Good Rich People(39)

I touch her and she’s cold again and I don’t know what to think. Maybe it was the blanket that made her seem warm. I didn’t even check her pulse when I found her on the floor. I just dragged her away so I could pee in private. “What did you do?”

“You saw me do it.”

“What did you do?”

“You saw me do it.” He sips his wine. “This could make you.”

“Did you just . . . kill her?”

He shrugs “I helped you. You asked for my help and I helped you.”

I stand up, move away from her. My body is shaking, wildly shaking, but that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that I know it will stop eventually. All bad things do. It will stop. And this will just be yet another bad thing that happened to me. Add it to the list.

I shake my head. “This is my fault.”

“This is your blessing.” He takes his foil from his pocket, gently unfolds it. “That’s the problem with you, y’know? You’re poor-minded. You look at things and see the worst.”

“You killed her.”

He slips his straw between his lips. “Be optimistic.”

I gag.

He lifts the foil. “Everything happens for a reason.” He flicks his lighter on and chases a thick black line. “Be the reason.”



* * *





THE TRUTH IS, nothing has changed. Whether or not she was dead before, she is dead now. My options are the same. My need of Michael is the same. I can’t bring her back to life if she is dead again.

Instead, I find a hammer at the back of the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. Michael agrees to knock out her teeth if I will cut off her hands.

“And her feet, just in case,” he adds.

At first it is sickening, wrenching and disturbing. But slowly it becomes just a task, just something you do, like anything: right.

“You’re fucking it up,” I say. “You can’t leave pieces. You have to take the whole tooth.”

“I’m taking most of it. Do you know how deep roots go? I should just detach her jaw.”

“No.”

And later: “They keep breaking! I want to keep one for a necklace, but they keep breaking.”

“You’re not keeping one for a necklace.”

After we are finished—or at least at “good enough”—we bag everything; then we shower.

It’s well after midnight when I help him carry the body into the yard, where we split up. I go above to find the car while he slides the body down the hill, through the trees and undergrowth. I find the car by clicking her proximity key until the headlights flash.

As I activate the ignition and gaze at the dark road, a surge of panic rushes through me. I want to drive. I want to keep driving. I want to leave all this behind. A car like this could drive me to another world.

But I force myself to focus, to see this as a series of obstacles. Release the parking brake. Achievement unlocked.

Therapists say to take it one day at a time; it’s the same with dumping a body. If you separate it into pieces, it’s totally manageable. You can achieve anything. You can achieve the unthinkable.

Step one.

I move slowly down the hill, through the twisted streets. I get lost a couple times before I find the valley below the glass house, where the yard ends at an uneven fence. Michael’s head pokes over the top.

“I’m gonna have to throw her over.” His eyes flash in the dark and he ducks down.

Step two.

Her hand appears first, reaching as if asking me to help pull her over. She is stiff and loose at the same time, weighed down with death. And I try to manage all the pieces of her as they move in ways you wouldn’t expect, in ways no living thing does.

“You’re scratching her up,” he says. I try to respond, but my voice is muffled by her coat, her black ski coat, the one that brushed against me on the street.

I lose my balance. She falls on top of me. She reeks of mulch and leaves with just a hint of expensive perfume. My heart races. For a second, for a minute, it’s like she is embracing me and then it’s like she is trying to kill me.

I can’t move. I deserve to die.

Michael’s heavy boots land on my side of the fence. “What are you doing?” He helps me out from under her.

“This doesn’t feel real.” I shake my head.

“No real thing does.” He lights a cigarette, then drags her toward the open trunk.

Step three.





DEMI



Michael sits in the front seat. He inhales so deeply from the foil that he frizzles the heroin. The burned smell makes me gag.

We drive in silence toward the camp.

“Someone is going to be awake,” I say. Michael sits back, starting to nod out. “Someone is going to see us.”

“No one sees us.” His eyelids are heavy. His lower lip hangs, a drop of spit at its center. “We don’t even see ourselves.” His head falls back, bounces lightly on the seat, and it is clear I am going to do this the same way I do everything, have done everything ever: alone.

I park the car at the dead end below the freeway off-ramp. I grip the steering wheel and order myself to be calm.

The camp stretches under the freeway, streams loosely across the sidewalk. You forgot to put your things away; now someone lives in them. I could go back to my tent. I could change my clothes; I could slip back in and no one would ever notice.