Twelve

The ring on your finger means a beginning is coming, but also an end. This is the aim in this town, to get a ring on the finger, to be ushered past the white fence and the rich red roses, to be pulled out of the rain. To step into a church and then step out of it, back out into the Bakersfield sunshine, but not alone, and all around are people who have joined themselves to others in the same way. The ring means you’ll be a wife, and the clean-cut boy who presented it has already promised you will no longer have to work in the shoe store. A beginning, but an end. No more toiling for Mr. Carson, no more long hours in the hot stuffiness of the store’s back room. A wife need not work. A wife gets a bouquet of promises: devotion, security, honor, hard work from her husband’s hands. The clean-cut boy wants no wife of his working, and this satisfies you. You have deserved this all along.

But the ring also means no more being the center. No more being able to lean toward the women patrons when they come not to try on shoes but to gossip, to let you in on whatever rumor floats around town.

In December, in early January, after the girl was murdered, the clientele had come in droves. Mr. Carson had pursed his lips at the women who arrived in the shop, who hardly even glanced at the merchandise, didn’t even bother to pretend. He stuffed his face with danish to keep himself from speaking out, not wanting to chastise his best customers at the height of the holiday buying season, but he bristled at the same thing you bristled at: the lack of decorum in these ladies, their visible thirst for word about that girl, the way they looked at the heavy curtain leading to the back room of the shop, as if tracing her steps would tell them everything they wanted to know about her. You wanted to point out the inexpensive black flats that the girl liked to wear—These, right here, you wanted to tell them—knowing the ladies in the group would feel a proximity to that girl just by the weight of her shoes, the smallest detail budding into significance.

But what could you have said to them? What did you know? You saw nothing. You weren’t there. You weren’t in her shoes.

“She was such a quiet girl,” you told them. This was true, but you didn’t want to tell them much more than that.

The ladies all knew about Dan Watson. Their feigned expressions of surprise didn’t convince you. They knew his mother from the town café, but his mother wasn’t in his swagger. His good mother wasn’t in the way he stepped out of his truck, cocked his hips as he lit a cigarette, waiting to cross the street. You know they had all looked at him with longing. He was no clean-cut boy like your soon-to-be husband, no straight line across the back of his neck from a dutiful Monday-morning haircut.

Actions like that should surprise no one. All around town, if people had only put their heads together, done the hard work of separating rumor from truth, of confirming what had been seen and not heard, nothing should have surprised anyone.

You didn’t tell these ladies much, no, not in December in the early days of the shock, and not in January, when it felt as if it might be best to toss out an observation, like a coin into a pool of water, just to see the ripples. But then the ring changed everything, and with it came a promise that you would be able to put all such ugliness to rest, never again having to step into Mr. Carson’s store, not one more reminder of that girl, living and breathing as she once was, coming around to haunt you. Marriage was coming for you, and with it would come a startling privacy, you nested in your brand-new home, guarding the things you learned about the family you would be married into: your husband-to-be the middle brother of three boys, the other two living in suspicious bachelorhood.

Marriage was going to save you from having to say anything at all to these ladies. You didn’t tell them about the last time you had been escorted to Las Cuatro Copas, your boyfriend eager to see what all the fuss had been about, those illustrations in the town newspaper and the drive-in shut down for the winter. If the murder hadn’t happened, perhaps you would’ve been able to make small talk about the crudeness of the cantina, the unsavory mixing of whites and Mexicans and how maybe Bakersfield shouldn’t be allowing such a thing. Or maybe you would’ve complimented the cheap but delicious taquitos served up by that girl, who looked only at your boyfriend, not willing to look you in the eye, not willing to acknowledge that she needed another job, that she even knew you. But you wouldn’t tell the women that—you’d tell them only about the cheap food, point to this as perhaps one of the reasons the night was such a weekly success. None of you would admit that it was really about Dan Watson up onstage. None of you would admit that it was the way that girl sang, the way her head turned to look at Dan Watson while she held a long note. The little storm he created inside her pushed to get out: you could all see it, how he was teaching her to sing, to let go of whatever caught in her throat. He shaped the thrust of her shoulder when she stood sideways to the audience, hand on the microphone, all those men looking at her. The more she sang, the more comfortable she became with their looking, the more she wanted their looks.

