Michael Koryta: Tonight I Said Goodbye

“But she killed a man. She murdered her own husband.”

“Well, sure,” I said. “There’s that.”

Amy nodded. “And you can rationalize it a little, can’t you? You can look at the situation and justify her actions, or least justify her freedom.”

“Yes,” I said. “But I shouldn’t be able to. Killing is killing. It’s not my job to justify it. She took a life, Amy. And John’s okay with letting her go, because he wants the best for his granddaughter. But it probably would have been best for her to have both parents alive, don’t you think?”

Amy pulled her legs up on the couch and tucked them underneath her. “You almost died for her, you know.”

“Yes.”

“Twice.”

“Yes.”

“Any bitterness about that?”

“No.”

We sat on the couch and stared at the wall. All the lights were off, and that was how I wanted it to remain. I was content to stay in the dark again.

“You loved her, didn’t you?” Amy asked softly.

I shook my head. “No, I didn’t love her. I’d known her for three days, Amy.”

“Okay, so you didn’t love her. But maybe you wanted the chance.”

I shrugged. “Screw it.”

She smiled at me. “Too tough to care, eh, Lincoln?”

I shook my head again. “Not too tough. Too smart.”

She touched the back of my head lightly, her fingers caressing the swollen knots left by Krashakov’s gun. “People come and go in our lives. We don’t get to pick when and how they come, and we don’t get to pick when and how they go. We just learn from it, deal with it, and move on. That’s how it goes. And that’s what you have to do now.”

“Deep,” I said. “You should be a writer.”

She flicked her finger against one of the knots hard enough to cause a little pain. “And you should be an ass. Oh, wait-you’ve already got that covered.”

I laughed, then sighed and put my head back against the couch. “I do what I can.”

“Yes,” she said, “you do. And that’s all you can ask of yourself, Lincoln. Now I’m going to let you get some sleep. You’re going to need it for a day under the interrogation lamps.”

“It’ll be a blast,” I said. “The cops are probably selling tickets if you want to be there for the show.”

I walked her down to her car. She gave me a long, hard hug, then climbed into the Acura and drove away.

I went upstairs and dug Betsy Weston’s diary out of the drawer where I had stashed it. I read through a few of the entries again, smiling at her spelling mistakes, able now to put a voice and an attitude with the thoughts. Then I snapped it shut and threw it in the garbage can. The heart-shaped prism I had taken from her bedroom that same afternoon was in the drawer with the diary. I started to toss it in the trash, too, but I didn’t. I took it down to the gym and used the fishing line to hang it in the little window next to the desk. The sun would emerge from behind the clouds again one of these days, and when it did, the prism would sparkle, and maybe it would make Grace smile. You do what you can.

I locked the office and walked out to the parking lot. A jet roared overhead, flying quite low as it came in for a landing at the airport just a few miles away. The sound was tremendous, a blast that seemed to shake me until it was all I was aware of. I looked up at the sky and watched the trail of smoke and the lights as the plane roared in. I wondered where it had been and where it would go next. I wondered if it had carried Julie and Betsy Weston someplace. Eventually, the plane descended so low the buildings obscured it from sight. The cloud of vapor it had left behind faded slowly into the night sky, and then there was nothing left but the memory of the sound.

I went upstairs and went to bed.