KNEEL BEFORE ME, WOMAN, spoke the porcelain god, and as commanded, so Mariah Nowak obeyed, rising to offer up her latest sacrifice. Once she had spent herself, she pulled the handle on her lord and savior and collapsed back to the floor. Amen. A few dark strands of hair clung to her brow. The rest fanned out across the chilly tile. She wore her favorite night shirt, the one with the famous (and rather phallic) Zeppelin Airship. The shirt was big enough to lose herself in while sleeping, something she had been doing quite happily until recently, thank you very much, and all its extra length had gotten rucked up around her panties, which were bright red and so tight they squeezed the soul. Period panties. But that was just wishful thinking.
Oh boy, was she in trouble.
Oh boy.
Water carried through the pipes in a deep, contented gurgle. The sound had almost faded before it dawned on her that she shouldn’t have been able to hear it, that her earbuds had flown the coop. How intensely she had prayed! Such fervor she had shown! She clapped a hand to her mouth to stuff a rising giggle (the last thing she wanted right now was to catch another whiff of her breath), then she felt around and popped her earbuds back where they belonged. Better. Much better. All suffering was bearable with a little rock and roll. And if that rock and roll was ripping from the guitar of a Mr. Jimmy Page, why, that was more than fine with her.
Mariah stared up into the overhead lamp, thinking back to the moment her troubles had begun . . . the moment when the man who sat at the corner of the bar, the same man who’d never spoken a word to her but ‘hello’ and ‘thanks,’ had gotten up from his stool to—
No. Be honest, Mariah dear. Your troubles started much earlier than that. With Musty and Mr. Poulter and your aluminum baseball bat.
The voice in her head was her mother’s, and Mom was right. She usually was, no matter how much Mariah hated to admit it.
Musty had been her yellow lab, named Musty not because he smelled like the inside of a laundry bin but because Musty had sounded like a good name for a dog. Mariah had been nine. Musty had been three. Their friendship required no logic. They existed in the small, private world that lonely children build for themselves around their pets. But Musty was a barker and a fence-hopper, especially when he had something to chase, and the neighbor who owned the property behind them didn’t care for things that intruded on his land or his ears. As far as Mariah was concerned, Mr. Poulter was as slimy and green inside as anything that grew under a rock. And he lived like he was under a rock, too, never leaving his house except to yell at Musty or beat at whatever hunk of metal was rusting away in his yard. Well, one day Musty was fine, and the next day Musty wasn’t. His fur began falling out in big tawny clumps, leaving bald spots like moon craters in his hide. His eyes got soft and gummy-looking, then crusty, and Mariah spent the afternoon wiping them with a washcloth, picking them clean, afraid he wouldn’t be able to see with all that stuff in them. The morning after that, it didn’t matter what was in Musty’s eyes, because Musty was dead. His doghouse—a big square hut built out of hay bales coated in hardened adobe—gave off the worst stink Mariah had ever smelled. It was the stink of guts turned inside out. When she crawled in looking for him, her hand pressed down in something sticky and wet, and came away a dark muddy red. After that, whenever Mariah thought of dying, she saw the black little cubbyhole of Musty’s doghouse. It was months before she could use the toilet without pinching her nose, because the smell—that low, dirty smell—made her throat constrict and her eyes well up and filled her head with a fluttery crow-winged panic.
They cut Musty open to ensure that whatever he’d gotten into wasn’t something kids could get into. The county footed the bill and everything. They found a few splintered rabbit bones and enough arsenic to kill an army of rats. Soon after, rumor got around that the previous week Mr. Poulter had bought a Dutch rabbit from Mrs. Davies, the librarian, who raised and sold them as pets. Then Mr. Poulter himself was heard at the bar bragging about how he gave the Kowak’s dog something real juicy to run after. Mariah wasn’t told about this until years later, but it didn’t matter. She knew. She knew because Musty used to growl at Mr. Poulter, and Musty never growled at anyone. And when Mr. Poulter came up to the fence one afternoon after Musty’s death and said, “sure is nice and quiet around here” with his eyes smiling for his mouth, Mariah’s knowing hardened into hate. She told her mom what he’d said, and her mom responded that it didn’t mean anything, that sometimes bad things just happened and there was nobody to blame. But her mom had known too. It was all over her face, and in the way she kept scrubbing their lunch plates long after they were clean. That night she made Mariah’s two favorite dishes, potato pancakes for dinner and Pierogi for dessert, and the following Sunday she let Mariah stay home from church, something Mariah never got to do unless she was sick.
