Redemption Lake
Sample Chapters
Chapter One
Tucson, Arizona – April 1989
In Catalina, a small town about twelve miles north of Tucson, eighteen-year-old Matthew Garrison paced the deck behind his best friend’s house, trying to regain his composure. But there was no control anymore. He needed to talk to Travis.
The sun was setting and a sprinkling of rust, violet and golden clouds gathered above the jagged peaks of the Catalina Mountains. A pale bruise-colored sky seeped through the saguaros’ giant arms.
Through the sliding glass door, he could see Travis’ mother standing in the middle of the kitchen, pivoting on her feet as if she were slow dancing. Crystal wore her waitress uniform, a short denim skirt, red leather cowboy boots, a low–cut white blouse with a red bandanna tied round her neck. A bottle of beer swung like a pendulum between her thumb and forefinger.
He rapped on the glass, averting his gaze from the deep crevice between her white breasts.
She cocked her head as she opened the sliding glass door. Her eye makeup looked smudged and two black mascara streaks ran down her face. “I thought your mother got married tonight.”
“She did,” he said. “In spite of her asshole son.” He wondered if Crystal was sad because she hadn’t been invited. Sad because she and Matt’s mother were no longer friends. “Is Travis around?”
“He’s dancing the night away at Jennifer’s spring formal.”
Matt cuffed his forehead with the heel of his right hand. “I can’t believe I forgot. Sorry to bother you, Mrs. Reynolds.”
He started to leave.
“You know I hate that Mrs. Reynolds crap.”
Her words stopped him and he turned around.
She threw her head back and laughed. “Call me Crystal. And by the way, you look downright gorgeous, like a movie star.” Her gaze wandered over his tuxedo, and then she lifted her hand, touched her fingers to the front of his shirt and looked full into his face. “Gorgeous and awful.”
“I need to get going.”
“Looks to me like you need someone to talk to.” She handed him her beer.
It felt sort of weird to be drinking out of the same bottle as Crystal, but that didn’t keep him from swilling what beer remained in one long swallow. When he stepped inside the kitchen, the air smelled like cigarette smoke.
She gently moved him aside so she could close the sliding glass door. “What’s wrong?”
He wiped his face with the back of his hand. He was both ashamed and really pissed off about the way he cried so easily. “Everything. I'm such a jerk,” he said, his voice ragged. “I can't believe what I did.” He paused, chased away the look of shock on his mother’s face at the wedding. “I ruined the whole thing.”
“I sincerely doubt that,” Crystal said. “But do you want to talk about it?” She smiled at him then, a beautiful smile made with both her eyes and her mouth. It was a smile that came from her heart because she cared about him and he knew it. A smile reminding him that Crystal had always been an adult he could talk to.
Matt looked down at her cowboy boots and remembered the last time he’d seen Crystal and Travis together. They’d been fighting about her drinking and missing work. Travis had run out the back door and into the desert, Matt at his heels. “Sometimes I hate my life,” Travis had said. “Sometimes I wish my mother was friggin’ dead.”
“I should get going,” Matt said now.
Crystal grabbed his arm and pulled him deeper into the kitchen.
“I don’t want you to be late for work,” he said.
She worked at The Silver Spur, a local steak house and her slender arms were muscular from lifting trays of beer mugs. “It’s my night off.” She didn’t bother to explain her attire. “So how about another beer?” She tucked her hair behind her ears, exposing the gold cross earrings she always wore.
He shook his head. “We’d better not.”
With a nod, she gestured toward the kitchen table. “What’s this we shit? I intend to have another beer and it looks like you could use one. Maybe a whole case.” She headed toward the refrigerator, a barely perceptible weave in her gait, grabbed two bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon and glanced over at him. “You're getting tall, like your father. And your voice sounds like him, too.”
Matt slipped off his tuxedo jacket, draped it over the back of the chair and took a seat at the kitchen table. He unclipped his mauve bow tie and matching cummerbund and then stuffed them into the jacket pockets.
Crystal launched one of the beer bottles toward him and then flipped on the overhead fan. She settled, sideways, in the opposite chair. She was a small, wiry woman with pixie-like features and a mass of curling blonde hair, like her son. When she talked, her eyes sent out little sparks that made you feel like there was no one else in the world she’d rather be with. “Now what's this about you ruining the wedding?” She eased off the cap with a bottle opener that played the Arizona fight song. Travis had won a full-ride baseball scholarship, including a stipend to cover books and incidentals.
Matt stared at the toes of his rented black shoes and thought about September—Travis going to the University of Arizona while Matt headed to either Chicago or Penn. How the two of them would be in different schools for the first time in their lives. How everything kept changing way too fast.
The refrigerator hummed steadily.
“It’s okay, Matt. You can tell me.”
“When Nate and Mom said their vows—tossing around the forever word like it actually meant something—I kept thinking about my dad and the vows he and my mother made. And then I thought about Danni and how she broke us up for no good reason.”
He hadn’t meant for it to happen, but every dark aspect of his life had risen up at the wedding, demanding to be heard. There was no forever. Not for his parents. Not for him and Danni. Not for anyone.
Crystal sighed. “What did you do?”
“I kept thinking about that word, forever, and how it was meaningless crap. I didn’t know I’d said bullshit out loud until I saw the looks on their faces. After the ceremony my mom, who’d practically begged me to be part of the wedding, told me to leave.”
There was sadness in Crystal’s eyes as she reached across the table to cover his hand with her own. Her fingernails were long, newly manicured bright red and her hand felt warm on top of his. “What happened with Danielle?”
He shrugged, hesitated for a moment and then figured, what the hell. Crystal was the least judgmental person he’d ever known. “Her mother found this poem I’d written about how much I liked to touch her bare skin. She freaked out and told Danni to stop seeing me. Said she wouldn’t have some sex-craved wannabe poet ruining her daughter’s life.”
Crystal removed her hand from his, raised her eyebrows and nodded, a slight smile on her face. “Personally, I have a soft spot for sex-craved poets.” She lifted her beer bottle in a pretend toast.
He studied her wrist, small boned and frail looking. “After I screwed up the wedding, I stopped by Danni’s house to talk and she’d hooked up with some football player from Tucson High.” He couldn’t believe how easily the words tumbled out of him. Usually when something bothered him, he’d write a poem that helped him understand what he felt. Poems he’d only shared with Danni and Travis.
