The Creek
Part One
About a week after Amy Klon's sixteenth birthday, something terrible happened to the family who lived on the corner at the bottom of the street. The woman, Paula, fell asleep driving down route 81 about an hour and a half from town, and crashed through a guardrail and into a river. The accident killed her and her five-year-old daughter, Eve. Neither Amy nor her parents knew the family well -- their name was Haight -- and they were generally thought by the people who lived on the block to be arrogant and standoffish, but after the accident a wave of sympathy arose which obliterated all ill will, and for quiet a while the Haights were discussed in tones of admiration and affection. The man in the family, Duane Haight, was left alone, in that small dark shingled house overlooking the creek, and where before he always looked hangdog, put-upon, and exhausted, he now looked utterly cast adrift.
Amy had used to see him lurching down the street on the way to Collegeville to fill his stained white travel mug with coffee -- didn't they have a coffee maker, this bizarre family? -- and she would say hello. Always he would raise his bloodshot eyes to her for a dismissive moment, and the stubbled chin would jut out a fraction of an inch in greeting, and he would return to the task at hand, dragging his sneakered (or, in summer, sandaled) feet down the weedy sidewalk. But now she didn't say hello at all when he passed, and she didn't think he would have turned to her if she had. By July of that year, three months after the accident, Duane Haight didn't even look like a regular man anymore -- he looked like some kind of cave man, a Cro-Magnon or Neandertal (which extinct humans they had studied that year in school, though not too strenuously, so the three evangelical Christians in the sophomore class wouldn't get all bent out of shape), with a filthy beard hanging down to the middle of his chest and a seemingly permanent hunch to his stride.
Duane Haight, by most accounts, was twenty-eight, and some kind of trust fund hippie. He painted paintings and sold them in New York City. He and his wife had used to fight -- not like violently, Amy sometimes told curious classmates visiting from across town, just yelling and all -- late at night with the windows open, and sometimes the police had had to be called. The little girl, Eva, seemed pleasant enough, never screaming or whining or throwing tantrums that Amy ever heard, and in fact Amy had once asked the mother if she needed a babysitter. But the woman, as Amy's own mother had said once to Amy's father when they thought Amy had gone to sleep, was a real bitch, and she had spat at Amy that no thanks, they didn't need a babysitter, as if the very idea of putting their child into the hands of a complete teenage stranger were utterly insane.
Fat lot of good it did her, Amy's mother said on another night to Amy's father, as the months of summer wore on and the collective sympathy of the neighborhood had begun to wane. The child would have been safer with Amy, or even that horrible Pam. Pam being Amy's friend from across town.
Amy hadn't known her mother felt that way about Pam.
If Duane Haight was going to seed that year, then he was only following the lead of his property, which had sprouted weeds as tall again as a man. A tree uprooted in a windstorm stayed where it was, partially blocking the sidewalk, as if Haight hadn't even noticed it, and mice began to infest the pantries of the neighboring houses. Residents who had the courage to complain to Duane Haight were greeted with puzzled stares, dismissive shakes of the head. By summer's end people had given up -- their social discomfort had trumped their irritation. They set mouse traps and ignored the mess. And when winter arrived, much of it was obscured anyway by the democratic cover of snow.
Some nights, when Amy lay awake, she thought about the Haights, going over and over in her mind everything she had ever noticed about them, trying to compile it all into some kind of story. She wondered what life might have been like in that house of quiet, unpleasant people. Were they mean to one another, or was that simply the face they showed the world? Amy was going through a phase of trying to learn people's secrets. Her parents had none that she could discern; she had always assumed that the private lives of others matched their public ones, and there was little mystery anywhere to be found. But now she had her own small secret, a sexual encounter with a very distant boy cousin at a summer camp for supposedly smart kids, and though she hadn't enjoyed it much and felt mostly shame about its having happened, she greatly enjoyed concealing the fact of it from her family and friends. And so it occurred to her that maybe everyone carried secrets around with them, and who in this neighborhood could possibly be harboring anything remotely interesting?
Duane Haight was the clear and unambiguous answer. This part of town was filled with stuck-up academics and their striving children. (Her family was an exception, as she was an average student, the product of a planner for the town and a public librarian.) Everyone was normal here, everyone but Duane Haight. The loss of his wife and child only made him stranger.
