The Song Is You (24 page)
Authors: Megan Abbott
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Hard-Boiled, #Thrillers, #Suspense
That night, Hop returned to his new place, still paint-fresh, at midnight. He’d begged off when—What was her name? Maura? Mona? Mina?—the one with the spangly dress and little-girl lisp offered to fry him up a steak at her little place in West Hollywood. He was tired. He didn’t feel like talking. He was bored.
He poured three fingers of scotch before taking off his dinner coat. Unloosening his tie and collar, he sat in his new Italian leather armchair.
He’d thought he wanted to be alone, but the quiet, the tomblike quiet of the place made him feel suddenly panicky. Why did he always forget this about himself? When had he ever wanted to be alone?
He thought about calling someone. He could call someone and then she would talk and then she would come over and then there would be no reason to sit in a chair with a drink in the quiet apartment and look out the window and think about things and recall things and recall people and remember stories and faces and feelings and voices that had flitted through him once in a coffee shop, at a bar, in a room smelling sharply of pine.
Iolene, she once said to him, You think you can forget.
And now he couldn’t stop remembering. It was the thing he dreaded most. By the time he finished his drink, he was remembering everything.
The pictures, the fast-moving images, the flickering lights like a movie playing in his head. Only by now, it had gotten so mixed up for him, he couldn’t separate real memories from things he hadn’t even seen, things he’d only been told about. They were all there. A belt across the mouth. A ring of blood. A revolver to the back of a head, pressed against a hair comb glittering. A girl falling over a chair.
There was something lost. There was something lost. He could look in the mirror a thousand times and he would never see it again. He’d snuffed it out. Had he known he’d never get it back… Had he known it would be gone forever…
He got up and walked into his bedroom. He knew it would be there and he shouldn’t do it, but he couldn’t stop. He opened the drawer to his bedside table and dug under the handkerchiefs, phone book, cigarettes, matchbooks. There it was.
He pulled it out. It was thin as a cobweb now, this postcard. It had become delicate with time. Postcards, after all, aren’t meant to last. They’re less than a letter. They’re a fleeting thing. A whisper in the ear reminding you, “Merry Lake’s Waiting for You.”