Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

“She didn’t like people messing around in there.”

“Did I ever tell you about the prom?”

“What prom?”

“Senior year. The prom. I wanted to take you.”

“You were probably too chicken to ask.”

“Not exactly,” I said. I shifted in the bed so that Darlene straddled my left leg. I liked the feel of her skin warm around my thigh. “You were sort of on and off with that football player.”

“Pete Klein. God, he was gorgeous. But really, I was just trying to make you jealous.”

“You succeeded. But still, as you say, I wasn’t really sure whether to ask you. So I went to Gracie.”

“No.”

“Oh, yeah. I figured, she’s your best friend, she’ll know your deal, she’s a romantic, she’ll level with me. Big mistake.”

“What did she say?”

“She said-and I quote-‘What makes you think you’re good enough?’ ”

Darlene giggled.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

“You said you wanted her to level with you. What did you expect?”

“I thought you’d be on my side.”

“I am. Now. But… it doesn’t matter.”

“What?”

I waited.

“Gracie told me.”

“Gracie told you what?”

“That you might ask me.”

“Yeah, right. So stay away from your phone, eh?”

“No,” Darlene said. “She said I should go with you.”

“She did not.”

“Yes, she did. Anyway, you didn’t ask me.”

I sighed. Darlene let her head fall to my chest and we lay quietly for a few moments. Then I said, “I did a little snooping at the rink.”

Darlene lifted her head. “Gus. That’s a crime scene. I hope you didn’t touch anything.”

I didn’t reply.

“Oh, God. You’re going to get me fired.”

“I thought you wanted me on this, Darlene. The town would love to smack a suicide label on it and get back to building their rink.”

“Did you or did you not-wait. Your voice mail. Why did you want to know which shoe Gracie was missing?”

“The left one, yes?”

“Why?”

I rolled out from under her and dug the baby shoe out of my coat pocket. The hairbrush was there too but I reflexively left it hidden away, as I would have when we were stealing the brush from one another years ago. I laid the baby shoe on the sheet next to Darlene and sat on the bed. The cheek under Darlene’s left eye twitched once. I saw tears welling again.

“You want me to put it back?”

She bit her lower lip, put a hand on my forearm, squeezed. “That’s what she was saying.”

“Gracie? When? What are you talking about?”

“The other night. At Riccardo’s. She kept talking about how her life was a failure because… because…”

“Because why?”

She shook her head. “She wanted a kid.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Can you imagine what a disaster-”

“Shut up. She was serious. She said her time was running out.”

Maybe Gracie should have considered that when she was partying away her body, her mind, her heart, the men who took to her. But then I did not really know what her life had been like all those years in Detroit. Even though we had lived in the same town for a long time, we rarely took any trouble to seek each other out, apparently content to live in our separate worlds, mine a submersion in newsprint and sources and late-night calls from phone booths, hers I had no idea what. At my mother’s insistence, I tried to call Gracie once in a while, but I couldn’t keep up with her ever-changing phone numbers and finally gave up. I wish I could say that I felt bad about it. There were no calls from Gracie, after all.

I saw her once, or thought I did. I was at Joe Louis Arena watching the Red Wings in a playoff game against the Chicago Blackhawks. A woman I was dating from the Detroit Free Press was supposed to join me but had to work late so I bought myself a standing-room only ticket and went alone. I stood with a twenty-four-ounce cup of Stroh’s with my back to the wall along the aisle between the lower and upper bowls of seats, watching Roenick and Larmer and Chelios trample the Wings’ hopes for a Stanley Cup. At a stop in play I looked to my right to check the scoreboard for the shots on goal and there she was.

At first I didn’t recognize her. Gracie had always been cute. The boys liked the way her sharp cheekbones set off her languid blue eyes, the narrow gap between her front teeth, the barely discernible overbite that imbued her smile with a hint of secret mischief. Her body, taut as a guitar string, and her willingness to share it had helped keep her in boyfriends.

But this Gracie following a tall man with black hair slick with mousse and a cashmere topcoat down to the rink-side seats was more elegant and beautiful than I had ever seen. Her auburn hair tumbled over a charcoal turtleneck. She carried a fur coat over one arm. She seemed straighter, taller, less mousy. Maybe it was the turtleneck. Or the fur.

The man, who also wore a turtleneck, stopped and turned with a suave smile and an offer of his hand. She took it and edged into her seat, laying the fur across her lap and fluffing her hair as she settled in. She looked more like a Grace than a Gracie. I tried to keep an eye on her, but the fans behind her kept jumping to their feet and blocking the view. At the end of the second period I went to the men’s room and when I returned to my place against the wall, she was gone.

“Why didn’t she just have a kid?” I asked Darlene.

She just looked at me.

“OK, dumb question. Hard to bring up a kid in a Zam shed.”

“Which was really her point,” Darlene said. “She kept saying, ‘I fucked up my life, I fucked up my life, and I can’t fix it.’ ” She nodded at the baby shoe. “I think I know what that is.”

I picked it up and turned it over. “You do?”

“You really want your prints all over that?”

“What do you think it is?”

She set her chin atop her fists and fixed her eyes on the pillow in front of her. “She had an abortion.”

“When she was downstate?”

“If she’d had one here, we’d all know about it by now, wouldn’t we?”

“I suppose. She didn’t tell you?”

“Not in so many words. But every now and then, she would talk about kids, and, you know, she’d get all misty and after a while she just stopped making sense.”

“Would she have had it recently? Or a long time ago?”

I was thinking of Soupy. But I wasn’t about to bring him up. I wanted to ask him about it before the police did, if they hadn’t already.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if she actually had an abortion. I just have this feeling. Whenever she got into one of her little crying jags, she’d always be saying something like, ‘Don’t ever give up what you got, because you can never, never get it back.’ ”

“Wait,” I said. “Why would she have a shoe if she had an abortion?”

“Come on, it’s Gracie. She might’ve gone to Kmart and bought one.”

“Just one? Where’s the other one?”

“Gussy… I don’t know.”

“You know, Darl, maybe she actually had a baby and adopted it out.”

“Do you think she’d go through that? Nine months? No drinking?”

I didn’t have to think much. “No,” I said.

I watched Darlene staring into the pillow. I felt for her. She and Gracie went back as far as Soupy and I did. As little girls, they’d combed each other’s hair, painted on each other’s makeup, worn each other’s clothes. When Gracie was on one of her extended stays at our house, she’d often go next door to sleep at Darlene’s. I could still picture them sitting knees to knees in their one-piece bathing suits on the dive raft in front of the house, the last of the day’s sun bathing their tan shoulders, them waving their arms, leaning back to giggle, chattering about whatever they chattered about.