Read The Tell for Free Online Page B

imagined the sound of his heartbeat echoing in the empty house. If Mira believed she had plucked Wilton out of the television screen—conjured him up, but for what?—he believed he had plucked Mira from the distant rooftops six years before. Because he’d needed to, needed her. Through the wire-etched window of his first classroom at Spruance, before they’d ever met, he’d spotted the contour of her house a mile away. With his back to his students, he’d looked every day at the determined roofline and stately chimneys above the trees and telephone wires, and it had been like reading his own EKG. Its rhythm was vibrant, alive with highs and lows and history, but it was also out of sync in places, with an extra beat or a missed one, quiet and then sometimes howling with grief. But he couldn’t look away, and every time he saw the same thing.
    The year before he’d fled overnight and wordless to Providence, leaving his job, his students, and his friends, he’d come so close to being killed one night in May that he’d tasted the briny end wash over him. The cold had bathed his eyelids. With Mira breathing lightly beside him, he couldn’t help replaying the moment the bullet announced its intention, not for him after all, but for Caroline, the woman he’d been having dinner with. His life was held in the gun’s slightest shift to the left. He could have moved, he could have shifted to meet it, but he hadn’t. He’d saved himself.
    Caroline was not his girlfriend, though they had been sleeping together for almost a year. It was a strange, chilly arrangement. She was prickly and quick to defend herself, while he was evasive and sarcastic, and together they made a sticky mixture they couldn’t extract themselves from. They went to movies and museums, a Knicks game she hadn’t liked because her sweater kept getting caught in the flip-up seat. They ate at El Sombrero, where scorched cacti and a faded piñata crowded the front window. That night, Caroline chillingly bit off the point of a chip with her front teeth. This might be the night to end whatever it was they were doing together; he’d been chewing on the notion for a while. Dissatisfaction had finally begun to mobilize him.
    But she spoke first. “We should discuss us,” she said, as though she’d gotten advance warning about the dinner’s topic. She was measured, exact. She didn’t intend to hurt his feelings; this was nothing personal, she said. “But people who sleep together should at least like each other.”
    Owen’s tamale was impossible to swallow. He knew he should be relieved, but there was still the gut punch of surprise. He gulped his Corona and saw her very reasonable expression. He said something sarcastic and vaguely hurtful. A voice rose and a chair scraped at the front of the restaurant. She asked if he wanted to try her chicken and held out her full fork to him, but she didn’t want him to take the fork itself. She would feed him instead, always holding on to what was hers. Somewhere, a plate fell and shattered on the red tile. Fork still aloft, Caroline swiveled to get a view of the action. Her face grew grim and old. Hair swept behind her ear fell forward. A man wearing a cheap black ski mask, the eyes and mouth holes outlined in red yarn, approached. A gun was attached to his right hand, which rose toward an imaginary horizon, Owen’s head pinned like a kite against it. This was a cartoon stickup, a joke as synthetic as the threads rising from the mask in static electricity. Owen had the urge to laugh. Caroline’s jaw thrust forward urging him to do something. But what? His heart was under his tongue, his bowels retreating fast. He struggled to get his fingers around his wallet and extract it from his back pocket. He put it in the man’s hand. Caroline took her purse off the back of her chair and held it on her lap. Water rushed innocently