“Thanks for Stopping”
by Tom Andes
Miranda Loisel hadn’t been back in Cow Hampshire six weeks when she ran into her ex, Bailey Rizzio hitchhiking on Dover Point Road, and all she could think was did he know about the accident. Later, she would ask herself why she didn’t floor it, leave Bailey sucking exhaust by the 7-Eleven across from the Weathervane Restaurant. Without thinking, still terrified of being behind the wheel—that kid’s face—she stepped on the brake, bringing her dad’s Nissan crunching to a stop on the gravel a hundred yards down the shoulder, Bailey jogging to catch up to her, and yeah, that was him, face prickly with stubble, hairy shoulders and bare biceps, black leather boots kicking up dust.
Oh my God, Bailey. Dressed for her interview at the Circuit City at the Fox Run Mall at three o’clock, she smoothed her shirt, checking her short, feathered hair in the rearview, the same breathless feeling since she’d first seen him across the boneyard, the cemetery where they partied, when she was a fifteen-year-old goth with her Manic Panic hair dye and oxblood Doc Martens. He’d been eighteen, a senior at Portsmouth High, totally badass, an artsy thug with greased hair, and that had been what, seventeen years? Another life.
“Thanks for stopping.” He stuck his face in the passenger’s side window. “Holy shit, Miranda?” He grinned, same cocky son of a bitch she’d fallen in love with before she was old enough to know better, and something cut through her, like no time had passed because with certain people it was cosmic, however much they hurt you. And whatever you did to them.
“Don’t just stand there, Sailor. Get in.” And he did. His weight made that imported compact bounce. Wearing black jeans, a wife-beater, and engineer boots, he shut the door, his feet next to her purse.
“I thought you were in London.” Panicked, she could feel her heart. She’d asked around, sure. As long ago as they’d split, people fed her intel about Bailey, like they were still joined in their friends’ eyes. And they’d probably told him about her, the wreck, too.
“I was hanging with these cockneys, crazy dudes out on the piss with their rhyming slang, and I was in Australia—Perth—living on the beach, surfing. But it got old, so I came back.” He shrugged. Had a five o’clock shadow, his dad’s Italian jaw, still handsome, damn him. Still trouble. “Instead of saying you fell and banged your head on the table, they say Clark because Gable rhymes, right? Like they substitute the word, Clark for gable for table. They say, ‘I hit me head on the Clark.’”
Same old Bailey, a big fish in that small pond, seacoast New Hampshire. Still too good for the place. Thirty-five, but he was a rich kid, traveling the world, while she was thirty-two, a day worker, took care of herself, paid her own bills, and now she was crashing in her room at Dad’s place in Somersworth haunted with its memories until she could get back on her feet, which she resented, sure.
“Bailey, why are you hitchhiking?” In spite of herself, all their history, she was happy to see him. Once, she’d loved him so much she’d hurt herself, cutting herself when they fought, if love was a strong enough word for what they’d had.
He pointed over his shoulder. “Van broke down. When did you get back from Frisco?”
She felt a blush of defensiveness, then a borderless fear, then a familiar shame. Did he know what happened, that she’d killed someone? In the August heat, with the AC busted, the wheel was sticky under her palms.
“Six weeks ago.” As they came down the hill past the turnoff for Newick’s Lobster House, the sun shining on the Piscataqua, the Sentra might’ve flown off the road, nothing Miranda could do about it, afraid she’d lose control if she touched the brakes, like when that kid had stepped onto Fillmore, crumpling under her Mini Cooper.
“Why’d you come back, anyway?” He rolled up his window, and Miranda’s grip tightened on the wheel. He damn well knew.
“My dad,” she said.
“Tough break.” Bailey thumbed his nose. “The kid, I mean. What was he, like, ten?”
Because sure enough her running into a kid who’d leapt in front of her car chasing a Whiffle ball and killing him had merited a series of articles on SF Gate, and between that, Google, and the Portsmouth, New Hampshire whisper network, the gossipy bitches she’d once called friends, well, everybody in their crowd knew.
It felt like a gut punch. Of course, he’d heard, people keeping tabs. Like Pacino in The Godfather: get out, and they pulled you back in. “Yeah, Bailey, he was ten. You must really hate me, saying that.”
“Just making conversation.”
When she dropped him at the bus stop in front of the Fox Run Mall, they hugged, his familiar smell making her dizzy, and he wrote his number on her palm with the pen that had been sticking out of her purse. His jaw clenched, and she could see it in his eyes, that familiar rage, like he was holding something in that could only come out in an explosion, like an angry toddler flying into an uncomprehending fury.
So, twelve years after they’d split, he was still angry.
“Call me.” Getting out of the car, he held thumb and pinky to his ear, like a phone.
As if.
Walking into her interview, five minutes late—damn him—she clenched her fist until the ink on her palm smeared. After all that time, she didn’t trust herself not to call. She wiped her hand on her skirt, then reached in her purse for a Kleenex. Her wallet was gone.
***
She was staying with her dad in Somersworth, the same apartment he’d been living in since her junior year of high school, the year she’d dropped out. It was just off High Street, on Memorial Drive. That year she’d broken up with Bailey for the first time, she’d had a couple of other boyfriends, but after nine months, she’d had to admit that she still loved Bailey, or maybe she was just too young and stupid to know better. Anyway, she’d gone back to him, his hostage for four more years, until she’d gotten her GED, dumped him for good, and run off to California, putting that distance between herself and Bailey, getting as far as she could from their old crowd.
When she climbed the stairs and opened the door, Dad was in the living room, Fox News on the television, a pot of something—Bolognese, smelled like—bubbling on the stove. Miranda emptied her purse onto the table under the window, but she’d been right at the store: compact, Kleenex, journal, ballpoint, a paperback copy of The Witching Hour, mace, a window breaker and seatbelt cutter Dad had given her to put in the car, keys, cellphone. No wallet.
Son of a bitch. She clenched her fists, breaking out in an anxiety sweat, the same thing he’d always managed to do to her because with Bailey it was about power, the hold he could have on her—and to think for a second, she might’ve expected better. Nothing—and nobody—changed.
“How was the interview?”
Dad was leaning against the doorframe, a crutch under his left arm. Sober sixteen years, nearly as long as he’d lived in this apartment, and not a day went by she wasn’t proud of him, but he’d taken a spill on his Harley on a ride up to Laconia and dislocated his left hip. Six months out of work, which had given her an excuse to come home, him saying he could take care of himself, and sure, he could, but wouldn’t it be better with someone—Miranda—there? Even if she knew it was a coward’s way out of the mess she’d made of her life in San Francisco.
“Fine.” Her hands were shaking, and she clasped them behind her back, so he wouldn’t see. She’d aced the interview, but it was hard to say she wasn’t overqualified for managing a Circuit City at the mall. She’d taught herself programming back in those early days of the tech bubble in San Francisco, when it didn’t matter whether you had a piece of paper or letters after your name, only that you could do the job, and she’d always learned whatever she needed to learn. “I’ll find out for sure tomorrow, but I think I got it.”
“I knew you’d do it.” And maybe people weren’t so awful. After sixteen years of meetings, step-work, coffee with his sponsor, Dad had changed, though he’d always been a harmless drunk, not like his scumbag friends, or Bailey. Even if he was going through the motions of being a dad now. Store manager at Circuit City was about ten steps down from lead programmer at Guild Fire, the startup where she’d worked in San Francisco.
“I ran into Bailey Rizzio.” Even saying his name triggered a burst of adrenaline, sweat in the small of her back. He was everything she’d feared coming back here: the hold the past could have on her, the way you could never escape it. Twelve years after she’d dumped him and run away to the West Coast, she saw him for twenty minutes, and it did this to her, like she was fifteen, cutting herself, helpless again.
“Yeah?” He cocked his head. Why had she told him? He’d always liked Bailey, the two of them getting plastered together in the living room back in those bad old days before the old man had gone on the wagon, splitting six-packs of PBR, and watching Nick at Nite. But how would he feel if he knew about half the shit Bailey had pulled on her, stuff she’d never told him because she didn’t want to see the look of disbelief you always saw on men’s faces when you confronted them with the sins of their kind: Dad, he shoved me, he slapped me, he called me a slut, he held me down, he choked me.
“He was hitchhiking.” She brushed her bangs out of her eyes, steadied herself on the table. They say Clark because Gable rhymes. Get out of my head, Bailey.
“Hitchhiking, no shit?” Her dad laughed, but he was still watching her, like he was trying to gauge how she felt about Bailey, or about being back in New Hampshire. Not that staying with Mom in Lynn had ever been on the table. Miranda hadn’t been able to spend more than half an hour under the same roof as that woman with her tarot, her astrology, and her crystals, not since Miranda was fifteen. “I didn’t think people thumbed anymore.”