To say you saw this would mean you envied her. To say you saw this would mean you, too, looked at Dan Watson.

That night, there was another man in the back. You could tell by the way that girl brought her voice inward, her eyes squinting as if to confirm what she had recognized, and her easy flirtation with Dan Watson hardened into a forced gesture. Something had changed within her. You turned your head to look back there because you knew she was ashamed—all along she should have been ashamed, the way she held the edge of her baby blue satin cowgirl dress, and those boots. Those boots! You hardly had time to register where you had seen those boots when that look flickered across her face, and you turned to study who was in the back, which face was going to shimmer into the person who could make her so apprehensive. Back there, though, stood a line of short Mexican men with no dates, hands in their pockets, their white T-shirts gleaming through the cigarette smoke.

You don’t tell the ladies any of this because you don’t know where to start. She wore boots she’d stolen from Mr. Carson, but what did that fact say about her murder? A line of short Mexican men stared at her through the smoke, but what did that say about the one the police ended up deporting?

Or this: A few days later, on a Monday, as you stepped out of the shop’s back room into the dusty alley out back, a little jar sitting on top of the garbage can. At first you thought it was from your clean-cut boyfriend, the jar sealed tight, with its label removed, and but inside lay a card from the Mexican bingo game, tilted to the side. A picture of a rose. Such specificity! Such imagination! la rosa and the number 41. Not your language. Colors in the faded scheme of the Mexican restaurant on the corner, that dusty blue, that exhausted pink. The gift was for that girl, but you crammed the jar into your purse as you scanned the empty alley. Around the corner, you tossed it into one of the city’s corner trash bins.

You don’t tell the ladies about that. What would this fact mean? What is the fact? That there was a jar? Or that the girl never received it?

Another jar appeared, its Gerber baby-food label missing and inside a store of shelled walnuts. The only reason you didn’t take it was the dark shape of a head ducking around the building at the end of the alley, studying, watching, guarding. Off you went, as you always would, rounding the corner, and just a ways down stood a short Mexican man in a white T-shirt, everything about his slender body tight and worked, as if he’d gathered those walnuts himself, up in Pixley in the center of the Valley, where the harvest had been going on, and when you passed him—this Mexican man who had no business just standing on a street corner like that—you understood that something had gone on between him and that girl, something Dan Watson didn’t know about, something that girl had held close to her when she measured the sultriness of her singing.

These are facts. Everyone in town has facts. They bring them out into the open to give them sense, even when there is none to be made. But you saw it. You put it all together.

That night, the girl held a hand at her throat, as if the thick cotton of a cold was catching. She had begged off singing. The crowd had been disappointed when Dan Watson made the announcement, but they lured her onstage with determined applause. She sang a Patsy Cline number very poorly, and even though she was showered with polite clapping, she made a funny grimace and gestured at her throat. The crowd allowed her offstage without much protest, and Dan Watson had to sing alone. She had stepped back behind the bar to watch him. Everyone watched him. You watched him. The hard stare of that man hiding in the shadows watched him. Dan Watson took command of the stage in his dark jeans and boots, a white cowboy hat still on. His body stood still—hips, upper body, even his knees refusing to quiver with nerves—and he announced that he would be doing an old Carl Smith song, “Hey Joe!” He held the guitar firmly and then began, all eyes on the quick dancing of his right hand, the song jumpy and energetic, a song about making his attentions clear to steal a friend’s girl.

She had watched him, his stiff, hard body, the white hat casting a shadow over his eyes, over half of his face, so that all the women in the audience could look only at his hard mouth.

That girl had been jealous, knowing those women had looked at Dan like that.

You had looked at Dan Watson like that.