Did he beat her? This seemed to Amy eminently possible. Or maybe she beat him. Maybe he liked it, needed it for his work. His painting. Needed to feel pain so that he could transfer it to the canvas. She had looked him up on the internet and found a link to a gallery in New York City that sold his paintings. They were frightening -- nude women's bodies with monkey heads, sitting in cages eating hunks of raw meat. Maybe they weren't all like that, what did she know, but looking at these, she didn't much want to see any others. he showed the web site to Pam, and Pam actually and quite loudly screamed. Amy remembered what her mother had said. She decided not to share her investigations with Pam anymore.
By springtime Amy was trying to decide where to go to college and had settled on Amherst, Wesleyan or Vassar. Her mother and father encouraged her to apply to other schools, just in case she didn't get in to those places, and the result was an unprecedented shouting match in which Amy proclaimed that, if she didn't get in to where she really wanted to go, she didn't want to go to college at all, and as for what she would do then, it was none of her parents' business, she would move to New York and be a prostitute and drug addict and it would serve them right. Her poor stunned father said that they were extremely disappointed in her and her mother went to the bedroom and cried.
So did Amy. She knew she wasn't going to get into those colleges. Her grades were lousy and the only extracurricular thing she did was play tennis. During the ensuing week of near-silence that shrouded the household, she sent away for other applications, and made sure that her mother was the one to take them out of the mailbox when they arrived. That seemed to smooth things over. But something had changed -- for the first time, Amy's parents acted careful around her, as if she might explode. Amy herself had mixed feelings about this. She missed the way things were, but liked her new status as a figure of fear and confusion. She walked around the house with a quasi-imperial bearing, sticking her chest out and stamping her bare feet on the floor. She could break their hearts, if she wanted. She could ruin their lives.
Part Two
Amy was a tall girl, about five feet nine, with small flat breasts and disproportionately wide hips, like her mother's. Her hair was cut short and the color of sand and her round face was lopsidedly darkened by freckles, with more on the left side than the right. She walked with her feet splayed and her knees were bony and strange, with all kinds of complicated and freakish-looking depressions and protuberances. For this reason she wore ace bandages on them when she played tennis, and sometimes just walking around town. People assumed she had some chronic injury, which won her a certain jock status she didn't actually deserve. Last fall, in the wake of the interlude with her fat cousin, she had briefly gone through a period of taking off her clothes and looking at herself in her bedroom mirror while squinting. She thought she looked like an ostrich and figured that her romantic future probably lay in the hands of people like Denny, the cousin, who didn't mind ostrich-looking girls. She thought her face was kind of pretty -- Pam always told her so anyway -- but it was so blotchy, so flat, and so far off the ground that whatever prettiness it harbored was forever obscured. For all that, though, she was not especially self-conscious. She didn't think about herself much at all. She thought about the things she would do when she moved away -- writing plays, drinking beer, and playing in a rock band. She'd never done a single one of these things but she felt very capable, far more capable than she ever was at school.
One morning in May, on her way to the school bus stop, Amy saw a strange man working in the Haights' yard. He was compact and muscular, with short spiky black hair and an angular, clean-shaven face. His skin was pale and his arms furred with black hair. He used a rusty hand saw to cut last year's fallen branch into pieces, which he stacked against the side of the house, and he went around pulling weeds out of the ground. He nodded at her when she passed. Over the next few days, the man could be seen replacing roof shingles and cutting the grass, and finally digging post holes and installing a five-foot wooden fence. She wondered if Duane Haight had decided to sell the place, and hired someone to fix it up. Or perhaps he already had, and this was the new owner. Almost a week later, on a Saturday afternoon, she was sitting in the yard on a lawn chair reading Canterbury Tales when the man trudged past on his way up the hill. He walked in a slouching gait and a stained white travel mug hung from his hand. As he went past her he looked up and offered her a small smile, which she returned. With a jolt she realized it was Duane Haight.
She asked her parents that night if they had noticed their neighbor's transformation. No, they hadn't, they'd thought that man was someone else. Her parents seemed pleased that she was willing to talk to them at all. They were fond lately of saying she had an early case of senioritis. They said, in deceptively self-mocking tones, that she had an attitude problem.
Over the summer Amy started going around with a boy named Josh. He was a drama society guy. He had used to be kind of a dork, but his zits had disappeared and it turned out he could sing. He had got the leading-man role in the spring musical, which is when Amy noticed him, and at a dance at the public pool in Vernor Park, they had hung out by the fence talking. She liked him -- he was tall, taller than she was, if maybe a little too skinny, and always had a joke on his lips. It was as if he'd been saving them up through all of the dorkwad years. In general he was a little too nervous for her taste, always looking around to see who was nearby, always nodding his head even when there was nothing for him to agree with. But he had a pleasant enough face and seemed to like looking at her, and they would walk down into the woods on the other side of the county highway and make out leaning against a tree. It was nice, a lot nicer than kissing her cousin had been, and by the time school started up again she more or less considered him a boyfriend. Her parents seemed to like him enough, though they wouldn't have dared say otherwise. They had become rather afraid of her, of her self-sufficiency.
