Coronado - Dennis Lehane [33]
SHE WALKS UP the wet beach with him now and they cross the boardwalk and she thinks of Sonya floating off that mailbox and floating, right now, somewhere beyond this world, looking down, and she feels that her baby sister has grown older too, older than herself, that she has run far ahead of time and its laws. She is wrinkled now and wiser and she does not approve of what they have done.
What they have done needed to be done. She feels sure of that. Someone had to pay, a message had to be sent. Can’t have some fool traveling free through life like he got an all-day bus pass. You got to pay the freight. Everyone. Got to.
But still she can feel her sister, looking down on her with a grim set to her mouth, thinking: Stupid. Stupid.
She and KL reach the Escalade and he opens the hatch and she places the gun in there under the mat and the tire iron and the donut spare.
“Never want to hear his name aloud,” KL says. “Never again. We clear?”
She nods and they stand there in the sweeping rain.
“What now?” she says.
“Huh?”
“What now?” she repeats, because suddenly she has to know. She has to.
“We go home.”
“And then?”
He shrugs. “No then.”
“There’s gotta be then. There’s gotta be something next.”
Another shrug. “There ain’t.”
In the Escalade, KL driving, the rain still coming down, she thinks about going back to school, finishing. She imagines herself in a nurse’s uniform, living someplace beyond the neighborhood. She worries she’s getting ahead of herself. Don’t look so far into the future. Look into the next minute. See it. See that next minute pressing against your face. What can you do with it? With that time? What?
She closes her eyes. She tries to see it. She tries to make it her own. She tries and tries.
UNTIL GWEN
YOUR FATHER PICKS you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon with an eight ball in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the backseat. Two minutes into the ride, the prison still hanging tilted in the rearview, Mandy tells you that she only hooks part-time. The rest of the time she does light secretarial for an independent video chain and tends bar two Sundays a month at the local VFW. But she feels her calling—her true calling in life—is to write.
You go, “Books?”
“Books.” She snorts, half out of amusement, half to shoot a line off your fist and up her left nostril. “Screenplays!” She shouts it at the dome light for some reason. “You know—movies.”
“Tell him the one about the psycho saint guy,” your father says. “That would put my ass in the seat.” Your father winks at you in the rearview, like he’s driving the two of you to the prom. “Go ahead. Tell him.”
“Okay, okay.” She turns on the seat to face you, and your knees touch, and you think of Gwen, a look she gave you once, nothing special, just looking back at you as she stood at the front door, asking if you’d seen her keys. A forgettable moment if ever there was one but you spent four years in prison remembering it.
“…so at his canonization,” Mandy is saying, “something, like, happens? And his spirit comes back and goes into the body of this priest. But, like, the priest? He has a brain tumor. He doesn’t know it or nothing, but he does, and it’s fucking up his, um—”
“Brain?” you try.
“Thoughts,” Mandy says. “So he gets this saint in him and that does it, because like even though the guy was a saint, his spirit has become evil because his soul is gone. So this priest? He spends the rest of the movie trying to kill the pope.”
“Why?”
“Just listen,” your father says. “It gets good.”
You look out the window. A car sits empty along the shoulder. It’s beige and someone has painted gold wings on the sides, fanning out from the front bumper and across the doors, and