Under a Dark Sky Read online

  “You don’t get it,” Dev said. “There is no other fund.”

  “‘Made do’ was never your thing,” Martha offered. “Except in boyfriends—”

  “Shut up,” Paris screamed. To Dev, she said more calmly, “But what about—”

  “It’s spent,” he said. “All of it. The second it’s earned, it’s gone, on some scheme of yours or some ridiculous thing—it’s spent.”

  “The wedding fund, then,” she said.

  He met her eyes at last. “Who do you think started one of those? My parents? Yours haven’t,” he said. “What’s the point? You were never going to marry me. At least with the ring . . . at least with the ring on your finger we could pretend for a little while longer.”

  The group stood in the stunned silence for a moment.

  And then Dev turned his head and spoke into his shoulder, “Which heirs?”

  “What?” Martha said. The smug look dropped from her face.

  “You said Malloy’s heirs would want the loan back,” he said evenly. The triangle closed off, and only Dev and Martha existed. Paris crossed her arms and shot Martha daggers over Dev’s shoulder. “Which heirs do you mean?” he said.

  “What does it matter? Get down here,” Cooley said. She checked the door behind us, muttering. “I can’t believe anyone thought it was a good idea to take a shower in a crime scene.”

  “Well,” Martha said. “I didn’t draft the will—”

  “But you seem to know all about it,” Dev said.

  “My colleague said . . . OK, I may have seen a draft,” she said. “Malloy asked me for referrals and my colleague—”

  “Stop saying colleague,” Paris said.

  “Which heirs, Martha?” Dev said.

  “Well, he named a few beneficiaries,” Martha said. I had never seen her so cowed, her vibrant, colorful personality dimmed to a reedy, pleading voice. “His parents, of course—”

  “Is one of the beneficiaries unnamed at the moment?” Dev said. “Unborn?”

  Martha’s color had begun to rise. She lifted her chin again, the playful dimples turned defiant. The rest of the house had gone still. “Yes.”

  “Hillary?” Paris said. “Did he put her into his will? He’s too trusting.”

  “Shut up, Paris,” Dev said. To Martha, he said, “How far along?”

  “Three months,” Martha said.

  “His? You’re sure?” Dev said.

  The steady look between Dev and Martha made me uncomfortable. How much did it matter to Dev that Martha’s heir was also Malloy’s? How long ago had Martha’s grand tour stopped in Dev’s city?

  Just as I had the thought, Paris must have had it, too. She launched herself across Dev at Martha, a wild thing. Dev flinched as Paris’s ring dragged across his cheek but dodged in to keep the two women apart. He pressed Paris against the railing and blocked Martha with his back.

  “Jesus Christ, can you stop?” Cooley yelled, only barely loud enough to be heard over the shouting. I glanced away from the ruckus above—the blasphemy came as an actual surprise—and in the moment she looked back at me, defensive, daring me to say a word, we both missed the end game at the railing. A loud cracking noise pierced the melee. We both looked up in time to see the railing break away from the wall and Paris pressed into the void. She fell, arms reaching for Dev, for Martha, for anyone, and then crashed to the floor below, the shape of her body on the floor awkward and tragic.

  Dev bellowed and raced down the stairs to her while Martha stood above, her face a mask of shock. She stood precariously close to the hanging railing her friend had just fallen through, reaching idly with a hand for the bannister, just out of her grasp.

  “She’s fainting,” I said, and ran up the stairs. When I reached her, she fell back against me. I dragged her safely away from the edge, where she buckled to the floor on her knees and fell sideways in a heap. I sat with her and let her grasping hands clutch at mine. “Is she—? Is she?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. The words caught in my throat. All I could see was the shape of Paris’s body in the pink towel passing from above me to below. Downstairs, Cooley radioed for help. Dev shouted Paris’s name. I listened for a noise underneath this: crying, moaning, anything. There was nothing.

  “Is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Martha turned her head, lovely red curls falling across her face, and passed out.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I first met Bix in an emergency room.