Things got a little weird during the school year. Josh applied early to Yale and got in, which impressed his teachers to no end. There was a little piece in the paper about it which his folks had had planted there, and instead of being embarrassed about it, Josh was really into it, and even taped a copy to the inside of his locker door. He seemed to grow in personal confidence, at least in public, standing a little straighter, talking with a deeper voice. But with her, he seemed somehow desperate, in some kind of hurry. His palms sweated when he touched her and his fingers twisted together in his lap when he didn't. He wanted to go out all the time, and never with all their friends, always just with her. He wanted to go to the woods even when it was cold, he wanted to park the car on secluded roads.
Amy didn't mind, really. She would have wanted it herself, if he hadn't been so uptight about it. But, she told Pam, the whole package was kind of a turnoff.
"He wants to fuck you," Pam said. "That's all it is." She had some experience with these kinds of things.
"I don't think so," Amy said.
But she was wrong. He asked her flat out a week later. It was the dead of winter, and her college applications were in, and she had been feeling free and happy, when he approached her with the idea, presenting it with a kind of missionary zeal, explaining all the reasons why it was a good move for both of them. Greater intimacy, learning to really know ourselves, taking on new responsibilities, etc.
She said she'd think about it. Up until now, they had merely fooled around, though Amy would practically have called it sex. She realized that his request was not unreasonable, and she had long ago figured that she would have slept with him by now. But he had become sort of insufferable, and she held him at bay for months, telling him maybe in the summer, asking him to please stop asking about it. At one point, when the weather was just beginning to grow warm, he told her he loved her, obviously in the hope of moving things along more quickly. And he did let her take her underwear off. But she put them back on not long thereafter and left them on for the rest of the night.
They both could drive now, but Josh owned a car, a sporty little Hyundai, which his parents bought him as a Yale-acceptance gift and which he loved to drive around town with the windows open, even in the cold. After their evenings of frustration and arousal he would drop her off in front of her house. But starting in springtime she asked to be dropped off farther and farther from home. She wanted to walk, she told him, and she wasn't lying -- she had gotten into a small second-tier college in Ohio and was becoming increasingly aware of her impending separation from her home town. She would get out of the car at some street corner in Collegeville and wend her way through the empty quiet streets, not worrying about her parents worrying, not worrying about anything at all. She stopped in the middle of the street to smell the air, to listen to the creek divide the neighborhood in two. She peered into people's windows, watching them watch TV and work on computers. She passed Duane Haight's house, and watched him standing in front of a large canvas he had propped against the wall, daubing with a brush. He wore a paint-spattered bathrobe, and continually ran a free hand through his thinning hair. Jazz music came through the open window. She imagined what it must be like to lose everything, to be free of all responsibilities, to be free of the obligation to love, and for a split second every night she experienced an intense and terrifying jealousy, wishing her parents and friends would vanish, leaving her to be herself alone. And then, a painful gulp of night air, an upwelling of desperate and sentimental affection, and a wave of remorse.
Part Three
By the time school ended -- graduation was a bore, she despised ceremony, she despised big parties, and loved her hatred of these things -- she looked forward to these walks more than her sessions with Josh. The feeling of sexual frustration, the smell of herself after being with him, the dirtiness of her clothes and the tiredness of her body -- these things somehow added up to a desperate closeness to life, whatever that meant, a sensation of absolutely, undeniably existing in the world. She would stand in the empty street and hear the distant rushing water and feel completely alive.
One humid night in July, mashing in the back seat with Josh, she suddenly felt so overheated, so suffocated, that she thought she might have a panic attack. She pushed him away, gulping air through the open window. "What?!" he said, "What!" But it was nothing, she told him, she'd felt a little lightheaded, maybe they could call it a night and --
"Fine," he said, violently climbing into the front seat. His unbuttoned shirt flapped around him and his belt buckle clanked against the steering wheel.
