Where the dead lay

FORTY-FOUR

You want another?” Neil Ratay asked, threatening to pour a fourth cup of coffee, black and strong. But Behr had had enough and waved Ratay off. Behr had gone straight home on the heels of the longest day he could remember living and passed out into a dreamless sleep. Seven hours later he shot bolt upright. He’d sweated through his T-shirt and the sheets. He had a feeling that would be happening for the next few weeks, or months, or maybe even longer. When he noticed morning had slipped around the blinds and into the bedroom and there was no point in trying to go back to sleep, he rose and went to get Susan. And while Susan sat there listening, her jaw clenched tight, he’d told it all to Ratay-all except for Pomeroy, and the name of the big investigation firm. It was what he owed the man, plain and simple.

“So I can write it?” Ratay asked, jotting his final notes.

“Give me a day to think it through clearly,” Behr said, “but yeah, you can write it.”

• • •

After that he took Susan home. They didn’t talk along the way. Something he couldn’t name wouldn’t let him speak. All Behr could do was glance over at her every half block or so and replay the events of the past week in his head. None of it made much sense to him, and the part that made the least was why he’d felt the same sensation when he learned Susan was pregnant as he had when he’d faced Terry Schlegel’s gun: cold, chest-squeezing blackness. He could dress it up and tell himself he’d felt disloyal, that he’d been concerned that a new life would wipe away his memories of Tim, and even Linda, and those memories were all he had left of his son-they were all he had at all for a long while-but now he knew the truth. He was afraid, plain and simple. Because what she had given him with those words in his car that night was hope-hope, and a chance at joy, and a future. But it is a fearful thing to love what death can touch. And the prospect of losing it all again was more than he could face.

Too quickly they reached her house, and the thing that wouldn’t let him speak kept on and she climbed out of the car. She looked at him for a long, disbelieving moment, then turned for her place.