Beautiful Little Fools(87)

“Beautiful morning, isn’t it, Mrs. Buchanan? But it’s going to be another hot one,” Ferdie said, pausing from his work polishing the white coupe. “Can I drive you somewhere?”

“No, Ferdie. I’m driving myself today,” I insisted, even though the thought of driving again made my hands shake a little. It didn’t matter that it was bright outside now, that I was completely sober. I could not forget the sound of her body as it hit the windshield, the look on her face. Oh, that god-awful look. But I was driving myself from now on, no matter what.

“Are you sure, Mrs. Buchanan?” Ferdie asked. “You look a little tired.”

“Get me the keys,” I insisted, obstinately. “I am perfectly well.”

Ferdie complied, and I got into the white coupe and turned the key. I took a deep breath and gripped the wheel too tightly, but then I drove down the long drive slowly.

I stopped before turning out onto the main drag and lit a cigarette to calm myself. I took a few puffs and hung my left arm out the side.

And then, altogether calmer, I drove toward West Egg, the warm morning air swirling against my face.





Catherine August 1922

WEST EGG




I SPUN THE FORD INTO Jay’s drive, still breathing hard and crying, so that his house was blurry in front of me. It had only been a few days since the last time I was here, when Jay told me he’d never cared about me at all, but now it felt like a lifetime. I’d been hurt and angry when I left then, both at him and at myself for ever believing anything good about him. But I never would’ve thought that he was evil, that murder bubbled up inside his veins, that just a few days later he would kill Myrtle with his car and that he wouldn’t even stop.

Myrtle was dead. Myrtle was really dead. I put my head down on the steering wheel and wept uncontrollably, unable to stop myself. Until I heard the sound of tires on gravel behind me, and I suddenly sat up.

I glanced in the mirror, a white coupe had pulled into Jay’s drive, and unmistakably there she was in the driver’s seat, pale and dewy and red-lipped: goddamned Daisy Buchanan.

I wiped at my tear-streaked face, grabbed my purse, and jumped out of the truck. “What are you doing here?” I shouted at her.

She got out of her car slowly, dropped her cigarette on the ground, and crushed it under her black patent leather heel. “I could ask the same of you?” she said, shaking her hair back behind her shoulders.

“Jay Gatsby killed my sister,” I spat at her. “He ran over her with his car. That’s the man you love. A cold-blooded murderer.”

The color drained from her face, and she was all at once a ghost with bright red lips. “Your… your… sister?”

Before I could respond, suddenly an explosion and a deep scream crackled the air.

“Gunshot,” Daisy gasped softly. It had been years since I’d heard the sound of a gun go off, and it took me a second to realize she was right, and that the scream had been a feral cry, hard to tell if it was a man’s or woman’s or an animal’s.

Daisy looked at me wide-eyed for a second, and then she started running away from the sound of the gun, toward the woods next to Jay’s house. Out of instinct I followed after her. I was running, sweating, crying, breathing hard. What had I been thinking, coming here alone? I knew now that Jay was a murderer, and I hoped to God whatever shot had just rung out from behind his house hadn’t led to him killing anyone else.

But the sound of that feral scream already echoed in my head, haunting me.



* * *



DAISY STOPPED RUNNING once we were loosely sheltered in the woods, the trees some flimsy protection. She was breathing hard, too, and she held her head down to catch her breath. “My cousin Nick lives just down that way,” she said, her voice trembling, as she pointed back toward the direction of Jay’s house. “If we could get back past Jay’s house, we could run to Nick’s and telephone the police.”

I thought about Detective Charles, standing out in the street in Flushing, smoking his cigarette. What would he think if he found me here now with a gun in my purse, after I’d told him I had no idea about the yellow car?

“You’re not going anywhere,” a familiar man’s voice slurred from behind me before I could answer Daisy. I turned, and there was George. Broken, forlorn, horrible, drunken George, with his shirt loosely untucked from his overalls and his hair all askew.

I almost felt a little sorry for him for a brief second, until he raised his arm, and he was holding one of his beloved pistols, aiming it right at Daisy Buchanan’s head.





Jordan August 1922

WEST EGG




DADDY ALWAYS USED TO SAY that justice was an ARC. That it started somewhere dark and awful and spun up and around until it ended rightly with him, just on the other side of a hill, up there on his judge’s bench.

But there was no justice for a woman like me. Or for a woman like Myrtle. Was there?

And I couldn’t think about Daddy, about justice, now. He was gone. Mary Margaret was getting married, and in spite of all my lies, I was no longer a golfer. All I had left was Daisy, and if I lost her, too, I didn’t know what I would do. I couldn’t let her leave with Jay this afternoon, not after what he did yesterday to Myrtle, running over the poor woman with his car, leaving her dead in the road. What would he do to Daisy, when in a matter of days or weeks or months, he’d realize she didn’t love him, that she would never love him?