Things went back to normal. Small towns may have long memories, but they have short attention spans. The whispers died down, and nobody in the Kowak household uttered Musty’s name for a month, except for Mariah. She would sit at her window after her parents had gone to bed and stare at the poisoned, evil light of Mr. Poulter’s house shining yellowly through the Yucca. “Musty,” she would say softly, her breath fogging the glass. “Musty, Musty, Musty.” Speaking his name in the dark was a sort of magic; it made her feel as if he was inside her, barking and running and alive. It was a bright feeling and a black feeling all at once, and sitting there, she would imagine how it would be to open the window and slip outside, to slink over the chain link like a shadow and creep up on Mr. Poulter’s house, tie him down while he slept and make him eat broken glass and wet cement and rat poison until he was good and dead. Her flesh would prickle at the terrible, wonderful thought, and on more than one occasion, she would fall asleep there at the windowsill, only moving when her aching body woke her up and forced her to crawl into bed.
Then, one night as she was holding her vigil, the door opened softly behind her, and her dad stepped into the room without turning on the light. Peter Nowak was a mild-mannered man, with squared, straight shoulders. Because of the long hours he worked for the county, he wasn’t around much, and when he was around he was usually quiet. To Mariah, her father’s silence was as familiar and as comforting as his face. He came over to the window and her heart started clapping in her chest—it felt just like that, like two big hands giving a round of applause. She waited, certain that she was in trouble, that he knew about all the nasty things she’d been thinking and was going to tell her how bad she was. How disappointed he was to have her as a daughter. Her eyes began to burn. Her breath caught and stuck, as if her throat had grown hooks. Don’t you cry, she thought, don’t you dare. He stood at her side, slender and still and something else—something that Mariah didn’t have a word for yet—a quality that made him seem taller than he really was. Dignified, she would think to herself years later, looking back on this moment. My father was dignified. The rims of his glasses caught the light from Mr. Poulter’s house. His silence seemed to fill the room. It was not comforting now. Tell me you hate me, she pleaded inside. Tell me you don’t love me anymore, just please, please, say something.
“What an ugly thing,” he said.
The storm gathering in Mariah’s chest rumbled and spit rain. A tear slipped down her cheek. A tiny, strained sound escaped her mouth. Only when her father continued to speak did she realize that he wasn’t talking about her; he was referring to the doghouse. It stood alone in the wide open of their yard. Its square doorway held onto the darkest piece of the night. “I built it so he could get out of the wind. I thought it’d keep him cool in the summer and warm in the winter, if a winter ever came our way. But I had no idea the damn thing would be so sturdy. You’d need dynamite to tear it down now.” He shook his head, turning from the window, and on his way out of the room, he paused to pick up the aluminum bat propped inside the closet. “You mind if I borrow this?”
He was gone before Mariah could form an answer—before she could even understand the question. She went to bed on legs full of strange, jittery trembles, and she listened from under the covers as the front door opened and shut. Her heartbeat settled after a time, and she fell asleep despite her best efforts to stay awake. The next morning the bat was back in its place, waiting for softball season to come around again. Mr. Poulter did not emerge from his house that day, nor the following day. When Mariah finally laid eyes on him a week later, he was having a hard time getting around thanks to his limp. A FOR SALE sign appeared in his front yard by the month’s end, and Mr. Poulter blew out of town like a tumbleweed, leaving his junkers behind for the Hispanic family that took his place. They had three children. And six dogs.
Mariah never asked her father what had taken place that night, knowing he would never tell. But she loved him for it, loved him with the unrelenting fury of the desert wind—a love that shook her to her foundations and sometimes frightened her. Her mother could not stand up to that wind, no matter how many meals she cooked, or loads of laundry she folded, or fevers she saw Mariah through, sitting up with her in the thin hours of the morning while her father slept undisturbed down the hall. From the moment Peter Nowak picked up her baseball bat and walked out into the dark, Mariah’s heart belonged to him and him alone.
Perhaps that was why she still, even now, could not quite separate the idea of love from the idea of violence.
And perhaps that was why she had fallen for John Hawthorne.
