Magic Hour, Susan Isaacs [life changing books txt] 📗

out to the pool to relax and make his last-minute phone calls if Bonnie was still upstairs. Say what you will about him, his manners were perfect. It wasn’t in his nature not to drive a lady home, or if she’d come on her own, escort her to her car. Believe me, after Bonnie and before Lindsay, there was quite a parade of women going upstairs to see his ocean view or whatever.

He always said a proper goodbye.”

MAGIC HOUR / 205

“Then how come you didn’t hear him escort her out?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I was beating egg whites. Maybe I was powdering my nose.”

“Did you hear Mr. Spencer come down and go out to the pool?” She did a cheek chew before she nodded. “And what about Bonnie? Did you hear her leave after he went outside?”

She didn’t answer. “Okay, between the time Bonnie went upstairs with Sy and the time you heard the shot, what precisely did you hear? Her voice? Her footsteps? The sound of her car?”

“She didn’t kill him.”

“What did you hear, Mrs. Robertson?”

“I didn’t hear anything.” She took away the muffins and my plate. “Does that make you happy, Steve?”

I knew the old saying was true: You don’t remember pain.

Physical pain, like in Vietnam, when some new kid from North Carolina heard enemy fire, aimed his M-60, and blasted me through the shoulder. The medic shot me up with a ton of shit, but they had to stuff a gag into my mouth so I wouldn’t scream and give away our position when they cut open my shirt. Me, who’d always looked at wounded, screaming guys and thought: Sure, it must hurt like hell, but can’t he just bite the bullet, control himself? I kept moaning so loud that they kept the gag in, and they took it out only when I puked and almost choked to death on my own vomit.

I can recall thinking, when they joggled my shoulder as they put me on the stretcher to get me to the helicopter: I will not live through this flight because the pain will kill me.

I truly cannot take it. I kept howling, “I want a priest!” Me, whose last confession

206 / SUSAN ISAACS

pretty much coincided with my first communion. But I don’t remember the pain itself.

And you don’t remember emotional pain either.

Like being a seven-year-old kid playing ball and my father drives onto the field in some farmer’s tractor he’s doing day work for, and he cuts the engine, stopping between the pitcher’s mound and first base, practically breaks his neck getting down and then grabs a bat out of the hands of one of my friends and insists on hitting a few.

More pain? Being a thirty-five-year-old and seeing my pal, my confidant, the only person I ever really spoke to outside work, the one person I thought to buy a Christmas card for—the guy who owned the liquor store—flash his wife a look of revulsion when I walked through the door.

You know all that pain and more occurred. Recalling it, you might feel sad or even cringe. But you do not remember the pain itself.

So when I rang Bonnie’s bell and got no answer, and then ran to her garage to see if her car was missing, and then, finally, spotted her in her chicken-wired garden, picking vegetables, I almost laughed at the panic I’d felt, the horror, the stab in the gut—the pain—when I thought she’d gone. So what if she had? You do get over these things.

And when Moose barked a welcome and Bonnie looked up and saw me and shuddered—a violent, uncontrollable shiver of fear—I wanted to disappear, or die, it hurt so much.

But I said to myself: I’ll get over it.

She was squatting over a basket of eggplants. “What are you going to do with all those things?” I asked.

“Get out of here.” Her voice was a hoarse whisper. She braced her hands on her knees and slowly, as if it MAGIC HOUR / 207

were too much of an effort, pushed herself up. All her energy, all her fire, all her humor was gone.

“Look, I just want you to understand…” What was I going to say? Nothing personal. “You lied, Bonnie.”

She walked out of the garden, leaving the eggplants, a plastic bucket full of tomatoes, Moose—everything—behind.

She headed toward the house, awkwardly, without any of her great jock grace, as if she’d lost her center of gravity. I followed her. “We have a neighbor who can not only identify Sy’s car as being here every day the week he died, but who can identify Sy himself. I mean, we can place you with him enough times…Why did you lie about a thing like that?”

She didn’t answer me, didn’t acknowledge that I’d grabbed onto her arm, trying to steady her or just hold on to her.

“And why did you lie about your screenplay? Didn’t you bother to think that he’d tell the people he worked with that it was a piece of shit?”

She tripped over a tree root. I lost my grip on her, and she fell on her hands and knees. “Are you okay?” I asked. She couldn’t get up. She sat back on the ground, breathless, and looked down at the pebbles and grass embedded in her hands, at the little rivulet of blood that ran toward her wrist, but she didn’t wince or weep. “Bonnie,” I said. Her spirit was gone.

Moose wandered over, wagged her tail and licked Bonnie’s hand, but Bonnie didn’t acknowledge her. “Please,” I said.

I pulled her up. She didn’t stop me. When she was on her feet again, she continued her unsteady journey toward the house. “Listen, your lawyer friend…He’s going to pay for the best criminal lawyer around.”

I felt sick. Empty. But I’d lived through too much. I knew.

Part of me understood that in two weeks, I’d 208 / SUSAN ISAACS

be hoisting an alcohol-free beer, eating potato chips, and Lynne would be saying: “Forget that you’re going to get the fattest