A Late Night Visitor

I’m just too glad that Delia and the kids weren’t at the house when that girl came by last night. She was just too much trouble and it was a flat-out pain-in-the-ass to clean everything up afterwards. I didn’t even want to be there when she showed up.

It was barely morning when she came crashing in and boy! she was in a hurry. Must have been driving 80 miles an hour down the road, mad as hell at her job or what’s his name and stinking of the frustration and loneliness of a night out. She just couldn’t wait to get to my place.

She was really beautiful. It’s the only way I really could describe her to you. Dressed in a slinky cocktail dress with delicate strings of pearls wrapped around her neck and her wrists. Soft, but taut pale skin of someone who cared about her health. Not too much sun. Plenty of exercise. Her hair was done up with such care…

And about that: the amount of skill and patience that must go into getting a head of hair to look like that! How many hours of her life did she spend wrapping it and sticking it and pinning it and slicking it and dying it and drying it and treating it and looking at it to make sure it was perfect?

Anyway, her hair was beautiful and black and all wrapped up like the very strings of inky-void that make up the universe. They swirled and knotted together like cosmic cotton candy. She crashed my party with a cacophonous screech and stayed way past her welcome.

It wasn’t ‘til the police showed up that I finally got her to leave!

That’s right, boring old me getting the police called to his place at 12:30 in the morning. Because of a woman to boot! The guys at work would never believe it, but it’s unlikely that I’ll tell them.

I’m taking some time off right now, so I won’t feel the need to fill the awkward silence of the lunch room tomorrow when everybody crams into that tiny, creepily lit room to eat bag lunches and microwaveable dishes with the clear peelable plastic glued on. I won’t feel like I’ll have to fill the silent stinky air with small talk.

I’ll never tell Delia.

And as I said before, I’m very glad that the kids weren’t home. The kids didn’t need to see all of that mess. It’s just not right to expose children of that age to that kind of behavior.

They also didn’t need to see how the blood on the cool-crete looked like thin black tar seeping out of her head. I could see the red streak in the part of her hair. The blood rolled into the small gutter-tracks and drained back into the pool. The police lights reflected off of the windows of my house and my neighbors’ and the blood shone blue and pink alternately in that cool still air.

The pool was a mess, I hadn’t cleaned it in a month and now it had a bunch of cinder blocks from the wall resting at the bottom from when her car exploded into my backyard. God what a noise!

Her car, a scraped up red sports car, was half-in and half-out of the pool, just as she was. Her legs floated lifelessly in the water among the algae and the leaves and she only had one shoe on. My neighbor, Russell Camden, the dentist, called the attention of one of the police officers and held the other shoe aloft, offering it to the cop.

I couldn’t hear much because my ears were ringing and my chest was pounding and I felt like I was gagging a little bit—even though I didn’t have anything in my stomach—and I couldn’t stop looking at her.

She lay half-in the pool and half-out and blood seeped out of her head.

She looked uncomfortable there leaking into my pool. But how else should she feel after getting thrown through a windshield and through a hail of cinderblocks?

Yeah, I’m glad that Delia and the kids weren’t around for that circus. The neighbors staring at the scene from their backyards, their eyes reflecting the same blue and pink that the blood reflected. The police stepping all over Barry’s army men in the sandbox by the pool, drinking coffee out of large paper cups. Me standing in my terrycloth bathrobe and boxers crying like a little kid who’s gotten lost in the supermarket. The car and wall pretty much crushed Chloe’s pink plastic Barbie house where she played tea time and doctor with the neighborhood kids. Delia’s tomato vines were pretty much finished too since they were affixed to the wall that exploded. The tomatoes. They’ve been pretty neglected for about a month now. It’s too late for them to grow now anyway, out of season.

Yeah, it’s good that Delia and Barry and Chloe weren’t around for this, but I wish they were here because I feel sad. I feel sad about how this stranger careened off the road, busting up my back wall. I feel sad that she died lonely in her now algae-damp cocktail dress. It makes me sick and sad and I just want to sit on the couch with Chloe and Barry and hear Delia clacking away on her laptop (always working too much)... I wish Barry was here rolling his eyes at his sister when she asks what’s happening in the movie. I wish they were all back home with me now and then I might not feel so sad.

I also really wish that the girl hadn’t been drinking. Had she not been drinking, she might still be alive and beautiful and not at all dead and disheveled in my pool.

Had she not suddenly parked her car in my pool I might not have been reminded that the girl who had rear-ended Delia’s Chevy had also been drinking.

They’re taking her away now.

Dawn has come and they’re taking the girl away. They’re taking her away to where they took Chloe and Barry and Delia.

Their broken bodies will rest, but not at home.