Because loving John Hawthorne and loving violence were one and the same.
???
The night that John Hawthorne got up from his bar stool was one of many blowy nights in a long, listless November.
They came rumbling up to the Trotter a few minutes before nine, three of them, their engines coughing in the rough way that always made Mariah think of heavy smokers. She set down the mug she’d been polishing as headlights splashed in through the windows. Dismay rose inside her, like bile from an upset stomach. She had an idea who those headlights belonged to, and she wished, suddenly, desperately, that she had called in sick.
As if that were an option.
As if there were anyone to call in to, except for herself.
“Will they turn them blasted things off?” Carl McKenzie yelled, shielding his eyes from one of the booths in the back. He was busy tucking himself into a bottle, or he had been until Mariah cut him off an hour ago. Let Carl pull the covers up high enough, and he’d make a bed out of the booth’s rubbery red cushions. Then nothing would wake him up, short of the jingle from Andy’s handcuffs . . . but Andy was gone now, a fact that Mariah was still getting used to, that she could not quite make sit right inside her head.
She glanced down the bar to where John Hawthorne sat in a dark blue denim jacket, sipping on his water. The headlights shined right on him, so bright he might have been in a photo studio, but he didn’t appear to notice. His gaze stayed fixed on something beyond the liquor bottles stacked against the Trotter’s log wall. He’d been coming in as long as Mariah had worked here, which was longer than she liked to reflect on, and not once could she remember him having missed a night. Not once. He’d walk in at eight and walk out by nine, a five-dollar bill tucked beneath his empty water glass. One glass was all he ever had, and he nursed it like it was the bitterest stuff on the shelf. Like sipping on it hurt. And maybe it did. Mariah had observed a great many drinkers over the years, but she had never seen someone want a drink as badly as John Hawthorne. She’d asked Andy about him once, on a slow evening much like this one. “What I know of John is he minds his own business,” Andy had told her, “and there’s no reason to worry over a man who minds his own business.” The implication there, unspoken but clear, was that if John stopped minding his own business there would be reason to worry.
The bikes shut off. The bar dimmed.
“Hallefuckinglujah!” said Carl.
“If you say so,” Mariah said under her breath, trying not to look at the front door. Her voice must not have been quite as steady as she thought it was, because for a brief moment, John seemed to notice her. He didn’t turn his head or move his eyes, but a change came about him. An awareness that hadn’t been there before.
It was gone so quickly Mariah wondered if she had imagined it.
They came in. The Lot Brothers, so called not because they were related by blood but because they dressed alike and talked alike and rode the same vintage Harleys. Bill entered first, his sleeves rolled up to display the tattooed hogs he had for arms (a great believer in working out his glamor muscles, was Bill). Next was Pete, working hard at his head with a fine-toothed comb. He had nice hair, thick and luxurious, and it almost made up for his face. Almost. If it had just been these two, Mariah would have been thrilled, but all turds lead back to an asshole, and this particular asshole went by the name of Rick Lot. He booted his way in as the door swung shut behind his stooges, his hands too lazy to unhook themselves from his belt. Some skulls were not meant to be bald, and Rick’s was one of them: his noggin was a mole-spotted, rugged landscape, divided by a twisting riverbed of scar tissue. He’d gotten that scar in prison, supposedly, where he’d done time for aggravated assault in a roadside bar just like this one. He never smiled—his mouth didn’t know how to—but his eyes contained a certain canny cheerfulness, a fool’s gold kind of sparkle. He scanned the room as he strolled in, pausing briefly on John before passing on to Mariah.
“Well, hello!” he said, as if he had not expected to find her here, exactly where she always was.
“Hello, Rick,” she said. “You’re out early tonight.”
“Me and the boys were feeling antsy this evening. A crisp winter day like today, it just gets in your bones. Makes an itch you’ve just got to scratch, you know?”
“This is San Bernardino, Rick. We don’t get winter.”
He laughed a harsh, barking laugh and dragged out a barstool to sit next to his brothers. They were quiet. They knew better than to take the floor when Rick was speaking. “Oh, Mariah, lovely Mariah, how I missed you and that mouth. It’s been far too long.”
Not by her count, it hadn’t. “What’re you drinking?”
“That depends,” he said, rubbing his sandpapered cheeks. “You don’t happen to fit in a pint, do you?”
