Killer Move

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 . . .”

“Shh,” I said. The manager came out from a side door, a guy called Derek, an older student and world-class dopehead I’d worked with at a previous job and who owed me for covering him a zillion times. When I’d called him at 4:00 A.M. that morning he’d been pissed as hell, but eventually decided he’d help.

“Ma’am,” he said, in a croak that sounded like a rook with a hangover. He cleared his throat, tried again. “Your table is totally waiting for you.”

He gestured, and Steph turned to see that the corner table in the window had two candles on it. I’d found them under the sink in the kitchen in my house. I had no idea how many years they’d been there, and one was three inches longer than the other. They had been stood upright in a pair of wineglasses I’d brought from the same place. There was metal silverware laid out, also from the house, a little bent and tarnished.

We went to the table and sat opposite each other. Derek brought us food. We ate. We talked, and when Derek couldn’t let the restaurant just be ours any longer and turned the lights and the Musak on, the first song that played was Shania Twain singing “You’re Still the One,” and sometimes that’s just how the world works, and finally Stephanie laughed and it was the day after her birthday, and everything was kind of okay.

That was our breakfast at McDonald’s.

Back when I was me.

I didn’t notice when it stopped raining. I merely realized, slowly, that it had. I called the hospital and was told that Stephanie was sleeping, and her signs were stable. I wanted to turn around and drive straight back, wait by the side of her bed and will her to be well again, but I knew that wasn’t what I had to do right now.

I pulled back out into the slow, postrain traffic, and drove on toward Longboat Key.

PART III

IMMEDIATE FUTURE

Let us depart, with a kiss,

for an unknown world.

—ALFRED DE MUSSET, La nuit de Mai

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Warner is in a chair again, but this time it is not a hard wooden chair but one that is padded and comfortable. He has no idea where the chair is, but it is pretty warm. He is running with sweat, though he is naked, and he can smell the smell of himself around him like a cloud. He can see the mess on his thigh and it looks terrible, like mangled meat left out in the sun. He has been given something—a lot of something—to make the damage fade away. It has worked. The pain got on a jet plane and flew to the other side of the world, business class. He doesn’t hurt at all, anywhere, even though his poor broken fingers still do not work. He feels great. He feels fabulous. He is just so fucking okay with everything, and everything is fine.

He jerks himself upright, peers around. Tries to work out where this heavenly place of comfort is. Hotel room? Apartment? The drapes are shut. The lights are low. The floor has been covered with plastic sheeting. There’s someone lying on it.

A woman.