River’s End

Iong-bladed sitting on the glass top. She picks up her wine. She knows I’m high now, so she’s angry. ‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’ she asks me. ‘Why are you doing this to me, to Livvy?’
    Sam lifted a hand to his lips, rubbed them, back and forth, back and forth. “‘I tell her it’s her fault, hers because she let Manning put his hands on her, because she put her career ahead of our marriage. It’s an old argument, old ground, but this time it takes a different turn. She says she’s through with me, there’s no chance for us, and she wants me out of her life. I make her sick, I disgust her.”
    Still the actor, he punched the words, used pauses and passion. “She doesn’t raise her voice, but I can see the words coming out of her mouth. I see them as dark red smoke, and they choke me. She tells me she’s never been happier since she kicked me out and has no intention of weighing herself down with a has-been with a drug problem. Manning isn’t just a better actor, he’s a better lover. And I was right all along, she’s tired of denying it. He gives her everything I can’t.”
    Noah watched Sam’s eyes go glassy and narrowed his own.
    “She turned away from me as if I was nothing,” Sam muttered, then lifted his voice to a half shout. “As if everything we’d had together was nothing. The red smoke from her words is covering my face, it’s burning in my throat. The scissors with the long silver blades are in my hands. I want to stab them through her, deep inside her. She screams, the glass flies out of her hand, shatters. Blood pours out of her back. Like I’d pulled a cork out of a bottle of perfect red wine. She stumbles, there’s a crash. I can’t see through the smoke, just keep hacking with the scissors. The blood’s hot on my hands, on my face. We’re on the floor, she’s crawling, the scissors are like part of my hand. I can’t stop them. I can’t stop.”
    His eyelids shuttered closed now, and the hands on his knees were bone-white fists.
    “I see Livvy in the doorway, staring at me with her mother’s eyes.”
    His hand shook as he picked up his coffee. He sipped, long and deep like a man gulping for liquid after wandering the desert. “That’s one way I remember it. Can I have something cold now? Some water?”
    “All right.” Noah switched off the recorder, rose, went inside to the kitchen. Then he laid his palms on the counter. Icy sweat shivered over his skin. The images of the murder were bad enough. He’d read the transcripts, studied the reports. He’d known what to expect. But it had been the perfect artistry of Sam’s narrative that knotted his stomach. That, and the thought of Olivia crawling out of her child’s bed and into a nightmare.
    How many times had she relived it? he wondered.
    He poured two glasses of mineral water over ice, braced himself to go back out and continue.
    “You’re wondering if you can still be objective,” Sam said when Noah stepped out again. “You’re wondering how you can stand to sit here with me and breathe the same air.”
    “No.” Noah passed him the water, sat. “That’s part of my job. I’m wondering how you live with yourself. What you see when you look in the mirror every morning.”
    “They kept me on suicide watch for two years. They were right. But after a while, you learn to go from one day to the next. I loved Julie, and that love was the best part of my life. It still wasn’t enough to make me a man.”
    “And twenty years in prison did?”
    “Twenty years in prison made me sorry I’d destroyed everything I’d been given. Cancer made me decide to take what was left.”
    “What’s left. Sam?”
    “The truth, and facing it.” He took another sip of water. “I remember that night another way, too. It starts off the same, toking up, cruising, letting the drug feed the rage. But this time the gates are open when I get there. Boy, that pisses me off. What the hell is she thinking? We’re going to have a little talk about that. If Manning’s inside ... I know damn well he’s in there. I can see him pumping himself into my wife. I think about killing him, with my bare hands, while she watches. The door of the house is wide open. Light’s spilling out. This really gets me. I walk in, looking for a fight. I start to go upstairs, sure I’ll catch them in bed, but I hear the music from the parlor. They must be fucking in there, with the music on, the door open and my daughter upstairs. Then