“We’ve been together for four years,” he said. “I didn’t think her mother…I thought we’d always —”
Crystal patted his hand. “I know exactly where you’re coming from. Loving someone who breaks your heart hurts in ways you didn’t know you could hurt.”
She stood, walked over to the refrigerator and grabbed two more beers. When she sat down again, she pulled a cigarette from the pack on the table, put it in her mouth but couldn’t steady her hands enough to light it.
He struck a match and held it to the cigarette.
She drew in until it lit, then took a long draw and exhaled, the smoke rising above her in a thin white stream. She fluffed her hair with her fingertips, leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Let's go in the living room. These oak chairs are hard on the butt, even when you’ve got as much padding as I do.” She patted the side of her slender hip.
In a different frame of mind, he would have given her the compliment she fished for and told her she looked great. But this time he remained silent. The beer slid, golden and cold, down the back of his throat. He stood, pushed his chair under the table and followed.
The night had grown cool, as the desert always did in late April, and she stoked the logs in the living room fireplace, flipped on the CD player and they sat, side-by-side, on the sofa. She played love songs from the sixties, all of them slow.
For a while he closed his eyes and slumped back against the faded, red corduroy cushions — listening to the soft music and trying to lose himself.
When he finally opened his eyes, Crystal fixed him with a thoughtful and considering stare. “Come on,” she said. “You can’t fool me. Something else is eating at you.”
Ever since he was a little boy, he’d loved being around Crystal. She was as good at reading him as his mother had been. But unlike his mother, Karina, Crystal had no rules about eating only at the table, not jumping up and down on the beds, or having a pillow fight in the living room. Crystal hadn’t cared if they wore their baseball caps through dinner or hadn’t scrubbed every bit of dirt from under their fingernails. Remembering those childhood days, he felt a sudden loosening in his chest as if she had reached out and pulled a cord from somewhere deep inside him. “Last week, my father admitted he’d been lying to me. He did have an affair. The real reason my mother moved out.” Matt ranted on about the way he’d defended his dad and chosen to live with him. About how much he’d hurt both his mom and younger sister.
Crystal listened but said nothing.
When they ran out of PBR, they started drinking bottles of Corona. And by the time he’d finished telling Crystal everything he needed to tell, he’d lost count of the number of beers he’d drunk and was crying again.
“If you stop expecting people to be perfect you can start to love them for who they really are.” She pulled him into her arms, rubbed his back with her open palm. The wildflower smell of her perfume, as familiar as his own childhood, comforted him. “If you ask me, Matthew Garrison, you've got the world by its balls. You got accepted to all those good schools. Danielle's a fool not to see it.”
Crystal let him go, slipped into the kitchen and returned with more beer. She lit the candles on the coffee table.
Before he knew what happened, they were dancing to Bobby Vinton singing Blue Velvet, Crystal’s warm cheek nestled in his neck. He could feel the blades of her narrow shoulders, the thin cotton fabric over her breasts, the dot of each nipple as it pressed against his chest.
“You're a hell of a good dancer.” She threw her head back and laughed. “Much better than the last time.”
He thought about the way she’d taught him and Travis to slow dance, just in time for their sixth grade party. “I owe it all to you.” Matt laughed too, a high-pitched fake sound, then bent from the waist in an exaggerated bow. Though it wasn’t even 9 p.m., he was dizzy from the beer, had never drunk so much before, and his head swirled, temples drumming to the slow and steady beat of the music. The candles seemed to float inside his eyelids like small full moons.
She undid the top two buttons of his shirt, removed his cufflinks and studied them for a moment, flat silver squares with a raised initial M in the center. “Travis got the plain ones. Your mother always did have a lot of class,” she said, as she tucked them into his pocket and rolled up his sleeves. She ran her fingertips over his forearm to the small blue veins in the crook of his elbow. And then she unbuttoned the rest of his shirt, slipped it from his shoulders and dropped it onto the chair. It drifted down, draping itself over the arm of the scuffed, leather recliner like the wings of a huge white bird.
As if she pulled him by a string, he stepped forward, wrapped his arms around his best friend's mother and kissed her hard on the lips. He dropped his hands to her waist, her body narrowing between his palms, like a slender and graceful vase.
Stunned by his desire, the thought that he'd just done something very wrong flickered for an instant before he pushed all thoughts aside. The scent of her perfume mingled with the beer and his dizziness and when she led him back to the sofa, he followed.
The sun was setting and a sprinkling of rust, violet and golden clouds gathered above the jagged peaks of the Catalina Mountains. A pale bruise-colored sky seeped through the saguaros’ giant arms.
Through the sliding glass door, he could see Travis’ mother standing in the middle of the kitchen, pivoting on her feet as if she were slow dancing. Crystal wore her waitress uniform, a short denim skirt, red leather cowboy boots, a low–cut white blouse with a red bandanna tied round her neck. A bottle of beer swung like a pendulum between her thumb and forefinger.
He rapped on the glass, averting his gaze from the deep crevice between her white breasts.
She cocked her head as she opened the sliding glass door. Her eye makeup looked smudged and two black mascara streaks ran down her face. “I thought your mother got married tonight.”
“She did,” he said. “In spite of her asshole son.” He wondered if Crystal was sad because she hadn’t been invited. Sad because she and Matt’s mother were no longer friends. “Is Travis around?”
“He’s dancing the night away at Jennifer’s spring formal.”
Matt cuffed his forehead with the heel of his right hand. “I can’t believe I forgot. Sorry to bother you, Mrs. Reynolds.”
He started to leave.
“You know I hate that Mrs. Reynolds crap.”
Her words stopped him and he turned around.
She threw her head back and laughed. “Call me Crystal. And by the way, you look downright gorgeous, like a movie star.” Her gaze wandered over his tuxedo, and then she lifted her hand, touched her fingers to the front of his shirt and looked full into his face. “Gorgeous and awful.”
“I need to get going.”
“Looks to me like you need someone to talk to.” She handed him her beer.
It felt sort of weird to be drinking out of the same bottle as Crystal, but that didn’t keep him from swilling what beer remained in one long swallow. When he stepped inside the kitchen, the air smelled like cigarette smoke.