"Look," she said, "I didn't mean--"
"You don't even know what you mean anymore." He started the car and threw it into gear, leaving her in the back. She buckled up and let the air flow over her face, and marveled at how un-angry she was with him, how much she sympathized. Nothing seemed very important just now, except the night and the air. He drove too fast, rocketing toward her house in a fever, and at last pulled over more than a mile from home.
"Here, why don't you get out here," he spat, and got out of the car, his pants still undone and sagging around his hips. He came around and opened her door.
He had meant to insult, to humiliate. But this was perfect -- this was what she wanted. To be left far away, and to return at her leisure. She got out, tried to kiss him goodnight, in gratitude and apology. He drew back.
"I'm tired of you pretending."
"I'm not pretending," she said, with genuine surprise.
His response was a shake of the head. "You just have no fucking idea what you're like," he said.
This gave her pause. Didn't she? Didn't she know? The round-faced girl with the horsey legs? The idea that this was not what she was like -- that Josh was right, there was something she didn't know -- gave her a momentary, vain frisson. And then he had thrown up his hands, hiked up his pants, and driven off into the night.
She wended her way through the labyrinth of town, passing through neighborhoods she knew only from the window of a car, feeling the day's heat rising up off of the road and through the soles of her flip-flops.
Her step quickened as the blocks disappeared behind her, as if she were late for something, as if someone were waiting for her. It was only when she arrived before Duane Haight's house that she realized: it was this she had been hurrying toward. He was there as usual, in front of his canvas, under the bizarre glow of a daylight-corrected lamp, its strange full-spectrum glare wrong in its rightness, like a daffodil coming up through a crack in a parking lot. She stood there on the sidewalk, the neighborhood sleeping around her, and closed her eyes listened to the music coming through the window. And when she opened them, Duane Haight was gone.
No -- not gone. At the open door, watching her from behind the screen. It gave her a start, and then, suddenly self-conscious, she giggled.
Duane Haight didn't smile, but he raised his arm and pushed open the door. After a moment, Amy walked toward it.
She was on the front stoop before she realized what was going to happen, what had been going to happen. There was not much time to savor the moment. She stepped inside, the door swung shut behind her, and he took her into his arms. They kissed. His face was rough and smelled like solvent. His mouth tasted of what she suspected was whiskey. Then he stepped back and regarded her with those dark, sunken eyes.
Was she supposed to say something? Apparently not. He reached out with both hands, hooked his fingers under her tank top, and pulled it up over her head. He did the same with her shorts, tugging them past her hips as deftly as she did herself, every night when she undressed for bed. He guided her to the couch, and she flopped into its musty, sunken depths.
"I'm not a virgin," she said and was instantly embarrassed.
"Good." She had never heard his voice so close, so clearly before. It seemed broken, a weary croak. He took off his robe and the shorts underneath and settled down onto her like a heavy fog.
What, she thought, a surprise! It was like a gift she had made for herself one time, had wrapped up and hidden and forgotten about, all so that she could have the pleasure of finding it now. She watched a cracked and cobwebbed high corner of the room as the strange man's hands and mouth traveled over her, and she supposed she would have to call him something, she would have to call him by name. She tried it out, mouthing the words without speaking, decided to keep it to herself.
After sex they lay on the couch semi-entwined, in silence, drawing and releasing deep breaths. No one on earth would suspect she was here. Eventually he heaved himself up off her and went off somewhere to dispose of the condom, and she realized that she could see right out onto the street through the screen door, the street her father drove down on the way to work every morning. Anyone could look in and see her there, if they stopped and squinted into the murk. But no one would.
He came back, sat down, regarded her with a puzzled frown. She liked his casual nakedness, it was new to her. She did not yet feel the need to cover herself, though she knew she would.
"I've seen you every night," he said.
"I thought you didn't notice."
He ran his hand up her leg and pressed his thumb to her. "How old are you?"
"Eighteen."
"What's your name?"
That gave her a jolt. She squeezed her legs together and his hand withdrew. "Amy."
"Do you have a boyfriend?"
"Yes."
He nodded, as if he already knew this. "Keep him."
She leveled him a serious look. "Why?"
"Because I'm no good for a boyfriend. But you can come whenever you want." His eyes bored into her. "I want you to."
"Okay."
They looked at one another for a few minutes more, and then he got up, put on his robe, and went back to his painting, in the next room. She lay there for a few minutes more, wondering what he wanted of her, before she realized they were finished. She dressed and left without saying goodbye.