That nameless Mexican face along the back wall must have seethed at how the women looked at Dan, the ripple of need he set off in them, sitting next to their clean-cut men.

All that need. Husbands fail. Boyfriends cannot provide. Men in the cantina feeling they could never match up against someone like Dan Watson, the collapsing darkness of the place allowing them to hide that fear. Whoever that Mexican face belonged to, nothing he could ever do would match whatever Dan Watson offered her.

Not a week later came the night in question.

That girl looking up at the painted ceiling of the Fox Theater, up at every tiny light shining down on her, the ceiling painted dark and swirled with faint clouds, studded with tiny lights that beamed down like stars. She looked up at the painted sky as if Dan Watson had offered it to her himself, as if he were the one who opened the barely contained promise of the Fox Theater in daytime: the scrolls of neon piping, the gallery of lightbulbs waiting to burst bright once the sun went down. All around them, people chose seats without a fuss, but that girl kept looking up in wonder. You knew without knowing that on her lunch breaks she’d gone down to the theater just as she’d gone to the record shop, to peek through the shut doors for the red carpet inside, the velvet ropes hanging on brass stands, the poster images of serious drama, of women in gowns, of love and long looks, of color and intensity, beauty shimmering all around her. She traced the ceiling with her eyes, then followed it all the way down front, where the dark velvet theater ended with an enormous white screen, blank and brilliant with promise.

People milled and chatted, and because it was December, the act of removing a coat gave the men a chance to be gallant, assisting their dates. People got comfortable, the rustle building into the excitement about whatever the screen held in store. This was not the dust and darkness of the drive-in, but the spotlight of standing in queue out front, people showing off their best garments. The women, both the older wives and the younger ones on dates, had arrived in dresses and scarves and earrings. Some of the older men wore hats, which they removed only after they had finally chosen a seat. That girl—what nerve—wore the baby blue satin cowgirl dress with the white fringe from her cantina performances, as if she knew people would recognize her, and you watched as she pretended to fix her hair in the back, the lift of her arm making the fringe on her sleeves dance and sparkle.

The chatter in the theater calmed a bit when the lights dimmed halfway. The gather of smoke from a few cigarettes floated visibly now, but the projector shot out such a bright beam that it hardly mattered. A Looney Tunes cartoon appeared to apparent indifference from the crowd, the last few people scurrying back from the concession stand. More coats removed and draped on the backs of chairs, more people settling in, but when the cartoon ended and the lights went down, the screen went dark, and up came the cheers, the whistles of anticipation.

After all this time, this is the moment you hold and remember, down to the sweaty, nervous palm of your boyfriend: the quiet in the dark of the theater, the story coming.

Darkness used to be the delicious moment of not knowing what would come next. You don’t see things like that anymore.

When the light burst on the screen, a desert appeared in a golden hue, a caravan of horses on a winding trail. Your heart sank—a western—but then rose again when the names appeared, one by one, in yellow, rough letters: John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson. His name flashed like an impossible promise. His name flashed as if it had been Dan Watson’s, and you read the name with a jealous scan of that girl’s head, sitting not four rows ahead of you, how you’d watched her at the record shop that morning, then scurried across the street to see what had captured her attention. Even her obsessions couldn’t be your own, Ricky Nelson all hers, and you heard yourself gasp, searching for him in the opening shot of a caravan approaching town, as if seeing him first could give you claim to him. Your eye caught him almost instantly, the cowboy slumped on his horse, looking insolent in his fringed brown suede jacket, his light-colored hat. His name was Colorado, and the caravan leader and John Wayne had a conversation about him that left him unpleased.

“I speak English, Sheriff,” he said, “if you want to ask me.” His speaking voice sang out just like the one on his records, the ones that girl closed her eyes to in the dark. You closed your eyes, wanting to be like her for a moment, to test whether you could hear his approach like she could, but the possibility of missing that face defeated you. That beautiful face, his lips glistening moist even under the desert sun, his mouth gentle even when it fixed to sing.

