Good Rich People(38)
To my relief, he starts toward the open door. I’m safe. Then he darts suddenly, inexplicably, toward her body like my life is a farce run on irony, and he reaches toward it, grabs at it. I squeal as he seems to wrestle with it. “I’m taking a blanket,” he explains, and he jerks it hard and the pillows leap up and her face is exposed, wrenched sideways by the upset but still beautifully lit in angelic repose. “Oh, my God.”
I shut the door.
DEMI
He sits on the couch. He has switched to red wine, body-finding booze.
“What were you planning to do with her?” he asks again. This is the one point he is sticking on, as if to emphasize how lucky I am that he showed up.
“I bought zip ties. Trash bags. Bleach.”
“A saw?” He watches me blanch. “I gave her straight H.” He throws back wine from the bottle. “It must have been something else she was taking.”
I don’t say anything, but I do wonder why he followed us, why he waited all day, hoping to run into me, as if he expected something like this to happen.
He scoots forward, heels scraping the floor. “You know what we should do? We should put her in the camp. I bet they wouldn’t even—” He bumps the wine bottle, catches it before it falls. “I bet you they wouldn’t even look into it if they found her there.”
“They’d still ID her. They’d find out she’s some rich woman. Then they’d care.”
He slips a crinkled rectangle of aluminum foil out of his pocket, sticks a short plastic straw in his mouth and chases heroin with a lighter, then sits back with bright eyes like he’s been enlightened. “We take off her fingers. Take out her teeth. I had a friend once burned to death by a heater in his tent. We could set her on fire.”
“That’s horrible.”
He scowls. “I’m trying to help you.”
I say nothing. I know he’s right. I need him; that’s the worst part.
He nods, as if my silence is agreement; then he runs another line of heroin and coughs. “You got ID on you?”
“Hers?”
“No, yours. We put her in your tent. Leave your bag outside with all your shit in it, personal stuff, whatever you got. They got a license, cops don’t need to ID the body.” He claps his hands together. “Open, shut.”
“But what if they do ID it? Once the body leaves here, we lose control.”
He leans back on the couch. “Do you know how many homeless people die in this city? Ha.” His shoulders jerk on the laugh. “You think they ID every body? They don’t even count. They don’t want anyone to guess how many people actually live on the street.”
My resolve wobbles. This isn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want Michael. I wanted her life for mine. I wanted control. “Maybe we should just leave. Leave the body. Leave the apartment. Take a few things with us.”
He smirks. “I won’t stop you.”
“You’re staying?”
He shrugs. “When a tornado drops a house on you, you live in it.”
“What if we get caught?”
“The police don’t have time to look into everything, especially in this town. People govern themselves; most of them are just too dumb to realize it.” He taps his temple with his finger. He reminds me of my dad, the things I loved and hated about him, the things I envied.
“What about the people upstairs?”
“They’re rich, right? They won’t even notice. Rich people live in a different world.” I want to live in that world. I want to live in a world where I can step over a body, not look need in the eye, where I can be free of want, free of me.
He gets to his feet.
“What are you doing?”
“We’re doing this. We’re doing it now.”
I move to stop him; then I stop moving. He’s right. If I’m going to do this, I need to do this now. And I need his help.
Her keys are by the door, where she dropped them when she came in. She has a BMW with an automatic unlock button. I can walk up to the street and find her car. I can park down below the yard. We can load up her body, take her to the camp, take her anywhere.
Maybe I can trust Michael. He has looked out for me. He directed me to a tent the night I was too sick to keep walking. In a way, he has kept an eye on me all along.
He saw me even when I was invisible. It’s unfortunate that this is the best I can get.
“Okay,” I agree.
He smiles from one end of his mouth to the other.
He walks to her body, kneels down over her. He peels back her sleeve, weaves his fingers around her wrist. “You idiot,” he says, and I think he is talking to her. “She’s not dead.”
And then he slides his huge hands up her face and cracks her neck.
DEMI
I am screaming inside, screaming so loud I can’t hear anything. And it’s like I’m dreaming. Then it’s like I’m too awake. Then I’m dreaming again. And I have a choice: wake up or keep dreaming.
“What do you mean, she’s not dead?” I rush to the body. It feels warm. Warm all of a sudden and she tricked me, she lied to me, she made me believe she was dead. “She’s alive?”
He sits back on his haunches, stretches toward the bottle of wine. “She was probably in a coma or something. Brain-dead.” Had she really been alive this whole time? Did I know? How could I not?