  He had fallen off a roof. Rescuing a kitten, I liked to say when I told the story later. And that wasn’t far from the truth. On leave, he’d been helping an elderly woman fix a piece of flashing around the chimney on her roof to stop a leak. He didn’t know the woman. He’d only just met her, at the hardware store. She hadn’t promised anything in exchange. Her roof was dilapidated and shouldn’t have had anyone climbing around on it, especially an amateur. When a loose shingle tore off under Bix’s foot, he slid down the entire length of the roof and off into the void. Two stories. He was lucky he hadn’t fallen on his head, or at a bad angle that cracked his neck or spine. That’s how he spun in, telling me the tale in the waiting room, as he waited to be seen by a doctor. Casual, grinning over the episode as though it had happened in a movie he’d seen. This was flirtation.

  I was there in the emergency room with my sister and her kids. My older niece, a toddler at the time, had a fever that wouldn’t come down. Things that had seemed easy now seemed dangerous. I sat with the baby sleeping in my arms in the corner of a busy waiting room, and only because Bix was the kind of man who needed to meet everyone, hear everyone’s story, did I get the chance to tell him mine.

  “Yours?” he had asked, nodding to Blythe’s newborn body formed against me. She was small and hot. I was sweating from the extra body heat but in love with holding her, in love with the idea that I might have my own someday. Michele had been called back through triage with Emmeline, wan and pink-skinned.

  He was settling into the chair across from me with one arm held awkwardly against his chest, wincing a bit. “What happened to you?” I said.

  “Just another attempt at superheroism, foiled. Is she OK?” He had dark hair and bright eyes. A blue-eyed devil.

  “Her big sister has a high fever.” And then against my better judgment, I asked about the arm and the heroic story. I had a thing about men with dark hair and bright eyes, with broken wings. By the time Michele came out and said Emmeline would be fine, I had stars in my head and his number in my phone. If he was going to supply a lifetime’s worth of heroics, I wanted to watch.

  That roof story didn’t seem like a heroic story to me anymore. The shine had worn off that old yarn, but also those like it that I heard later. Like the time he’d been arrested for trespassing and breaking-and-entering, fingerprinted, and shut into a cell in downstate Illinois before anyone could find out the truth, which was that he’d been helping someone he’d just met pick up a few things from the place he was moving from. Except that it wasn’t the guy’s stuff. Or his house. Bix had a million stories like that. After I’d heard enough of them, I couldn’t see the point. It was recklessness, derring-do. All I was left with was worry, at which point I was pushed into the role of caregiver, of mother. Of killjoy. Of a person I had never intended to be.

  Until he took one last chance, and I was left with the role of widow and the remnants of a story, but not a full one. The pieces left behind didn’t make sense. Our life together hadn’t made sense.

  When Michele and I had finally taken the girls home to their beds early that morning after the dangerous fever, we drove the empty streets in shock that the world still existed as it had just hours before. The air was crisp and reviving but I kept the window rolled up to keep it from hitting the dozing girls in their car seats. Michele had gray rings under her eyes from the weekend’s missing hours of sleep. Five years older than I was, she had always gone through so many passages before me, but I had been beginning to worry I would
n’t follow her on this one. Marriage, kids. It wasn’t for everyone, was it? I thought of the man grinning over his broken arm the entire drive back to Michele’s tidy little house, carefully keeping the number and my phone safe in the front pocket of my jeans.

  “There’s a slim line between believing in fate and letting your life be decided for you,” Michele said. “He fell off a roof. Come on, Edie, be sensible.”

  I had not chosen sensible. I had not chosen. I thought I was following the magic, the strange banging together of lives in coincidence and accident. That’s what love felt like in its earliest moments. Like I was being pulled along by the way things had to go. Like I had no choice in the matter and never would.