All around, some of the younger women rested their heads on the shoulders of their dates. Out of boredom, maybe, especially when Ricky Nelson was not on the screen. Four rows ahead, Dan Watson slipped his arm around that girl, and she tensed, then eased. You tensed, then eased, sensing the heat on the back of your own neck. Some of the younger women drew even closer to their dates, nestling. They didn’t care who watched. The married couples sat stiff and proper, two rigid silhouettes. Was marriage love? A wife’s shoulders rounded, her body almost curled in, as if protecting the purse in her lap. The young women in the audience ignored John Wayne’s gun brandishes and concentrated on the heat near the back of their necks. Dan Watson’s arm. Handsome, but not like Ricky Nelson. Rugged and not soft, not moist lipped, not a transfixing star.

Not a whistle-clean Everly Brother either.

If all the women in the audience stared at Ricky Nelson sitting on top of a kitchen table, so did you. Boots resting on a chair, he played guitar for Dean Martin. Your eyes drifted south to his open legs, wanting to study every part of his body, his shape. The theater was dark. This is what people did in the dark. He spoke Spanish, and even that fact—that soft voice saying things you could only dream, candy-sweet and loving—gripped the women in its delicious possibility. That girl knew Spanish. She would know what candy-sweet things he could say. After the first song, Dean Martin ceded the screen to just Ricky, still seated at the table, and all around the theater, women lifted their heads from their dates’ shoulders. Ricky alone meant love was coming. Ricky alone meant being torn between the guitar resting on his thigh and the proximity of his long lashes.

The cut of his suede jacket, the dance of its fringe, the round shape of his buttocks when he crossed the room, the angle of his boots on the floor, his youthful face a testament against the coarser ways of older men like John Wayne.

Your boyfriend, your soon-to-be husband, was going to be a John Wayne. You’d already come round to meet the new in-laws, the small, quick-witted mother with the pinched face, the tall father with the gigantic belly, suffering through a forced grapefruit diet. “I have the insides of a steel pipe,” he bragged, but in the bathroom of their home, you glimpsed a faint brown smear at the bottom of the toilet.

A vulgar fact. The ugly privacy of marriage.

The two brothers living in suspicious bachelorhood, one going up to San Francisco to live luridly, the other quietly expected to care for their parents once they aged.

Understood facts, no matter that they were vulgar. People said that was what San Francisco was becoming.

So it must be true.

No wonder people applauded the picture when it ended. No wonder they stood up in an excited buzz, the film a respite from their lives, the ugly things they knew. No wonder the crowd took its time to file out of the theater, the house lights brought up, the tiny stars on the ceiling extinguished. Handsome men with mustaches, cowboy hats, shiny belt buckles, all of them walking protectively behind their dates, all of them guarding the women they intended to marry. At the theater, a date was for display. Not like at the drive-in, not like at the grocery store, not like at the café. But eyes everywhere locked on each other in regard, men looking from the safety of where they stood, behind their dates. How many times had men looked at that girl, looked up to see Dan Watson looking back at them, their eyes filled with a different knowing?

Traffic rumbled, headlights all along Union Avenue, as patient as the lines to exit the theater. Some cars drove off toward the Bluebird, toward El Molino Rojo. Married couples drove on to the side streets to their dark homes, the taillights lonely along the road. Everyone else, it seemed, had headed to the Jolly Kone, all the ones in between, too young to be going to the bars so late, too young to be married quite yet.

That was the night in question. People went to the bars to drink or to the Jolly Kone for a burger or right on home. Good married couples went right on home.

None of the ladies who came to the shoe store ever knew about the Jolly Kone. They never knew about the drive-in. The things that went on in both places. You never said a word about the boyfriend taking you there.

The large neon sign lit bright in yellow and blue, an ice cream cone with a grinning, welcoming face. Large orange heaters glowed overhead at the order windows, all the young men with hands in their pockets to keep themselves warm. Dan Watson and that girl had eased right into one of the choice slots, right under the awning near the door.

