Page 12 of Kill Your Darlings

She unclasped her purse and took out her phone, dialing 911.

After being asked for her emergency, she broke into the breathless words that she’d already planned.

“My husband, I think he was drunk, he just fell down the steps.”

“What steps?” came a voice that was so regulated that for a brief moment Wendy wondered if she was talking to a real person.

“I don’t know what they’re really called, but they’re the Exorcist Steps. From the movie.”

“Are you in Georgetown?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’m sending people your way right now. Are you near your husband’s body?”

“No, he’s... down at the bottom, and I’m up...”

“That’s okay. Can you be very careful and walk down to the bottom of the steps toward your husband?”

“Okay,” Wendy said, and ended the call. She knew she wasn’t supposed to, but she needed a moment to think. For one terrible moment she thought she was being watched, and turned around to look back at the dark buildings. There was no one there, just her alone. The 911 operator had told her to go down the steps, and that was what she did, climbing down them now, one hand still holding her phone, and one on the handrail. It was still quiet and her shoes made clacking sounds on the concrete.

When she got to the bottom and saw the way that Thom was lying, she knew he was dead. It would have been surprising if he wasn’t. He’d fallen so violently.

She sat down again, on the second step from the bottom, about a yard away from Thom’s body. He was cast in a sickly yellow light from a streetlamp. One arm was up and over his head as though he were attempting to answer a question in class. There was less blood than she thought there would be, but his head was at an unnatural angle. She thought there might be some blood on his neck, but then she realized she was looking at a sharp bump under his skin that was causing a shadow to fall where there shouldn’t be one. Something had snapped in his neck.

She turned and looked down the street instead. Someone was on a bike, pedaling past on the other side of the nearest road, but Wendy kept quiet. She had already heard the sirens in the distance.

Sitting still on the step, Wendy worked on her breathing, not knowing if she was scared or if the walk down the steps had takenit out of her. She repeated some of the lines she’d been telling herself the past several days. This is what’s best for her. And this is what’s best for Thom. But it still felt momentous, like she’d cracked her world in two. There was the world she had five minutes before, Thom still alive, and now there was this world, and who knew what that was going to bring.

The sirens were closer now. She took another look at her husband, all of his angles wrong. Darling, darling, she thought, and almost looked away. But she kept her eyes on him, forming a memory she would one day push to the very back of her mind. It would go into a room with other memories. Not gone forever, of course. But the room had a door and she knew how to shut it.

Blue lights flooded the scene and she turned away from her husband to the arriving ambulance.

2018

i

“It’s the only thing we have in common,” Thom said, a joke he’d made... how many times?

“We can’t be the only ones, of course,” Wendy said. “But I’ve, we’ve, never met anyone else with the same—”

“With the same nightmare,” Thom said.

“Why do you call it a nightmare?” This was from Louise Holly. She and her husband, Mike, were over for dinner. It was the first time just the four of them had socialized together. Mike and Louise were a recently retired couple who had moved to Goose Neck a year and a half earlier. It was such a small community that Thom and Wendy had seen them often enough, but had never felt the need to have dinner with just them until Thom had discovered that he and Louise shared a love for jazz trumpet. So, Mike and Louise were over for lasagna and to listen to Thom’s vinyl collection of Miles Davis and Chet Baker records. And now Thom was opening another bottle of wine even though Mike and Louise were drinking decaf coffee, andthey were all talking about the upcoming shared fiftieth birthday party that Thom and Wendy were throwing.

“It’s a nightmare because your birthday is supposed to be a day just for yourself, and I have to share it with my wife. And she doesn’t even care about her birthday.”

“When I heard you two were doing a shared fiftieth,” Mike said, “I naturally assumed you were combining them because they were close together, not that you had the exact same birthday.”

“Itisstrange,” Wendy said.

Mike asked, “When did you realize?” at the same time as Louise said, “Who was born first?”

These were all questions they’d been asked before, of course, multiple times. Whenever anyone learned they were born on the same day it became the most interesting thing about them.

“I was born close to noon and Thom was born...” She turned her head and looked at him, even though she knew.

“At seventeen minutes past eleven at night. I’m almost a half day younger.”

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