32

MONDAY NIGHT

I'm sitting in the hospital's east corridor, a waiting room behind a wall of gla.s.s bricks. the hospital's east corridor, a waiting room behind a wall of gla.s.s bricks.

Beth's mom appears in the doorway just past nine, flinging her camel Coach bag onto the sofa and bursting into inky tears that seem to come in gaping spurts for hours.

She talks mournfully of her failures, her weaknesses, and most of all the harshness of life for pretty girls who never know how good they have it.

Finally, she cries herself to sleep, sinking into her coat like a slumbering bat.

I move three seats away.

The TV, pitched high in a corner, scrolls footage of Beth being wheeled out on the gurney, one arm dangling limply.

Then the on-camera interviews, and there's Tacy Slaussen's rabbit face.

"I just want everyone to know that our stunts usually hit," she says, tightening her ponytail and showing all her teeth. "But let's face it. Cheer can be dangerous. I got injured just the other day. It was supposed to be me out there."

Behind her, Emily sobbing in the background. "I didn't mess up the count, I didn't."

I reach up and switch the channel, but Tacy's on that one too.

"But Beth always told us, life is about taking risks, and you can die at any moment," she says, with those pointy teeth of hers, forehead shining.

"It's what we sign up for."

And then Brinnie c.o.x, crying just as she cried a few hours before when she flunked a chemistry quiz, and a few hours before that, when Greg Lurie called her Bitty t.i.tty.

"She is such a talented girl," she wails, racc.o.o.n-eyed, "and we all feed off her positiveness."

Not long after, I see the news of the arrest.

The closed caption reads: Cheerleading coach husband to be charged in slaying. Cheerleading coach husband to be charged in slaying.

Which is such a simple way to say what is anything but simple.

The snapshot they show on the news seems to be from some other world I don't know, Coach and Matt French, faces giddy, a great custardy wedding veil whipping around her.

I think of him out there in the backyard the other day, his stillness. But wasn't he always so still, a shadow drifting past all our antic energy? So strange to think how much was roiling in him. The thing we mistook for blankness, for boringness, for a Big Nothing, turned out to be everything. A battered heart, a raging one.

"What is this, the all-cheerleading network?" brays a tired expectant father in the chair next to me, until he sees my uniform, the sequins matted to my leg.

Later, Beth's mom comes back from talking to the doctor and smoking twelve cigarettes in the parking lot.

She says it's a skull fracture in three places.

"I was waiting for her." That's what Beth kept saying, lying on the gym floor, her eyes black. "Where did she go?"

All the way out, like on some continuous loop. "When will she come back? I was waiting for her."

There seems no point in sitting, so I drive to the police station at two a.m. and sit.

It's an hour before I see Coach, holed up in the back lot with a pack of Kools-these are not times for clove cigarettes-her breath making dragony swirls.

"Hey," she says, when she spots me.

We sit in my car, her eyes darting over and over to the back door, like she's waiting for the cops to realize she shouldn't be out here alone.

I don't tell her about Beth, don't ask if she knows.

It's her time to talk, and she does.

That night, like any other night, she tells me, Matt was working late and she still had no car.

Will wants to see her, needs to, really.

Says he'll drive her back and forth if she'll come. He never wants to be alone.

No one ever needed her half as much, not even her daughter. She is sure of it.

At his apartment, everything feels different. It's been that way lately. The feeling that it's all too much, and even scary, the way he holds her hard enough to hurt, talking the whole time about how she is all that keeps him from the way he feels, which is like his heart is pumping water and drowning him to death.

These are the ways he talks lately, and the only thing to do is to hold on to him. Some nights she's held him so hard, she has bruises on the heels of her hands.

They are in the bedroom a long time, and nothing is made better for more than one tight minute. The look on his face after frightens her.

She takes a long shower to give him time to pull himself together, to shake off the night horrors of his dark room.

But when she turns off the faucet she hears a man talking loudly. Saying something over and over. At first she thinks it's Will, but it isn't Will.

