• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

"Are you crazy?"

Her voice wakes Max. The baby emits a feeble cry.

"You want to go to prison?"

"Think that’s how it’ll end up?"

"Andy, it won’t be too difficult for them to pin murders on you you didn’t do, considering where they found some of those bodies."

"I don’t care. I’m going to tell them the truth. What they do with me is out of my control."

"You gonna tell them about Portsmouth?"

"I’m going to tell them the truth, Vi."

Crying now, "About me killing that boy?"

"I don’t know."

"Andy, please. Let me help you. You feel like this right now, but will you feel like this for the next fifteen years? Or the rest of your life? Do you honestly want to rot in prison?"

I sigh, lean back into the warm vinyl, the summer sky now fading into dusk. I can’t imagine next week. Can’t even see tomorrow. I could cry, but I don’t.

"Look, if I don’t do this, I won’t last. I’ll get up to the Yukon, kill myself. I’m close to it now. I want to. There’s comfort in the idea of it. Please do this for me, Vi. Please."

# # #

Vi guides us home—64 to Statesville, I-77 to Davidson. I sit in the passenger seat holding Max, asleep in my arms, watching rivers of carlight streaming south toward Charlotte.

As we cross Lake Norman, rimmed with the light of wealth, I think of my old home, glowing somewhere out there in a distant cove.

Vi reaches over, steadies my hands.

# # #

The knot in my stomach tightens when she veers onto Exit 30. I shut my eyes, feel the car come to rest at the stoplight. Ten seconds. Accelerating again. Turning left. Cruising through Davidson, the college close now. In the autumn, I’d take a manuscript and spread a blanket out on the grass of its lovely campus, surrounded by those tall, molting trees.

We make a right onto Jackson Street, my heart throbbing. After several blocks, we turn again. The car stops, Vi shifts into park, and the engine dies.

My eyes open. We’re parked in front of the Davidson Police Department.

It’s real now.

Vi says, "Sure you don’t want us to make a go of it up in Canada? Speak now or forever."

She’s kidding, but it sounds forced, her voice thick with tears. I look at her and see that she’s aching to be home. To forget.

"Better take him." I hand Max over, careful not to wake him. "Will you come in with me?"

"I need to go home, Andy. They’ll try to keep me here, and I want to see my husband before the madness starts."

I’ve gone short of breath.

"So just walk in there, huh?"

"Tell them who you are, that you’re turning yourself in."

I notice two men in plainclothes sitting on a bench near the entrance, having a good laugh. One of them gets up and staggers around, impersonating what can only be a bombed sobriety test.

"You’ll be all right, Vi?"

"Sure."

I open the door, step outside, and close it. The window is down. I peer back through it. Vi reaches out, squeezes my hand.

I walk toward the entrance. When I reach the sidewalk, I glance back, see Vi sitting in the Kites’ Impala, her pretty face lit by a streetlamp, crying.

I hear one of those men near the entrance say, "And this fuckwit didn’t even know he had the stop sign wrapped around his bumper. He’d been draggin’ the damn thing for two miles. I just followed the trail of sparks!"

The approach of my footsteps arrests their harsh laughter.

They exchange looks of fleeting embarrassment, caught in a moment of levity. Wiping their eyes, they regard me with the newfound scowls of lawmen, beefy blonds, clean-shaven, with hard, alert eyes and trimmed mustaches that blend into their pale faces.

I address the man who’s standing.

"You fellas police officers?"

"I am," he says.

The engine of the Impala roars to life.

"Could we have a word in private, please?"

# # #

The first thing Vi notices are the forsythia bushes. They were seedlings when she and Max planted them last September. In her absence, they’ve shot up nearly to the windows. She can’t bare to wonder what else has grown and changed and died.

She parks on the street and turns off the engine. Arcadia Acres twinkles in what