Mariah pretended not to hear him. With one hand, she lined three beers beneath the tap and started to pour. With her other hand, she reached under the rack, out of sight so that she could send Andy a message on her phone. He would stop by and see the Lots along after a drink or two, as he had done before on many occasions, and then all would be right again. At least until they came back. That was the problem with guys like Rick: they always came back.
She got as far as, You’d better come over, before she remembered. The phone suddenly seemed much heavier. She set it down and looked up to find Rick watching her, one of his eyebrows cocked in a curious, considering way.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“How’s our dear sheriff these days?”
Spider legs walked Mariah’s spine. Smart Rick might not have been, but stupid he was not. “Just fine,” she said—if he hadn’t heard the news, she certainly wasn’t about to inform him. “You know Andy.”
“I surely do. I surely do. And you know something else?” His voice dropped, taking on a conspiratorial note. “I think he might have a thing for me. Whenever I wander around this way, I can always count on him stepping through that door a little while later. It’s like the old boy just can’t get enough of my company. Ain’t that right, fellas?”
Bill nodded vigorously. Pete only sucked on his beer. He seemed determined to hide behind his glass, not that Mariah could blame him. Good lord, wasn’t acne supposed to settle down after puberty?
A loud, bouncing crash rang across the room. Mariah looked over to see Carl’s end-of-the-line drink (H20 and enough lemon juice to make the soul pucker) waterfalling over the edge of his table. The noise turned every head in the bar, except John’s. He merely sat there, his glass clasped loosely in one hand. Mariah couldn’t help but notice that the glass was now almost empty. And when the last of it was gone, he’d be gone too. A five-dollar bill for a goodbye. She gathered up a few dry rags to clean the spill, but did not step out from behind the bar. Back here, there was at least something between herself and the Lots, and maybe the safety was an illusion, but it was all she had now that she didn’t have Andy.
Except, she realized, that wasn’t entirely true. She had something else on her side, and it was a small thing, but maybe it was enough. It didn’t matter that Andy was out of the picture; what mattered was what Rick believed, and Rick believed Andy was still around, which meant Rick would be on his best behavior.
She hoped.
Armed with that thought, Mariah struck out into open waters. The Lots twisted around on their bar stools to stare at her, taking her in, bite by bite. At last she reached the table, where Carl was trying to scoop water back into the glass with his palms. “I’m sorry, Mariah,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s just a little spill, Carl. Cool your jets.”
She shooed his hands away and gave the table a once-over with the rags, then she dropped them on the floor to mop up the rest with her feet—no way was she bending over for her current audience.
“What’s wrong?” Carl asked, his whiskered face lined with concern. “You look upset.”
“Nothing’s wrong. You just relax.”
He swallowed. “Is it the drought? It’s the drought, isn’t it? Here I am wasting water when there are kids out there dying of thirst.”
She might have laughed, if Carl’s dismay hadn’t been so genuine. That’s how it was with him when he got drunk—nothing in the world was safe from his guilt. Which was why he got drunk in the first place: to break his own heart. In a way Carl wasn’t so different from John Hawthorne, who also came here to punish himself. “Nobody’s dying of thirst,” she said. “Not because of you.”
Carl didn’t hear her. He’d gotten what he needed, what he felt he deserved. He climbed up from the booth, slipping a little on the damp floorboards, and headed for the door. As she watched him go, a thought came to her—one that set her skin tingling. She could leave. No farewells, no explanations . . . she could just leave, and let the boys help themselves to whatever they liked on the shelves. Who cared? She’d never wanted to run this hole in the first place—it just happened, the slow, insidious way it always happens. You tell yourself it’s only for a little while, this job, this house, this town. You say, I only have to pay off my loans, save up some money, then I’ll hit the highway like it’s bad and needs spanking. But you get comfortable. Your routine learns the shape of you, becomes as snug and cozy as a glove. You don’t even notice it smothering you because it feels so . . . good. There’s your television—sixty inches of sexy plasma. There’s your Netflix, always ready to welcome you with some rewarmed sitcom laughter, and your stack of Blu-rays and your bookcase full of well-worn paperbacks. There’s Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram to keep you connected, to show you all the places you’ve yet to visit and people you’ve yet to meet. You’ve got a thousand worlds at your fingertips, a thousand lives, and before you know it, home is just the place you go to be somewhere else, someone else, until morning comes and your dreams end and you have to be you again.