She gently moved him aside so she could close the sliding glass door. “What’s wrong?”
He wiped his face with the back of his hand. He was both ashamed and really pissed off about the way he cried so easily. “Everything. I'm such a jerk,” he said, his voice ragged. “I can't believe what I did.” He paused, chased away the look of shock on his mother’s face at the wedding. “I ruined the whole thing.”
“I sincerely doubt that,” Crystal said. “But do you want to talk about it?” She smiled at him then, a beautiful smile made with both her eyes and her mouth. It was a smile that came from her heart because she cared about him and he knew it. A smile reminding him that Crystal had always been an adult he could talk to.
Matt looked down at her cowboy boots and remembered the last time he’d seen Crystal and Travis together. They’d been fighting about her drinking and missing work. Travis had run out the back door and into the desert, Matt at his heels. “Sometimes I hate my life,” Travis had said. “Sometimes I wish my mother was friggin’ dead.”
“I should get going,” Matt said now.
Crystal grabbed his arm and pulled him deeper into the kitchen.
“I don’t want you to be late for work,” he said.
She worked at The Silver Spur, a local steak house and her slender arms were muscular from lifting trays of beer mugs. “It’s my night off.” She didn’t bother to explain her attire. “So how about another beer?” She tucked her hair behind her ears, exposing the gold cross earrings she always wore.
He shook his head. “We’d better not.”
With a nod, she gestured toward the kitchen table. “What’s this we shit? I intend to have another beer and it looks like you could use one. Maybe a whole case.” She headed toward the refrigerator, a barely perceptible weave in her gait, grabbed two bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon and glanced over at him. “You're getting tall, like your father. And your voice sounds like him, too.”
Matt slipped off his tuxedo jacket, draped it over the back of the chair and took a seat at the kitchen table. He unclipped his mauve bow tie and matching cummerbund and then stuffed them into the jacket pockets.
Crystal launched one of the beer bottles toward him and then flipped on the overhead fan. She settled, sideways, in the opposite chair. She was a small, wiry woman with pixie-like features and a mass of curling blonde hair, like her son. When she talked, her eyes sent out little sparks that made you feel like there was no one else in the world she’d rather be with. “Now what's this about you ruining the wedding?” She eased off the cap with a bottle opener that played the Arizona fight song. Travis had won a full-ride baseball scholarship, including a stipend to cover books and incidentals.
Matt stared at the toes of his rented black shoes and thought about September—Travis going to the University of Arizona while Matt headed to either Chicago or Penn. How the two of them would be in different schools for the first time in their lives. How everything kept changing way too fast.
The refrigerator hummed steadily.
“It’s okay, Matt. You can tell me.”
“When Nate and Mom said their vows—tossing around the forever word like it actually meant something—I kept thinking about my dad and the vows he and my mother made. And then I thought about Danni and how she broke us up for no good reason.”
He hadn’t meant for it to happen, but every dark aspect of his life had risen up at the wedding, demanding to be heard. There was no forever. Not for his parents. Not for him and Danni. Not for anyone.
Crystal sighed. “What did you do?”
“I kept thinking about that word, forever, and how it was meaningless crap. I didn’t know I’d said bullshit out loud until I saw the looks on their faces. After the ceremony my mom, who’d practically begged me to be part of the wedding, told me to leave.”
There was sadness in Crystal’s eyes as she reached across the table to cover his hand with her own. Her fingernails were long, newly manicured bright red and her hand felt warm on top of his. “What happened with Danielle?”
He shrugged, hesitated for a moment and then figured, what the hell. Crystal was the least judgmental person he’d ever known. “Her mother found this poem I’d written about how much I liked to touch her bare skin. She freaked out and told Danni to stop seeing me. Said she wouldn’t have some sex-craved wannabe poet ruining her daughter’s life.”
Crystal removed her hand from his, raised her eyebrows and nodded, a slight smile on her face. “Personally, I have a soft spot for sex-craved poets.” She lifted her beer bottle in a pretend toast.
He studied her wrist, small boned and frail looking. “After I screwed up the wedding, I stopped by Danni’s house to talk and she’d hooked up with some football player from Tucson High.” He couldn’t believe how easily the words tumbled out of him. Usually when something bothered him, he’d write a poem that helped him understand what he felt. Poems he’d only shared with Danni and Travis.
“We’ve been together for four years,” he said. “I didn’t think her mother…I thought we’d always —”
Crystal patted his hand. “I know exactly where you’re coming from. Loving someone who breaks your heart hurts in ways you didn’t know you could hurt.”
She stood, walked over to the refrigerator and grabbed two more beers. When she sat down again, she pulled a cigarette from the pack on the table, put it in her mouth but couldn’t steady her hands enough to light it.
He struck a match and held it to the cigarette.
She drew in until it lit, then took a long draw and exhaled, the smoke rising above her in a thin white stream. She fluffed her hair with her fingertips, leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Let's go in the living room. These oak chairs are hard on the butt, even when you’ve got as much padding as I do.” She patted the side of her slender hip.
In a different frame of mind, he would have given her the compliment she fished for and told her she looked great. But this time he remained silent. The beer slid, golden and cold, down the back of his throat. He stood, pushed his chair under the table and followed.
The night had grown cool, as the desert always did in late April, and she stoked the logs in the living room fireplace, flipped on the CD player and they sat, side-by-side, on the sofa. She played love songs from the sixties, all of them slow.
For a while he closed his eyes and slumped back against the faded, red corduroy cushions — listening to the soft music and trying to lose himself.
When he finally opened his eyes, Crystal fixed him with a thoughtful and considering stare. “Come on,” she said. “You can’t fool me. Something else is eating at you.”
Ever since he was a little boy, he’d loved being around Crystal. She was as good at reading him as his mother had been. But unlike his mother, Karina, Crystal had no rules about eating only at the table, not jumping up and down on the beds, or having a pillow fight in the living room. Crystal hadn’t cared if they wore their baseball caps through dinner or hadn’t scrubbed every bit of dirt from under their fingernails. Remembering those childhood days, he felt a sudden loosening in his chest as if she had reached out and pulled a cord from somewhere deep inside him. “Last week, my father admitted he’d been lying to me. He did have an affair. The real reason my mother moved out.” Matt ranted on about the way he’d defended his dad and chosen to live with him. About how much he’d hurt both his mom and younger sister.
