Amy Bloom - Where the God of Love Hangs Out

“Oh, we love glamorous,” Mrs. Warburg said.

In the Adirondacks, the Glens Falls trail and the old mining roads sometimes overlap. Miles of trail around Speculator and Johnsburg are as smooth and neatly edged as garden paths. These are the old Fish Hill Mining Company roads, and they will take you firmly and smoothly from the center of Hamilton County to the center of the woods and up the mountainside. Eugene Trask took Anne and her boyfriend, Teddy Ross, when they were loading up Teddy’s van in the Glens Falls parking lot. He stabbed Teddy twice in the chest with his hunting knife, and tied him to a tree and stabbed him again, and left him and his backpack right there, next to the wooden sign about NO DRINKING, NO HUNTING. He took Anne with him, in Teddy’s car. They found Teddy’s body three days later and his parents buried him two days after that, back in Virginia.

Eugene Trask killed another boy just a few days before he killed Teddy. Some kids from Schenectady were celebrating their high school graduation with an overnight camping trip, and when Eugene Trask came upon them, he tied them all to different trees, far enough apart so they couldn’t see one another, and then he killed the boy who’d made him mad. While he was stabbing him, the same way he stabbed Teddy, two sharp holes in his heart and then a slash across his chest, for emphasis, for something, the other kids slipped out of their ropes and ran. By the time they came back with people from town, Eugene Trask had circled around the woods and was running through streams, where the dogs could not catch his scent.

The heart is really two hearts and four parts: the right and the left, and the up and the down. The right heart pumps blood through the lungs, the left through the body. Even when there is nothing more for it to do, even when you have already lost ten ounces of blood, which is all an average-size person needs to lose to bring on heart failure, the left heart keeps pumping, bringing old news to nowhere. The right heart sits still as a cave, a thin scrim of blood barely covering its floor. The less air you have, the faster the whole heart beats. Still less and the bronchioles, hollow, spongy flutes of the lungs, whistle and squeeze dry until they lie flat and hard like plates on the table, and when there is no more air and no more blood to bring help from the farthest reaches of the body, the lungs crack and chip like old china.

Mrs. Warburg and I both went to psychics.

She said, “A psychic in East Cleveland. What’s that tell you?” which is why I kept talking to her even after Mr. Warburg said he didn’t think it was helping. Mrs. Warburg’s psychic lived in a rundown split-level ranch house with lime-green shag carpeting. Her psychic wore a white smock and white shoes like a nurse, and she got Mrs. Warburg confused with her three o’clock, who was coming for a reading on her pancreatic cancer. Mrs. Warburg’s psychic didn’t know where Anne was.

My psychic was on West Cedar Street, in a tiny apartment two blocks away from us on Beacon Hill. My boss’s wife had lost a diamond earring and this psychic found it, my boss said. He looked like a graduate student. He was barefoot. He saw me looking down, and flexed his feet.

“Helps me concentrate,” he said.

We sat down at a dinette table and he held my hands between his. He inhaled and closed his eyes. I couldn’t remember if I had the twenty dollars with me or not.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

We sat for three minutes, and I watched the hands on the grandfather clock behind him. My aunt had the same clock, with cherrywood flowers climbing up the maple box.

“It’s very dark,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s very dark where she is.”

I found the money and he pushed it back at me, and not just out of kindness, I didn’t think.

I told Mrs. Warburg my psychic didn’t know anything, either.

The police came on Saturday and again on Monday, but not the same ones. On Monday it was detectives from New York, and they did not treat me like the worried roommate. They reminded me that I told the Boston police I’d last seen Anne at two o’clock on Thursday, before she went to Teddy’s. They said someone else had told them Anne came back to our apartment at four o’clock, to get her sleeping bag. I said yes, I remembered — I was napping and she woke me up, because it was really my sleeping bag; I lent it to her for the trip. Yes, I did see her at four, not just at two.

Were you upset she was going on this trip with Ted? they said.

Teddy, I said. Why would I be upset?

They looked around our apartment, where I had to walk through Anne’s little bedroom to use the bathroom and she had to walk through my little bedroom to get to the front door, as if it were obvious why I’d be upset.

Maybe you didn’t like him, they said.

I liked him, I said.

Maybe he was cutting into your time with Annie.

Anne, I said, and they looked at each other as if it was significant that I had corrected them.

Anne, they said. So maybe Teddy got in the way of your friendship with Anne?

I rolled my eyes. No, I said. We double-dated sometimes. It was cool. They looked at their notes.

You have a boyfriend? they said. We’d like to talk to him, too.

Sure, I said. He’s in Maine with his family, but you can talk to him.

They shrugged a little. Maine, with parents, was not a promising lead.

They pressed me a little more about my latent lesbian feelings for Anne and my unexpressed and unrequited love for Teddy, and I said that I thought maybe I had forgotten to tell the Boston police that I had worked double shifts every day last week and that I didn’t own a car. They smiled and shrugged again.

If you think of anything, they said.

It’s very dark where she is, is what I thought.

The police talked to me and they talked to Rose Trask, Eugene’s sister, too. She said Eugene was a worthless piece of shit. She said he owed her money and if they found him she’d like it back, please. She hid Eugene’s hunting knife at the bottom of her root cellar, under the onions, and she hid Eugene in her big old-fashioned chimney until they left. Later, they made her go up in the helicopter to help them find him, and they made her call out his name over their loudspeaker: “Eugene, I love you. Eugene, it will be okay.” While they circled the park, which is three times the size of Yellowstone, she told the police that Eugene had worked on their uncle’s farm from the time he was seven, because he was big for his age, and that he knew his way around the woods because their father threw him out of the house naked, in the middle of the night, whenever he wet his bed, which he did all his life.

Mrs. Warburg said she had wanted to be a dancer and she made Anne take jazz and tap and modern all through school but what Anne really loved was talking. Debate Club, Rhetoric, Student Court, Model U.N., anything that gave you plenty of opportunity for arguing and persuading, she liked. I said I knew that because I had had to live with Anne for four years and she had argued and persuaded me out of cheap shoes and generic toilet paper and my mother’s winter coat. She’d bought us matching kimonos in China town. I told Mrs. Warburg that it was entirely due to Anne that I was able to walk through the world like a normal person.

Mrs. Warburg said, “Let me get another drink.”

I lay back on Anne’s bed and sipped my beer. Mrs. Warburg and I had agreed that since I didn’t always remember to get rum for our get-togethers, I would make do with beer. Anne actually liked beer, Mrs. Warburg said. Mr. Warburg liked Scotch. Mrs. Warburg went right down the middle, she felt, with the rum and Coke.

“Should we have gone to Teddy’s funeral?” she said.

I didn’t think so. Mrs. Warburg had never met Teddy, and I certainly didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to sit with his family, or sit far behind them, hoping that since Teddy was dead, Anne was alive, or that if Anne had to be dead, she’d be lying in a white casket, with bushels of white carnations around her, and Teddy would be lying someplace dark and terrible and unseen.