They don’t, Dad, she wanted to say, normal people use their cellphones to call tow trucks when their vans break down, but she was tired of talking about Bailey. Should she call the cops? And tell them what? Hey, I think my psycho ex might’ve lifted my wallet from my purse after I picked him up hitchhiking this afternoon, and no I can’t prove it.
Shit, half the Portsmouth cops were probably Bailey’s old high school buddies, anyway.
She rubbed her palm. If she’d kept his number, she could call, yell at him.
“Gotta check on dinner.” Her dad crutched across the room, lifted the lid on the saucepan. The windows above the sink steamed, the stained-glass hummingbird that had been there since Miranda was a teen. In the living room, a window unit blasted cold air.
“I’ve got it, Dad.” She took the wooden spoon, rubbing his shoulder. He was in cutoffs, a Molly Hatchet tee shirt. “Want me to put water on for spaghetti?”
His face darkened. He wasn’t much taller than she was, five-four to her five-two, and he smelled sour, like he hadn’t showered in a few days. The inactivity, nothing to do but sit around and watch TV, didn’t agree with him. “I’m not a cripple, kid.”
“Maybe you should relax, let somebody take care of you for a change.”
He sat in the chair under the window, and no, it wasn’t lost on Miranda he was still on those pain pills—Vicodin, six 10 mg tablets a day: she’d read the instructions on the bottle—but she didn’t know what his sponsor had said about that, didn’t know whether he was following the prescription. Between that and running into Bailey, she felt like she was falling back into a nightmare.
“Sorry, I’m not used to this.” He waved. Outside it was getting dark, the streetlights starting to come on. On the TV in the next room, they were talking about the war, a bombing in the Green Zone in Iraq.
“It’s okay.” With her back to him, she ran water into a pot. If she’d looked at him, she might’ve cried, and she didn’t want him to know how defeated she felt. She should’ve stayed in San Francisco. “I’m not really used to it, either.”
After they ate, in order to make sure she wasn’t losing her mind, she went outside and checked the Nissan, in case her wallet had fallen out of her purse, and Bailey hadn’t taken it—and wasn’t that how it worked with guys like Bailey, you doubted reality before you suspected them of what they’d done. No dice.
In her room, her body quivering, her hands shaking with rage, she called and cancelled her credit cards. No suspicious activity, but the money wasn’t the point. No, the point was to mess with her.
“Thank you.” Miranda hung up, lying awake on the futon mattress where she’d slept since she was sixteen, in the bedroom her dad had converted to storage. When she left, Miranda had been in such a hurry to get out of that place, she hadn’t bothered to clean the room, and the boombox she’d used to make mixed tapes for her friends was still on a table in the corner behind a pile of boxes, Nine Inch Nails, Madonna Erotica posters, and a dreamcatcher on the walls. In the bathroom, the tap was running, and her dad crutched across the creaking floorboards before the hall light went out.
This time she said it aloud, clenching her fists, breaking a silence that scared her shitless after twelve years with the constant background hum, the white noise of a city: “Bailey, you son of a bitch.”
***
She called him the next morning not at the number she’d scrubbed from her palm but at his parents’ house in Portsmouth, the landline there burned into her memory like the one at her dad’s. His mom answered, and sure enough, Bailey was living there.
“I want my wallet back.” She was standing on the landing outside her dad’s apartment, a pile of terracotta flowerpots next to the railing, a couple plants so dead, they might’ve been there since Miranda had left. If he’d denied taking it, she might have broken down and called the cops, the whole thing an insult to her intelligence. Like she was a stupid slut he’d been banging back in the day in his vintage Corvair, that deathtrap he’d tooled around Portsmouth in, the muffler held up by a clothes hanger, and God he’d made her panties wet, except a lot of those other girls that he’d been screwing had been her so-called friends.
“Get lunch with me. For old times’ sake.”
As if there were anything about old times she wanted to revisit. He was goading her, trying to get a reaction. And Miranda was primed to give him one.
“You don’t deny taking it?” She felt like she was interrogating him, like one of his high school teachers, and she resented him putting her in that position, like it was all a harmless prank. Stealing her shit, it was a crime. Girl, don’t you forget that.
“How about the Stockpot, at twelve?” He hung up.
At the restaurant, they sat outside at a table on the deck overlooking the harbor. She’d worn a skirt that fell to her knees and a matching suit jacket in case she had to go back to the mall for a second interview, and she hoped Bailey didn’t think it was for his benefit, but she still looked good, and she wanted him to see what he’d been missing. He was drinking club soda with lime, so maybe he was sober, too. Not that she cared.
“You hear from Jack?” he asked, and dread pricked her heart. So, was that how this was going to be, rehashing the past, going over the gory details of how she’d hurt him twelve years ago, when hooking up with his best friend Jack Macgowan had been meaningless, a fling, nothing more, a way to get rid of Bailey, and when they’d cheated on each other a dozen times besides that, anyway? Though even at the time she’d understood Jack had been a bridge too far, a way to guarantee Bailey would never be able to forgive her, and looked at in that light, hadn’t she gotten what she wanted?
“No, you?” All she knew of Jack Macgowan was that he was in prison for holding up a convenience store in Springfield, Massachusetts, which was where he probably belonged. She’d never been proud of fucking Jack because that’s all it had been, a fuck, albeit one that lasted a few months. But that was how desperate she’d been to get Bailey off her back.
“We keep in touch, write back and forth sometimes. They let him get mail in that place, at least.” He drank water, sucking his teeth, making a face, like poor Jack. “Did you know he has a kid?” She nodded. People talked to her, Bailey, too, she said. “Listen, I’m sorry about what I said in the car—about the kid, the accident—yesterday.”
The waitress brought her coffee, took their order. Half the people they’d known had worked at the Stockpot back in the day, the place the main source of employment for the Portsmouth punk scene. But she didn’t recognize anybody now.
“It was really mean, Bailey.”
“Like I said, I’m sorry.” His voice got firmer, edgier, as if sorry fixed everything, and she tensed at his anger. He leaned closer, the blinding white sun hitting the water behind him, where a boat was tacking across the harbor, so she had to squint. She’d skipped breakfast, and she felt fluttery, weak, a headache coming on. “But seriously. Are you alright?”
She wanted to tell him to shove his concern. With Bailey, everything was an angle, potential leverage, but maybe she wasn’t giving him enough credit. How would she feel if someone judged her for the person she’d been twelve years ago?
“Bailey, I—.” She was on the verge of opening up to him, telling him about the nightmares, the way she’d seen that kid’s face every night for six months after he’d wandered in front of her car on Fillmore through Pac Heights. And the kid’s mom, who’d rushed out of the bakery on the corner and cradled her son in her arms, speaking to him in Chinese and directing a look of such rage at Miranda that she felt it now, the sense she’d done something she could never undo, something that had the potential to change her life, too.
And it had, though not in the ways she’d feared in that moment, when her first thought hadn’t been for the kid but for herself. Oh God, I don’t want to go to prison. Please, don’t let him die.
“I still have dreams, bad,” but she caught herself. Don’t tell him anything he can use against you. “I want my damn wallet. You’re lucky I didn’t call the cops.”
He shrugged like it was no big deal, took it out of his jacket pocket, and set it on the table. Almost like he was angry at her for not trusting him. “I was going to buy you lunch.”
“With my money?”
She was pissed—not like he didn’t have the dough—but he laughed. He showed her that grin, which he’d used to charm his way out of things that should have landed him in the clink with his buddy Jack. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Bailey’s dad was a lawyer, rich, connected. “You staying with the old man? How is Leo?”
She didn’t like the familiarity, as if Bailey should be on a first name basis with her dad, and she didn’t like Bailey knowing where she was staying. Not like he hadn’t been to that apartment hundreds of times back in the day. “Banged up, but he’s all right. I’ll tell him you asked.”
“I used to see him around meetings,” Bailey said, and she felt that prick of tenderness she couldn’t afford to risk feeling, the blue calfskin Coach wallet he’d stolen looming large on the table between them. All the shit he’d pulled over the years, including this, and she could still rationalize it, telling herself hey, at least he was trying.
Son of a bitch’d had a lifetime of second chances.
“You’ve been going to meetings?” She fought the urge to reach across the table and touch his hand. Instead, she drank her tepid coffee, and there were few pleasures in life like strong, black coffee, though now, it made her want a cigarette. And yeah, she did care if Bailey attended meetings. She wanted the best for him.
“Sober and crazy, baby.” Bailey grinned. And that wasn’t overstatement. But as a breeze riffled the water, even in August, a chill, his face got serious again. “I had three years, in June. Got the chip and everything.”
