PART EIGHT THE TABLE
Caleb Marsh stood in the hall. Tired. Emptied. He’d been hiding out nearby all day, waiting for nightfall to sneak back to Devin’s apartment. He did not have flowers this time. He had his hands in his pockets.
Devin let him in. The apartment was what it was.
Dark. A lamp. A couch that came with the place.
A TV and two game consoles on a shelf. Posters on the wall: a sci-fi movie, an anime, a band.
A bookshelf full of boxed action figures still in their plastic.
A small dining table with two chairs. The kitchen counter had a stack of takeout boxes and a pile of mail he had not opened.
Caleb looked around. He saw the action figures.
He saw the posters. He saw the consoles.
Something in him recognized the room. He had the same shelf in his apartment in Tulsa.
The same plastic figures. The same posters.
He felt the room as familiar in a way that had nothing to do with this apartment and everything to do with the kind of man who lived in it.
Devin pulled out a chair. He said: sit down.
They sat across the small table from each other.
Devin said: I have to tell you something. I don’t know why I’m telling you. I don’t know you. But I can’t sit in here alone with it. The woman, the one I told you about, my roommate, Maren. She didn’t make it. She passed tonight. From the accident. The injuries were too much.
He said it because it was the story he had.
It was the lie he had told on Valentine’s Day.
It was the lie that had kept Caleb away for months.
He did not know that Caleb knew where Maren lived.
He did not know that Caleb had been in Albuquerque that afternoon.
He did not know that Caleb had been in her driveway.
Caleb held still.
Something moved behind Caleb’s eyes. A small, cold light.
The lie landed in the wrong place. She did not pass from a car accident.
There was no car accident. Caleb knew that.
Caleb had searched for months. There had never been a wreck.
And she had not passed tonight from a wreck, because the thing that had happened to her tonight was not a wreck. It was him.
Caleb watched Devin. He saw it now: how Devin’s eyes slid, how the story came out too smooth, as if he were reading from a script he had written.
She did not pass from a car accident. She never spoke to Caleb on the phone.
It was never really her. The photos were stolen.
Caleb had been fooled. And the woman in the photos, the real one, the one whose face he had loved, was not dead of an accident.
She was on a table in a hospital because Caleb had put two bullets in her back three hours ago.
Caleb reached into his jacket. He laid the 9mm on the table between them. Then he picked it up again and pointed it at Devin’s face.
He said: tell me the truth. Who is she. How do you know her. And why did you just lie to me about how she died.