Crystal listened but said nothing.
When they ran out of PBR, they started drinking bottles of Corona. And by the time he’d finished telling Crystal everything he needed to tell, he’d lost count of the number of beers he’d drunk and was crying again.
“If you stop expecting people to be perfect you can start to love them for who they really are.” She pulled him into her arms, rubbed his back with her open palm. The wildflower smell of her perfume, as familiar as his own childhood, comforted him. “If you ask me, Matthew Garrison, you've got the world by its balls. You got accepted to all those good schools. Danielle's a fool not to see it.”
Crystal let him go, slipped into the kitchen and returned with more beer. She lit the candles on the coffee table.
Before he knew what happened, they were dancing to Bobby Vinton singing Blue Velvet, Crystal’s warm cheek nestled in his neck. He could feel the blades of her narrow shoulders, the thin cotton fabric over her breasts, the dot of each nipple as it pressed against his chest.
“You're a hell of a good dancer.” She threw her head back and laughed. “Much better than the last time.”
He thought about the way she’d taught him and Travis to slow dance, just in time for their sixth grade party. “I owe it all to you.” Matt laughed too, a high-pitched fake sound, then bent from the waist in an exaggerated bow. Though it wasn’t even 9 p.m., he was dizzy from the beer, had never drunk so much before, and his head swirled, temples drumming to the slow and steady beat of the music. The candles seemed to float inside his eyelids like small full moons.
She undid the top two buttons of his shirt, removed his cufflinks and studied them for a moment, flat silver squares with a raised initial M in the center. “Travis got the plain ones. Your mother always did have a lot of class,” she said, as she tucked them into his pocket and rolled up his sleeves. She ran her fingertips over his forearm to the small blue veins in the crook of his elbow. And then she unbuttoned the rest of his shirt, slipped it from his shoulders and dropped it onto the chair. It drifted down, draping itself over the arm of the scuffed, leather recliner like the wings of a huge white bird.
As if she pulled him by a string, he stepped forward, wrapped his arms around his best friend's mother and kissed her hard on the lips. He dropped his hands to her waist, her body narrowing between his palms, like a slender and graceful vase.
Stunned by his desire, the thought that he'd just done something very wrong flickered for an instant before he pushed all thoughts aside. The scent of her perfume mingled with the beer and his dizziness and when she led him back to the sofa, he followed.
Chapter Two
When it was over, the taut quivering strings inside Matt loosened. “I’m sorry,” he slurred. “I never thought...well...I just never thought.” Though he lay flat on his back, he felt as if he were on a yacht in the ocean, reeling from side to side. He tried to sit up, grabbed one of the sofa cushions as the room spun in circles around him. Finally, he closed his eyes and lowered his head.
A moment later, Crystal lifted his chin with her fingertips. “We both needed a little comfort tonight.” She touched his cheek. “Nobody got hurt here.”
He opened his eyes. “I…I…don't know,” he said. “What about Travis?”
The way she looked at him changed abruptly. She leaped up from the sofa and pulled on her blouse, carefully buttoning it all the way up. She slipped into her denim skirt, tugged at the hem as if trying to lengthen it. “I feel so ugly right now.”
“You’re not…You’re not…” Though he hadn’t intended to, he giggled, unable to make the word ugly come out of his mouth. He wanted to tell her that all their friends thought she was hot and totally funny. “You should…I mean you will probably…maybe…get married again.” His tongue seemed to trip over his words.
She smiled sadly. “I can’t see Travis with Baxter for his stepfather.”
Thomas Baxter, an aging ex-boxer with a crush on Crystal, owned The Silver Spur and was her boss. He parted his few long strands of black hair just above his left ear and combed them across the top of his head in an attempt to hide the baldness. Travis had nicknamed him, Barcode.
“If he made you happily. I mean happy. Travis would accept him. I know he would.”
“The way you’ve accepted Nate?”
Matt said nothing.
“Baxter used to make me laugh. But now he’s got plans, follows me around like a lovesick teenager. I don’t know what I ever—”
“Travis and I, we’ve always been straight with each other.” His voice pleaded for her to understand. He awkwardly pulled on his underwear, losing his balance each time he tried to stand on one leg. Finally, he sat on the edge of the sofa.
She jerked a cigarette from the drawer in the coffee table. “You don’t get it, do you? Travis won’t blame you. I’m the one he’ll be angry with. Ever since he got involved with Jennifer and her crazy church.”
“He’s a teenager,” Matt said, trying hard to make his mouth form the words. “He, I mean he probably just goes there to spend more time with Jennifer.”
Crystal shook her head. “We had a big fight about it last night. Travis said if I forced him to choose between me and that church he’d choose them.” She shook her head. “I’m surprised Jennifer’s parents even let her go to Marana’s spring dance. I wish they’d put her in a Christian school where Travis would have never met her.” She paused, started again. “He blames my lack of faith for everything—even the fact that my two sisters won’t speak to me and that his father died. Like if I’d only gone to that church, the whole damn Vietnam War would never have happened. Believe me, Travis will hate me forever if you tell him.”
Matt wanted to reassure her that Travis could never hate her, but he didn’t have the clarity of thought. He rushed into the bathroom and vomited beer, then rinsed out his mouth, washed his hands and returned to the living room.
“You’ll feel better now,” she said, then took a long draw on her cigarette. She looked away from him when she exhaled. “I’ve got a lot of problems these days. Decisions to make. Things you and Travis don’t know about.” She grabbed his forearm. “Promise you won’t add this to them.”
Matt lowered his head. He felt so sick he wasn’t sure how much longer he could sit up. “I can’t,” he mumbled. “I mean…I never lied to him.”
Crystal’s eyes flashed. “This is my life. Understand me? This is none of Travis’ business.”
“I have to go now. My dad…my dad will be worried.”
“I can’t let you do that.” She snuffed her cigarette out in the ashtray. “Your dad wouldn’t want me to.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Think about it. You’re eighteen, not even old enough to drink, let alone drive drunk. What kind of mother do you think I am?” She put her hand to her mouth for an instant, and then let it drop by her side. “Besides, if the police stop you I could get in trouble for providing the beer.” She glanced away.
