Chapter 3 (p.3)
“Yes.”
“How was prison?”
“Could have been worse.”
“Yes.” The tip of the cigarette glowed orange. “I'm still grateful. I should never have got you mixed up in it.”
“Well,” he said, “I agreed to do it. I could have said no.” He wondered why he wasn't scared of her: why a dream of a museum could leave him terrified, while he seemed to be coping with a walking corpse without fear.
“Yes,” she said. “You could have. You big galoot.” Smoke wreathed her face. She was very beautiful in the dim light. “You want to know about me and Robbie?”
“Yes.” It was Laura, he realized. Living or dead, he couldn't fear her.
She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “You were in prison,” she said. “And I needed someone to talk to. I needed a shoulder to cry on. You weren't there. I was upset.”
“I'm sorry. ” Shadow realized something was different about her voice, and he tried to figure out what it was.
“I know. So we'd meet for coffee. Talk about what we'd do when you got out of prison. How good it would be to see you again. He really liked you, you know. He was looking forward to giving you back your old job.”
“Yes.”
“And then Audrey went to visit her sister for a week. This was, oh, a year, thirteen months after you'd gone away.” Her voice lacked expression; each word was flat and dull, like pebbles dropped, one by one, into a deep well. “Robbie came over. We got drunk together. We did it on the floor of the bedroom. It was good. It was really good.”
“I didn't need to hear that.”
“No? I'm sorry. It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.”
“It matters to me.”
Laura lit a second cigarette. Her movements were fluid and competent, not stiff. Shadow wondered, for a moment, if she was dead at all. Perhaps this was some kind of elaborate trick. “Yes,” she said. “I see that. Well, we carried on our affair—although we didn't call it that, we did not call it anything—for most of the last two years.”
“Were you going to leave me for him?”
“Why would I do that? You're my big bear. You're my puppy. You did what you did for me. I waited three years for you to come back to me. I love you.”
He stopped himself from saying I love you, too. He wasn't going to say that. Not any more. “So what happened the other night?”
“The night I was killed?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Robbie and I went out to talk about your welcome-back surprise party. It would have been so good. And I told him that we were done. Finished. That now that you were back that was the way it had to be.”
“Mm. Thank you, babe.”
“You're welcome, darling.” The ghost of a smile crossed her face. “We got maudlin. It was sweet. We got stupid. I got very drunk. He didn't. He had to drive. We were driving home and I announced that I was going to give him a goodbye blowjob, one last time with feeling, and I unzipped his pants, and I did.”
“Big mistake.”
“Tell me about it. I knocked the gearshift with my shoulder, and then Robbie was trying to push me out of the way to put the car back in gear, and we were swerving, and there was a loud crunch and I remember the world started to roll and to spin, and I thought, I'm going to die. It was very dispassionate. I remember that. I wasn't scared. And then I don't remember anything more.”
There was a smell like burning plastic. It was the cigarette, Shadow realized: it had burned down to the filter. Laura did not seem to have noticed.
“What are you doing here, Laura?”
“Can't a wife come and see her husband?”
“You're dead. I went to your funeral this afternoon.”
“Yes.” She stopped talking, stared into nothing. Shadow stood up and walked over to her. He took the smoldering cigarette butt from her fingers and threw it out of the window.
“Well?”
Her eyes sought his. “I don't know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn't know then I can't put into words.”
“Normally people who die stay in their graves,” said Shadow.
“Do they? Do they really, puppy? I used to think they did too. Now I'm not so sure. Perhaps.” She climbed off the bed and walked over to the window. Her face, in the light of the motel sign, was as beautiful as it had ever been. The face of the woman he had gone to prison for.
His heart hurt in his chest as if someone had taken it in a fist and squeezed. “Laura…?”
She did not look at him. “You've gotten yourself mixed up in some bad things, Shadow. You're going to screw it up, if someone isn't there to watch out for you. I'm watching out for you. And thank you for my present.”
“What present?”
She reached into the pocket of her blouse, and pulled out the gold coin he had thrown into the grave earlier that day. There was still black dirt on it. “I may have it put on a chain. It was very sweet of you.”
“You're welcome.”
She turned then and looked at him with eyes that seemed both to see and not to see him. “I think there are several aspects of our marriage we're going to have to work on.”
“Babes,” he told her. “You're dead.”
“That's one of those aspects, obviously.” She paused. “Okay,” she said. “I'm going now. It will be better if I go.” And, naturally and easily, she turned and put her hands on Shadow's shoulders, and went up on tiptoes to kiss him goodbye, as she had always kissed him goodbye.
Awkwardly he bent to kiss her on the cheek, but she moved her mouth as he did so and pushed her lips against his. Her breath smelled, faintly, of mothballs.
Laura's tongue flickered into Shadow's mouth. It was cold, and dry, and it tasted of cigarettes and of bile. If Shadow had had any doubts as to whether his wife was dead or not, they ended then.
He pulled back.
“I love you,” she said, simply. “I'll be looking out for you.” She walked over to the motel room door. There was a strange taste in his mouth. “Get some sleep, puppy,” she told him. “And stay out of trouble.”
She opened the door to the hall. The fluorescent light in the hallway was not kind: beneath it, Laura looked dead, but then, it did that to every one.
“You could have asked me to stay the night,” she said, in her cold-stone voice.
“I don't think I could,” said Shadow.
“You will, hon,” she said. “Before all this is over. You will.” She turned away from him, and walked down the corridor.
Shadow looked out of the doorway. The night clerk kept on reading his John Grisham novel, and barely looked up as she walked past him. There was thick graveyard mud clinging to her shoes. And then she was gone.