“No shit?” In spite of herself, she was surprised, and proud of him, too. Though she had her doubts, she wanted to believe that however he tried to hide it, inside Bailey was a decent man trying to find his way out. “Good for you, Bailey. Good for you.”
When their lunch arrived—chicken salad on a croissant with a side of fruit for Miranda, a burger cooked medium-rare with steak fries for Bailey—they dug in, and for the first few bites, it felt like no time had passed, like they’d been whisked off to a place where they’d never hurt each other, none of that murky water having passed under the bridge, and none of the other stuff, either. The croissant was buttery, flaky, grease coating the tips of her fingers, and the grapes in the chicken salad popped in her mouth. She speared a piece of cantaloupe, wiping her chin with a napkin, and for a few minutes, sitting by the water with the wind on her face, despite everything—despite Bailey, despite the accident, despite Dad and his pills—she might’ve been happy, that fleeting feeling of contentment she’d been chasing all her life.
“So, how long are you planning on sticking around?” Bailey asked, his mouth full.
“At least long enough to make sure Dad’s all right.”
“Cool.” Bailey nodded, taking another bite of his burger, dipping his steak fries in mayo.
And no sooner did she feel okay than it hit her again. The kid’s name was Joey Lu, and his mother worked in the library at the University of San Francisco. And the two and a half weeks he’d been in that coma, Miranda’s name in the newspapers, a reporter from the Chronicle having gotten her cell number and calling every morning, changing numbers when she blocked him, she’d prayed the kid would wake up just to spare her the agony of knowing she’d caused his mom that grief. She’d prayed because she’d done something she couldn’t reconcile with the person she wanted to be, but it had been an honest mistake, hadn’t it, so why should she have to pay for a moment of inattention, a lapse, the quick glance at her cellphone to see if her boss had texted, which all the papers wanted to talk about, just like they played up the race angle, her being white, too?
“What about you?” she asked Bailey, but he was vague on that point, shrugging, like he wanted to deflect the question, and she felt the balance of power shifting between them, him asking for more than he was willing to give. She’d made a mistake coming here, humoring him, letting him think he hadn’t done anything wrong by taking her wallet.
“We’ll see.” He pushed back his plate, picking his teeth, eating a gray piece of meat off the end of his finger. She’d had three serious boyfriends in the years after Bailey, more unserious ones than she could count, and every one of them had been younger than she was, a kid, really, but things hadn’t lasted with any of them, either. Well, the son of a bitch, Bailey, he’d ruined her, and she hated him for it. “I’ve got a few irons in the fire.”
“Right.” With Bailey, who knew what that could mean?
He paid, like he’d promised, and she let him, since it was the least that he owed her. When they got up to leave, she took her wallet, dropping it in her purse, and a few minutes later, he grabbed her hand as he walked her up to the parking lot on Chapel.
“Let’s hang out again, yeah?” He towered over her, standing too close, pressing her up against the Nissan, so she felt grateful they were in public. She must never again be alone with Bailey Rizzio. As if she hadn’t known that, anyway.
“Bailey, no.” She laughed. Didn’t mean to be cruel, but she was exasperated, furious, and so angry with him, the whole thing like a sick joke that kept replaying itself, a tape loop on repeat. As if he was any different now than he had been—same old Bailey—as if either of them was, not when you put them together, their chemistry toxic, like bleach and ammonia. “What the hell are you even talking about?”
He looked stricken, an expression on his face that turned from anguish to that more familiar look of rage, his nostrils flared, his forehead knitted, and hadn’t she always wondered if something was wrong with him, a developmental thing, mild autism, or Asperger’s, even if she hadn’t the words for those back then, something to explain the tantrum he was about to throw?
“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.” He was leaning against the car with his palm on the roof, so he’d cornered her, and she caught another whiff of that meaty smell of sweat he’d always had, even when Bailey was eighteen, stinking like a full-grown man, like her dad’s degenerate, beer-drinking buddies. Those dudes had groped her in the kitchen, pinching her when she walked past, inviting her to sit in their laps when she was thirteen—a kid—her dad laughing, too drunk or stupid or maybe too weak to see what his pals were doing. Bailey had greased his hair, and a black blade of it fell away from his widow’s peak, like a spit curl.
She pushed him away, so he took a step back. She pitied him. Twelve years after they’d split up for the last time, they’d both washed up back in Portsmouth because they were failing at their lives, so he was looking for the same answers she was, but that didn’t mean they needed to try again at something that had only ever brought out the worst in both of them.
“Yeah, I have thought about it, which is why I know better. The answer is no. I’m happy to be friends, but I don’t think we should see each other, not like that.” Christ, even friends was too much. It scared her to realize how much she hated him, and she wanted to know whether she could still make him bleed. She wanted to lash out, to hurt him. “You know, I don’t think we should hang out after this, either. Not even as friends, not until you can respect me and not pull shit like taking my wallet. It was over between us a long time ago, and we’re not going back.”
She should’ve said that back in the day instead of screwing his best friend, which was her fault, fine, but he shrugged, the walls going back up. As if this was about love. As if this wasn’t about power and control and how she’d hurt him.
“Cool.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Forget I said anything. I guess I’ll see you around, right?” And he started walking toward Market Square. He was storming off, like a goddamn child. And how could she have expected better of him?
“Bailey, you don’t need to be like that.” Why couldn’t she leave well enough alone? Now that he was walking away, it shocked her to discover she didn’t want him to go. She felt that same pull, like she could mend him, ease the pain she knew she’d caused him. In his black Levi’s and checked, collared shirt, he might’ve been 18, might’ve been 80, and she could see the old man he would one day become, stooped, haunted, and lonely. She wanted to spare him that fate, wanted him to be that good person she knew was inside him. “Bailey.”
Halfway down the block, he turned and walked back to her.
Hard not to think they were different people, and on a cellular level, maybe that was true. But what struck her was what hadn’t changed: the scratch of his stubble on her chin, the smell of his breath, the steady sureness of his hands on her ribcage, the crick in her neck as she leaned up, and he bent to her, all of which seemed both new and familiar, exciting and scary. Maybe she’d been expecting this, known it was coming from the moment he climbed in her car. No, from the day she’d decided to come home.
“Come back with me,” he said. Where did he mean? His breath was hot on her face. Were they going to screw in the back of his van, in his bedroom at his parents’ house, like high school all over again?
But she had a girl-boner she couldn’t take the edge off, not on her own, her fingers not enough for this, and stupid as he was—sleazy prick he’d always been—a coward and a jerk, he was still the guy who’d cried in her arms when his dad kicked him out at nineteen, and she knew him like no one else. And this was bad in the ways they’d always been bad, teenagers who’d lived entire adult lives before they were legal drinking age. Bad like in that Madonna song she’d loved: “Bad girl, drunk by six, kissing someone else’s lips.” Bad like illicit, a thrill.
And she wanted him. God, did she want him, the size and thrust of him, which had always been so much, like it was on the verge of splitting her apart. Even once, she needed him.
No. Her mind forming the word, even as against his, her mouth said yes.
***
Next day, he borrowed her car. His van was still in the shop, he needed to pick something up in Keene for an art project he was working on, and really, she should have known better, but it was the morning after that before he texted her back to say he’d ended up spending the night. By then, she’d long since cabbed it to her orientation shift at Circuit City. And it wasn’t even that she couldn’t afford the taxi, though that was part of it, her dad still collecting unemployment insurance, which was only a fraction of his salary, as she told Bailey over the phone during her break, but it was more the principle of the thing, the fact he’d promised something and failed to deliver, the fact he hadn’t done what he’d said he was going to do, that old push and pull: whenever she let him get close, he hurt her, and after all these years hadn’t they outgrown this?
“I’m sorry.” He said it on the phone, and he said it again when he showed up at the end of her shift to drop her keys in her palm. But he still had that dumb look, forehead scrunched up like a kid who doesn’t want to hear the word no, and if he thought he had it bad, when had he suffered or paid the consequence for anything? Because the kid hadn’t woken up, and in court she’d cried and apologized, the judge stern, reprimanding Miranda, dressing her down for her inattention, her selfishness, but even afterward, she’d felt hollow, gutted, like she’d gotten away with something she didn’t deserve to skate on: no jail time, a fine of ten thousand dollars, and points on her license, a slap on the wrist, so that she no longer knew whether her tears in that courtroom had been genuine or a ploy.
“Fine, Bailey, you’re sorry. Apology accepted. But we don’t need to do this anymore.”
And if she was honest with herself, she couldn’t deny the frisson of joy she felt at the fact she could still send him away down in the dumps.
In the parking lot, he turned and shouted back at her, in front of God and anyone else who was listening. “You know, I didn’t have to forgive you for what you did with Jack, or for fucking any of the rest of my friends, either. And I didn’t have to give you your goddamn wallet back. You should count yourself lucky, baby, you should be happy I ever gave you the time of day.”