Part Four
"You didn't say goodbye," he said the next night, when she showed up at his door. So there was that, she would say goodbye from now on. She went to his house at least four times a week for the next month, and new rules emerged, how much should be said, how much could be asked. What each wanted to do together or did not, and for how long. Sometimes he let her drink a little whiskey -- she professed to like it, and though it wasn't so, it wasn't quite a lie, because she could envision so clearly a day when she would, when it would remind her of him -- and sometimes he showed her what he was painting. Sometimes she asked him about the music he played on the stereo. She'd never heard of any of it and forgot what it was called the moment he finished telling her. The only thing they always did was have sex.
And throughout this time she continued to see Josh. He apologized for the night he kicked her out of the car, and in exchange she agreed to sleep with him. He was astonished and thrilled. He let out little squeaks while they did it, and thanked her afterward. Later she walked to Duane's house and did it again.
One night, in early August, a couple of weeks before she was to leave for Ohio, she said to Duane Haight, "Do you miss them?"
His head snapped around to face her and he said, "Who?"
They looked at one another for an endless series of moments. She shouldn't have asked, of course, she knew that immediately. But now he was offering her an opportunity to prove her mettle, to follow through on her cruel question, to demand of him what she thought she deserved. An image suddenly sprung into her mind, a seeming non-sequitur: the bland Italian "family" restaurant, Angela's, where she used to go with her parents, in the years when she was old enough to eat out but not yet old enough to dislike doing so en famile. It occurred to her that she wouldn't get to go there anymore, and though she didn't want to, hadn't wanted to for many years, her chest burned with grief.
To Duane, she said, "Your family."
His jaw twitched slightly and he nodded once. He gave his answer not to her, but to the large wooden coffee table that lay before them, heaped with magazines and dirty tumblers. He said, "It's not like that."
"How do you mean?"
"I mean it's not a question of missing. It's a question of being gone." He looked at her, his eyes hard. "Not just them, but me."
She said nothing. She didn't understand.
"People around here thought my wife was a terrible person."
Again she couldn't speak. He let this statement hang in the air, neither confirming nor contradicting it.
He got up, reached for his robe. "I won't stay long," he said, and returned to his painting.
The weekend before she was to leave, Josh dumped her. "When I go to Yale, I want to see other people," he said. Of course he did, she thought -- that's what this was all about, of course, the summer in the back of his car. He wanted to have someone to tell his new girlfriends about, someone he had had to let down. It wasn't a surprise -- she would have dumped him, had he failed to get around to it. But for some reason it still stung. She actually cried into her cupped hands. He put his arm around her, trying to comfort her. She shrugged him off, and he said, "Sorry, you have a right to be mad."
"I'm not mad!" she screamed.
"Okay, okay."
"That's not what this is about!"
"Whatever!"
But she wasn't going to make him understand, and she didn't entirely understand herself. "I guess this is goodbye," he said when he dropped her off, this time right in front of her house.
She looked at his pale, earnest face, slightly aglow with perspiration, and sighed.
"Good luck at Yale," she said.
"Thanks."
And that was that. She got out of the car and he drove off. When the car was out of sight, she looked up at her house and saw her mother, in her nightgown, watching through the window. The two of them looked at one another, her mother smiled. And then Amy turned and walked down the street toward Duane Haight's house. She heard the front door open behind her, but her mother didn't call to her, didn't follow. Amy did not turn to find out if she was still watching when she knocked and entered Duane's house. She didn't care if her mother knew. She didn't care about anything.
"Duane?"
Strange to say it out loud -- they didn't address one another that way when they were together. The house was quiet, though the door had been open, the kitchen light on.
"Are you here?"
She walked through the rooms, searching for him -- the dining room, its large round table, overhung with a crooked candelabra, piled high with papers, boxes, art supplies. The mud room, its door painted shut, the creek visible at the bottom of the hill, lit by the moon. And there was the door to the basement, yellow light leaking out from under it. "Duane?" she said again, then opened it. She walked down the stairs. The shelved stairwell walls were covered with cans of beans, tomatoes, fruit in heavy syrup, all of them covered with dust.
She found him sitting on the floor, his back against the water heater. He looked up at her but didn't speak.
"You were hiding?"
He shook his head no.
"So what are you doing?"
Arrayed along the wall beside him stood a wall of sagging cardboard boxes, the bottom row disfigured by water and darkened by mold. One box sat near him, just out of reach of his feet, as if he'd kicked it away. Inside it she could see some papers and a piece of curved yellow plastic, maybe part of a rattle or ball. She looked away.
