“Sounds about right,” I said.

So that’s what we did, the three of us. Skink drove us down to some red-painted shack on the bay with brown paper on the tables, where we pounded on the hard shells with our hammers and ate till our fingers bled. Skink lit a cigar and told us stories, Beth cracked jokes, I drank beer enough so the sea shifted and the land heaved and the sun dropped low over the water. It was a night of celebration and camaraderie, of noisy arguments with the blowhards at the next table, of sadness and hilarity, of Skink baring his teeth in laughter. Elvis was on the jukebox, and so was Louis Armstrong, blowing the blues, and by the end the brown paper was covered with bits of red shell and long-necked bottles, cobs shorn of corn, a cigar butt, all in an evocative pattern that would have made Joseph Cornell proud. It was a lovely evening, proof that life could be more than the sordid adventure we had just passed through, a lovely evening, perfect enough to almost make me forget.

Almost.

54

I AWOKE with a start from my sleep. I sat up on the living room couch, scratched, looked around. In the dim city light slipping through the slats of my shade, the apartment looked old and hard, lonely. I had been there too long to be objective enough to figure what it said about my life, but somehow, now, it seemed lonelier than it should.

Then I noticed that the chain latch of my front door, the chain I fastened each night out of habit, was hanging loose.

Guy had done it again, left me like a thief in the middle of the night. This time I didn’t scour the apartment frantically for him, this time I didn’t desperately work out where he was headed. This time I knew. I rinsed my face in cold water, I put on a pair of jeans and a white tee shirt, my raincoat, took a six of Rolling Rock out of my fridge, and headed out after him.

He had just been released and didn’t know yet where he wanted to go, so I had volunteered my place for a few nights while he decided. He was through as a lawyer, his felony conviction on fraud would see to that, and his marriage was broken, though not irretrievably, as Leila remained forever stalwart. There were more questions than answers in his future, which might have been the best thing he had going for him. But he seemed dazed when he stepped out of the prison, justifiably confused and angry, having been accused of murdering his lover and forced to defend himself without ever yet having been given the opportunity to mourn. He just needed time, he told Leila, who was standing outside the prison yard with me, and I assumed that after having spent six months sleeping on a prison cot, he needed a full-size bed, too. Which is why I was sleeping on the couch when I awoke with a start to discover him gone.

The houses all along the fine suburban street where I found him were well lit, all but one. Their outside lamps were shining, and within the ambit of those lights families were sleeping, parents were holding one another, kids were snug in their beds, all asleep, all preparing for the next day of their lovely lives. Work, school, friends, family, good food, fast food, noisy triumphs, quiet defeats, hope, hope. Life was waiting for those asleep in the confines of those houses, all but one.

Hailey Prouix’s house was dark as death.

Guy Forrest sat on the steps in front of her house, the same step, in fact, on which I found him the night of Hailey Prouix’s murder. I didn’t say a word as I walked up, sat down beside him, twisted a beer free from its plastic noose. He didn’t say a word when he took it, just gave me a glance like he had been expecting me. I took a beer for myself. Two soft exhalations as we popped the tops. We sat there together on the steps and quietly drank.

Her house had been scrubbed of blood, and scrubbed again, and still it lay fallow. But not for long. With the trial now over, a sign would soon sprout on its lawn and a lockbox with a key would blossom from the knob of its front door. Realtors would drive their Lexuses to the curb and bring their clients in for a look. The first few might come with a morbid interest, getting a glimpse for themselves of where the mattress lay on the floor, where the woman lay on the mattress, from where the shots were fired. But then the curiosity seekers would disappear and the young couples would arrive. They’d hear the whispers and smile, knowing that an unsavory past would lower the price. One of those couples would discuss it long and hard and then make a lowball offer that would be quickly accepted. After closing, the couple would scrub it down for the umpteenth time, strip the floors, paint, lay wall-to-wall and buy a big sleigh bed for the master bedroom where they’d make love with the wild freedom allowed young marrieds with no children to knock late at night on their bedroom door. Later they’d paint the second bedroom a sweet powder blue, buy a crib, set up a black-and-white mobile to catch their new baby’s attention. They’d bring the bundle home and spend their nights pacing the upstairs hallway in a vain attempt to get the baby to sleep, and in their love and exhaustion the warmth of family would fill the house and scrub away the blood far more efficiently than the toughest wire brush or harshest chemical cleanser.

But all that awaited still in the future. Now, as Guy and I sat on the steps, Hailey Prouix’s house was dark, dark as death, and for that I think we both were grateful.

“I dream about her,” he said softly, finally, after a long silence. “I dream I’m holding her, I’m kissing her, I’m making love to her. Sometimes in the middle of the night I smell her in the air, and my heart leaps.”

“I know.”

“You do, don’t you, you son of a bitch?”

I didn’t say anything. What could I say?

“Let me have another.”

The scrape of his nail on the metal top, the quick exhalation of the gas. The desperate gulping, as if there were something more than beer in the can.

“What am I going to do?” he said.

“You can stay with me for as long as you need to.”

“And then what?”

“Anything.”

“Or nothing.”

“Guy. You have to move forward.”

“Forward to where?”

“It’s up to you. Remember the old proverb, ‘In crisis there is opportunity.’”

“That’s what you have for me, some old Chinese proverb?”

“I think it was Kennedy who said it, actually.”

“Shut up.”

“But he was indeed speaking of the Chinese word.”

“Just shut up.”

“All right.”

“I thought she would save me, Victor. I thought it would save me. I sacrificed everything I had for love, absolutely everything, my family, my future. It demanded everything, and that’s what I gave it, and I thought then it would save me.”

“Well, there was your problem right there.”

“You don’t believe in love?”

“I suppose I do, like I believe in television, or the interstate highway system, but neither of them is going to save me, and I don’t expect love to either.”

“You’re just being a hard-ass.”

“You abdicated your life to love because that meant you didn’t have to take responsibility for your own failures. You thought this thing you craved would swoop down and save you.”

“It wasn’t a thing.”

“There’s no difference. A big TV. An SUV. Someone new to love. It’s still something outside yourself, so it will never be enough. There is always more to crave, and more and more. That’s the secret, Guy, the terrifying secret. There is nothing big enough to fill the gap. Nothing is coming along to save you. Your only chance is to save yourself.”

“How?”

“Figure it out. Your whole life has been a series of blind reactions. The Wild West life leading to the strictures of law, and marriage leading to abandonment of everything for love. Maybe it’s time to quit reacting. Maybe it’s time to sit down and stop running from where you are and decide instead where it is exactly you want to go.”