Rivals

Rivals Page 36

On the other side of town Maggie stopped with her finger over a doorbell and wondered if she should even announce her presence. Maybe it would be more effective to just tear the door off its hinges and storm inside.

No, she thought. That might attract attention. By the look of the houses on either side, with their dying lawns hemmed in by chain link fences, she doubted any of the neighbors would want to get involved. But they might call the cops. So she leaned on the doorbell until she could hear it buzzing inside, and didn't let up until he opened his front door.

It was almost worth coming all this way in the middle of the night just for the look on his face. The color went out of his cheeks and his eyeballs quivered in their sockets. His jaw fell open, as if he wanted to say something but was too scared to breathe and form the words.

"Just let me in," she told him.

He recognized her. He knew her all too well. From the day she and Dad had driven out here, when she'd been so intent on confronting him, on demanding answers. And from the night she and Brent had stood outside and she threw the empty liquor bottles at his wall. The guy who killed Mom knew exactly who she was, and what she could do to him. He probably thought he knew why she was there, too.

Maybe he was right.

He stepped back and flattened his back against a wall. She closed the door behind her, then walked into his living room. There wasn't much furniture, just a patched corduroy couch and a tiny little television set with a cable box on top. She flopped down on the couch as if she owned the place and just stared at him for a while.

"Are you going to kill me?" he asked, in a small voice.

Maggie was a bad girl. Maggie was a villain. It turned out there wasn't a lot to be said for villain as a career choice. But you did get to hurt people, even people who deserved it. It was expected of you to get revenge. She could kill this guy, and it would be easy. It would probably feel a lot better than when she hurt the policeman. Or even when she broke Grandma's arm.

"I want to talk, right now," she told him.

"Talk to me?" he asked.

"Duh." She stared at her nails. The paint on them had mostly chipped away but they were smooth and round. They didn't seem to get any longer than they were when she got her powers. That was weird. Thinking about stuff like that was safer than thinking about what she was actually doing in the guy's house. Sighing, she said, "Look, if you're honest with me, if you answer my questions and you don't lie, I promise I won't actually kill you. That's the best offer you're going to get tonight, so I think you should take it."

He nodded readily.

"You live alone?" she asked. He nodded. "Anybody coming over tonight?" He shook his head. "That's a good start. You killed my mom."

He paused, then, as if thinking of the best way to answer her question. Finally, he sat down on the floor next to the television set and said, "Yes."

He wasn't a big guy. He didn't look like he was all that smart, either. What had his life been like, she wondered? Since the accident. "You went to jail for a while, on a felony charge. I guess it's tough to come back from that. Hard to find a job."

"It's been difficult," he admitted. "Plus, you get a parole officer who comes around at random times. Checks up on you, makes sure you aren't breaking any laws. It can get pretty intrusive. Look, Margaret, I regret what I - "

"Don't say my name," Maggie told him. "Especially that name. Only my grandmother calls me that name anymore. Do you remember what my Mom looked like?"

"Yes," he told her. He put a hand over his mouth, then took it away again. "I only saw her the one time, of course. After the - the accident. I went over to her car to see if she was hurt, and, well, she was. But she was beautiful, just like you. Even with the blood and the steering wheel jammed into her - "

"I didn't ask for gory details." There was no way Maggie wanted to know what that had looked like. "How can you remember what she looked like? That was over a year ago. And you only saw her for a minute, right?"

"I'll never forget. You don't."

Was this what Maggie had come for? To find out what it felt like to have killed somebody? But she already knew that, didn't she? She'd killed Dad. Just as certainly as this guy had killed Mom.

"You keep thinking that maybe, today, it'll be better," he told her. "You wake up in the morning and for a second, just a second, you're a normal person. A good person. Then you remember what you did, and that the woman you killed had two kids. You think long and hard about why you lived through that accident and she didn't. You wonder if maybe there was some reason for it, but you know there wasn't. It was just stupidity, your stupidity, and a dark corner of a road that was a little too narrow. You go over the accident in your head, every little detail, all the ways you could have avoided what happened, you obsess over those chances, as if you still had them, as if you still could stop it from happening if you just imagine it hard enough. But you can't."

"No," Maggie agreed.

"It's like glass. Time is like glass. Once it's broken, you can't put it back together. It's always going to be broken. You get stuck, reliving the same moment for the rest of your life, and you can't ever fix it."

"No."

"Is that - what you wanted to know?" he asked her. "Why you came?"

"Maybe," she told him. She was still having trouble identifying her motivation herself. Unless - unless she'd come to see if there was any hope. Hope for herself, hope that things could get better again.

Or maybe she'd just wanted to talk to the one guy in town who might actually know how she felt. The one who understood that for her it was too late, that she'd crossed some dark boundary and now she was a bad guy, and there wasn't anything she could do to change that. Turning herself in wouldn't make the cop better, or heal Grandma's arm. Going to jail wouldn't do anything, except ruin her own life.

But in the end talking to the drunk didn't help her feel better. Because he still had one thing she didn't. He could remember what her mom looked like. Maggie couldn't.

It was tearing her up inside. She couldn't remember what Mom's voice sounded like, or what her birthday was, or what clothes she used to wear. All those memories had drained right out of her. She could see Dad's face just fine. It was like the drunk had said - she would never forget Dad's face. But Mom was a hole where memories used to be.

There were pictures she could look at, back at the house, but she couldn't go there. Her memories of Mom were broken, just like her innocence, and the pieces didn't fit together anymore.

She got up off the couch. She didn't want to be there anymore.

"What do you do for fun?" she asked the drunk. "You have a girlfriend, or any friends you hang out with?"

"No," he told her. "Mostly I just come home from work and watch TV. It helps, kind of, watching TV - your mind stops working, and you just focus on the pictures in front of you. You can forget, for a little while."

"Hmm." She strode across the room and put her foot through the glass screen of his TV set. He threw his hands over his head as glass and bits of wiring crashed all over his carpet. "That's for my family," she said.

She left through the back door.