Coronado - Dennis Lehane [31]
Sylvester rests the side of his forehead against the window and stares out at the rain snapping off the highway, boiling in puddles.
When they reach the beach, it’s empty, even the boardwalk, just like KL figured. They sit on the seawall and KL gives her his pissed-off glare. She can’t tell if he’s pissed off because she left the bullets in her other jacket or if he’s still part-pissed about the whole situation in general. Eventually, he gives her a smile when she raises her right eyebrow. He kisses her and his tongue tastes like metal because of the GHB and then he says, “Sylvester, come smoke this with me.” He and Sylvester walk down the beach in the rain and she sits on the wall in the cold and watches while they walk into the ocean and KL holds Sylvester under the water until he drowns.
HE HANDS HER the gun when he gets back, tells her to hold on to it.
She says, “That’s kind of risky, don’t you think?”
He puts his thumbs under her eyelids and pulls them down, looks into her eyes. “Drugs making you paranoid. That’s a good gun.”
They walk the beach for a bit as KL tells her how he did it, how he bluffed with the gun, put it against Sylvester’s head and forced him down into the water. “I tell him I’m just going to teach him a lesson, hold him down for a minute because he fucked up with Whitehall and that Rory thing too.”
“He believe you?”
KL smiles, kind of surprised himself. “For a few seconds, yeah. After that, it didn’t much matter.”
She watches the water to see if Sylvester pops up anywhere, but the waves are cold and gray and high, like whales, and KL tells her there was a pretty strong undertow out there too. Clams, a few inches below the wet sand, spit on her feet as she stares at the sea and KL wraps his arms around her from behind. She leans back into his chest, the heat of it, and KL says, “I had a dream about killing him last night. How it would feel.”
“And?”
He shrugs. “Wasn’t much different.”
SHE WASN’T ALWAYS old.
Not long ago she was a girl, a girl without breasts, with a little boy’s body really. She walked back from school one day in a skirt she hated—an itchy, woolen thing with pleats, black-and-gray plaid, a chafing thing. She walked alone—usually she was alone—and the streets she followed home were tired, like they’d had a flu too long, the buildings leaning forward as if they’d topple onto her braided hair, her nose, her little boy’s body.
She cut through a playground, and there was a man sitting on the jungle gym, drinking a tall can of beer. He wore an army uniform that had sharp creases in the pants even though the shirt was wrinkled. He stood and blocked her path. She met his eyes and saw that there was a kindness hiding in them behind the rest of what lived there, which was good, because the rest of what lived there was hopeless, as if all the light had been vacuumed out. She never knew how long they stared at each other—a day maybe, an hour, a year—but everything changed. Her little boy’s body disappeared forever, sucked into those blasted eyes, replaced with a new body, a body that ached, that tingled as he watched her, a body covered with skin so new and thin it felt raw.
He said, “Fuck you waiting for, little girl? A hall pass?” And he bowed and held out his arm and she saw light fill his eyes for an instant, a moment in which she saw how beautiful they could be, powder blue and soft, love living there like a morning prayer. When he caressed her ass as she passed, she resisted the urge to lean into his hand.
When she got home, she saw his eyes in the mirror. She ran a hand over her new body, over the sudden nubs of her breasts, and she knew for the first time why her father sometimes seemed afraid and ashamed when he looked at her. She knew, looking in the mirror, that she was not of him; she was of her mother; she felt buried with her in the dark earth.
The next day, when she walked through the playground, he was waiting. He was smiling, and his shirt had been ironed.
WHAT HAPPENED