  DEV WENT WITH Paris in the ambulance and Martha insisted we follow it in Cooley’s car. We had hurriedly packed our things from the guest house, Martha grabbing a change of clothes and shaving gear for Dev to tuck in with her own stuff. I could have excused myself to find another way to the motel, but then there was nothing there for me but the possibility of vermin and bad TV and running into Hillary. I went along to the hospital in Cooley’s cruiser, cradling my swollen right hand in my left and my camera bag in my lap.

  “I can’t believe this,” Martha said, wiping at her running nose. Cooley poked a tissue through the mesh of the divider between us, and I pulled it through and handed it over. Martha blew her nose, then sniffed the air around us and made a face. I shook my head to keep her from commenting.

  Cooley was shaken. She was muttering little oaths under her breath all the way through the park and east. She hit the siren, easily catching up with the ambulance as it rushed through town.

  And then we were outside the town and—nothingness. There was nothing but water, far below. “What—”

  The bridge. We were on the famous suspension bridge to the Upper Peninsula, proper tourists at last, racing along the slim precipice of the bridge with the siren screaming.

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  “The nearest hospital is over on the Yooper side.”

  I looked out at the water, my stomach doing flips. That horizon of land that had seemed not so far to me a day ago now seemed much too distant. “Where’s the next nearest?”

  “Not near enough.”

  Martha cried quietly into the door on her side of the car. We all heard what Cooley meant. Perhaps no hospital was near enough to help Paris.

  I slid down in my seat so that all I could see were the wires of the bridge rushing by, double vertical strands at regular intervals until a sudden swooping rise of wires, signaling we were nearing one of the suspension towers. One of the towers loomed into view, and then the swoop of wire led back to the ground. The wires seemed impossibly slender, the barest threads of a spider’s web. If the nearest hospital was across the bridge, then I must have been driven over it already the night of Malloy’s murder. Closed inside and oblivious. And again, when Cooley had picked me up and delivered me to the sheriff for questioning. Dozing, unaware. I closed my eyes. I was not afraid of heights, but then hadn’t a woman just fallen through the stair railing I had been pushed against? My stomach lurched. The bridge, too fragile. The water below, too far. I was also not afraid of drowning, as a particular way of dying. I knew what I was afraid of. It should have been comforting to understand my limitations. But in the backseat of Cooley’s car, I found I was also afraid of fast-moving cars, of the narrow passage a car with a siren got from the cars pulling to the side, of the slight distance between what you expected to happen and what could happen. All I could think of was the television screen, the newscaster live on the road with the rolling lights behind her. The tangle of metal, crushed to nothingness. All the lights on in the house but knowing that darkness was coming for me.

  “Don’t upchuck in my car,” Cooley said.

  I felt Martha shift next to me.

  “Not you,” Cooley said. “Her.”

  “Slow down a little,” Martha said. “Didn’t her husband die in a car accident?”

  “Yeah,” Cooley said. “He caused it.” But she slowed down a bit, letting the ambulance slip away, the apology coming too late. I closed my eyes.

  Martha was silent for a time. “Your husband was the drunk driver,” she said at last. “You left that part out.”

  “I had to,” I said, taking a shuddering breath. “Bix was always the hero of his stories.”

  I felt her processing this new information. I’d been in this conversation a few times already. Here it came. “He killed five people.”

  “Four,” I said, opening my eyes and looking at her. “And himself.”

  She didn’t know what to make of me. She turned back to the window.

  Cooley cleared her throat. “You’ll want to get checked out at the hospital, too,” she said.

  My vital functions had already had a look-see at this hospital. Martha wasn’t paying attention. “She means you, Mama,” I said.

  “I’m fine,” Martha said, a hateful glance in my direction.

  “You fainted,” Cooley said. “Wouldn’t hurt. Better safe than—”

  “I know what’s wrong with me,” Martha said. “I’m not sure about anyone else, though.”