He was pointing at her, and he spit. She covered her face with her hands, so he wouldn’t see her crying. Hadn’t she known this was coming?
“Bailey, I—.”
“Are you laughing at me?” He was hurt, shocked.
“No, I’m—.” But whatever it was, the sound she was making, she couldn’t stop it, and she only did it harder when he yelled at her, her face in her hands. I’m crying.
“You know what?” He was trembling. “I’m glad you fell flat on your face in California. I’m glad you killed that kid. You always thought you were better than the rest of us, always thought you were too good for this place, but I guess you needed your friends. Guess you needed me, after all, didn’t you?”
And the worst part was that even if he was lashing out, he was right.
After he’d disappeared around the corner to the bus stop, it took her fifteen minutes before she’d calmed down enough to drive. When she got back to her dad’s, she threw up.
***
That night, six o’clock, she was dealing herself a hand of solitaire at the kitchen table, an act that triggered her muscle memory, all those nights she’d spent at that table when she was between boyfriends, drinking coffee and playing cards, then that year she’d broken up with Bailey, when she’d dated different guys from the prep school, Berwick, and sure enough the neighbors were right, her dad had let her run wild, but those were the bad old days when he’d kept cases of Bud in the crisper drawer, no goddamn food in the house unless she bought it.
Bailey. Shuffling the cards, cutting the deck, did she say his name aloud? He’d called a dozen times, as relentless as if he were stalking her, and she shut her phone off, unplugging the landline.
In the next room, the TV was blasting, Dad snoring in his armchair, and that brought her back, too. All those nights he’d passed out in front of Mister Ed and Mork and Mindy reruns with a beer in his hand and a cigarette burning in the ashtray, losing his license for a dee-wee that year she’d dropped out, so she’d had to ask her boyfriends to drive him to the nightshift at the power plant.
“Dad.” She was standing in the doorway, and he sputtered and came awake, looking at her with bleary eyes. She hated that she’d done this, but she’d counted the pills in his bottle, and he was chipping, taking more than his dose, gobbling down eight or ten Vicodin a day. He rubbed his face, sitting up in the chair, and put his glasses on.
“What’s up, kid?” He looked naked, defenseless, like she’d caught him at something. She felt sorry for him, but she was pissed, too.
“I wanted to see if you could use a lift to your meeting.”
And sure enough, she was testing him. Tuesday nights, he went to an NA meeting in the basement of the Pilgrim Orthodox Presbyterian a few miles down the road in Dover. Place he’d been going ten, twelve years, almost since he got sober, those old heads and bikers in their leather vests like brothers.
“Think I’m gonna take the night off. Leg’s really hurting.”
And he gestured at that left hip, chicken flesh around the edges of the brace, which he said made him feel like Mr. Roboto, but wasn’t he getting better, she asked, and sooner rather than later, he’d be back on days at the hydro plant?
“Yeah, kid, I think I’m getting there. You don’t need to worry about your old man, all right? Your dad’s gonna be fine.” He reached for the glass of water on his TV tray and sipped, and at least that was an improvement over cans of Natty Light or Busch, or God forbid Golden Anniversary Beer. Or maybe he was cotton-mouthed from those pills.
“I’m going to the store.” Purse slung over her shoulder, she’d put on a pair of Keds, cheap, practical walking shoes she’d picked up at the DSW in downtown San Francisco the week she left the city. Still had her Docs, and she still had her high-top Chucks, which was the signature footwear for that punk scene, required gear if you were sixteen years old and going to sit on the benches in Market Square with the older kids like Bailey and Jack Macgowan who drank and fought in the boneyard. But those shoes gave her blisters. And as much as she’d once looked up to Bailey and Jack, they hadn’t amounted to much.
“I know you’re a big girl, and you’re used to living in the city, but be careful, all right? High Street gets busy this time of day. You never know who’s out there.”
At his concern, she softened. Sober sixteen years, but he’d spent half of that on the marijuana maintenance plan, and he hadn’t touched a drink, so if he felt like he needed more of those pills to manage his pain, she could try to trust him, right?
He was an adult, old enough to sort his problems out on his own.
“I’ll be fine.” Her eyes blurred, and she turned away, still not wanting him to see her cry. She felt hopeless, trapped. Sober or not, he would never be able to make her safe, not now any more than when she was thirteen. She’d only ever been able to rely on herself. “See you when I get back.”
“You okay,” he said, “being here?”
And Miranda wiped her cheeks.
“I’m fine.” What would he do about it, anyway?
“You know you can turn to me. You can talk to your dad.”
“Thanks.” She couldn’t turn to him. But at least he was trying.
On her way out the door, she grabbed the car keys. And when she got to the bottom of the steps, she climbed into the Nissan and sat behind the wheel of that ’88 Sentra her dad had bought for six hundred bucks from his landlady, who’d never taken it farther than the Shop’N Save in Dover, so despite being almost twenty years old, it only had sixty thousand miles on the odometer. Thing about the accident, Joey, the kid she’d killed back in San Francisco, was that it was her fault, and it came as a relief to admit that her distraction, the pressure she’d felt living in the city, the way she was rushing everywhere, had gotten the better of her, causing her to slip up, to make a mistake that had led her back here, to that place she’d been running from all along.
She stuck the key in the ignition and started the car. She was still in her red Circuit City shirt. Guys like Bailey thought they were too good to hold real jobs, too special to wear a uniform, but Miranda was going to make 45K a year, and she was staying in New Hampshire. Wasn’t sure when she’d decided that, but she knew it now. And it felt okay. Felt like she was free of something she’d been dragging behind her for years.
“For as long as I live, Bailey, you will not leave me alone,” she told the empty car, and she switched on the radio, which she’d left on a Top 40 station, 94.1, and which was playing that godawful Smash Mouth song, “All Star.” Turning onto High Street, heading southwest toward Portsmouth with the sun in her eyes, she flipped the visor down.
She had to pick up a few groceries, stuff for dinner. But first, she wanted to drive, to prove to herself she could, that she was okay.
***
When she got back to her dad’s place, the van was parked by the concrete wall. Upstairs in the apartment, through their lighted windows, she could see Bailey and her old man, Bailey shaking Dad’s hand, and wasn’t that how the world went round, divvied up over a handshake between men? And what were they doing, anyway? For a moment, she might’ve suspected he was selling her dad pills, but she couldn’t let herself believe Bailey or the world could be that evil.
Son of a bitch. Once upon a time in her journals, which were in a box in her room, she’d written down every time she’d been with Bailey, what he’d said, how she’d felt, in an effort to control it or make it normal when it had been anything but that, when for the first year they’d been together, with the difference in their ages, it hadn’t even been legal, when it had been goddamn statutory rape. Miranda wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life crying about being a victim. But this felt like a final, awful violation.
She shut the engine off and stepped out of the Nissan. The night was hot, sticky. She slammed the car door, making no effort to keep Bailey and Dad from hearing it. No AC, so her undershirt stuck to her back. The van’s driver’s side window reflected the stars, so many of them in the country sky, more than she could hope to count. She climbed the stairs on the side of the building, and Bailey came out the door, his face lighting up—gloating—when he saw her.
He was laughing when Miranda went for her mace. On the landing, her dad standing in the doorway, she faced Bailey and pointed into the darkness.
“Leave,” she said.
“I just wanted to talk to you.” He showed her his hands, like he was innocent.
“What do you want from me, Bailey?”
He had a dumb look like the question flustered him. Maybe if he caught her, and the chase ended, he wouldn’t know what to do, and maybe she wouldn’t, either. Or maybe the answer was the obvious thing, what they’d done the other day in the back of his broken-down Dodge van.
“Oldest reason in the world,” he said, but he was joking, and it was a line from a movie. He was thirty-five, she was thirty-two, and they were adults, people who’d known each other more than half their lives, but they were still doing this. When would it end? And what was this, her penance? Something else she could never undo. She was stuck with Bailey as surely as she was with the fact she’d taken a life, killing that kid in California.
She punched his chest, and he caught her in his arms, pulling her close, her dad watching from the doorway, like he didn’t know whether it was okay to laugh at the scene the two of them were making on the porch, or maybe he would club the guy with his crutch, protecting his daughter like he never had. She kept swinging, kicking. “Bailey, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you in my life.”