At the window, a large-breasted teenage girl, blue paper hat pinned in place. She grinned slyly at Dan Watson, her mouth suggesting a banter than involved more than the order. He leaned in, looking up at the posted menu as if he’d forgotten what to say. The waitress stared at his Adam’s apple, not minding the wait, but she glanced over at the Ford where that girl sat, as if she’d felt a stern glare coming at her, and the unspoken possession brought her back to jotting in her notepad, closing the window. Dan Watson stood outside under the orange heaters, waiting, and once again it was all there for everyone to see: how steady and strong his back looked, his plaid shirt pressed and tucked in snug at the waist. He was taller than Ricky Nelson, surely, but a survey of the other men milling around, carrying food back to their cars, showed how he stood out. That one was squat and powerful in the legs; another too thin and slender in the chest; yet another had wide, flat buttocks.

Everyone hungry, everyone eating. Dan Watson walking back to the Ford with a box of burgers and greasy fries. The Jolly Kone ice cream sign looked down at everyone with its neon grin.

In the car, your whistle-clean boyfriend pointed to the paper cup of soda lodged between his legs, the two straws poking out of it.

“Thirsty?” he asked.

The pretty, large-breasted waitress shot a stare over at the Ford.

“I’m kidding,” he said, but his hand slid over in the shadowy darkness of the car and settled on your knee.

“Not with all these people around,” you said.

“Nobody can see,” he said, and this was true. People held greasy napkins, sloshed leftover soda; some actually stood outside their cars, necking out in plain view under the yellow and blue sign of the Jolly Kone. Some cars already pulled themselves out of the lot, heading out to the western part of town, to the emptier side, where they could pull into the darkness.

“You getting shy now?”

“Not here.”

Not there. You watched the Ford retreat from the front of the Jolly Kone. You watched that girl give one last glare to the pretty waitress as the truck pulled away into the dark. You watched the Ford head back in the direction of that rented room above the bowling alley, the roads considerably cleared, and you could see the truck park in front of the green door leading up to that apartment.

You can see Dan Watson shutting off the engine. You can see the deserted street.

No, you were not there. But you could see it.

And that made it a fact, if you told it.

He stepped out, walking to her side of the truck. He opened her door and held out his hand and she took it. A large, sweaty hand. Strong. Not the hand of someone who could play a guitar softly.

At the shoe store, that girl had always patted her purse as if it contained something secret. Repeatedly. An assurance. What was in there, of course, was her apartment key.

That key slid into the lock of that green door and snapped it open, Dan Watson behind her, his arm above her frame.

The stairwell loomed dark, and what you do with darkness is pitch yourself into it.

So up the stairs they went, her hand fumbling along the wall for the switch but feeling, instead, Dan’s strength behind her, his hard torso underneath his shirt.

That night, your boyfriend, your husband-to-be, your clean hairline across the back of the neck, your Everly Brother, walked you to the front door, the light on, the parents sleeping assuredly inside, the porch swing still. At the Jolly Kone, his hand had moved yours to the aching bulge, urging, but marriage was coming. That was not respectable behavior anymore.

You behaved one way at the drive-in, but being a wife means something different. If there’s a promise to be a good husband, then the aching bulge can wait until the white fence appears, along with a house with the sparkling kitchen and the shiny teacups.

Up in that room above the bowling alley, she would have tidied up before she left for the theater. What little she had, she had put in its place, no matter that the room looked meager.

A single bed with light blue cotton sheets. A table and a chair. Tin cups, the blue-speckled kind. Blue curtains hanging on a rod.

The blue curtains were a fact. You saw them yourself, fluttering from the window once.

An electric radio? A rotary fan? An iron? The white blouses she wore to work. Her plain black flats. Her blue denim skirt. What else could she have had?

A yellow nightgown, lifted from the top drawer of the dresser, unfurling like a ghost. A patch of white fabric starting at the neckline and covering the breasts, a spring of flowers etched in as decoration.

