Heartsick

“Well, I can whip something up.” He gave a fancy little bow. “I can make a hell of an artichoke heart and peanut butter casserole.”

Susan glanced back at her laptop on the coffee table, longing suddenly for the comfort of her wine and her computer. “I’m on deadline. I’ve really got to get some writing done tonight.” She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the Pottery Barn mirror. There was the furrow again. Her wineglass still sat where she’d left it on the curio table in front of the mirror.

“You have to eat.” He looked at her expectantly.

She turned to him. “How did you know where I lived, anyway?”

“We’ve got access to Nexus at school. You can find anyone. Just by typing in their name.” Reston took a moment, as if considering his exact intent, wanting to get the words just so. “It was hard for me after you graduated.” He glanced away. “You didn’t respond to my letters.”

“I was in college.”

He shrugged casually and shot her a handsome smile. “I loved you.”

“That’s because I was a teenager,” Susan said, trying to explain. “I adored you. What’s not to love about that?” She walked over to the mirror and picked her wineglass off the table and drained it. The photograph that Bliss had given her the week before was stuck in the corner of the mirror. Three-year-old Susan holding hands with her father. Safe. Happy.

Everything changes eventually.

“I’ve never stopped thinking about you,” Paul said.

Susan looked at her reflection. “Come on, Paul,” she said to her own image. “You don’t even know me.”

He walked up behind her, his reflection serious and a little hurt. “How can you say that?”

Susan picked her wooden hairbrush off the table and began to brush her pink hair. It didn’t need it, but it gave her something to do. “Because when you knew me, I wasn’t a fully formed person. I was a teenager.” She kept brushing, feeling the bristles of the brush drag along her skull, the blood rush to her scalp. Her bearded father stared at her from the photograph, his hand clenched protectively around the little girl’s.

Paul touched the back of her head. “You were never a teenager.”

She put the hairbrush down. She did it heavily, and the brush made a snapping sound against the wooden table, startling her. “Look,” she said, glancing at her watch. “You have to go. I’m on deadline.”

“Let me take you out to di

She turned away from the mirror, from the photograph, from her father, and looked at him. “Paul.”

He gave her that handsome smile again. “One hour. I’ll regale you with stories of Dan McCallum. For your story. Then I’ll drop you off and you can get your work done.”

Susan felt like she was fifteen again. Incapable of disappointing him. Besides, she didn’t have the energy to argue. “One hour.”

“Cross my heart.”

The elevator took a thousand years to get down to the parking garage in the basement of Susan’s building. Paul didn’t speak, and for the first time in Susan’s life, she didn’t try to fill the silence. Paul just stood there with a soft smile on his face, watching her as she fiddled with the sash of her trench coat and shifted her weight on her feet and studied the illuminated numbers above the elevator door. Susan could see both their reflections in the wall’s steel sheeting, a distorted mesh of colors refracting off the metal.

The doors opened and Paul let her exit first.

“I’m this way,” he said, and he pointed off to a car on the far side of the garage, away from the elevator, far from the other parked cars. Well, Susan thought, at least there’d be time to suck down half a cigarette. She fumbled in her purse for one and lit it.

“So, did you know Lee Robinson?” Susan asked, taking a drag.

Paul drew his face back in disgust. “You still smoke?”

“No,” Susan said, flustered. “Just in social situations.”

He looked around the parking garage. “Is this a social situation?”

Susan groaned. “You’re not my teacher anymore, Paul. Don’t lecture me.”

“Four hundred and forty thousand people die a year in the U.S. from smoking. That’s fifty people an hour.”

Susan took another careful drag off the cigarette. “How well did you know Lee Robinson?” she asked again.

He reached up and touched his head, like he had a sudden headache. “Not well at all,” he said.

Susan pulled at her sash, untying it and retying it. “But you were pretty tight with McCallum, right? I thought I remembered you telling a story about going fishing or something with him on his boat.”

“Suzy,” Paul said with an exasperated smile. “That was twenty years ago.”

“So you used to hang out.”

“We went fishing together once twenty years ago.” He reached over and put his arm around her shoulder, and she took an extra step forward and shrugged it off.

Susan laughed nervously. “Could you have parked any farther away?” she asked.

Paul shrugged and put his hands back in his pockets. “It was crowded when I got here.”

“Well, if I collapse because of my poor lung capacity, just leave my body for the rats,” Susan joked.

“Smoking isn’t fu

The car, finally. Susan had never been so happy to see a ten-year-old silver Passat wagon. She smiled at the two stickers affixed neatly side by side on the back bumper. One read SAVE OUR SCHOOLS. The other read IF YOU’RE NOT OUTRAGED YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.

Paul got in on his side first, leaning over and unlocking Susan’s door. She climbed in and pulled her seat belt into place, and took a final drag off the cigarette. Then she looked for the ashtray to put it out in. It was the cleanest car she’d ever seen. The dash was so clean, it shone. There wasn’t a Corgi hair or a pen or an old pack of catsup to be found. She reached out and opened the ashtray in the center consol. The ashtray in her car was filled with old gum and ashes. Paul’s ashtray was empty. You could eat out of it. If you wanted to. Susan examined her cigarette; it seemed a shame to sully his sterile ashtray with it. Paul had turned his head and was leaning between the seats to root for something in the back. She didn’t want to just drop the cigarette on the parking garage floor-she was trying to be better about the whole littering thing. Maybe Paul had something in the glove compartment she could wrap the cigarette in and then she could put it in her purse. She opened the glove compartment. Inside was a flashlight and a single folded map. “Jesus, Paul,” she said. “Clean much?” The car even smelled disinfected, like a freshly scrubbed public bathroom.

“What did you do? Dip your car in bleach?” she asked. “Because it smells like-” She pulled the map out and turned it over in her hands. It was a nautical map of the Willamette. “Clorox.”

He grabbed her from behind just as she reached for the door handle. She clawed at the door, but he hit an all-lock button and the electronic locks bolted into place with a mechanical thud. She scrambled to get to the button on her door handle to unlock her door, but he had a forearm around her neck and something over her mouth and nose and she couldn’t get free of him. She fought, all knees and elbows, but it wasn’t enough. He had leverage on her. She thought of all sorts of things: how she wished she’d done that story on self-defense classes; how she should have worn her shit-kicker boots, the ones with the steel toes; how she should have kept her nails long, so she could rip his fucking eyes out; how, somehow, none of this surprised her at all. She managed to get the lit cigarette up, grinding it hard into his neck until he howled and wrenched her wrist until she dropped it. She had wanted to kill him with it, but she would settle for it burning a hole through his spotless floor mat. That would be her legacy: a burn spot on an otherwise-pristine surface. Fucking perfect. It was her last thought as the darkness engulfed her.