The Darkest Evening of the Year

“What would really upset my horny rich fella is if you show up with a crew from some tabloid-TV show. He’s not a celebrity, but he’s a name a lot of people know. He’s got the reputation those sickos love to chew up and vomit out coast to coast. First step is, you go to Santa Barbara tonight.”
    “Think about it one more time,” Brian said. “I have everything to lose and nothing to gain by trying to take you down. You have every reason to trust me.”
    “Every reason? Is that right? Like I trusted you to knock me up with a fine little pink baby, and what you gave me was a freak and ten years of my life ruined. There’s nobody I’ve got less reason to trust, Bry.”
    Her position was irrational, but that didn’t surprise him. Any attempt to reason with her about this would be as great a folly as commanding the sea to stop breaking on the shore.
    “I have to talk this over with Amy,” he said. “I can’t decide for her.”
    “Oh, I’m sure she’ll do it. She’s so dog nuts. Tell her there’s a funky little dog here named Piggy, needs to be rescued. But better e-mail me within an hour.”
    “An hour isn’t enough.”
    She said, “I’ve worked this out with Mr. Deep Pockets, but he could turn skittish on me.”
    Vanessa hung up.
    Brian turned to Amy.
    “The way you look,” she said.
    A cold sweat greased the back of his neck. He figured the blood had drained out of his face because his lips felt half numb.
    “Like Death,” Amy said, “like Death looking for someone to cut down and take away.”

 
    Chapter
40
    H arrow says, “Cool as ice.”
    Getting off the kitchen stool from which she had made the call, sitting across from him at the table, she says, “Brian always was easy.”
    “Dry ice.”
    As the moon draws ocean tides, so she seems to bend the light of the candles to her by a gravity of her own.
    “How much did you prep for that?” he asks.
    “No prep. Just played off him.”
    “Not off him. Played him.”
    She smiles. “Like a piccolo.”
    “He should know you by now.”
    “I wasn’t this much me, back then.”
    “You were never less.”
    “Was I never a child?”
    “Were you?”
    She does not answer.
    “Where did you learn?”
    “You mean, to lie like that?”
    “You make lying poetry.”
    “Started learning from Mama’s tit.”
    “You’ve never told me about your mother.”
    “She’s dead.”
    “That’s it?”
    “What else could there be?”
    He watches her sip red wine. It looks black on her lips, and then she licks it away.
    They are in a new place in their relationship. Anticipation of what is coming gives them a greater sense of shared destiny.
    Harrow feels that he can ask questions that were previously off limits. He senses, however, that he cannot yet ask her why she has kept Piggy all these years or why she had a child when she believes, as certainly she does, that nothing matters but the self, the moment, and the thrill.
    “What about your old man?”
    “He was a liar’s liar.”
    “What did he do?” Harrow asks.
    “Nothing he didn’t want to.”
    “My kind of guy.”
    “He taught history.”
    “History is lies?”
    “The way he taught it.”
    “Does he still teach?”
    “He’s dead.”
    “They both died young.”
    “Yes.”
    Harrow takes a shallow sip of his wine. He never drinks to excess in her company.
    “Amazing to hear you talk so much on the phone.”
    “With anyone, a lot of talk always means it’s lies.”
    She is implying that she doesn’t lie to Harrow.
    He says, “I’m remembering two months ago—Karen and Ron.”
    “What a fun couple.”
    They had been twentysomethings, adventurers, backpackers, hiking the coast.
    “You were a chatterbox with them,” he says.
    A guidebook led Karen and Ron to this remote, picturesque cove. They had walnut walking sticks, expensive gear, fresh good looks, and a love of nature.
    She says, “Women come on cool to me.”
    “Because their men come on hot.”
    Moongirl had done more than open the floodgates of charm. She had posed as a discreet lesbian, and had subtly but repeatedly hit on Karen.
    “Poor girl was so flustered.”
    “But flattered,” Harrow says. “She didn’t go that way, but she was flattered you wanted her—and relieved you didn’t want Ron. You disarmed her.”
    “We were best pals, me and Karen.”
    The couple had asked if they could camp the night on the beach, and the four of them had enjoyed a surfside picnic by lantern light.
    Karen and Ron