Like yours.

On the porch, your boyfriend swallowed hard, full of nerve and frustration. You watched his Adam’s apple pitch up and down. “Sit with me,” he pleaded, pointing to the swing. “I’ll be quiet.”

What else? Deodorant on top of the dresser and bobby pins and a hairbrush, white cotton panties in the drawer. But toiletries are not possessions, and that girl came from nothing. So she had nothing.

If you bring down those blue curtains, nothing but the cold white light of winter pours in.

“Sit with me,” he said.

The way Ricky Nelson had sat on the kitchen table, boots perched on a chair, legs spread wide. Being able to watch him, take him in.

On the porch, you relieve him a bit, touch him. He still doesn’t know that he’s enormous and beautiful. He won’t ever really know, if he keeps the promise of his engagement ring, the metal rubbing him as he closes his eyes.

“You ever think about leaving Bakersfield?”

“Never.” That girl says it. The word slips from her because it’s true but false at the same time. But it’s you who dream of Dan Watson taking you away in his Ford pickup truck, out somewhere to a big white farmhouse with a clothesline out back and a garden and a room where you could watch TV on a set from Stewart’s. The word comes from inside, a hesitant, nervous bubble that could not have formed itself fully as a word, and it flashes instead as a smile, her hand moving up to contain it, to hide it. That girl looking down at the floor of her rented room, the rough grain of the wood.

“Closer,” he urged.

From the record shop, a collection of A sides, purchased by Dan Watson and handed to her in a brown-papered package: “All I Have to Do Is Dream” by the Everly Brothers. “I Only Have Eyes for You” by the Flamingos. “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” by Paul Anka.

An expensive record player and the needles, too.

“Closer.”

The space between is a wide, enormous distance, a destination—there’s so much urgency to get across—the pinpoint of some kind of promise way out beyond seeing. Never close enough.

She moved toward him. She moved toward it.

You extended your hand and he reached for it, strong and now clammy with sweat. She raised her hand to his lips very softly, then rested it on his cheek, cupping his face. He kept his hand over yours, moved his fingers across your cheek, your nose, your ears, urging you to touch him. You kissed him and he tasted like cold, like water from a tin cup, the blue-speckled kind.

“Who’s Sorry Now?” by Connie Francis. “Tears on My Pillow” by Little Anthony and the Imperials.

He let go of her hands and she could not feel him at all, just her eyes closed to him and his lips wet and cold. She floated, nothing tethering her but Dan Watson’s lips, his lips parting and becoming his mouth, the cold giving way to a warmer feel, the dart of his tongue searching her. This was the feeling she liked, his strong hands on her arms, holding her to him, an anticipation, like walking past a flock of birds feeding on street crumbs, waiting for them to burst into the sky at the slightest threatening motion.

“Poor Little Fool” by Ricky Nelson.

Your boyfriend’s thigh pressed against yours as you sat on the porch swing, and you wanted to open your eyes to see Dan Watson, his rugged and beautiful face, to see him the way the pretty waitress at the Jolly Kone saw him.

They kept kissing, wet and deep. The bed squeaked. Dan Watson inched closer. She could feel the entire plane of his body now—his leg, his torso, his arm—and she reached down and felt the hard length of him. She kept her hand there, not moving, before giving in to his urgency, his fingers pushing her to explore.

There were men who sat at kitchen tables and sang gentle songs with the round O of their mouths. There were men holding guns, both good and bad. There were men riding sinister horses. There were men hell-bent on terrible missions. There were men who nodded their heads politely at the women. All of them had this need. All of them.

He unbuckled his belt, the sound of the metal unlatching, his jeans undone into a deep V, his underwear pulled down to give a full view. She gripped him harder, enjoying how it forced him to close his eyes, how she’d seen him do this at the drive-in, how she’d done it before. His hands rustled up her skirt and she closed her eyes, how one day they’d do this in their white farmhouse.