Tom Andes’ the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me is forthcoming from Crescent City Books. His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2012, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He lives in Albuquerque, where he is a working musician. He’s taught writing at a bunch of places, privately, and also works in catering. In early 2025, Southern Crescent Recording Co. collected his acclaimed EPs on a vinyl release, The Ones That Brought You Home. He can be found at tomandes.com.
by Tom Andes
Miranda Loisel hadn’t been back in Cow Hampshire six weeks when she ran into her ex, Bailey Rizzio hitchhiking on Dover Point Road, and all she could think was did he know about the accident. Later, she would ask herself why she didn’t floor it, leave Bailey sucking exhaust by the 7-Eleven across from the Weathervane Restaurant. Without thinking, still terrified of being behind the wheel—that kid’s face—she stepped on the brake, bringing her dad’s Nissan crunching to a stop on the gravel a hundred yards down the shoulder, Bailey jogging to catch up to her, and yeah, that was him, face prickly with stubble, hairy shoulders and bare biceps, black leather boots kicking up dust.
Oh my God, Bailey. Dressed for her interview at the Circuit City at the Fox Run Mall at three o’clock, she smoothed her shirt, checking her short, feathered hair in the rearview, the same breathless feeling since she’d first seen him across the boneyard, the cemetery where they partied, when she was a fifteen-year-old goth with her Manic Panic hair dye and oxblood Doc Martens. He’d been eighteen, a senior at Portsmouth High, totally badass, an artsy thug with greased hair, and that had been what, seventeen years? Another life.
“Thanks for stopping.” He stuck his face in the passenger’s side window. “Holy shit, Miranda?” He grinned, same cocky son of a bitch she’d fallen in love with before she was old enough to know better, and something cut through her, like no time had passed because with certain people it was cosmic, however much they hurt you. And whatever you did to them.
“Don’t just stand there, Sailor. Get in.” And he did. His weight made that imported compact bounce. Wearing black jeans, a wife-beater, and engineer boots, he shut the door, his feet next to her purse.
“I thought you were in London.” Panicked, she could feel her heart. She’d asked around, sure. As long ago as they’d split, people fed her intel about Bailey, like they were still joined in their friends’ eyes. And they’d probably told him about her, the wreck, too.
“I was hanging with these cockneys, crazy dudes out on the piss with their rhyming slang, and I was in Australia—Perth—living on the beach, surfing. But it got old, so I came back.” He shrugged. Had a five o’clock shadow, his dad’s Italian jaw, still handsome, damn him. Still trouble. “Instead of saying you fell and banged your head on the table, they say Clark because Gable rhymes, right? Like they substitute the word, Clark for gable for table. They say, ‘I hit me head on the Clark.’”
Same old Bailey, a big fish in that small pond, seacoast New Hampshire. Still too good for the place. Thirty-five, but he was a rich kid, traveling the world, while she was thirty-two, a day worker, took care of herself, paid her own bills, and now she was crashing in her room at Dad’s place in Somersworth haunted with its memories until she could get back on her feet, which she resented, sure.
“Bailey, why are you hitchhiking?” In spite of herself, all their history, she was happy to see him. Once, she’d loved him so much she’d hurt herself, cutting herself when they fought, if love was a strong enough word for what they’d had.
He pointed over his shoulder. “Van broke down. When did you get back from Frisco?”
She felt a blush of defensiveness, then a borderless fear, then a familiar shame. Did he know what happened, that she’d killed someone? In the August heat, with the AC busted, the wheel was sticky under her palms.
“Six weeks ago.” As they came down the hill past the turnoff for Newick’s Lobster House, the sun shining on the Piscataqua, the Sentra might’ve flown off the road, nothing Miranda could do about it, afraid she’d lose control if she touched the brakes, like when that kid had stepped onto Fillmore, crumpling under her Mini Cooper.
“Why’d you come back, anyway?” He rolled up his window, and Miranda’s grip tightened on the wheel. He damn well knew.
“My dad,” she said.
“Tough break.” Bailey thumbed his nose. “The kid, I mean. What was he, like, ten?”
Because sure enough her running into a kid who’d leapt in front of her car chasing a Whiffle ball and killing him had merited a series of articles on SF Gate, and between that, Google, and the Portsmouth, New Hampshire whisper network, the gossipy bitches she’d once called friends, well, everybody in their crowd knew.
It felt like a gut punch. Of course, he’d heard, people keeping tabs. Like Pacino in The Godfather: get out, and they pulled you back in. “Yeah, Bailey, he was ten. You must really hate me, saying that.”
“Just making conversation.”
When she dropped him at the bus stop in front of the Fox Run Mall, they hugged, his familiar smell making her dizzy, and he wrote his number on her palm with the pen that had been sticking out of her purse. His jaw clenched, and she could see it in his eyes, that familiar rage, like he was holding something in that could only come out in an explosion, like an angry toddler flying into an uncomprehending fury.
So, twelve years after they’d split, he was still angry.
“Call me.” Getting out of the car, he held thumb and pinky to his ear, like a phone.
As if.
Walking into her interview, five minutes late—damn him—she clenched her fist until the ink on her palm smeared. After all that time, she didn’t trust herself not to call. She wiped her hand on her skirt, then reached in her purse for a Kleenex. Her wallet was gone.
***
She was staying with her dad in Somersworth, the same apartment he’d been living in since her junior year of high school, the year she’d dropped out. It was just off High Street, on Memorial Drive. That year she’d broken up with Bailey for the first time, she’d had a couple of other boyfriends, but after nine months, she’d had to admit that she still loved Bailey, or maybe she was just too young and stupid to know better. Anyway, she’d gone back to him, his hostage for four more years, until she’d gotten her GED, dumped him for good, and run off to California, putting that distance between herself and Bailey, getting as far as she could from their old crowd.
When she climbed the stairs and opened the door, Dad was in the living room, Fox News on the television, a pot of something—Bolognese, smelled like—bubbling on the stove. Miranda emptied her purse onto the table under the window, but she’d been right at the store: compact, Kleenex, journal, ballpoint, a paperback copy of The Witching Hour, mace, a window breaker and seatbelt cutter Dad had given her to put in the car, keys, cellphone. No wallet.
Son of a bitch. She clenched her fists, breaking out in an anxiety sweat, the same thing he’d always managed to do to her because with Bailey it was about power, the hold he could have on her—and to think for a second, she might’ve expected better. Nothing—and nobody—changed.
“How was the interview?”
Dad was leaning against the doorframe, a crutch under his left arm. Sober sixteen years, nearly as long as he’d lived in this apartment, and not a day went by she wasn’t proud of him, but he’d taken a spill on his Harley on a ride up to Laconia and dislocated his left hip. Six months out of work, which had given her an excuse to come home, him saying he could take care of himself, and sure, he could, but wouldn’t it be better with someone—Miranda—there? Even if she knew it was a coward’s way out of the mess she’d made of her life in San Francisco.
“Fine.” Her hands were shaking, and she clasped them behind her back, so he wouldn’t see. She’d aced the interview, but it was hard to say she wasn’t overqualified for managing a Circuit City at the mall. She’d taught herself programming back in those early days of the tech bubble in San Francisco, when it didn’t matter whether you had a piece of paper or letters after your name, only that you could do the job, and she’d always learned whatever she needed to learn. “I’ll find out for sure tomorrow, but I think I got it.”
“I knew you’d do it.” And maybe people weren’t so awful. After sixteen years of meetings, step-work, coffee with his sponsor, Dad had changed, though he’d always been a harmless drunk, not like his scumbag friends, or Bailey. Even if he was going through the motions of being a dad now. Store manager at Circuit City was about ten steps down from lead programmer at Guild Fire, the startup where she’d worked in San Francisco.
“I ran into Bailey Rizzio.” Even saying his name triggered a burst of adrenaline, sweat in the small of her back. He was everything she’d feared coming back here: the hold the past could have on her, the way you could never escape it. Twelve years after she’d dumped him and run away to the West Coast, she saw him for twenty minutes, and it did this to her, like she was fifteen, cutting herself, helpless again.
“Yeah?” He cocked his head. Why had she told him? He’d always liked Bailey, the two of them getting plastered together in the living room back in those bad old days before the old man had gone on the wagon, splitting six-packs of PBR, and watching Nick at Nite. But how would he feel if he knew about half the shit Bailey had pulled on her, stuff she’d never told him because she didn’t want to see the look of disbelief you always saw on men’s faces when you confronted them with the sins of their kind: Dad, he shoved me, he slapped me, he called me a slut, he held me down, he choked me.
“He was hitchhiking.” She brushed her bangs out of her eyes, steadied herself on the table. They say Clark because Gable rhymes. Get out of my head, Bailey.
“Hitchhiking, no shit?” Her dad laughed, but he was still watching her, like he was trying to gauge how she felt about Bailey, or about being back in New Hampshire. Not that staying with Mom in Lynn had ever been on the table. Miranda hadn’t been able to spend more than half an hour under the same roof as that woman with her tarot, her astrology, and her crystals, not since Miranda was fifteen. “I didn’t think people thumbed anymore.”
