Melanie!
I yelled the word but only inside my head: I had no voice. I lurched to my left, threw an arm around one of the slender tree trunks just before my legs gave out. Clung there gasping, trying to clear the dizziness out of my head.
Melanie might have been some kind of alfresco statue, both arms down at her sides, unmoving. I couldn’t see her face clearly, couldn’t tell what was written on it. But she didn’t move, didn’t move, didn’t move—and my throat opened up, my lungs worked, the feeling of suffocation faded and strength came back into my arms, my legs. My mind was clear again. I let go of the tree and took a slow step toward her, still deep in the tree shadows so that she couldn’t see me. She couldn’t hear me, either, because of the wind and the surfs hissing cannonade.
Another step. Another—
And she moved, turned to her right abruptly and took a couple of small shuffling sidewise paces toward the edge. Leaned out a ways, with the wind whipping her frizzed hair, swaying her thin gangly body. Looked down, I saw her look down. Then she straightened again, and either saw or heard me somehow because she swiveled her head in my direction.
“I’m going to jump,” she said.
The wind caught the words, tore them apart almost instantly. But I heard them, the awful dull resignation in them. There was no doubt she meant it.
I yelled at her, “No, Melanie!” Hoarse croak: the words couldn’t have carried to her. I yelled them again, took another step.
“I have to,” she said, “I have to jump. Richie … Richie … I killed him. Oh God, I killed him!”
Coming down off the coke high, that was it. The full implications of what she’d done settling in on her, the weight of it building a suicidal depression. I took another step. She didn’t move. Another step, and I was at the edge of the clearing. No more than ten feet separating us. The twisted shape of the cypress growing up from the cliff face gyrated nearby … too far away from both of us for it to be of any use. Nothing anywhere near her except me. And the restless fog. And the black emptiness, waiting out there like something sentient, whispering to her, beckoning to her.
“Melanie, listen to me …”
“You can’t stop me,” she said. “I’m going to do it. I don’t have anything to live for now. I don’t want to live. He’s dead, I killed him. I loved him and I killed him.”
“Please, Melanie, please …”
She put her back to me, put her arms out at her sides like a bird about to take flight, and looked down, looked down … and I ran at her, full of terror that was as much for me as for her because this was a high place, because of my vertigo, and I reached her, clawed a hold on her sweater with my good hand
and she jumped
oh Jesus God she jumped with my hand on her
and the sweater tore, I couldn’t hold on, and she
she was gone, tumbling over and over, screaming, gone, and I
I staggered, teetered at the edge windmilling my arms
Deadfall!
and somehow I managed to pitch my body backward and to one side … breath jarred out of me when I hit the ground … and I was sliding, I felt my legs go over the edge, I clutched frenziedly at the rough surface and caught onto something, a rock, something, and I wasn’t sliding anymore, I was pulling myself up and away from the edge …
Safe.
I lay with my head buried in my arms, my cheek against the rough sandstone, listening to the hungry feeding of the surf far below, crying a little. But not for Melanie. Not for Melanie, not for anyone in her God-damned family, not for Danny Martinez, not for any of them.
For me. The one I was crying for was me.
Chapter Twenty-four
Sunday afternoon, three days later.
Kerry’s apartment.
We had spent a quiet day there, reading, watching tapes of old comedy films on her VCR. It was almost five o’clock and getting dark outside. I leaned over and turned on the end-table lamp. I didn’t like the darkness much right now; it made me uneasy. Beside me on the couch, Kerry was silent. She understood.
The past three days had been bad, worse than the three days after my beating: psychic damage was much harder to deal with than the physical kind. Thursday night had been the worst. Police, ambulances, sirens, questions, more questions; floodlights and winches on the cliff, men milling about, working at the retrieval of Melanie’s broken body from the rocks; exhaustion, half-sleep, nightmares—always the nightmares, like a preview of hell seen over and over but only vaguely perceived. Friday had been bad, too, but Kerry had been there at my flat, and Eberhardt for a while, and they had made it tolerable. Saturday had been a little better. And today better still. Time would fade it all, blend it with all the other similar episodes, all the other views of pain and death, and make it indistinguishable from them. Scar tissue added to scar tissue, hidden away inside.