She went to him, knelt beside him, and kissed his forehead. It was cold and oily and tasted of salt. She helped him to his feet, brought him upstairs, to the sofa, undressed him and made love to him. All the while he looked at her with a curious kind of pity, as if she were the one needing comfort. If indeed that's what this was, comfort. When they were done, she went and got him a drink and poured one for herself as well. They sat in silence. She said, "I'll be gone next week."
"I'll miss you," he said.
She bit her lip. "I think my mother may know. I think she watched me come here."
Again that pitying smile. "It's all right," he said.
"She might...I don't know."
"It's all right."
After a while she dressed, leaving her whiskey undrunk on a free patch of coffee table. He made no move to rise. She crouched down beside him and took his cold hands in hers. He looked old, he looked more than forty. She said, "You're brave and good and a great artist. I'll write to you."
He shook his head. "Don't."
"I will. And I can come see you on vacations."
Again he shook his head.
When it was clear he had nothing more to say, Amy left. She trudged up the hill, her mind blank. he walked into her parents' house -- this is how she would have to come to think of it now that she was leaving -- and locked the door behind her. The house was dark and silent. She went to her room, where the posters were already down, the winter clothes packed, the desk drawers emptied into ziploc bags. She undressed and got into bed.
Five minutes later she heard her parents' bed creak. Soft footsteps came closer and stopped outside her door. Amy waited. After a minute, the steps went back the way came, and the bed creaked a second time, not to creak again until morning.
Part Five
He was right, she sent him no letters. She went to class, to parties, met new friends, found the tennis people. She didn't get right to the playwriting and rock band, but did drink beer. Her parents called twice weekly and sent things from home, newspaper clippings, food, photographs. She smiled as she opened these things and then set them aside. Pam had enrolled at the state college nearest home and sent hilarious postcards. She thought of Duane sometimes. Of Josh, hardly at all. When she did, it was to imagine him telling some girl how he had broken Amy Klon's heart.
The first week of November, she received a cryptic postcard in the mail. On the front was a photograph of a lake not far from her home town, and on the back was an unsigned message: It isn't because of you.
Strange as it later seemed, she didn't think of Duane Haight. She tucked the postcard into a file folder she kept for Pam's correspondence. Pam, whom she referred to as "my crazy high school friend" whenever a dormitory pal saw the file. She just tucked it away and didn't think about it. It wasn't until weeks later -- the week before Thanksgiving, in fact, when her mother called to arrange her transportation home, that she found out about Duane.
"Anything new?" Amy said, and her mother said no.
"Well," her mother went on, after a pause, "there's the drama on our street from the other week ago but I think I sent you the clipping."
"I don't think so."
"About the man down the street?"
"What man?"
"The man whose family died. The painter."
In the silence that followed, each listened very closely to the other. "What happened?" Amy asked at last.
"Well, they found him in the creek. He drowned himself," her mother replied, whispering the words, as if they might be contagious.
"That's terrible," Amy made herself say, as the chair, the floor, the second-tier college in Ohio fell away beneath her.
"They had the funeral last week. His parents did. They were from Toledo." A beat. "Not far from you actually."
Toledo. He had never said he was from there. He had never said anything about himself at all. She could have gone to that funeral. She could have met his parents, his siblings if he had any. She should have gone. They had loved each other, a little bit, maybe.
This is why her mother had waited to tell her. So that she couldn't go to the funeral.
When she hung up the phone she lay down on the bed and tried to find the thread of some recognizable emotion. The one that emerged, eventually, was panic. She gripped the pillow, bit hard into it, kicked her legs. Then she remembered the postcard. It was from him. What had she done with it? Had she thrown it away? She got on her knees, crawled under her desk, pawed through the wastebasket. But she'd emptied it, of course, several times since then. She smacked the floor with her open palms, "No, no..." And then she remembered. Pam's file. She tried to get up and banged her head on the desk, fell back down, cried out in pain. Got out and pulled open the drawer. Found the file.
It was there. How could she have been so stupid? It wasn't Pam's handwriting at all. It was his. It isn't because of you. She brought the postcard to her face, inhaled deeply. She imagined she could smell him there.
Drama queen, she thought, and laughed, and lay down with the postcard pressed to her chest. She cried and slept. People banged on her door, trying to collect her for dinner, but she didn't respond. Not tonight -- tonight would be for him. She waited until they were gone, sneaked down the hall, and stole her friend's fake ID. She went to a liquor store and bought a bottle of whiskey. Then she came back, locked herself in her room, poured a glass of the horrible stuff, and cancelled her plane reservation home.