Go.
Leave.
Go.
But suppose the Lots didn’t stick around to cash in on a free drink? Suppose they followed her outside, into the wind and the dark? That was their territory. At least in here she was on her own grounds.
Mariah scooped up the rags, careful to leave her hips out of it, and returned to the bar on spring-loaded legs. As she passed, Rick clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth. The sound was like a door closing, like a key turning inside a lock. “You sure cleaned that spill up nice. I might have to lose this beer to my lap, just so you can come around and wipe me off.”
“Be nice, Rick,” Pete said.
“I am being nice. I was paying the lady a compliment.”
“Maybe she didn’t take it that way. You ever think of that? Maybe you hurt her feelings.”
In the mirror between the liquor shelves, she watched as Rick drummed the bartop with scabbed knuckles. “You’re being silly. A girl like Mariah doesn’t get her feelings hurt over a compliment.”
“If she took it as a compliment, don’t you think she would have thanked you?”
“Well, damn, Pete, you’ve got a point. Maybe she didn’t hear?”
“Maybe.”
“Mariah,” Rick said, “did you hear that nice little thing I said about you a moment ago?”
She turned around—a touch too fast for her own good. The room gave a slight, bumping jerk as it settled into place. “I heard, Rick.”
“Then why didn’t you say ‘thank you?’”
Those eyes. That false cheerful sparkle. She swallowed the fishhook in her throat and said, “Guess I forgot.”
“That’s okay. I know how you can make it up to me.” Rick polished off the last of his beer and wagged the empty pint at her. She took down a fresh one. He tsked. “You’re about two short by my count. Me and my boys, we don’t do anything we can’t do together. We like to share.”
We like to share.
The fishhook—now in her guts—sunk itself in deep. She took down another pair of glasses, then filled all three and carried them over one at a time. As she set Rick’s down in front of him, his fingers sprang open and clasped around her wrist. The feel of his skin was warm and soft, like cheese left out in the sun. “You know what’s special about today?” he asked.
She tugged, but he only pulled her closer.
“Today is Sunday, and on Sundays I read the paper. I do it for the funnies, you see—Sunday has the best funnies. Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Rick, that isn’t special at all. Everyone likes the funnies. But I don’t just read the big papers. I read the little papers too. I get the one from Big Pines, where us three live, delivered right to the door. I even get the one you’ve got here in Wrightwood. That’s my favorite.”
Mariah listened numbly, her body encased in slow-moving ice.
“But it got no laughs out of me this morning,” Rick continued with sadness in his voice—and a smile in his eyes. “What I saw on the front page just about broke my heart. I sat down on my stoop and I thought to myself, I’d better go see Mariah tonight and make sure she’s holding up okay . . . she won’t want to be alone right now.” He gave a slow, solemn shake of his head, letting go of her wrist. “Poor old Andy. He must have been so well-loved around here.”
Mariah straightened. It was a difficult thing to do. Gravity seemed to be working twice as hard on her. Except for her feet. Those felt light. Balloon feet. She drifted down the bar, away from the Lot Brothers, and picked up her polishing rag. The wine flutes were dusty, which was no surprise—she hadn’t popped a bottle of champagne since New Year’s. She reached for one but bumped it with her fingers instead. It walked off the shelf and shattered on the floor.
“Be careful,” Pete said.
“Don’t tell her to be careful,” Rick said. “It’s okay, Mariah. Accidents happen. You’ve got nothing to feel bad about.”
She got down on her knees to sweep the shards into the break bucket. The largest piece—the stem—was nowhere to be seen. It must have rolled off somewhere. She’d find it later, hopefully not by stepping on it. That was a thing that happened sometimes to bartenders. They’d be walking along, putting on a show, only to develop a sudden and incurable case of champagne-stem-through-the-foot. Mariah let out a nervous titter and began to feel a little better, a little smoother, as if she’d had wrinkles in her head and laughing had ironed them out. She took a deep breath as she rose back to her feet. Nothing’s going to happen. They’re just playing games. Trying to freak me out. Nothing’s going to . . .
John’s glass.
His water glass.
It was empty.