Over and over, the same rhythm and the same feeling of panicky anger, like her dad after things started to go wrong for him, at work, with her mom, with the world, and sometimes it was like he would tear the whole house down with him, raze it, incinerate it.

She guesses she is hearing it through the ceiling, the floor. Doesn't that happen in apartments, where nothing is private or secret?

For a few seconds she doesn't even call out to Will, figures she is being silly, all the noises that rattle through these big buildings, the way sound carries in the gorges.

But then the sound flies up fast and is now familiar to her, feels close enough to touch. That's when she pulls on her T-shirt, her body still so wet it fuses to her in an instant, and starts walking out of the bathroom.

"Will," she says. "Will."

And she is shaking the water from her hair. Her head is down and so she doesn't see how it started.

"Listen, please, calm down and-"

Will, towel wrapped around him, is talking to someone in the tone she sometimes uses with Caitlin when Caitlin scares herself at night, seeing ghosts slipping under her closet door.

And another voice, one she knows: "-think you can do whatever you want. Another man's wife-"

And it is Matt, and how can Matt be here? She wonders if she is still asleep and this is like a soap opera when you walk out of the shower and learn everything has been a dream.

Matt.

At first she thinks it's his phone in his hand, that black curve always like a dark beetle in his palm.

She remembers hearing Will say, "How did you get my gun-"

Will had shown her the gun the week before. He'd taken it from his top bureau drawer and said, Is this what life is supposed to be about? Is this what life is supposed to be about?

He'd held it in his lap as he told her he hated the Guard, hated everything except her.

Because that was how he talked lately, which wasn't a way she wanted anyone to talk, not after Dad.

In bed with him, it was all she could think about.

When he was sleeping, she opened the bureau drawer again, took the gun, and put it in her purse.

She hid it in her file cabinet at home, far in the back behind the hundreds and hundreds of Xeroxed cheer routines. She tried not to think about it. But it was there and, trying to sleep at night, she could think of nothing else.

But now her husband has the gun, holding it funny, like it's this thing in his hand he doesn't recognize.

It happens so fast, Will saying to Matt, "Do you think I care? Do you think I'd stop you?"

And Will grabbing for the gun, and Matt's eyes seizing on her at last, spotting her standing there, and abruptly gaining focus, gaining balance.

Matt, suddenly realizing, but not fast enough to stop it.

The two men pressed together, almost like they are embracing. It is as though they are embracing.

And then suddenly the gun is shoved up between their faces, and Will tipping back, the gun tilting-like the way you'd feed a bottle to a baby.

"This is it," he says. Will says.

She'll always remember that.

And the pop.

The flash from Will's mouth.

Like a cherry bomb.

Like Will's face lit from within.

Candescent.

And Will sliding to the floor.

It is so graceful, like a dance.

If it hadn't been what it was, it would've been beautiful.

After that, she loses time.

Mostly, she remembers the high, sharp whistling sound that she finally realizes is coming from her.

And Matt crying. She'd never ever seen him cry, except when Caitlin was born and he'd sat in the chair next to her hospital bed and told her that he had never been so happy and nothing could ever be bad again, he wouldn't let it be.

After that, everything is a red blur, Matt smearing the gun on the sofa cushions, smearing his fingerprints away.

She remembers thinking, How does he know to do that? How does he know to do that? And then thinking, And then thinking, Everyone in the world would know to do that. Everyone in the world would know to do that.

She remembers him holding her in his arms and telling her things, and the red-wrung way of his face, and how she felt sorry for him, she just did.

She remembers how she looked down and his shirt cuffs were misted red.

He tried to get her to leave with him, but she refused. Maybe he tried. That part she doesn't really remember.

She remembers sitting on the leather sofa for a minute, staring out the big windows, night-blackened.

She couldn't have, but she thinks she heard Matt driving away, twenty-seven floors down.

She doesn't remember calling me.

She never looked down at the floor.

When she finishes telling me, we're sitting on a back curb and it's so cold but neither of us wants to go inside.