When she looked at him again, her eyes were filled with tears. “Sleep it off in my bed. Travis won’t even know you were here. I’ll wake you in a couple hours. Then you can go home and pretend like you dreamed the whole damn thing. Pretend it never really happened. But please, I’m begging you. Don’t get all righteous and tell Travis.”
She picked up his tuxedo pants, draped them over the recliner, then shoved him toward her bedroom and pushed him onto her bed. She took off his shoes and socks. When she left the room, she pulled the door partially closed behind her.
A moment later, he heard the refrigerator open, the sound of a cap popping off a bottle. Another chorus of the Arizona Fight Song.
For the next two hours, he drifted in and out of sleep. Cradled by the night sounds of the desert outside the open window, each time memory emerged, his thoughts thickened and folded back into sleep. At one point he heard water running for a bath.
When he woke up, the curtains were drawn and the room was very dark. He wore only his undershorts and a white T-shirt his mother had insisted upon—claiming his usual dark one would show through his tuxedo shirt. As if the color of his T-shirt could ruin her perfect wedding. He turned toward the empty space beside him. It took a few moments for him to realize where he was. He closed his eyes, shook his aching head to clear it. Crystal was his best friend’s mother. What the hell was he doing in her bed?
He thought he heard the sound of the front door open, then close again. Oh God, please don’t let it be Travis. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and his gaze landed for an instant on the sunflower sheets, the blue checked background. One event at a time, he remembered everything.
Fully awake now, he shot from the bed, rocking for a few seconds before he achieved balance, and then hurried to the window. Crystal was supposed to wake him. He held his breath, and then opened the curtains. The moon sat on the top windowsill, its light silver and unforgiving. The driveway was empty. Whatever he’d heard, it wasn’t Travis.
Matt let out the breath he’d been holding and glanced at the digital clock—its red letters told him it was 10:58 p.m. He needed to get dressed and leave. The dance ended in an hour and Travis would head home.
Matt closed the curtains and flipped on the overhead light. On the other side of the street a car door slammed shut, an engine started. He hurried back to the window, parted the curtains, but saw only two circular taillights turning north onto Oracle Road.
He raced into the living room, stepping over Crystal’s skirt and blouse, the lace slip and underwear she’d left on the hallway floor outside the bathroom. He grabbed his tuxedo pants and shirt from the recliner, then returned to Crystal’s bedroom. His hands were shaking so hard he could barely work the fly and the button on his trousers. He slipped into his shirt and then sat on the edge of the bed to pull on his socks and shoes.
As if he had the flu, his head throbbed and his stomach felt queasy. He tied his shoes, and then rushed into the bathroom, his gaze fixed on the toilet. He sat on his heels in front it, pitching slightly, then wrapped both arms around the bowl and vomited. The room seemed to spin. He closed his eyes. His face was cool from the spray of the flushing toilet. His legs and arms trembled. He wasn't sure he remembered how to walk. He opened his eyes and tried to stand. And when he did, he turned and saw Crystal. For a strange moment, everything remained calm and slow.
Crystal lay naked in a bathtub filled with blood-colored water, her head propped against one of those blow-up pillows that attached to the back of the tub with suction cups. Her skin was pale and slightly blue. Her eyes were open and staring straight ahead—looking into something he couldn’t see. Blood splattered the white tiles that surrounded the tub. It dripped down them like wet paint. One of her blood-covered hands flopped over the side of the tub. A single thick drop fell from her index finger into the crimson pond congealing on the linoleum floor. Blood covered her neck and shoulders. Tiny bubbles of frothy blood still oozed from the gash in her neck.
An empty Smirnoff bottle set in a puddle of blood on the tub’s rim beside a straight edged razor blade.
The bathroom was so quiet. Nothing but the sound of his own breathing. He clenched and unclenched his hands. His body grew numb. “Oh no. Oh God, no,” he said, the words thickening in the air in front of him. His head filled with strange sounds—the drone of insects humming, violinists tuning their strings. “What have I done?”
Again, the contents of his stomach rose. He crouched in front of the toilet and heaved until nothing came up. And then he started to rock, back and forth, muttering what he already knew was a useless prayer. Please, just let her be okay. He said it over and over like an unstoppable mantra. If only he could keep saying the words, maybe he could reverse this unthinkable thing.
Her eyes were glazed over and he couldn’t be sure she was dead. Maybe she was still alive. He straightened up, stepped over to the bathtub to check Crystal’s neck for a pulse. As he bent closer, he smelled the metallic scent of her blood as it mixed with her perfume and the stale, metabolized smell of alcohol seeping through her skin. He placed two fingers on her neck, searching for her carotid and pressed. His fingers slipped into the gaping hole. It felt wet and warm. He screamed and jerked them out. They were covered in blood.
He swiped his bloody hand on the front of his shirt and then checked the other side of her neck for a pulse. Please, just let her be okay. Nothing. He shook her by the shoulders, and then tried again. Still no pulse. At that moment, he stopped his mantra.
Though he knew she was dead, he held her hand—soft and still warm. It belonged to Crystal who’d taught him to line dance, who liked hot buttered popcorn with cheddar cheese grated on top. Crystal who was sometimes irresponsible and drank way too much. Travis’ mother who’d cheered for him at bat in Little League, cheered just as loud as she had for her own son. Crystal who’d always be sitting in a bathtub of blood. “I’m sorry.” He squeezed her hand and then let her go.
Struggling to his feet, he headed for the kitchen phone to call 911. Halfway to the bathroom door, he stopped. Blood smeared the front of his white shirt. And there was still blood on both his hands. His body was slick with fear. He could smell it, taste it, and feel it coming out of his pores like sweat.
He dropped his chin and stared at his shirt. Holy shit. If anyone saw him like this, they’d think he’d killed Crystal. The thought stopped him. Had he? Was he capable of doing something so heinous?
The bubble of panic in his throat got bigger. He hurried across the bathroom to wash his hands. A Caribbean blue streak of toothpaste had hardened onto her sink. Staring at the uncapped tube beside Crystal’s toothbrush, he felt as if something had been cut out of his chest.
