungs and held it there, the sharpness itching at her nostrils, before her breath burst out in a small white cloud. “It's cold,” she said, burrowing closer.

“It's beautiful,” Chris whispered. “Like you.” He touched her face and kissed her deeply, as if he meant to drain away her sorrow. Their lips separated with a faint ripping sound.

“I'm not beautiful,” Emily said.

“You are to me.” Chris drew her between his bent legs, her back to his chest, and wrapped his arms around her ribs. The sky seemed rich and heavy, and the moment was suddenly full of a thousand tiny things which Emily knew she would always remember-the tickle of Chris's hair against the back of her neck, the seal-smooth callus on the inside of his middle finger, the parking lights of the Jeep, casting a blood-red shadow over the grass.

Chris nuzzled her shoulder. “Did you read the science chapter yet?”

“How romantic,” Emily laughed.

Chris grinned. “It is, kind of. It says how a star is just an explosion that happened billions of years ago. And the light's just reaching us now.”

Emily squinted at the sky, considering. “And here I thought it was something to wish on.” Chris smiled. “I think you can do that, too.”

“You first,” Emily said.

He tightened his arms around her shoulders, and she felt the familiar sensation of wearing Chris's own skin, like a cloak of heat or a barrier for protection, maybe even a second self. “I wish that things could stay like this ... like now ... forever,” he said softly. Emily turned in his arms, afraid to hope, even more afraid to let this opportunity slip by. Her head was canted at an angle, so that she could not quite look Chris in the eye but could make her words fall onto his lips. “Maybe,” she said, “they can.”

Christmas 1997

Harte to Control."

Chris looked up from the book he was reading and rolled out of his bunk, studiously ignoring one of his cellmates, Bernard, who was sitting on his own bunk cracking ice between his teeth. The officers brought ice once a day and set it in a cooler in the common room, where it was supposed to last well into the night. Unfortunately, Bernard managed to siphon most of it away before other inmates even noticed it had arrived.

He walked down the catwalk to the locked door at the end of the medium security unit, where he waited until one of the officers hovering at the control booth noticed his face. “Visitor,” the officer told him, unlocking the door and waiting for Chris to take a step forward.

His mother had tearfully informed Chris the last time she'd come that she'd be unable to make it on Saturday, since Kate's dance recital fell at the same exact time. Chris had told her, of course, that he understood, although he was jealous as hell. Kate had their mother seven days a week. Couldn't she give up one lousy hour?

At the door of the basement, an officer was waiting. “There you go,” he said, pointing Chris in the direction of the table farthest away.

For a moment, Chris stood motionless. The visitor was not his mother. It was not even his father, which would have been enough of a shock.

It was Michael Gold.

Chris took one wooden step, and then another, mechanically bringing himself toward Emily's father. He took some courage from the fact that the same officers who kept him from escaping were also there to protect him. “Chris,” Michael said, nodding toward a chair. Chris knew that he had the right to refuse a visitor. Before he could speak, however, Michael sighed. “I don't blame you,” he said. “If I were you, I would have hightailed it upstairs the minute you saw my face.”

Chris sat down slowly. “The lesser of two evils,” he said.

A shadow passed across Michael's features. “Is it that bad here, then?”

“It's a fucking party,” Chris said bitterly. “What did you expect?” Michael blushed. “I just meant, well. .. compared to the alternative.” He looked into his lap for a second, and then raised his head. “If things had gone the way you planned, you wouldn't be here. You'd be dead.”

Chris's hands, drumming on the tabletop, stilled. He was wise enough to know an olive branch when he saw one, and unless he was mistaken, Michael Gold had just admitted that, in spite of whatever garbage the prosecution was dishing up, he believed Chris's story. Even though it wasn't the truth.

“How come you're here?” Chris asked.

Michael rolled his shoulders, one at a time. “I've been asking myself that question. The whole drive out here, I've been wondering.” He turned his frank gaze onto Chris. “I don't really know,” he said.

“What do you think?”

“I think you're spying for the AG,” Chris said, not so much because he believed it but because he wanted to see the reaction on Michael's face.

“God, no,” Michael said, stunned. “Do they have spies?” Chris scuffed his sneaker on the floor. “I wouldn't put it past them,” he said. “The whole point is to lock me away, right? To keep me from killing a whole string of girls, like I did to Em?” Michael shook his head. “I don't believe that.”

“Don't believe what?” Chris asked, his voice growing louder. “That the attorney general doesn't plan to throw away the key? Or that I didn't kill her?”

“You didn't,” Michael said, his eyes tearing. “You didn't kill her.” Chris found his throat too tight to speak. He scraped his chair along the floor, wondering what the hell had ever made him sit down in the first place, what had made him think that he had anything to discuss with Emily's father.

