LITMIR.BIZ

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Here was the sickening truth. The swimming party had come to grief in these phantom waters. He’d been ogling the dead.

      Revolted with himself, he wanted to retreat, but a perverse obligation to this tragedy kept him watching.

      All four of them were caught up in the same turmoil now, thrashing in the air, their faces darkening as they fought for breath. How was it possible? They looked to be drowning in four or five feet of water. Had some current taken hold of them? It seemed unlikely, in water so shallow and so apparently placid.

      ‘Help them …’ he found himself saying. ‘Why doesn’t somebody help them?’

      As though he might lend aid himself he started towards them. Arleen was closest to him. All the beauty had gone from her face. It was contorted by desperation and terror. Suddenly her wide eyes seemed to see something in the water beneath her feet. Her struggling ceased, and a look of utter surrender took its place. She was giving up life.

      ‘Don’t,’ Buddy murmured, reaching for her as if his arms might lift her up out of the past and carry her back to life. At the very moment his flesh met that of the girl, he knew this was fatal business for them both. He was too late in his regrets, however. The ground beneath them trembled. He looked down. There was only a thin cover of earth there, he saw, sustaining a meagre crop of grass. Beneath the earth, grey rock; or was it concrete? Yes! Concrete! A hole in the ground had been plugged here, but the seal was fracturing in front of him, cracks widening in the concrete.

      He looked back towards the edge of the lake, and solid ground, but a rift had already opened between him and safety, a slab of concrete sliding into it a yard from his toes. Icy air rose from underground.

      He looked back towards the swimmers, but the mirage was receding. As it went he caught the same look on all the four faces, eyes rolled up so they showed solid white, mouths open to drink death down. They hadn’t perished in shallow water, he now understood. This had been a pit when they’d come swimming here, and it had claimed them as it was now claiming him: them with water, him with wraiths.

      He started to howl for help, as the violence in the ground mounted, the concrete grinding itself to dust between his feet. Perhaps some other early-morning jogger would hear him, and come to his aid. But quickly; it had to be quickly.

      Who was he kidding? And he, a kidder. Nobody was going to come. He was going to die. For fuck’s sake, he was going to die.

      The rift between him and good ground had widened considerably, but leaping it was his only hope for salvation. He had to be fast, before the concrete beneath him slid into the pit, taking him with it. It was now or never.

      He jumped. It was a good jump too. Another few inches and he’d have made it to safety. But a few were everything. He snatched at the air, short of his target, and fell.

      One moment the sun was still shining on the top of his head. The next, darkness, icy darkness, and he was plummeting through it with cobs of concrete hurtling past him on the same downward journey. He heard them crack against the face of the rock as they went; then realized it was he who was making the noise. It was the breaking of his bones and back he could hear as he fell. And fell and fell.

      ii

      The day began earlier for Howie than he’d ordinarily have welcomed after sleeping so little, but once he was up and exercising he felt good about being awake. It was a crime to lie in bed on a morning so fine. He bought himself a soda from the machine and sat at the window, gazing at the sky and musing on what the day might bring.

      Liar; not of the day at all. Of Jo-Beth; only of Jo-Beth. Her eyes, her smile, her voice, her skin, her scent, her secrets. He watched the sky, and saw her, and was obsessed.

      This was a first for him. He’d never felt an emotion as strong as that possessing him now. Twice in the night he’d woken in a sudden sweat. He couldn’t remember the dreams that had brought it on, but she was in them, for certain. How could she not be? He had to go find her. Every hour he spent out of her company was a wasted hour; every moment not seeing her he was blind; every moment not touching her, numb.

      She’d told him, as they’d parted the previous night, that she worked at Butrick’s during the evening, and at a book store during the day. Given the size of the Mall, it wouldn’t be too difficult to locate her work place. He picked up a bag of doughnuts to fill the hole not eating the previous night had left. That other hole, the one he’d come here to heal, was very far from his thoughts. He wandered along the rows of businesses, looking for her store. He found it, between a dog-grooming service and a real estate office. Like many of the stores, it was still closed, opening time, according to the sign on the door, still three quarters of an hour off. He sat down in the steadily warming sun, and ate, and waited.

      Her instinct, from the moment she’d opened her eyes, was to forget about work today, and go find Howie. The events of the previous night had run and re-run in her dreams, changed each time in some subtle way, as though they might be alternative realities, a few of an infinite selection born from the same encounter. But among such possibilities she could conceive of none that did not contain him. He had been there, waiting for her, from her first breath; her cells were certain of it. In some imponderable way she and Howie belonged together.

      She knew very well that if any of her friends had confessed such sentiments she’d have politely dismissed them as ludicrous. That was not to say she’d not moped over a few faces, of course; turned up the radio when a particular love song was played. But even as she’d listened she’d known it was all a distraction from an unmelodious reality. She saw a perfect victim of that reality every day of her life. Her mother, living like a prisoner – both of the house, and of the past – talking, on those days when she could muster the will to talk, of hopes she’d had, and the friends she’d shared them with. Until now that sad sight had kept Jo-Beth’s romantic ambitions, indeed any ambition, in check.

      But what had happened between herself and the Chicago boy would not end the way her mother’s one great affair had ended, with her deserted, and the man in question so despised she could not bring herself to name him. If all the Sunday teachings she’d dutifully attended had instructed her in anything, it was that revelation came when and where least expected. To Joseph Smith, on a farm in Palmyra, New York; news of the Book of Mormon, revealed to him by an angel. Why not to her then, in circumstances no more promising? Stepping into Butrick’s Steak House; standing in a parking lot with a man she knew from everywhere and nowhere?

      Tommy-Ray was in the kitchen, his perusal as sharp as the scent of the coffee he was brewing. He looked like he’d slept in his clothes.

      ‘Late night?’ she said.

      ‘For both of us.’

      ‘Not particularly,’ she said. ‘I was home before midnight.’

      ‘You didn’t sleep though.’

      ‘On and off.’

      ‘You stayed awake. I heard you.’

      That was unlikely, she knew. Their bedrooms were at opposite ends of the house, and his route to the bathroom didn’t take him within earshot of her.

      ‘So?’ he said.

      ‘So what?’

      ‘Talk to me.’

      ‘Tommy?’ There was an agitation in his demeanour that unnerved her. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

      ‘I heard you,’ he said again. ‘I kept hearing you, all through the night. Something happened to you last night. Didn’t it?’

      He couldn’t know about Howie. Only Beverly had any clue as to what had gone on at the Steak House, and she wouldn’t have had time to spread rumours, even if she’d had a mind to, which was doubtful. She had enough secrets of her own to keep from the vine. Besides, what was there to tell? That she’d made eyes at a diner? Kissed him in the parking lot? What did any of that matter to Tommy-Ray?

      ‘Something

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