One Cold Night

anyone else, just some guy who couldn’t get his stones to skip without sinking. She wished he hadn’t done it this way, that instead he had just come up and introduced himself. She could almost see the two of them sitting together on the parkbench, talking. His turn would have been a better turn, a real turn, if he had just gone about it without all the drama. He glanced over and found her looking at him and he kind of smiled at her. She found herself thinking he had a nice smile. She had a strange sensation, a desire to know him, yet she knew it would never be possible.
    They began to emerge from the densest part of the woods. The trees thinned and pale light trickled through. After another fifty feet or so they stepped out of the woods and into a large, lopsided clearing. It looked like some kind of orchard, with a semicircle of trees heavy with fruit. Apples. They were all over the ground, some perfect, some rotting. Somewhere beyond the orchard, Lisa heard the vague buzz of traffic.
    They walked across an open expanse to the opposite side of the orchard, where the trees were planted evenly, about twenty feet apart. Lisa’s eyes swept the heavy branches dripping with apples, then the partly green, partly burnt canvas of earth speckled with fallen fruit. The orchard was abandoned, that was obvious, or else all these perfectly good apples would have been gathered and sold.
    Her eyes stopped on a hole between two of the trees. It was at least five feet long and narrow. Just about her size. Next to it was a mound of dirt spiked with a shovel. Nearby, between another two trees, was a swell of earth about the same size and shape as the hole, but filled in and sparsely overgrown with grass.
    “He didn’t tell me about this!” he said.
    The gun was still at her back, but she felt it pull slightly away, as if he were distracted. She got the feeling he was as surprised as she was to be confronted by the two graves: one old, the other freshly dug.
    “This is wrong! This was not the plan! He didn’t say anything about this!”
    Lisa didn’t know how to think of him or how to think of this moment, except that his agitation seemed genuine. She wished she had asked him his real name because she saw now that it might have been useful. She had to calm him down, and had to start somewhere.
    “How long has God been talking to you?” As soon as she’d said it, she realized she might have found a subtler way to ask.
    “What?” His voice was shrill, his face bright red. “You think I actually talk to God?”
    “You said—”
    “This is wrong, ” he said again. Poking her with the gun, he moved her over to the open grave and stared down into it. It was a good yard deep. “He never said anything about this. ”
    “Please don’t,” she begged. “Please, please, please don’t!”
    “This is wrong, ” he said again.
    “Yes,” she whispered, “it’s wrong; it’s very wrong.”
    Her fear seemed to distress him even more than the orchard and the new grave. He looked at her with his blue eyes and his flushed face and his dimpled chin just like her own.
    “If I let go of you, you’re going to run away.”
    It was a statement, not a question. If she hadn’t been so scared, she would have said, Duh. Of course she would run away; it was all she had in mind, nothing else. If not for the gun...
    And just as she thought it, he looked down at the gun in his hand. “Here,” he said, and handed it to her.
    She had never held a gun before. The metal wassmooth and warm from his hand, and it was heavy. It felt strangely delicious to have the gun, because the gun was the power, and now she could do it: run away, or even shoot him.
    Then he dug into his pocket and her heart nearly exploded, thinking he had something else, another gun or the knife from before, and they would have to fight. She couldn’t fight; she didn’t know how and she didn’t want to, but if she had to, she would; she would... But between his fingers was a little piece of paper, which he gave to her.
    It was a tiny photograph, a one-inch square. It looked like it had been cut from one of those four-frame photo strips you got at the mall. Only this was older, the colors were faded, and it showed Susan when she was a teenager, and she was kissing a boy. And the boy was him — and he was handsome. Their heads were tilted so their faces fit and their lips were pressed together and their eyes were closed.
    He walked to the nearest tree and sat down at