She stared at the five-dollar bill tucked beneath it, knowing what that bill meant. He was leaving. He had finished his ritual, and in another minute he would be gone, and she would be alone. Just her and them, three good old boys who did everything together. Who liked to share.
With some difficulty, she looked up at John. He was looking back. His eyes—green tinged gray—regarded her as if from a great distance. “Would you like a refill, Mr. Hawthorne?”
He must have heard the plea in her voice.
He must have.
“No,” he said, and a trapdoor opened beneath Mariah. She was falling, falling, wind in her ears, falling, when he said, “I think something stronger is in order tonight.”
It took her a while to remember how to speak. “What? You’ll what?”
“Jim Beam,” he told her. “And you’d better make it a double.”
“Are you—you’re sure?”
He nodded, slightly. She selected a big shot glass, filled it to the top, and slid it to him with a hand that felt as if it might start shaking at any moment. Then she watched, waiting for him to pick it up, still not quite believing he had ordered it in the first place. For years he had been coming to sip on his water. In at eight, out by nine, as regular as clockwork. For years. And now, on this windy night in the middle of November, it was three minutes past nine and he was sitting here with a whiskey. The realization was enough to make Mariah forget all about the men at the other end of the bar, if only for a second. When John did not take the shot, when he instead got up slowly from his stool and walked toward the brothers, carrying the glass with him, her surprise had no more room left to grow. She could only stand back and stare.
“What’s this?” Rick asked as John placed the drink in front of him.
“You need me to explain it? You confused?”
A hush fell over the Trotter. Pete’s shoulders took on a hunch, while Bill’s muscles tightened, making his small shirt seem that much smaller. Rick simply gazed up at John with his head cocked and an expression of mild amusement on his face. He appeared to be enjoying this. Whatever this was. At last he shrugged. “Never turn down a free drink. That’s what I say.” He booted the shot and slammed the glass down with a bang. “Wooh! That’s good shit. Cheap shit, don’t get me wrong, but only the cheap shit packs enough heat to burn twice. Wait . . . wait . . . wooh! There it is again!”
“Here,” John said. “Let me pour you another.”
He reached out and caught Rick’s nose between his thumb and forefinger. Then he twisted. Hard. The sound of breaking bone and cartilage was like rock salt grinding between someone’s teeth. Like gravel crunching underneath a Harley’s tires. Rick might have had time to move at this point, but he chose instead to scream. John grabbed him by the back of the neck and shoved his face, which had been tapped like a keg, down over the shot glass. As the glass filled with Rick’s blood, his feet performed a frantic, skittering tap dance against the bar’s wooden side. THUMPTHUMPthumpthumpTHUMP. His brothers, meanwhile, had forgotten they had feet in the first place. They watched, frozen, from their seats.
When the glass was full again, John let go.
“My fucking—fuck!” Rick shouted, rocking backward on his stool and cupping the ugly mound that had been his nose. “You sonofabitch. You fucking—”
He started to rise.
Stopped.
Something passed between the two men. It was as if the Trotter’s front door had opened and the wind had let itself into the bar. Rick Lot looked up at John Hawthorne from his bar stool, and whatever he saw looking back made him sit down again. That was the end of it, Mariah understood later. The rest was decided in that moment.
“Thought you never turned down a free drink,” said John.
Rick’s eyes, tear-glazed and lacking all trace of their former sparkle, shifted to the shot glass. It brimmed in front of him, a rich, warm, quivering red. He swallowed. Reached for it. His hand, Mariah noticed with a tickle of pleasure, trembled as he raised the dripping rim to his lips. Drink, she thought. Drink, you fucker, drink drink drink drink.
Then he did.
All of it.
He set the glass down, gagged into his palm, got up, gagged a second time, and headed for the door. His boys made to leave too. John stopped them both with a shake of his head.
“The first shot was on me. The second was on the house. But the beers are on you.”
“I only got a twenty,” Bill said, the only words he spoke all evening.
“Twenty is fine,” said John. “Right, Mariah?”
Mariah, unable to speak, nodded.
Within moments, the three of them were gone. As their bikes rumbled awake and swept off down the road, John turned to look at Mariah over the bar. His arms were slack. The lamp hanging over him did nothing to soften the sharp lines of his face. He watched her for what seemed a long time.
“I’m John,” he said, finally.
“I know. May I pour you something to drink?”
