Marcia Talley - This Enemy Town

Medwin Black was already huffing his way up the steps to the stage, followed closely by John Tracey. I started to get up, but Dorothy grabbed my arm. “What is it?” she whispered, her breath hot against my cheek.

I pressed a hand to my chest, as if that would do anything to quiet my racing heart. “I think it’s a who ,” I said, noticing that the bundle wore a blue and gold track suit and white Nikes.

“Cell phone! Who’s got a cell phone?” someone yelled, nearly bursting our eardrums as his request blasted out over the speakers.

There wasn’t a midshipman at the Academy who didn’t own a cell phone-Sprint cut them a sweetheart deal-but after a mid took a call during rehearsal in the middle of “City on Fire,” they’d been summarily banished from the set. The rule didn’t apply to me, so I rushed to the stage, hauling my phone from its holster as I ran.

I held out the phone, then felt like an idiot when Professor Tracey just waved a hand and yelled, “Call 911, for heaven’s sake.”

I did as I was told.

While we waited for the paramedics, Tobias and Sweeney began CPR, Tobias doing compressions and Sweeney breathing into the victim’s mouth. From the edge of the stage I could see only the victim’s head, and it made my stomach churn. Blood covered the forehead and cheeks, and the eyes stared up, unblinking, into the spotlights in the fly gallery.

Sweeney checked for a pulse, shook his head, and the two began again, keeping up the rhythm until the paramedics clattered onto the stage and took over. It took less than five minutes for them to arrive, but I’m sure that to everyone-especially to Sweeney and Tobias-it must have seemed like hours.

It was, as I had suspected, too late. Their body language said it all. While one paramedic packed up their gear, two others lifted the body and laid it gently on the stretcher they’d brought with them. As the paramedics straightened the limbs, a twist of hair separated from the bloody mess that had once been a forehead and hung darkly down over one ear. Blond, I thought. The victim was a blonde. A blanket appeared from somewhere, and in the instant before the blanket covered the face, something clicked in my brain and I knew. The victim wasn’t a midshipman at all.

It was Jennifer Goodall.

Nothing-not my husband’s embrace, nor a stiffshot of brandy, nor a half-dozen Paxil left over in the medicine cabinet from 1994-was going to take this misery away, not anytime soon.

When the investigators finally let us go, I trudged home alone through the deepening snow with the bitter wind tearing at my scarf, its icy fingers plucking at every seam in the fabric of my coat.

I’m glad she’s dead.

There, I’d said it.

Just ahead of me, a man walked his beagle. When he stopped suddenly and turned, I feared I’d spoken out loud, but something in Dawson’s Gallery had caught the man’s attention. He paused for a moment, admiring, his nose pressed to the window while his dog stretched its leash to the limit and lifted its leg against a trash can. The pair moved on.

I’m glad she’s dead. And if wishes had been arrows, Jennifer Goodall would have been dead years ago, an arrow from my bow shot straight through her callous heart.

Someone had solved my problem for me. Jennifer was gone for good.

My boots slithered along the treacherous sidewalk; I spread my arms for balance. I tried to dredge up sympathy for Jennifer’s friends, her family, if only to prove that I wasn’t as blackhearted as she. She had a mother somewhere who would grieve, I told myself, a mother who might have nothing now to cherish but a high school photo, a young girl’s canopied bed, pencil marks on the kitchen door that marked young Jennifer’s growth from child to woman.

It would be hours before the official identification, of course, before the police knocked on that mother’s door in Kansas or Iowa or snowbound North Dakota, and the woman’s grieving would begin. It would be days more before Jennifer’s name hit the news. Paul would hear it first from me.

I turned left onto Prince George Street and slogged the half block to my door. I fumbled with my key and eased it into the lock. The welcoming blast of heat from a furnace working overtime hit my cheeks like a Caribbean breeze.

“Paul! I’m home!” I peeled off my gloves and arranged them to dry on top of the radiator. I kicked my boots underneath.

“Paul!”

Where the heck was he?

I hung my jacket on the hall tree my father had built, left with us when he moved to a smaller place in Snow Hill on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and padded in my stocking feet toward the kitchen. I stuck my head through the basement door. “Paul!”

“I’m in the office,” he called. “Keeping the world safe from the Infidels!”

I should have known. Thursday night. Paul would be playing Civilization III.

I didn’t go much for computer games. Emily had given me The Sims for Christmas, and even though it hogged the hard drive on my laptop, I’d installed it just to please her. Together we’d created families modeled on people we knew, and moved them into houses of our own design-a mother-daughter kind of thing. Then the Dennis character I’d named after my brother-in-law self-immolated in a kitchen fire, turning himself into a tombstone in the back garden, and I threw up my hands.

“Install a smoke detector,” Emily had suggested, hanging over my shoulder, kibbitzing. “And make sure he studies cooking.” Ever helpful, she downloaded a Sean Connery character from the Internet, Mel Gibson, too. I tried to hook Sean up with the freshly widowed Connie, but inexplicably, she refused. Little fool. Then characters started making decisions on their own-Mel wouldn’t go to work, and while Mrs. Bromley’s plumbing overflowed, a burglar broke in and stole her TV. I decided that real life was complicated enough without taking on a whole fictional community.

Life is real, life is earnest. I don’t remember who said that, but the quote sprang to mind as I lingered at the top of the basement stairs and wondered how I would break the news about Jennifer Goodall to my husband. “Can you come up a minute, sweetheart?” I stammered. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

If my voice sounded strange to him, he didn’t let on. “I can’t leave now,” he yelled back, “the Greeks are massacring the French. Give me a moment. Why don’t you put on the kettle for tea.”

Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. At least I knew who said that: Fielding. The way my life was going lately, just like the British in times of trouble, I was always hauling out the tea.

The kettle was rumbling, nearing a boil by the time Paul finally joined me, sneaking up behind me where I stood at the stove, kissing the back of my neck. “Sorry, sweetie. The Zulus launched a nuclear attack on the Iroquois and I had to wait it out.” He took me gently by the shoulders and turned me around, easing me gently back against the oven door. “Ummmm, you smell like-”

“Careful,” I warned, worrying about the gas burner blazing merrily on high behind me, “or you’ll set my butt on fire.”

He kissed the tip of my nose. “You smell like turpentine!”

“Paul,” I began, the teakettle quite forgotten. “Sit.”

“What?” he asked.

“Just sit,” I said.

I thought I’d cry. But standing at the stove studying the puzzled face of the man who had loved me unconditionally for more than twenty-five years, feeling secure in the comfort of my centuries-old kitchen with familiar objects all around me, I was dry-eyed, practically convinced that the whole horrible evening hadn’t actually happened.