You closed your eyes, how one day you’d do this in a white farmhouse.

You could never tell those ladies such a thing.

“That Mexican boy,” they said, but they could say nothing more about him.

“I can’t imagine … ,” you said, but you could. That Mexican boy and his gifts in the jar, the way you could feel his hard stare in the darkness of the cantina, the same way you could almost touch the desire of the pretty waitress at the Jolly Kone.

You can imagine.

Maybe an observation, like a coin tossed into a pool of water, just to see the ripples when you tell it.

I heard, you might try, the Mexican boy showed up that night at her apartment. People could finish the story with that, jealousy enough of a fuel to explain what happened.

The people in the theater could tell you that men come to blows over women all the time, fists landing in savage anger.

What no longer matters is how Dan Watson killed her. What matters is that she’s dead. What matters is not whether that Mexican boy shouted up from the darkness of the deserted street, but the blood in the stairwell. How it got there, after all, was a fact.

Many months from now—months—people will file into the Fox Theater to watch the suspense picture, the one with a motel, that one that looks just like the one out on the west of town, and everyone will see a dark silhouette get up and walk away in a pinched, furious manner.

You will be there and will see only a dark silhouette, but you’ll believe those people when they claim it was Dan Watson’s mother. She saw what was coming up on-screen. Who—who on earth—ever wants to put themselves in someone else’s shoes? To see something so close to them?

The drive-in. The theater. The stairwell. The lawn just past the porch swing. What you do with darkness is pitch yourself into it.

How she reached the stairwell was that the Mexican boy had been downstairs somehow. How it ended there was that Dan Watson had bounded down to the sidewalk. That was a fact. People said there had been a fight out there, that Mexican boy who got deported. But however the fight between the men ended didn’t matter. What mattered happened in the stairwell. People said blood had splattered all over the wall. Dan Watson had slammed the green door behind him, shutting away the world. The stairwell had shot into darkness, and that girl had fallen into it, Dan with a fistful of her hair. The two of them pitched backward, her stolen boots slipping, their bodies slamming against the wall. Her back landed with a sharp crack against the edge of a stair. Her head knocked against the wall. She tasted metal in her mouth. She tasted blood.

Did you? Dan Watson asked. Because that is the question everyone wanted to know about that girl. Had she, with that Mexican boy?

Do you take … ? the question will come out.

What will be the answer?

That girl bit at his hand, but he only pressed himself harder on top of her. She bit harder and he let go of her hair to slap her once, then a second time, hard enough for her head to hit the wall again. She could not scream because the metallic taste in her mouth had sharpened into a gurgle. Blood had come up from her throat. She sensed it coming, and she would have spit it out in order to cry.

Yes.

When she spat out the blood, the cry came out. They had tumbled all the way down the stairwell, near the street with no one on it at that hour. She opened her eyes, but it was only darkness, only the sweat of Dan’s hair, hardly even the light from the top of the stairwell. A pounding came at the green door, closed to the street. Over and over again.

Why was it like that? Didn’t the songs make a promise? Didn’t the songs say to hold your arms out wide open? Wasn’t love supposed to come through an open door to find you?

The dark silhouette stalked out of the theater in disgust, in shame at what she had been forced to see. The quick-witted mother with the pinched face held in her knowledge of two sons—two!—and their suspicious bachelorhoods, the unfairness of it. Everyone with something to keep private.

Her eyes stared up at the darkness of the stairwell, but her heart saw the stars of the theater ceiling, their faint but false twinkle.

Once the song left the soft, beautiful O of Ricky Nelson’s mouth, there was only a sweet darkness left behind, not this light. Love was arriving through the open door. She heard its knock, over and over, insistent. A light was coming, brilliant and unstoppable.

Something dark was forming in her throat. A burst of light was forming there. You tried to swallow to keep it from arriving.

You wanted her to close her eyes. You had to force yourself to close them. You know she saw something. You wanted that girl to see something, and there was no going back once she did.