He grabbed the sides of the sink, stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. The face staring back resembled no one he’d ever seen before. Was it the face of a murderer? Had he just pushed someone else to her death? He shook his head—breathing in short gasps, like a swimmer gearing up for a plunge. His lungs burned as if he were being swept away by a strong current.
When the memory of Justin’s death surfaced, as it often did, Matt used his fists to hammer the stranger’s face he saw reflected in the medicine cabinet. The mirror fractured, sending out long cracks in every direction. The face split into interlocking parts like an abstract puzzle. One jagged sliver fell into the sink, breaking in half. It left a black and empty space in what had once been the mirror.
He held onto the sides of the sink again and rocked slowly in front of it, still staring at the blood on his hands and under his fingernails. “You’re all right,” he said, but could barely hear the words, the sounds inside his head were so loud.
In his mind he saw himself letting go of the sink, turning on the spigot, and then walking through the rest of the house. Doing the things he needed to do. And all at once his body began to move. After carefully washing his hands, he rinsed all traces of blood from the sides and bowl of the sink, recapped the toothpaste and tucked it into the medicine cabinet. He wrapped the shards of mirror in toilet tissue, careful to avoid getting his fingerprints on the glass, and then placed them in the trashcan, jagged sides down. There were no towels in the bathroom, so he wiped his wet hands on his pant legs.
As if he were someone else, running through an obstacle course, he gathered the empty beer bottles and took them out into the garage, carefully placed them in their cardboard carriers. He wiped the kitchen table, closed the open drawers, loaded the dishwasher, emptied the ashtrays, then made Crystal’s bed. He blew out the fat candles she’d left burning on the coffee table, picked up the work clothes she’d discarded in the hallway beside the bathroom door, folded them neatly, then placed them on the chair beside her bed. He grabbed her red cowboy boots from the living room and set them beneath the chair.
When he finished, he called 911.
“What is the nature of your emergency?”
He tried to make his voice sound deeper. “There’s a woman in the bathtub. She’s unconscious and she’s bleeding really bad.” He gave them the address and Crystal’s name, hoping they’d send an ambulance and the body would be taken away before Travis had to see it.
“With whom am I speaking?”
Matt didn’t respond. He stared at the corkboard beside the phone. Crystal’s calendar said she had an appointment with a Doctor Cunningham yesterday. Could she have gotten bad news? He wanted an explanation for her death, another reason besides his threat to tell Travis what they’d done.
“Are weapons involved, sir?”
“I don’t know. There’s a razor blade on the rim of the bathtub.”
“Is the victim under the influence of drugs or alcohol?”
“Not drugs,” he said. “At least I don’t think so. But it looks like she’s been drinking something—maybe Vodka.”
“I’ve dispatched an ambulance,” the operator said. “Now I need your name.”
The telephone receiver grew slick in his hand.
“Is there anyone else in the home with you?”
“I think she might have been trying to commit suicide,” he said, still wondering if there could be another reason for her death.
“I need you to stay with the victim until the paramedics arrive. Keep her warm,” she said. “And it’s protocol for me to take your name for the records.”
He hung up, grabbed a dishtowel and wiped the receiver. The clock on the stove read 11:30. Jennifer’s church didn’t allow opposite-sex teenagers to spend unsupervised time together. Her parents would pick her up from the dance. That meant Travis would be home soon.
If Matt hurried, he could intercept him, talk him into spending the night at Matt’s house.
He raced into Travis’ bedroom, jerked open the drawer where he kept his T-shirts. Surely he had a plain black or a dark blue one in here somewhere. Matt lifted the stacks of folded shirts until he found one, ripped off the tuxedo shirt, slipped the T-shirt over his head, then grabbed his jacket from the kitchen chair and hurried outside. On the back deck, insects clustered around the light fixture, high-pitched, insistent and frantic. The sound reminded him of Crystal’s voice when she’d pleaded with him not to tell Travis.
He hurried around to the carport, unlocked the trunk of his Mustang, a restored nineteen sixty-seven Grande, that had been his mom’s first car, and dropped both the jacket and the bloodstained shirt inside. Silence ballooned into the night air around him, a strange silence with a ticking heartbeat. Then he remembered the cuff links. He checked the shirt pocket. They weren’t there. He plunged his hands into his pants pockets and then the tuxedo jacket. No cufflinks. He didn’t have time to go back inside. He had to stop Travis from coming home.
When he climbed into the front seat, he looked out through the windshield, but the dome light inside the car and the darkness outside had changed the glass into a mirror. He turned away. His face was the last thing he wanted to see.
A moment later, Crystal lifted his chin with her fingertips. “We both needed a little comfort tonight.” She touched his cheek. “Nobody got hurt here.”
He opened his eyes. “I…I…don't know,” he said. “What about Travis?”
The way she looked at him changed abruptly. She leaped up from the sofa and pulled on her blouse, carefully buttoning it all the way up. She slipped into her denim skirt, tugged at the hem as if trying to lengthen it. “I feel so ugly right now.”
“You’re not…You’re not…” Though he hadn’t intended to, he giggled, unable to make the word ugly come out of his mouth. He wanted to tell her that all their friends thought she was hot and totally funny. “You should…I mean you will probably…maybe…get married again.” His tongue seemed to trip over his words.
She smiled sadly. “I can’t see Travis with Baxter for his stepfather.”
Thomas Baxter, an aging ex-boxer with a crush on Crystal, owned The Silver Spur and was her boss. He parted his few long strands of black hair just above his left ear and combed them across the top of his head in an attempt to hide the baldness. Travis had nicknamed him, Barcode.
“If he made you happily. I mean happy. Travis would accept him. I know he would.”
“The way you’ve accepted Nate?”
Matt said nothing.
“Baxter used to make me laugh. But now he’s got plans, follows me around like a lovesick teenager. I don’t know what I ever—”
“Travis and I, we’ve always been straight with each other.” His voice pleaded for her to understand. He awkwardly pulled on his underwear, losing his balance each time he tried to stand on one leg. Finally, he sat on the edge of the sofa.
She jerked a cigarette from the drawer in the coffee table. “You don’t get it, do you? Travis won’t blame you. I’m the one he’ll be angry with. Ever since he got involved with Jennifer and her crazy church.”
