Patrick Quinlan - The Hit

‘Jesus, Mom,’ Katie said. What she thought was: Fuck you, Mom.

‘It’s true, isn’t it? How is an old-fashioned person like Tyler supposed to deal with that? He can’t talk about it. He probably can’t even think about it without getting upset. Personally, I think your marriage is doomed.’

With that, she stood on unsteady legs and gathered their glasses. ‘Are you having another drink?’ It came out ferociously, almost an accusation.

‘Sure, why not?’ Katie said. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

Her mother went inside and Katie sat, watching the light begin to fade from the sky. She never watched the news, but even she knew that many people thought the world was ending. The weather was changing. The economy was collapsing and millions of people were out of work, or had lost their homes. None of these hardships had touched her life, but she felt them somehow, like they were all around her, in the air she breathed, on the empty highways she drove, in the gated communities where she and her mother both lived.

And she had her own hardships, didn’t she? It was a painful thing, not being able to bear a child. She had lost that ability years ago, at the age of twenty-five, without even knowing it. Back in her Dewey Beach days she had picked up a case of gonorrhea. Worse yet, she apparently had it for months before any symptoms appeared. Even worse, she got it during a time when she was particularly active, partying too much, and she wasn’t even sure who it came from. She was horrified by it, of course. Who wouldn’t be horrified by a foul-smelling, painful discharge coming from their body, especially that part of their body? But she had gone to a medical clinic and a round of antibiotics had knocked it out in a few days. Katie was good at forgetting unpleasant facts, and a short time later it seemed that the whole episode had happened to somebody else.

Then, two years ago, she had miscarried a baby. It was early into the pregnancy, less than two months. These things happened. Then, last year, it had happened again. A battery of tests quickly revealed something she hadn’t even suspected. Her uterus had been scarred by the gonorrhea. As a result, her pregnancies were ectopic – meaning the fetus lodged each time in one of her fallopian tubes, and grew there for a little while. But the tubes were too narrow. They weren’t designed for growing a baby, so her body expelled the fetus in self-defense. This was one impromptu anatomy lesson that she hadn’t wanted to learn.

The good news was that there was no threat to her overall health, and she could enjoy a normal, active sex life with a willing partner. The bad news was that she could never carry a baby to term. The worst news was that there was no way to explain her past to Tyler in a way that would make sense to him, or that he could accept. She had never felt like a whore before – not until the day they found out why she couldn’t have a baby, and not until she looked into her husband’s eyes.

She remembered how some weeks afterward he wasn’t home one night, and she wandered the big house, thinking that she might start cleaning. Instead she poured herself a glass of wine and went into the living room. She sat on the leather sofa across from Tyler’s chair. She could see the indentations his body had made. It was like he was sitting there, invisible. When the grandfather clock chimed nine, she began to cry. There wasn’t much force behind the tears, and she regained herself. Maybe she was reaching the point where she was all cried out. She hoped so.

She remembered another time when he left the bed in the middle of the night. She padded down the stairs, looking for him. She found him in the living room, slouched in his chair, whiskey glass in hand. His eyes were open, staring straight ahead. He looked up when she came to the doorway. Those eyes were hard. She saw no caring there, no warmth, just cold intelligence measuring her. He could have been a creature from an alien race, come to take specimens back home. He stared at her a long time.

‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Tell me how much you love me.’

There was nothing she could do, nothing she could say. Things were never OK between them. They had moments when they were easy together, like they used to be, but those moments became increasingly rare. It was quiet in the house, and she felt his anger most of the time, rather than saw it. He shut her out. She suspected that when the time was right for him, he would put an end to the marriage. Right now, Katie, flawed as she was in his eyes, fit his purposes. Appearances were important to Tyler, and in their community they still seemed the perfect couple – a wealthy, successful and very fit older man with a stunning young wife. But she imagined a day would come when his purposes changed, and then he would make her go away. Maybe he would find himself another young woman. For all she knew, maybe he already had.

He blamed her, of course. He blamed her for those men who came before him. She had always been vague about her past love life. But that luxury was gone. He extracted confessions from her regarding each and every man that came before him. When she told him about Ray, she could swear she saw Tyler’s heart break. He got drunk and slapped her that night, for the first time ever. It didn’t hurt, but it surprised her and she cried.

Good for you, she told him in her mind as the tears rolled down her cheeks. You should be the one with the broken heart for a change.

Now, her mother came out the sliding glass doors with the next round of drinks. ‘Mom,’ Katie said. ‘I just don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t live like this anymore.’

Foerster was dead tired.

He stood at a payphone on the street in downtown Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It was night, just after ten o’clock, and he was half a block from the beach. He could hear the water lapping at the sand. High-rise hotels and low-rise motels lined the strip here. A lot of them were closed and boarded up. Foerster didn’t care. He had exactly nineteen dollars left of the money his mother had given him, and he would avoid paying for a room if he could.

A handful of honky-tonk bars were open right near here. Neon lights blinked, country music blasted, and people milled around and smoked cigarettes in the night air. A lot of military types in olive T-shirts and crew cut hair. A lot of biker types wearing leather and denim jackets and showing gang colors. A lot of sun-kissed, big-haired blonds wearing shorts, bikini tops and high-heels. Once in a while, a police cruiser rolled slowly by. To Foerster’s eyes, these were the only people who seemed to be out.

He seemed to have no energy left – like someone had inserted a tube and drained the vitality right out of him. The payphone kiosk was practically holding him up. His head was congested and he felt a bit feverish. No surprise there. By his own estimate, he’d traveled about seven hundred miles in a little over thirteen hours. Luck had been with him. After swimming to shore from the ferry, he’d limped to the highway entrance ramp, stuck his thumb out and inside of ten minutes got picked up by a long haul trucker headed for Maryland. Half-drowned and bedraggled, the barest trickle of traffic on the roads, and he’d still managed to get a ride. Foerster was almost willing to say that something more than luck was at work here.

Maybe it was meant to be.

Of course that was silly. Nothing was meant to be. The universe unfolded in random fashion and people were the helpless playthings of enormous forces beyond their control. But then again…

If mere luck had sent that first ride, it couldn’t have worked out much better than it did. The driver was young, with a three day growth of beard. He had been arrested half a dozen times, hated cops, and sympathized completely with Foerster’s story. He even gave Foerster a flannel shirt and jeans to wear, plus a towel to dry off with. The clothes were a size or so too big, but it was better to be dry than wet.