Michael stared at the table, running his thumb along the battered edge. “I came ... the reason I came,” he began, "is because I wanted to ask you something. It's just that we didn't see it. Melanie and I, we didn't know Emily was upset. But you did; you must have. And what I was wondering is. .

.“ He paused, glanced up. ”How did I miss it?“ he whispered. ”What did she say when I wasn't listening?"

Chris swore softly and rose, intending to escape, but Michael gripped his arm. Chris swung toward him, eyes burning. “What?” he said roughly. “What do you want me to say to you?” Michael swallowed. “That you loved her,” he said thickly. “That you miss her.” He pinched his ringers into the corners of his eyes, fighting for composure. “Melanie's not-well, I can't speak about Emily to her. But I thought... I thought...” He looked away. “I don't know what I thought.” Chris rested his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands. He couldn't promise Michael Gold anything. Then again, if the man wanted to talk about Emily, you couldn't get better than Chris for a captive audience. “Someone will find out you came,” he warned. “You shouldn't be here, you know.”

Michael hesitated. “No,” he said finally. “But neither should you.” Gus PUSHED HER SHOPPING CART absently through the aisles of Caldor, amazed that her family, which was no longer by any means ordinary, would still cling to the trappings of the mundane, needing shampoo and toothpaste and toilet paper just like any other. Driven to shopping out of desperation, she wandered through the big store, sometimes so engrossed in her thoughts that she passed the Kleenex without putting any in her cart, that she stared blankly at cat food for minutes although they had never owned a cat.

She wound up in the sporting goods section, idly passing shiny bicycles and Rollerblades until she stopped short, arrested by the display of the hunting/fishing area. Buffeted by huge camouflageprint raincoats and blaze orange vests, she examined the small items hanging on the pegboard-Hoppes Solvent #9, and gauze cleaning patches, and bluing. Fox urine, doe estrus. Things she could not believe were sold to the public, but that never failed to make her husband smile when he found them in his Christmas stocking or Easter basket.

She stared at a picture of a hunter taking aim and realized that she didn't want James ever to pick up a gun again.

If he had never purchased the antique Colt, would this have happened?

Gus sank down on the metal shelf that edged the floor of the pegboard. She took deep breaths, her head between her knees. And with her ears ringing, she did not hear the approaching cart until it nicked the edge of her shoe.

“Oh,” she said, her head snapping up at the same moment another voice said, “I'm so sorry.” Melanie's voice.

Gus stared at the tight lines of her face, the dulled skin, the anger that made her seem several inches taller than she actually was. Melanie drew the cart across the aisle. “You know,” she said softly,

“I'm not sorry, after all.” She pushed her wagon away. Leaving her own cart in the middle of the aisle, Gus ran after her. She touched Melanie's arm only to have the woman swing around, her eyes filled with a cold, banked rage. “Go away,” she bit out.

Gus remembered what it had been like when she first met Melanie; how they would sit and hold their hands over their bellies, knowing that the other understood the ripple and hum of a stretching child; the quiver at the fingertips and nape and nipples that came late in the pregnancy, when you had given your body up to someone else.

What she wanted to say to Melanie was: You aren't the only one who was hurt. You aren't the only one who lost a person you love. In fact, when it came down to it, Melanie grieved for one person, whereas Gus grieved for two. She had lost Emily-and she'd also lost her best friend.

“Please,” Gus finally managed, her throat working. “Just talk to me.” Melanie abandoned her cart and headed out of the store.

All OF a SUDDEN, Jordan stood up from the cramped table in the small conference room and yanked hard on the window sash, gritting it open. It was lined on the outside with bars, of course, but a cooling breeze threaded into the room. Chris leaned into it, smiled. “You trying to help me break out of here?”

“No,” Jordan said, “I'm trying to keep us from suffocating.” He wiped his sleeve across his forehead. “I'd love to see the heating bills for this place.”

Chris laced his hands over his stomach. “You get used to it.”

Jordan looked up briefly. “I imagine you have to,” he said, and then spread his hands on a stack of papers.

They had been going over the discovery from the attorney general's office for three hours. It was the longest continuous stretch that Chris had ever spent away from his cell. He waited for Jordan to ask him another question, absently reading the names on the spines of the New Hampshire statute books arranged on a metal cart for the convenience of the visiting counselors.

Jordan had told him, almost immediately after arriving this morning, that his defense strategy would be based on a double suicide that had not been carried through to its end. He had also told Chris that he would not be taking the stand in his own defense. It was the only way, Jordan insisted, to win the case. “How come,” Chris said for the second time, “on TV, the defendant always takes the stand?”

“Oh, holy Christ,” Jordan muttered. “Are we back to that again? Because on TV the jury says whatever the hell the script tells it to. Real life is considerably less certain.” Chris's lips thinned. “I told you that I wasn't suicidal.”