“He’s a teenager,” Matt said, trying hard to make his mouth form the words. “He, I mean he probably just goes there to spend more time with Jennifer.”
Crystal shook her head. “We had a big fight about it last night. Travis said if I forced him to choose between me and that church he’d choose them.” She shook her head. “I’m surprised Jennifer’s parents even let her go to Marana’s spring dance. I wish they’d put her in a Christian school where Travis would have never met her.” She paused, started again. “He blames my lack of faith for everything—even the fact that my two sisters won’t speak to me and that his father died. Like if I’d only gone to that church, the whole damn Vietnam War would never have happened. Believe me, Travis will hate me forever if you tell him.”
Matt wanted to reassure her that Travis could never hate her, but he didn’t have the clarity of thought. He rushed into the bathroom and vomited beer, then rinsed out his mouth, washed his hands and returned to the living room.
“You’ll feel better now,” she said, then took a long draw on her cigarette. She looked away from him when she exhaled. “I’ve got a lot of problems these days. Decisions to make. Things you and Travis don’t know about.” She grabbed his forearm. “Promise you won’t add this to them.”
Matt lowered his head. He felt so sick he wasn’t sure how much longer he could sit up. “I can’t,” he mumbled. “I mean…I never lied to him.”
Crystal’s eyes flashed. “This is my life. Understand me? This is none of Travis’ business.”
“I have to go now. My dad…my dad will be worried.”
“I can’t let you do that.” She snuffed her cigarette out in the ashtray. “Your dad wouldn’t want me to.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Think about it. You’re eighteen, not even old enough to drink, let alone drive drunk. What kind of mother do you think I am?” She put her hand to her mouth for an instant, and then let it drop by her side. “Besides, if the police stop you I could get in trouble for providing the beer.” She glanced away.
When she looked at him again, her eyes were filled with tears. “Sleep it off in my bed. Travis won’t even know you were here. I’ll wake you in a couple hours. Then you can go home and pretend like you dreamed the whole damn thing. Pretend it never really happened. But please, I’m begging you. Don’t get all righteous and tell Travis.”
She picked up his tuxedo pants, draped them over the recliner, then shoved him toward her bedroom and pushed him onto her bed. She took off his shoes and socks. When she left the room, she pulled the door partially closed behind her.
A moment later, he heard the refrigerator open, the sound of a cap popping off a bottle. Another chorus of the Arizona Fight Song.
For the next two hours, he drifted in and out of sleep. Cradled by the night sounds of the desert outside the open window, each time memory emerged, his thoughts thickened and folded back into sleep. At one point he heard water running for a bath.
When he woke up, the curtains were drawn and the room was very dark. He wore only his undershorts and a white T-shirt his mother had insisted upon—claiming his usual dark one would show through his tuxedo shirt. As if the color of his T-shirt could ruin her perfect wedding. He turned toward the empty space beside him. It took a few moments for him to realize where he was. He closed his eyes, shook his aching head to clear it. Crystal was his best friend’s mother. What the hell was he doing in her bed?
He thought he heard the sound of the front door open, then close again. Oh God, please don’t let it be Travis. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and his gaze landed for an instant on the sunflower sheets, the blue checked background. One event at a time, he remembered everything.
Fully awake now, he shot from the bed, rocking for a few seconds before he achieved balance, and then hurried to the window. Crystal was supposed to wake him. He held his breath, and then opened the curtains. The moon sat on the top windowsill, its light silver and unforgiving. The driveway was empty. Whatever he’d heard, it wasn’t Travis.
Matt let out the breath he’d been holding and glanced at the digital clock—its red letters told him it was 10:58 p.m. He needed to get dressed and leave. The dance ended in an hour and Travis would head home.
Matt closed the curtains and flipped on the overhead light. On the other side of the street a car door slammed shut, an engine started. He hurried back to the window, parted the curtains, but saw only two circular taillights turning north onto Oracle Road.
He raced into the living room, stepping over Crystal’s skirt and blouse, the lace slip and underwear she’d left on the hallway floor outside the bathroom. He grabbed his tuxedo pants and shirt from the recliner, then returned to Crystal’s bedroom. His hands were shaking so hard he could barely work the fly and the button on his trousers. He slipped into his shirt and then sat on the edge of the bed to pull on his socks and shoes.
As if he had the flu, his head throbbed and his stomach felt queasy. He tied his shoes, and then rushed into the bathroom, his gaze fixed on the toilet. He sat on his heels in front it, pitching slightly, then wrapped both arms around the bowl and vomited. The room seemed to spin. He closed his eyes. His face was cool from the spray of the flushing toilet. His legs and arms trembled. He wasn't sure he remembered how to walk. He opened his eyes and tried to stand. And when he did, he turned and saw Crystal. For a strange moment, everything remained calm and slow.
Crystal lay naked in a bathtub filled with blood-colored water, her head propped against one of those blow-up pillows that attached to the back of the tub with suction cups. Her skin was pale and slightly blue. Her eyes were open and staring straight ahead—looking into something he couldn’t see. Blood splattered the white tiles that surrounded the tub. It dripped down them like wet paint. One of her blood-covered hands flopped over the side of the tub. A single thick drop fell from her index finger into the crimson pond congealing on the linoleum floor. Blood covered her neck and shoulders. Tiny bubbles of frothy blood still oozed from the gash in her neck.
An empty Smirnoff bottle set in a puddle of blood on the tub’s rim beside a straight edged razor blade.
The bathroom was so quiet. Nothing but the sound of his own breathing. He clenched and unclenched his hands. His body grew numb. “Oh no. Oh God, no,” he said, the words thickening in the air in front of him. His head filled with strange sounds—the drone of insects humming, violinists tuning their strings. “What have I done?”
Again, the contents of his stomach rose. He crouched in front of the toilet and heaved until nothing came up. And then he started to rock, back and forth, muttering what he already knew was a useless prayer. Please, just let her be okay. He said it over and over like an unstoppable mantra. If only he could keep saying the words, maybe he could reverse this unthinkable thing.