They don’t, Dad, she wanted to say, normal people use their cellphones to call tow trucks when their vans break down, but she was tired of talking about Bailey. Should she call the cops? And tell them what? Hey, I think my psycho ex might’ve lifted my wallet from my purse after I picked him up hitchhiking this afternoon, and no I can’t prove it.
Shit, half the Portsmouth cops were probably Bailey’s old high school buddies, anyway.
She rubbed her palm. If she’d kept his number, she could call, yell at him.
“Gotta check on dinner.” Her dad crutched across the room, lifted the lid on the saucepan. The windows above the sink steamed, the stained-glass hummingbird that had been there since Miranda was a teen. In the living room, a window unit blasted cold air.
“I’ve got it, Dad.” She took the wooden spoon, rubbing his shoulder. He was in cutoffs, a Molly Hatchet tee shirt. “Want me to put water on for spaghetti?”
His face darkened. He wasn’t much taller than she was, five-four to her five-two, and he smelled sour, like he hadn’t showered in a few days. The inactivity, nothing to do but sit around and watch TV, didn’t agree with him. “I’m not a cripple, kid.”
“Maybe you should relax, let somebody take care of you for a change.”
He sat in the chair under the window, and no, it wasn’t lost on Miranda he was still on those pain pills—Vicodin, six 10 mg tablets a day: she’d read the instructions on the bottle—but she didn’t know what his sponsor had said about that, didn’t know whether he was following the prescription. Between that and running into Bailey, she felt like she was falling back into a nightmare.
“Sorry, I’m not used to this.” He waved. Outside it was getting dark, the streetlights starting to come on. On the TV in the next room, they were talking about the war, a bombing in the Green Zone in Iraq.
“It’s okay.” With her back to him, she ran water into a pot. If she’d looked at him, she might’ve cried, and she didn’t want him to know how defeated she felt. She should’ve stayed in San Francisco. “I’m not really used to it, either.”
After they ate, in order to make sure she wasn’t losing her mind, she went outside and checked the Nissan, in case her wallet had fallen out of her purse, and Bailey hadn’t taken it—and wasn’t that how it worked with guys like Bailey, you doubted reality before you suspected them of what they’d done. No dice.
In her room, her body quivering, her hands shaking with rage, she called and cancelled her credit cards. No suspicious activity, but the money wasn’t the point. No, the point was to mess with her.
“Thank you.” Miranda hung up, lying awake on the futon mattress where she’d slept since she was sixteen, in the bedroom her dad had converted to storage. When she left, Miranda had been in such a hurry to get out of that place, she hadn’t bothered to clean the room, and the boombox she’d used to make mixed tapes for her friends was still on a table in the corner behind a pile of boxes, Nine Inch Nails, Madonna Erotica posters, and a dreamcatcher on the walls. In the bathroom, the tap was running, and her dad crutched across the creaking floorboards before the hall light went out.
This time she said it aloud, clenching her fists, breaking a silence that scared her shitless after twelve years with the constant background hum, the white noise of a city: “Bailey, you son of a bitch.”
***
She called him the next morning not at the number she’d scrubbed from her palm but at his parents’ house in Portsmouth, the landline there burned into her memory like the one at her dad’s. His mom answered, and sure enough, Bailey was living there.
“I want my wallet back.” She was standing on the landing outside her dad’s apartment, a pile of terracotta flowerpots next to the railing, a couple plants so dead, they might’ve been there since Miranda had left. If he’d denied taking it, she might have broken down and called the cops, the whole thing an insult to her intelligence. Like she was a stupid slut he’d been banging back in the day in his vintage Corvair, that deathtrap he’d tooled around Portsmouth in, the muffler held up by a clothes hanger, and God he’d made her panties wet, except a lot of those other girls that he’d been screwing had been her so-called friends.
“Get lunch with me. For old times’ sake.”
As if there were anything about old times she wanted to revisit. He was goading her, trying to get a reaction. And Miranda was primed to give him one.
“You don’t deny taking it?” She felt like she was interrogating him, like one of his high school teachers, and she resented him putting her in that position, like it was all a harmless prank. Stealing her shit, it was a crime. Girl, don’t you forget that.
“How about the Stockpot, at twelve?” He hung up.
At the restaurant, they sat outside at a table on the deck overlooking the harbor. She’d worn a skirt that fell to her knees and a matching suit jacket in case she had to go back to the mall for a second interview, and she hoped Bailey didn’t think it was for his benefit, but she still looked good, and she wanted him to see what he’d been missing. He was drinking club soda with lime, so maybe he was sober, too. Not that she cared.
“You hear from Jack?” he asked, and dread pricked her heart. So, was that how this was going to be, rehashing the past, going over the gory details of how she’d hurt him twelve years ago, when hooking up with his best friend Jack Macgowan had been meaningless, a fling, nothing more, a way to get rid of Bailey, and when they’d cheated on each other a dozen times besides that, anyway? Though even at the time she’d understood Jack had been a bridge too far, a way to guarantee Bailey would never be able to forgive her, and looked at in that light, hadn’t she gotten what she wanted?
“No, you?” All she knew of Jack Macgowan was that he was in prison for holding up a convenience store in Springfield, Massachusetts, which was where he probably belonged. She’d never been proud of fucking Jack because that’s all it had been, a fuck, albeit one that lasted a few months. But that was how desperate she’d been to get Bailey off her back.
“We keep in touch, write back and forth sometimes. They let him get mail in that place, at least.” He drank water, sucking his teeth, making a face, like poor Jack. “Did you know he has a kid?” She nodded. People talked to her, Bailey, too, she said. “Listen, I’m sorry about what I said in the car—about the kid, the accident—yesterday.”
The waitress brought her coffee, took their order. Half the people they’d known had worked at the Stockpot back in the day, the place the main source of employment for the Portsmouth punk scene. But she didn’t recognize anybody now.
“It was really mean, Bailey.”
“Like I said, I’m sorry.” His voice got firmer, edgier, as if sorry fixed everything, and she tensed at his anger. He leaned closer, the blinding white sun hitting the water behind him, where a boat was tacking across the harbor, so she had to squint. She’d skipped breakfast, and she felt fluttery, weak, a headache coming on. “But seriously. Are you alright?”
She wanted to tell him to shove his concern. With Bailey, everything was an angle, potential leverage, but maybe she wasn’t giving him enough credit. How would she feel if someone judged her for the person she’d been twelve years ago?
“Bailey, I—.” She was on the verge of opening up to him, telling him about the nightmares, the way she’d seen that kid’s face every night for six months after he’d wandered in front of her car on Fillmore through Pac Heights. And the kid’s mom, who’d rushed out of the bakery on the corner and cradled her son in her arms, speaking to him in Chinese and directing a look of such rage at Miranda that she felt it now, the sense she’d done something she could never undo, something that had the potential to change her life, too.
And it had, though not in the ways she’d feared in that moment, when her first thought hadn’t been for the kid but for herself. Oh God, I don’t want to go to prison. Please, don’t let him die.
“I still have dreams, bad,” but she caught herself. Don’t tell him anything he can use against you. “I want my damn wallet. You’re lucky I didn’t call the cops.”
He shrugged like it was no big deal, took it out of his jacket pocket, and set it on the table. Almost like he was angry at her for not trusting him. “I was going to buy you lunch.”
“With my money?”
She was pissed—not like he didn’t have the dough—but he laughed. He showed her that grin, which he’d used to charm his way out of things that should have landed him in the clink with his buddy Jack. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Bailey’s dad was a lawyer, rich, connected. “You staying with the old man? How is Leo?”
She didn’t like the familiarity, as if Bailey should be on a first name basis with her dad, and she didn’t like Bailey knowing where she was staying. Not like he hadn’t been to that apartment hundreds of times back in the day. “Banged up, but he’s all right. I’ll tell him you asked.”
“I used to see him around meetings,” Bailey said, and she felt that prick of tenderness she couldn’t afford to risk feeling, the blue calfskin Coach wallet he’d stolen looming large on the table between them. All the shit he’d pulled over the years, including this, and she could still rationalize it, telling herself hey, at least he was trying.
Son of a bitch’d had a lifetime of second chances.
“You’ve been going to meetings?” She fought the urge to reach across the table and touch his hand. Instead, she drank her tepid coffee, and there were few pleasures in life like strong, black coffee, though now, it made her want a cigarette. And yeah, she did care if Bailey attended meetings. She wanted the best for him.
“Sober and crazy, baby.” Bailey grinned. And that wasn’t overstatement. But as a breeze riffled the water, even in August, a chill, his face got serious again. “I had three years, in June. Got the chip and everything.”
