Dangerous Women

In the subtle yet harrowing story that follows, she shows us that there are some things that you just can’t get over, no matter how hard you try—and some insights into the hearts of even those we love the most that you can’t unsee once you see them.

MY HEART IS EITHER BROKEN (#ulink_b8fbcf17-3c22-5931-967f-3fd9856dc9d4)

He waited in the car. He had parked under one of the big banks of lights. No one else wanted to park there. He could guess why. Three vehicles over, he saw a woman’s back pressed against a window, her hair shaking. Once, she turned her head and he almost saw her face, the blue of her teeth as she smiled.

Fifteen minutes went by before Lorie came stumbling across the parking lot, heels clacking.

He had been working late and didn’t even know she wasn’t home until he got there. When she finally picked up her cell, she told him where she was, a bar he’d never heard of, a part of town he didn’t know.

“I just wanted some noise and people,” she had explained. “I didn’t mean anything.”

He asked if she wanted him to come get her.

“Okay,” she said.

On the ride home, she was doing the laughing-crying thing she’d been doing lately. He wanted to help her but didn’t know how. It reminded him of the kinds of girls he used to date in high school. The ones who wrote in ink all over their hands and cut themselves in the bathroom stalls at school.

“I hadn’t been dancing in so long, and if I shut my eyes no one could see,” she was saying, looking out the window, her head tilted against the window. “No one there knew me until someone did. A woman I didn’t know. She kept shouting at me. Then she followed me into the bathroom stall and said she was glad my little girl couldn’t see me now.”

He knew what people would say. That she was out dancing at a grimy pickup bar. They wouldn’t say she cried all the way home, that she didn’t know what to do with herself, that no one knows how they’ll act when something like this happens to them. Which it probably won’t.

But he also wanted to hide, wanted to find a bathroom stall himself, in another city, another state, and never see anyone he knew again, especially his mother or his sister, who spent all day on the Internet trying to spread the word about Shelby, collecting tips for the police.

Shelby’s hands—well, people always talk about baby’s hands, don’t they?—but they were like tight little flowers and he loved to put his palm over them. He never knew he’d feel like that. Never knew he’d be the kind of guy—that there even were kinds of guys—who would catch the milky scent of his daughter’s baby blanket and feel warm inside. Even, sometimes, press his face against it.

It took him a long time to tug off the dark red cowboy boots she was wearing, ones he did not recognize.

When he pulled off her jeans, he didn’t recognize her underwear either. The front was a black butterfly, its wings fluttering against her thighs with each tug.

He looked at her and a memory came to him of when they first dated, Lorie taking his hand and running it along her belly, her thighs. Telling him she once thought she’d be a dancer, that maybe she could be. And that if she ever had a baby she’d have a C-section, because everyone knew what happened to women’s stomachs after, not to mention what it does down there, she’d said, laughing, and put his hand there next.

He’d forgotten all this, and other things too, but now the things kept coming back and making him crazy.

He poured a tall glass of water for her and made her drink it. Then he refilled it and set it beside her.

She didn’t sleep like a drunk person but like a child, her lids twitching dreamily and a faint smile tugging at her mouth.

The moonlight coming in, it felt like he watched her all night, but at some point he must have fallen asleep.

When he woke, she had her head on his belly, was rubbing him drowsily.

“I was dreaming I was pregnant again,” she murmured. “It was like Shelby all over again. Maybe we could adopt. There are so many babies out there that need love.”

They had met six years ago. He was working for his mother, who owned a small apartment building on the north side of town.

Lorie lived on the first floor, where the window was high and you could see people walking on the sidewalk. His mother called it a “sunken garden apartment.”

She lived with another girl and sometimes they came in very late, laughing and pressing up against each other in the way young girls do, whispering things, their legs bare and shiny in short skirts. He wondered what they said.

He was still in school then and would work evenings and weekends, changing washers on leaky faucets, taking out the trash.

Once, he was in front of the building, hosing down the garbage cans with bleach, and she rushed past him, her tiny coat bunched around her face. She was talking on the phone and she moved so quickly he almost didn’t see her, almost splashed her with the hose. For a second he saw her eyes, smeary and wet.

“I wasn’t lying,” she was saying into the phone as she pushed her key into the front door, as she heaved her shoulders against it. “I’m not the liar here.”

One evening not long after, he came home and there was a note under the door. It read:

My heart is either broken or I haven’t paid the bill.

Thx, Lorie, #1-A

He’d read it four times before he figured it out.

She smiled when she opened the door, the security chain across her forehead.

He held up his pipe wrench.

“You’re just in time,” she said, pointing to the radiator.

No one ever thinks anything will ever happen to their baby girl. That’s what Lorie kept saying. She’d been saying that to reporters, the police, for every day of the three weeks since it happened.

He watched her with the detectives. It was just like on TV except nothing like on TV. He wondered why nothing was ever like you thought it would be and then he realized it was because you never thought this would be you.

She couldn’t sit still, her fingers twirling through the edges of her hair. Sometimes, at a traffic signal, she would pull nail scissors from her purse and trim the split ends. When the car began moving, she would wave her hand out the window, scattering the clippings into the wind.

It was the kind of careless, odd thing that made her so different from any girl he ever knew. Especially that she would do it front of him.

He was surprised how much he had liked it.

But now all of it seemed different and he could see the detectives watching her, looking at her like she was a girl in a short skirt, twirling on a bar stool and tossing her hair at men.

“We’re gonna need you to start from the beginning again,” the male one said, and that part was like on TV. “Everything you remember.”

“She’s gone over it so many times,” he said, putting his hand over hers and looking at the detective wearily.

“I meant you, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, looking at him. “Just you.”

They took Lorie to the outer office and he could see her through the window, pouring long gulps of creamer into her coffee, licking her lips.

He knew how that looked too. The newspapers had just run a picture of her at a smoothie place. The caption was “What about Shelby?” They must have taken it through the front window. She was ordering something at the counter, and she was smiling. They always got her when she was smiling. They didn’t understand that she smiled when she was sad. Sometimes she cried when she was happy, like at their wedding, when she cried all day, her face pink and gleaming, shuddering against his chest.

I never thought you would, she had said. I never thought I would. That any of this could happen.

He didn’t know what she meant, but he loved feeling her huddled against him, her hips grinding against him like they did when she couldn’t hold herself together and seemed to be holding on to him to keep from flying off the earth itself.

“So, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, “you came home from work and there was no one home?”

“Right,” he said. “Call me Tom.”