Her eyes were glazed over and he couldn’t be sure she was dead. Maybe she was still alive. He straightened up, stepped over to the bathtub to check Crystal’s neck for a pulse. As he bent closer, he smelled the metallic scent of her blood as it mixed with her perfume and the stale, metabolized smell of alcohol seeping through her skin. He placed two fingers on her neck, searching for her carotid and pressed. His fingers slipped into the gaping hole. It felt wet and warm. He screamed and jerked them out. They were covered in blood.
He swiped his bloody hand on the front of his shirt and then checked the other side of her neck for a pulse. Please, just let her be okay. Nothing. He shook her by the shoulders, and then tried again. Still no pulse. At that moment, he stopped his mantra.
Though he knew she was dead, he held her hand—soft and still warm. It belonged to Crystal who’d taught him to line dance, who liked hot buttered popcorn with cheddar cheese grated on top. Crystal who was sometimes irresponsible and drank way too much. Travis’ mother who’d cheered for him at bat in Little League, cheered just as loud as she had for her own son. Crystal who’d always be sitting in a bathtub of blood. “I’m sorry.” He squeezed her hand and then let her go.
Struggling to his feet, he headed for the kitchen phone to call 911. Halfway to the bathroom door, he stopped. Blood smeared the front of his white shirt. And there was still blood on both his hands. His body was slick with fear. He could smell it, taste it, and feel it coming out of his pores like sweat.
He dropped his chin and stared at his shirt. Holy shit. If anyone saw him like this, they’d think he’d killed Crystal. The thought stopped him. Had he? Was he capable of doing something so heinous?
The bubble of panic in his throat got bigger. He hurried across the bathroom to wash his hands. A Caribbean blue streak of toothpaste had hardened onto her sink. Staring at the uncapped tube beside Crystal’s toothbrush, he felt as if something had been cut out of his chest.
He grabbed the sides of the sink, stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. The face staring back resembled no one he’d ever seen before. Was it the face of a murderer? Had he just pushed someone else to her death? He shook his head—breathing in short gasps, like a swimmer gearing up for a plunge. His lungs burned as if he were being swept away by a strong current.
When the memory of Justin’s death surfaced, as it often did, Matt used his fists to hammer the stranger’s face he saw reflected in the medicine cabinet. The mirror fractured, sending out long cracks in every direction. The face split into interlocking parts like an abstract puzzle. One jagged sliver fell into the sink, breaking in half. It left a black and empty space in what had once been the mirror.
He held onto the sides of the sink again and rocked slowly in front of it, still staring at the blood on his hands and under his fingernails. “You’re all right,” he said, but could barely hear the words, the sounds inside his head were so loud.
In his mind he saw himself letting go of the sink, turning on the spigot, and then walking through the rest of the house. Doing the things he needed to do. And all at once his body began to move. After carefully washing his hands, he rinsed all traces of blood from the sides and bowl of the sink, recapped the toothpaste and tucked it into the medicine cabinet. He wrapped the shards of mirror in toilet tissue, careful to avoid getting his fingerprints on the glass, and then placed them in the trashcan, jagged sides down. There were no towels in the bathroom, so he wiped his wet hands on his pant legs.
As if he were someone else, running through an obstacle course, he gathered the empty beer bottles and took them out into the garage, carefully placed them in their cardboard carriers. He wiped the kitchen table, closed the open drawers, loaded the dishwasher, emptied the ashtrays, then made Crystal’s bed. He blew out the fat candles she’d left burning on the coffee table, picked up the work clothes she’d discarded in the hallway beside the bathroom door, folded them neatly, then placed them on the chair beside her bed. He grabbed her red cowboy boots from the living room and set them beneath the chair.
When he finished, he called 911.
“What is the nature of your emergency?”
He tried to make his voice sound deeper. “There’s a woman in the bathtub. She’s unconscious and she’s bleeding really bad.” He gave them the address and Crystal’s name, hoping they’d send an ambulance and the body would be taken away before Travis had to see it.
“With whom am I speaking?”
Matt didn’t respond. He stared at the corkboard beside the phone. Crystal’s calendar said she had an appointment with a Doctor Cunningham yesterday. Could she have gotten bad news? He wanted an explanation for her death, another reason besides his threat to tell Travis what they’d done.
“Are weapons involved, sir?”
“I don’t know. There’s a razor blade on the rim of the bathtub.”
“Is the victim under the influence of drugs or alcohol?”
“Not drugs,” he said. “At least I don’t think so. But it looks like she’s been drinking something—maybe Vodka.”
“I’ve dispatched an ambulance,” the operator said. “Now I need your name.”
The telephone receiver grew slick in his hand.
“Is there anyone else in the home with you?”
“I think she might have been trying to commit suicide,” he said, still wondering if there could be another reason for her death.
“I need you to stay with the victim until the paramedics arrive. Keep her warm,” she said. “And it’s protocol for me to take your name for the records.”
He hung up, grabbed a dishtowel and wiped the receiver. The clock on the stove read 11:30. Jennifer’s church didn’t allow opposite-sex teenagers to spend unsupervised time together. Her parents would pick her up from the dance. That meant Travis would be home soon.
If Matt hurried, he could intercept him, talk him into spending the night at Matt’s house.
He raced into Travis’ bedroom, jerked open the drawer where he kept his T-shirts. Surely he had a plain black or a dark blue one in here somewhere. Matt lifted the stacks of folded shirts until he found one, ripped off the tuxedo shirt, slipped the T-shirt over his head, then grabbed his jacket from the kitchen chair and hurried outside. On the back deck, insects clustered around the light fixture, high-pitched, insistent and frantic. The sound reminded him of Crystal’s voice when she’d pleaded with him not to tell Travis.
He hurried around to the carport, unlocked the trunk of his Mustang, a restored nineteen sixty-seven Grande, that had been his mom’s first car, and dropped both the jacket and the bloodstained shirt inside. Silence ballooned into the night air around him, a strange silence with a ticking heartbeat. Then he remembered the cuff links. He checked the shirt pocket. They weren’t there. He plunged his hands into his pants pockets and then the tuxedo jacket. No cufflinks. He didn’t have time to go back inside. He had to stop Travis from coming home.
When he climbed into the front seat, he looked out through the windshield, but the dome light inside the car and the darkness outside had changed the glass into a mirror. He turned away. His face was the last thing he wanted to see.