head. He feels her breath on his bare neck. Tries to take inventory of the room—the lamp, the cord, the toolbox out by the light by the door that he’d been messing with, he’d have heard her pick up anything heavy, the clink of metal. He stares straight ahead, waiting, feeling her behind him.
“So do you or don’t you know where Chloe Pinter lives?”
“What?” It comes out like a gasp.
“I heard you. On the phone. Do you know where the bitch who took my son, who has all our money, lives?”
“Um, I, I…,” he stammers.
“Do you know where Chloe Pinter lives?” She says it slowly—he can feel each breath on the top of his shaved head.
“Yeah, I know.”
Jason turns and looks up at her, the light from the brass lamp casting up on her face, her nostrils deep holes, her mouth black and gaping; she looks like a gargoyle.
“What do you want me to do?” he says. It comes out like a whimper.
“Make this right. Get our money, get our wheels, get us out of here.”
She is walking toward the bedroom when she calls back over her shoulder, “If you pick Option A, have the goodness to do it without me waking up. I don’t want to feel nothing no more.”
She closes the bedroom door, and with the click of the handle, the baby wakes up. Jason gets to his feet, half expecting his liquid guts to run down his legs, and he picks up the thin towel on the corner of the couch, knots it at his heart, puts the baby in. He clicks off the brass lamp and starts wearing their nightly track in the rust-colored carpet: up to the bathroom, back to the kitchen, around the couch, up to the bathroom, back to the kitchen, around the couch…
It’s warm where their bodies touch. Jason’s throat itches, like a panicky trapped bird he can’t swallow, and its name is Desperation.
42
Quitting Time
CHLOE
Chloe wakes up on Valentine’s Day gasping—a bad dream, a man in her doorway, but as the first watery light fills her room and Chloe catches her breath, she sees it’s just clothes piled on a chair, her dark jacket hanging on the handle of the white door, nothing more. She is alone.
She clutches her cell phone off the nightstand for any missed calls or messages. None. She gets up, and though she has to pee badly, stops by the computer at the foot of the bed and taps the space bar to wake it up. No e-mail. It has been three days since she and Dan last communicated, and it is starting to affect her physical well-being.
Chloe drives to the café at Strohecker’s and orders a bagel and two coffees, waiting, but of course he doesn’t come anymore. She drinks them both and feels nauseated from the overload of cream and sugar.
At work, she pulls into her parking space and takes the stairs to the agency slowly, despite the misting rain. The wind is blowing from the Camas pulp factory, and the air is putrid with its stench. Inside, Chloe tries to get past Beverly, but she’s waving slips of pink paper. “And Heather wants you to call her,” she adds. “She left a message on the service.”
Chloe’s feet sound like a steelworker’s as she trudges up the wooden stairs. She is wearing her black Tarifa hiking boots, a pair of Dan’s left-behind Lucky jeans, and her Hot Stick surfer sweatshirt—she’s only doing paperwork today, but she thinks of the saying “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.”
Upstairs, Casey is stretched out on Chloe’s couch, dirty Nikes crossed on the arm, flipping through an old Rolling Stone.
“Do you know Johnny Depp wants to have a second mouth grafted on so he can smoke while he’s talking or eating?” Casey says.
“Would you put your feet down?” Chloe says peevishly. Her eyes dart toward her computer screen, already turned on (grrr!) and she sees it, the red flag above her AOL mailbox, the one that wasn’t there this morning before she left home. She calculates the time change in her head—could it be Dan?
“Testy!” Casey swings her feet down, sits up. “And did you know you have your own thermostat, which means that you have your own vent system up here, which means you could totally blaze up at lunchtime, and they would never know it downstairs?”
“Except I don’t smoke.” Chloe puts her purse on the floor by the dry-erase board, her eyes darting back