Free The Killer's Wife by Bill Floyd Page B

settling down beside me on the couch. “I went up there for Christmas break my sophomore year. Some guys from the dorm were going and I couldn’t really afford it but in the end I decided, fuck it. I mean, when was I going to get the chance again?”

    The shot was taken from a low angle, about waist high, and portrayed a silhouetted, featureless figure facing away from the photographer and gazing off into the horizon. The horizon was the most striking facet of the scene: a forested slope at dusk, dropping away beneath the first evening stars and a hint of rippling aurora at the very top of the frame, an orange hem of sprinkled light.
    “It’s quite majestic,” I said, gently teasing. “But you should’ve turned around and smiled or something. It’s a little too dour.”
    “It’s dramatic effect,” he chided me. “The lone figure against the coming night. When the sun starts going down, which is like at noon that time of the year, you really only have a short window between the daylight and when it gets totally dark. And it does, darker than you’ve ever seen.” He sounded wistful, pensive; dramatic effect, I supposed. “Really dark, up there at the top of the world.”
    If that was not the exact moment I fell in love with him, still there was a palpable sensation in my chest as he said it. The moment could almost have been posed, just like the photo itself, but I didn’t feel manipulated. It sounded like something he’d thought of before, pondered upon, and I felt awfully damned privileged, at that postcoital moment, that he would share it with me. I snuggled in close and he smelled good. I started kissing his neck, tasting salt and soap, and then we were going at it again. And it was better this time. It got better each time for a long while, right up until we got married.
    2.
    S o let’s suppose you’re the young Nina Leigh Sarbaines, right out of Tapersville, Oregon, a logging town in the eastern half of the state, growing up among the big trucks thundering down the narrow two-lanes, the constant fog in the air like an unqualified gloom. The landscape all bright mossy greens and slate gray, that paper-mill smell that lingers over the town and that natives only notice after we’ve been away for a while. I wore flannel and triplepierced my ears; I got a butterfly tattoo on my ankle. Certified full-time smoker by age fifteen, sexually active by sixteen, celebrity-obsessed and spending the money from my part-time job at the drugstore on gossip magazines and jeans jackets and accessories, but I managed to avoid the meth and the harder trouble that came with it, at least for the most part. Some of my friends succumbed, but I had starry eyes early on and didn’t want to jeopardize my chances of getting out any more than was necessary just to get by socially.
    Dad was the regional manager for one of the trucking outfits, so we weren’t as poor as some of my friends whose parents worked the mills or logged out in the expanses of seemingly boundless woodlands (although the interloping environmentalists from Seattle and California were constantly reminding us that they were diminishing by the hour). Our house, though, was too small by half, especially when Mom would catch Dad cheating on her and the halls would practically scream with silence for weeks at a time.
I’d lock the door to my bedroom and stay on the phone with my friends for hours, or stare at my little TV, or listen to headphones, all those overwrought grunge CDs that spun through my Discman. Mom never did leave him; my father died of liver failure my senior year of high school. He was never a violent drunk, or particularly neglectful; my memories of him are actually quite fond, for the most part, and he treated me like gold, spoiling me as much as he could afford to. He bought me earrings and CDs and my first car, an old Volkswagen Bug. I imagine this was part of what made him attractive to other women; when he was with you, you were the total