  We made our own way to the hospital, pulling into the emergency bay only as they were bringing Paris out from the back of the ambulance. She was gray against the white sheets and small, childlike. Dev, face bleeding from the scratch he’d taken during the scuffle, hurried after the gurney. Martha fidgeted at her secured door until Cooley got out, went around the car, and opened it, and then she was off after them. When Cooley came around to let me out, I waved her off. “Take me to the motel.”

  “I’m not actually a taxi driver, dangit,” she said.

  “You’re supposed to take me to the motel,” I said.

  “I would dump you off there happily, but I should probably get inside and do a little bit of my real job, dontcha think, before I take Her Highness back to her castle?”

  “You wouldn’t call it that if you’d ever been in one of the rooms. I’ll just stay here and wait.”

  “Get out.”

  I did. She glared at my suitcase until I pulled it out.

  “Get the other one, too.”

  I reached in for Martha’s soft blue bag and balanced it on my case. “What did you hope to gain by telling Martha that my husband caused the accident he died in?”

  “It’s the truth, isn’t it?” She wouldn’t look at me, though. It was not in Cooley’s nature to be mean, but she was making a special effort in my case.

  “It has nothing to do with me.”

  “Oh, really? Nothing about what he did—”

  “You don’t know anything about it.”

  She stared me down for a minute, then relented. “I guess not. Not enough to judge. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about your husband and the . . . the other people—”

  “I know all about the other people.”

  “Yeah, I guess you would. It’s a darn shame, no matter what you— I’m sorry I mentioned it.”

  As though this group of friends needed anything more to talk about, but somehow I knew that my gossip would still travel among them. Martha would tell Dev, Dev would tell Paris—

  The chain was broken.

  No one would tell Paris. Paris might never hear it. I had forgotten for a moment that other people could suffer, that others might die.

  I followed Officer Cooley through the swishing hospital doors, rolling my suitcase behind me and thinking: Did I know what was wrong with me?

  Chapter Twenty

  By the time Cooley and I entered the emergency room, Paris had been whisked away with Dev pulled into a triage room to look at the gash on his face. Martha was left pleading with the staff to be allowed to follow Paris and if not Paris, then Dev. Cooley commandeered the situation and forced us to turn ourselves in, Martha, for her swoon, me for my hand.

  I was given a much-belated ice pack, a sheaf of forms to fill out, and a seat in the waiting room. Martha announced
her pregnancy and received a quicker response. One minute she was leaning over the desk wheedling her way into her friends’ health care and the next she was dropped into a wheelchair and swept down the hall. I was left alone, at last, with my suitcase at my feet and Martha’s candy-colored bag on the chair next to me.

  I eyed the bag and then the other walking wounded in the area. We were all living our own private dramas. I set aside the ice pack.

  Digging through Martha’s bag this time, I didn’t bother to be careful. With Dev’s things added in, it was even more of a jumble. The vitamins rattled in their bottle. Folic acid. Should have known. And was she trying to make us believe that Malloy was the father? And what was that look between her and Dev? The envelope of legal papers was still in place. I pulled them out and riffled through them. Patrick Malloy Halloway, sound mind and body. Patrick? I tucked them away, not into Martha’s suitcase but my own.

  Which made me a thief. My hand darted for the papers again, to put them back. I didn’t want to be one of them, one of the people who had used the cover of darkness to get away with wicked deeds. I wasn’t that kind. Was I?

  A pay phone hung down the hall. I shoved the papers back in my case and rushed for it.

  When I had the earpiece in hand, all I could do was stare at the buttons. So few numbers known by heart: my own, Bix’s old cell phone. No one was answering either of those. I called my sister, collect.

  As I waited for the call to be accepted, I studied the other people in the waiting room. A lot of mothers with kids, a guy in work boots with a hard hat at his feet along with what seemed to be his supervisor. A handkerchief of blood here, a look of misery there. Older people, alone and in couples. Everyone, worried. It was a slender thread that held us to this earth. You couldn’t help notice it at times like these, how easily you might slip between a regular moment, unthinking, into the void. How easily you might fall.

  And some of us, in addition, also had to call their big sister for help. Again.