“You did take his car.”
Her eyes open and she sits up. “I borrowed it, for Christ’s sake! I just needed a ride to Athens to see Dirt Plow. How did I know I’d get pulled over?”
“The police thought it was stolen.”
“Borrowed.” She emphasizes this by poking me in the shoulder.
“Ow.”
“Toughen up, buttercup,” she says. “What about you? You seen him?”
“No. Dirt Plow? Who was that, your boyfriend at the time?”
“They were a band, dumbass.”
“I’m the dumbass? The band’s name was Dirt Plow.”
“They were good, asshole. That was their last show before they broke up. They were reinventing grunge. Very earthy.”
“I’ll bet,” I say. “Did they play on farm equipment? Use a tractor as a drum?”
“Tommy Mojo was their guitar player. He was a freak.”
“No doubt.”
“You wouldn’t know a good band if it farted in your bathtub.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
Susannah glances at her phone. “Shit, it’s almost seven thirty.”
I groan.
“Come on, Ethan.” She grabs my TV remote. “It’s time for Jeopardy!”
Susannah’s version of Jeopardy! is simple: you have to verbally guess the correct question before the contestants or any other opponents—meaning me—do, and if you guess the correct answer first, you win the cash amount for that question. You have to answer in the form of a question, of course, and you cannot write anything down—you have to keep track in your head of how much money you’ve won. She has played this with me since she was ten.
On the television, Alex Trebek stands behind his Jeopardy! lectern, looking like a televangelist about to gently admonish some wayward teens. The categories appear on-screen, and as usual the titles are somewhere between geeky and twee: MAPS, ATTILA THE HUNGRY, THE 1860S, COMIC STRIPPERS, PRESIDENTS BY FIRST NAME, and MYTHELLANEOUS. The computer programmer contestant starts with Mythellaneous for two hundred and Trebek reads out the answer, about Laocoön and a wooden horse.
“What is Troy?” Susannah shouts out before I can even open my mouth. “Boom!” She mimes throwing down a mike. I roll my eyes.
At the end of the first round, Susannah is winning, but I’ve answered five straight in a row and am feeling good enough to get us each another beer at the commercial. “Comic Strippers was so lame,” I call out from my kitchen, popping off the bottle caps.
“That’s just because you couldn’t get that one,” Susannah says.
“You mean the one you thought was Family Circus instead of FoxTrot?” I say, grinning.
She flips me off but takes a beer from me when I walk back in, all without taking her eyes off the television, where Alex Trebek has reappeared with a new board: AMERICAN WRITERS, FOUR-LETTER STOCK MARKET WORDS, PEOPLE ON POSTAGE, ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS, SCIENCE, and YOU KNOW, THE MOVIE WHERE …
“Science?” I scoff. “Stupid title.”
“Here’s a better one—what is potassium?” Susannah belts out before Alex Trebek is even halfway through the first question. She gets it right, and naturally it’s worth two grand.
Nine minutes later the second round is over and we are virtually tied within a few hundred dollars of each other. Susannah bares her teeth at me. I offer a sneer in return. “For our final round,” Alex Trebek says, and we both lean forward in anticipation. With a ding, the final category appears: SHAKESPEARE’S WOMEN.
“Yes!” I lift my clenched fists over my head.
“Jesus Christ,” Susannah says.
Quickly we grab our phones and type out how much we want to bet, which we will show each other at the end to prove who the winner is. Susannah is muttering to herself. I try to calculate how much I can bet without going bankrupt. My sister is brilliant, but this is my game, my question. I bet half of what I have. We both put our phones on the table, facedown, just as Alex Trebek reappears.
“And the answer is,” he says gravely, just before it appears on-screen:
The last words spoken by this character are
“What’s done cannot be undone: to bed, to bed, to bed.”
“One of your students, maybe?” Susannah says.
I flip her off—nice try—as I read the words. The answer skates around my brain, too quick to comprehend. Not Gertrude, not Juliet, not Portia … I almost have it, my lips forming the answer.
“More like whoever you banged at your conference,” Susannah says, and her comment sweeps through me like a winter blast, clearing my head of everything except an image of Marisa, her lips on mine, our bodies tangled together in that hotel room. My heart contracts, squeezed in a fist of granite. Susannah takes advantage of my hesitation and shouts, “Who is Lady Macbeth?” Which is, of course, the correct answer. Triumphantly she picks up her phone and displays how much she bet: everything.
* * *
IT’S LATER AND we are sitting on my couch in the dark, the blank screen of my TV facing us. In his bed in the corner, Wilson sighs, a single huff, and then goes back to sleep. I lift my beer to my lips, but the bottle is empty, like the many bottles littering the coffee table. “I need to go to bed,” I say.
Susannah stirs. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“No,” I say, followed by a molar-cracking yawn. “You get the bed. I’ll take the couch.”
“I like the couch.”
“Seriously, Suze, take my—”
“I’m sleeping on the goddamned couch, Ethan.”
“Okay, fine. Jesus.”
Susannah hmms.
I try to read her expression, but I can’t make out her face in the dark. I yawn again, my wits fading. I feel as if I’m turning to stone, that come morning I’ll be a statue of a man sitting on a couch.
“You gonna go back to therapy?” I ask. It’s a risky question, but it just popped into my head, and I’m too tired to care.
To my surprise, Susannah hmms again.
“Is that a maybe?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe. Yes.”
Wilson whimpers in his sleep.
“I gotta go to bed,” I say again, without moving.
Susannah says, “Do you ever think about that night?”
I hold in my words along with my breath. There is only one night she could be talking about. I try not to think about the shoe on the walkway, or Susannah’s bedroom light, the one she turned on, a beacon in the dark to the growling car. “No,” I manage.
“I do,” she says. “All the time.” And then she says nothing else as I sit there in the dark next to her. From the street, a passing car’s headlights sweep across the window, glinting off the beer bottles on the coffee table, and then they slide away, leaving both of us stranded in the shadows.
CHAPTER TWO
The night my parents died I was taken to the hospital, where, at some point, bathed in a twilight haze of painkillers, I realized that a man wearing a flat tweed cap was sitting in a chair across from me, reading a newspaper. He glanced up as if he knew I was awake, and his eyes were black as tar. “You look like you’re trying to give me a Nazi salute,” he said.