Killer Move - Michael Marshall [84]
But now he was gone. There had been no calls in the intervening six weeks, no note, no e-mail, nothing—to either Stephanie or her mom. The guy just bugged out, disconnected the line, went 404. I spent the week leading up to the day knowing Steph still believed that, come her birthday, something would happen and this bad, sad dream would end. That there’d be a card in the mail, a gift—cheap, trivial, it didn’t matter to her—maybe even that she’d be sitting in the window of the house she shared with four other girls and see his car pull up outside.
The day came.
There was no card. There was no gift.
She sat in the window, and he did not come.
I wasn’t with her. We were both working through college, barely scraping by. At that point I had a submenial job helping clear out the basement of a local factory, and the guy wouldn’t let me take the evening off. There were plenty of other assholes, he knew, who’d be happy to step into my shoes. I couldn’t afford to lose the job, and Steph knew it and wouldn’t have let me. I’d given her my gift that afternoon—an inexpensive necklace and a new copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a book she loved—but had to leave her after that.
I got off work at one in the morning and walked back into town as quickly as I could. It was January and beyond cold. I’d talked to the other girls in the house and they’d said they were going to throw her a party, but either it hadn’t happened or she’d declined to take part. There was only one light on in her house, and it was Steph’s. Her room was on street level, had this big window in front. I stood outside and saw her at her desk. She had fallen asleep with her head on her arms. She was dressed in the best clothes she had.
She’d waited, and he hadn’t come.
I was young and didn’t understand a whole lot about the world, but I knew that this was dark and bad and wrong and could not stand. I stood there for ten minutes, too cold to shiver, not knowing what to do.
Then I turned back and walked home. I entered a silent house and looked around for what I could find. I knew it wasn’t going to be much, or anything like enough, but it was all I had and all I could do.
At six I walked back to her street and went up to her window. She was still at her desk, still asleep. I rapped on the window, quietly. She woke up. She looked over at the window, saw it was me, and her disappointment was only momentary. I gestured at her to come over.
She did, and slid up the windowpane. “He didn’t come.”
“But I did.”
“What are you wearing?”
The answer was the blackest jeans I had (sadly also the ones with a tear on the knee), a white shirt belonging to one of my housemates, and another’s crumpled black jacket—plus I had a tie I’d made half an hour before, from a strip of dark T-shirt.
“It’s Armani,” I said. “Really. I wrote it on the collar with a Sharpie.”
She tried to smile.
“Come on,” I said.
She climbed out through the window. I took her hand and led her up the street. It was still night-dark and when we got to Main there was nothing open yet except the place we were going. I felt kind of dumb and knew this could land very flat, but I also knew it was the best I could do and that I loved this girl enough to take the risk of looking a fool.
Finally we were outside the place.
“Bill, why are we . . . here?”
“Because we have a reservation,” I said.
I guided her toward the door. Inside the McDonald’s it was deserted, though it was technically open. Only half the normal array of lights were on. A pasty-faced server stood yawning behind one of the registers.
“Bill