“Yes,” he said. “Water would be nice.”
Between them, on the bar, blood trickled and collected darkly at the bottom of the shot glass.
???
After another hearty round of prayer, Mariah wiped her mouth and sat back from the toilet to catch her breath. She did not move again for a while, and when she did it was to reach for her phone and check the time. It was 8:24. Far too early to be awake (any hour before noon was a blasted hour, as far as she was concerned), but here she was. Morning would have to make do with her company, just this once. Her thoughts soon began sliding back to the bar, to John Hawthorne and Rick Lot and the shot glass filled first with whiskey, then later with blood, but she cut them off before they could gain momentum. No. She had looked back enough for now. Now it was time to look forward, to figure out what she was going to do. A little peppermint tea to settle her stomach seemed as good a place as any to start. And then? She hadn’t considered ‘and then’ yet, but she figured a trip to the clinic would factor in somewhere along the way.
Do you really want to do that? her mother asked. Is that really the direction you want to go?
Mariah ignored the voice, something she was often forced to do, and got up to leave the bathroom. The southern region of her butt—the part that panties never quite covered—unpeeled from the tiles as she rose. The sensation was not pleasant, and neither was the feeling of going vertical after spending so long on the floor. She gave a slow, recalibrating sway before heading out into the hall. The house was still dark, thanks to the blackout curtains hanging on all the windows. Mariah must have closed those curtains extremely well last night, because not even a whisper of daylight had found its way inside.
In the kitchen, with a pot of water heating on the stove, she set about rummaging through the cupboards for the loose leaf. She did not notice that the high, tiny pane over the back door—the pane shaped to resemble a sunrise—was as black as it had been at midnight. But some part of her felt the darkness. Unease began to pace the back corridors of her mind. She rocked her head to the Black Sabbath pumping in through her earbuds. Tony Iommi was no Jimmy Page (nobody was), but he would do in a pinch. The water reached a boil. She poured it into her teapot to steep. And still that feeling. Something wrong. Something off balance. Something wrong. The electric guitar riff faded, pursued into silence by the downbeat thunder of drums, and she lifted her head. Looked toward the street. Was somebody laughing? Who the hell would be outside laughing this early? And was that a lawnmower? The two sounds did not pair well together. They gave her lizard brain a cool, sharp tickle. But before she could wonder about it any further, Pandora Radio slipped a gear and put on country. Shania Twain, to be exact. And not just some random bit either, but one of those blasphemously catchy, godforsaken creations that had haunted the radio station for years. Title: “Life’s about to Get Good.”
“We’ll see about that,” Mariah said. She skipped the track, and the Mothership swooped in to rescue her with that old classic, “Ramble On.” The thing she liked most about Led Zeppelin was that if you stripped away the frills, their music was all about going places. About adventures in strange lands, journeys steeped in danger and excitement and myth. Tolkien’s Gollum. Thor’s hammer. Valhalla and Mordor and days of old. It was impossible to listen to them and not want to get up and go, never mind the distance or the outcome; their songs were made for open roads and far-off horizons. But even as Mariah mouthed the lyrics she knew and loved so well, her unease continued to pace inside her. She looked down. Her left foot had begun to tap. What was happening? Good God, did she really need to ask? She knew what was happening: it started with a P and ended with Nancy. And Nancy should have known better, the bitch.
Nausea climbed her throat with slick, green fingers. She poured the weak-smelling tea and carried her mug into the living room. The couch looked inviting to her legs, but the rest of her was too woozy to sit. She walked over to the window, the big one she thought of as her bay window, although in reality it was much too small for the name. Her unease had matured into dread. Its footsteps no longer tip-tapped quietly along. They boomed. The walls of her mind rattled and groaned with the force. But why?
Why?
Because no matter how tightly she closed the curtains, no matter how careful and thorough she was with sealing the cracks, she could never quite lock out the sun. Some light always leaked in around the cloth.
There was no light now.
None.
Mariah stopped in her tracks. The answer was so obvious that she almost laughed. It was a cloudy day. Of course. Even these mountains, dry as they were chaperoning the desert, occasionally saw some rain. Shaking her head, wondering how she had managed to get so worked up in the first place, she swept open the curtain.
The coffee mug slipped from her fingers.
Led Zeppelin rambled on.
And on.
And on.
And on.