“No shit?” In spite of herself, she was surprised, and proud of him, too. Though she had her doubts, she wanted to believe that however he tried to hide it, inside Bailey was a decent man trying to find his way out. “Good for you, Bailey. Good for you.”
When their lunch arrived—chicken salad on a croissant with a side of fruit for Miranda, a burger cooked medium-rare with steak fries for Bailey—they dug in, and for the first few bites, it felt like no time had passed, like they’d been whisked off to a place where they’d never hurt each other, none of that murky water having passed under the bridge, and none of the other stuff, either. The croissant was buttery, flaky, grease coating the tips of her fingers, and the grapes in the chicken salad popped in her mouth. She speared a piece of cantaloupe, wiping her chin with a napkin, and for a few minutes, sitting by the water with the wind on her face, despite everything—despite Bailey, despite the accident, despite Dad and his pills—she might’ve been happy, that fleeting feeling of contentment she’d been chasing all her life.
“So, how long are you planning on sticking around?” Bailey asked, his mouth full.
“At least long enough to make sure Dad’s all right.”
“Cool.” Bailey nodded, taking another bite of his burger, dipping his steak fries in mayo.
And no sooner did she feel okay than it hit her again. The kid’s name was Joey Lu, and his mother worked in the library at the University of San Francisco. And the two and a half weeks he’d been in that coma, Miranda’s name in the newspapers, a reporter from the Chronicle having gotten her cell number and calling every morning, changing numbers when she blocked him, she’d prayed the kid would wake up just to spare her the agony of knowing she’d caused his mom that grief. She’d prayed because she’d done something she couldn’t reconcile with the person she wanted to be, but it had been an honest mistake, hadn’t it, so why should she have to pay for a moment of inattention, a lapse, the quick glance at her cellphone to see if her boss had texted, which all the papers wanted to talk about, just like they played up the race angle, her being white, too?
“What about you?” she asked Bailey, but he was vague on that point, shrugging, like he wanted to deflect the question, and she felt the balance of power shifting between them, him asking for more than he was willing to give. She’d made a mistake coming here, humoring him, letting him think he hadn’t done anything wrong by taking her wallet.
“We’ll see.” He pushed back his plate, picking his teeth, eating a gray piece of meat off the end of his finger. She’d had three serious boyfriends in the years after Bailey, more unserious ones than she could count, and every one of them had been younger than she was, a kid, really, but things hadn’t lasted with any of them, either. Well, the son of a bitch, Bailey, he’d ruined her, and she hated him for it. “I’ve got a few irons in the fire.”
“Right.” With Bailey, who knew what that could mean?
He paid, like he’d promised, and she let him, since it was the least that he owed her. When they got up to leave, she took her wallet, dropping it in her purse, and a few minutes later, he grabbed her hand as he walked her up to the parking lot on Chapel.
“Let’s hang out again, yeah?” He towered over her, standing too close, pressing her up against the Nissan, so she felt grateful they were in public. She must never again be alone with Bailey Rizzio. As if she hadn’t known that, anyway.
“Bailey, no.” She laughed. Didn’t mean to be cruel, but she was exasperated, furious, and so angry with him, the whole thing like a sick joke that kept replaying itself, a tape loop on repeat. As if he was any different now than he had been—same old Bailey—as if either of them was, not when you put them together, their chemistry toxic, like bleach and ammonia. “What the hell are you even talking about?”
He looked stricken, an expression on his face that turned from anguish to that more familiar look of rage, his nostrils flared, his forehead knitted, and hadn’t she always wondered if something was wrong with him, a developmental thing, mild autism, or Asperger’s, even if she hadn’t the words for those back then, something to explain the tantrum he was about to throw?
“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.” He was leaning against the car with his palm on the roof, so he’d cornered her, and she caught another whiff of that meaty smell of sweat he’d always had, even when Bailey was eighteen, stinking like a full-grown man, like her dad’s degenerate, beer-drinking buddies. Those dudes had groped her in the kitchen, pinching her when she walked past, inviting her to sit in their laps when she was thirteen—a kid—her dad laughing, too drunk or stupid or maybe too weak to see what his pals were doing. Bailey had greased his hair, and a black blade of it fell away from his widow’s peak, like a spit curl.
She pushed him away, so he took a step back. She pitied him. Twelve years after they’d split up for the last time, they’d both washed up back in Portsmouth because they were failing at their lives, so he was looking for the same answers she was, but that didn’t mean they needed to try again at something that had only ever brought out the worst in both of them.
“Yeah, I have thought about it, which is why I know better. The answer is no. I’m happy to be friends, but I don’t think we should see each other, not like that.” Christ, even friends was too much. It scared her to realize how much she hated him, and she wanted to know whether she could still make him bleed. She wanted to lash out, to hurt him. “You know, I don’t think we should hang out after this, either. Not even as friends, not until you can respect me and not pull shit like taking my wallet. It was over between us a long time ago, and we’re not going back.”
She should’ve said that back in the day instead of screwing his best friend, which was her fault, fine, but he shrugged, the walls going back up. As if this was about love. As if this wasn’t about power and control and how she’d hurt him.
“Cool.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Forget I said anything. I guess I’ll see you around, right?” And he started walking toward Market Square. He was storming off, like a goddamn child. And how could she have expected better of him?
“Bailey, you don’t need to be like that.” Why couldn’t she leave well enough alone? Now that he was walking away, it shocked her to discover she didn’t want him to go. She felt that same pull, like she could mend him, ease the pain she knew she’d caused him. In his black Levi’s and checked, collared shirt, he might’ve been 18, might’ve been 80, and she could see the old man he would one day become, stooped, haunted, and lonely. She wanted to spare him that fate, wanted him to be that good person she knew was inside him. “Bailey.”
Halfway down the block, he turned and walked back to her.
Hard not to think they were different people, and on a cellular level, maybe that was true. But what struck her was what hadn’t changed: the scratch of his stubble on her chin, the smell of his breath, the steady sureness of his hands on her ribcage, the crick in her neck as she leaned up, and he bent to her, all of which seemed both new and familiar, exciting and scary. Maybe she’d been expecting this, known it was coming from the moment he climbed in her car. No, from the day she’d decided to come home.
“Come back with me,” he said. Where did he mean? His breath was hot on her face. Were they going to screw in the back of his van, in his bedroom at his parents’ house, like high school all over again?
But she had a girl-boner she couldn’t take the edge off, not on her own, her fingers not enough for this, and stupid as he was—sleazy prick he’d always been—a coward and a jerk, he was still the guy who’d cried in her arms when his dad kicked him out at nineteen, and she knew him like no one else. And this was bad in the ways they’d always been bad, teenagers who’d lived entire adult lives before they were legal drinking age. Bad like in that Madonna song she’d loved: “Bad girl, drunk by six, kissing someone else’s lips.” Bad like illicit, a thrill.
And she wanted him. God, did she want him, the size and thrust of him, which had always been so much, like it was on the verge of splitting her apart. Even once, she needed him.
No. Her mind forming the word, even as against his, her mouth said yes.
***
Next day, he borrowed her car. His van was still in the shop, he needed to pick something up in Keene for an art project he was working on, and really, she should have known better, but it was the morning after that before he texted her back to say he’d ended up spending the night. By then, she’d long since cabbed it to her orientation shift at Circuit City. And it wasn’t even that she couldn’t afford the taxi, though that was part of it, her dad still collecting unemployment insurance, which was only a fraction of his salary, as she told Bailey over the phone during her break, but it was more the principle of the thing, the fact he’d promised something and failed to deliver, the fact he hadn’t done what he’d said he was going to do, that old push and pull: whenever she let him get close, he hurt her, and after all these years hadn’t they outgrown this?
“I’m sorry.” He said it on the phone, and he said it again when he showed up at the end of her shift to drop her keys in her palm. But he still had that dumb look, forehead scrunched up like a kid who doesn’t want to hear the word no, and if he thought he had it bad, when had he suffered or paid the consequence for anything? Because the kid hadn’t woken up, and in court she’d cried and apologized, the judge stern, reprimanding Miranda, dressing her down for her inattention, her selfishness, but even afterward, she’d felt hollow, gutted, like she’d gotten away with something she didn’t deserve to skate on: no jail time, a fine of ten thousand dollars, and points on her license, a slap on the wrist, so that she no longer knew whether her tears in that courtroom had been genuine or a ploy.
“Fine, Bailey, you’re sorry. Apology accepted. But we don’t need to do this anymore.”
And if she was honest with herself, she couldn’t deny the frisson of joy she felt at the fact she could still send him away down in the dumps.
In the parking lot, he turned and shouted back at her, in front of God and anyone else who was listening. “You know, I didn’t have to forgive you for what you did with Jack, or for fucking any of the rest of my friends, either. And I didn’t have to give you your goddamn wallet back. You should count yourself lucky, baby, you should be happy I ever gave you the time of day.”
He was pointing at her, and he spit. She covered her face with her hands, so he wouldn’t see her crying. Hadn’t she known this was coming?
“Bailey, I—.”
“Are you laughing at me?” He was hurt, shocked.
“No, I’m—.” But whatever it was, the sound she was making, she couldn’t stop it, and she only did it harder when he yelled at her, her face in her hands. I’m crying.
“You know what?” He was trembling. “I’m glad you fell flat on your face in California. I’m glad you killed that kid. You always thought you were better than the rest of us, always thought you were too good for this place, but I guess you needed your friends. Guess you needed me, after all, didn’t you?”
And the worst part was that even if he was lashing out, he was right.
After he’d disappeared around the corner to the bus stop, it took her fifteen minutes before she’d calmed down enough to drive. When she got back to her dad’s, she threw up.
***
That night, six o’clock, she was dealing herself a hand of solitaire at the kitchen table, an act that triggered her muscle memory, all those nights she’d spent at that table when she was between boyfriends, drinking coffee and playing cards, then that year she’d broken up with Bailey, when she’d dated different guys from the prep school, Berwick, and sure enough the neighbors were right, her dad had let her run wild, but those were the bad old days when he’d kept cases of Bud in the crisper drawer, no goddamn food in the house unless she bought it.
Bailey. Shuffling the cards, cutting the deck, did she say his name aloud? He’d called a dozen times, as relentless as if he were stalking her, and she shut her phone off, unplugging the landline.
In the next room, the TV was blasting, Dad snoring in his armchair, and that brought her back, too. All those nights he’d passed out in front of Mister Ed and Mork and Mindy reruns with a beer in his hand and a cigarette burning in the ashtray, losing his license for a dee-wee that year she’d dropped out, so she’d had to ask her boyfriends to drive him to the nightshift at the power plant.
“Dad.” She was standing in the doorway, and he sputtered and came awake, looking at her with bleary eyes. She hated that she’d done this, but she’d counted the pills in his bottle, and he was chipping, taking more than his dose, gobbling down eight or ten Vicodin a day. He rubbed his face, sitting up in the chair, and put his glasses on.
“What’s up, kid?” He looked naked, defenseless, like she’d caught him at something. She felt sorry for him, but she was pissed, too.
“I wanted to see if you could use a lift to your meeting.”
And sure enough, she was testing him. Tuesday nights, he went to an NA meeting in the basement of the Pilgrim Orthodox Presbyterian a few miles down the road in Dover. Place he’d been going ten, twelve years, almost since he got sober, those old heads and bikers in their leather vests like brothers.
“Think I’m gonna take the night off. Leg’s really hurting.”
And he gestured at that left hip, chicken flesh around the edges of the brace, which he said made him feel like Mr. Roboto, but wasn’t he getting better, she asked, and sooner rather than later, he’d be back on days at the hydro plant?
“Yeah, kid, I think I’m getting there. You don’t need to worry about your old man, all right? Your dad’s gonna be fine.” He reached for the glass of water on his TV tray and sipped, and at least that was an improvement over cans of Natty Light or Busch, or God forbid Golden Anniversary Beer. Or maybe he was cotton-mouthed from those pills.
“I’m going to the store.” Purse slung over her shoulder, she’d put on a pair of Keds, cheap, practical walking shoes she’d picked up at the DSW in downtown San Francisco the week she left the city. Still had her Docs, and she still had her high-top Chucks, which was the signature footwear for that punk scene, required gear if you were sixteen years old and going to sit on the benches in Market Square with the older kids like Bailey and Jack Macgowan who drank and fought in the boneyard. But those shoes gave her blisters. And as much as she’d once looked up to Bailey and Jack, they hadn’t amounted to much.
“I know you’re a big girl, and you’re used to living in the city, but be careful, all right? High Street gets busy this time of day. You never know who’s out there.”
At his concern, she softened. Sober sixteen years, but he’d spent half of that on the marijuana maintenance plan, and he hadn’t touched a drink, so if he felt like he needed more of those pills to manage his pain, she could try to trust him, right?
He was an adult, old enough to sort his problems out on his own.
“I’ll be fine.” Her eyes blurred, and she turned away, still not wanting him to see her cry. She felt hopeless, trapped. Sober or not, he would never be able to make her safe, not now any more than when she was thirteen. She’d only ever been able to rely on herself. “See you when I get back.”
“You okay,” he said, “being here?”
And Miranda wiped her cheeks.
“I’m fine.” What would he do about it, anyway?
“You know you can turn to me. You can talk to your dad.”
“Thanks.” She couldn’t turn to him. But at least he was trying.
On her way out the door, she grabbed the car keys. And when she got to the bottom of the steps, she climbed into the Nissan and sat behind the wheel of that ’88 Sentra her dad had bought for six hundred bucks from his landlady, who’d never taken it farther than the Shop’N Save in Dover, so despite being almost twenty years old, it only had sixty thousand miles on the odometer. Thing about the accident, Joey, the kid she’d killed back in San Francisco, was that it was her fault, and it came as a relief to admit that her distraction, the pressure she’d felt living in the city, the way she was rushing everywhere, had gotten the better of her, causing her to slip up, to make a mistake that had led her back here, to that place she’d been running from all along.
She stuck the key in the ignition and started the car. She was still in her red Circuit City shirt. Guys like Bailey thought they were too good to hold real jobs, too special to wear a uniform, but Miranda was going to make 45K a year, and she was staying in New Hampshire. Wasn’t sure when she’d decided that, but she knew it now. And it felt okay. Felt like she was free of something she’d been dragging behind her for years.
“For as long as I live, Bailey, you will not leave me alone,” she told the empty car, and she switched on the radio, which she’d left on a Top 40 station, 94.1, and which was playing that godawful Smash Mouth song, “All Star.” Turning onto High Street, heading southwest toward Portsmouth with the sun in her eyes, she flipped the visor down.
She had to pick up a few groceries, stuff for dinner. But first, she wanted to drive, to prove to herself she could, that she was okay.
***
When she got back to her dad’s place, the van was parked by the concrete wall. Upstairs in the apartment, through their lighted windows, she could see Bailey and her old man, Bailey shaking Dad’s hand, and wasn’t that how the world went round, divvied up over a handshake between men? And what were they doing, anyway? For a moment, she might’ve suspected he was selling her dad pills, but she couldn’t let herself believe Bailey or the world could be that evil.
Son of a bitch. Once upon a time in her journals, which were in a box in her room, she’d written down every time she’d been with Bailey, what he’d said, how she’d felt, in an effort to control it or make it normal when it had been anything but that, when for the first year they’d been together, with the difference in their ages, it hadn’t even been legal, when it had been goddamn statutory rape. Miranda wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life crying about being a victim. But this felt like a final, awful violation.
She shut the engine off and stepped out of the Nissan. The night was hot, sticky. She slammed the car door, making no effort to keep Bailey and Dad from hearing it. No AC, so her undershirt stuck to her back. The van’s driver’s side window reflected the stars, so many of them in the country sky, more than she could hope to count. She climbed the stairs on the side of the building, and Bailey came out the door, his face lighting up—gloating—when he saw her.
He was laughing when Miranda went for her mace. On the landing, her dad standing in the doorway, she faced Bailey and pointed into the darkness.
“Leave,” she said.
“I just wanted to talk to you.” He showed her his hands, like he was innocent.
“What do you want from me, Bailey?”
He had a dumb look like the question flustered him. Maybe if he caught her, and the chase ended, he wouldn’t know what to do, and maybe she wouldn’t, either. Or maybe the answer was the obvious thing, what they’d done the other day in the back of his broken-down Dodge van.
“Oldest reason in the world,” he said, but he was joking, and it was a line from a movie. He was thirty-five, she was thirty-two, and they were adults, people who’d known each other more than half their lives, but they were still doing this. When would it end? And what was this, her penance? Something else she could never undo. She was stuck with Bailey as surely as she was with the fact she’d taken a life, killing that kid in California.
She punched his chest, and he caught her in his arms, pulling her close, her dad watching from the doorway, like he didn’t know whether it was okay to laugh at the scene the two of them were making on the porch, or maybe he would club the guy with his crutch, protecting his daughter like he never had. She kept swinging, kicking. “Bailey, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you in my life.”
Tom Andes’ the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me is forthcoming from Crescent City Books. His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2012, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He lives in Albuquerque, where he is a working musician. He’s taught writing at a bunch of places, privately, and also works in catering. In early 2025, Southern Crescent Recording Co. collected his acclaimed EPs on a vinyl release, The Ones That Brought You Home. He can be found at tomandes.com.