Page 40 of Kill Your Darlings

October

It was a forty-minute walk from Rachel’s apartment in North Cambridge to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, but the weather

was perfection, and Wendy felt as though she could do this walk every day of her life. Her friend’s neighborhood in North

Cambridge was a little run-down but still had more character and charm than the nicest neighborhood in Lubbock. After navigating

through Porter Square, Wendy began to walk down Oxford Street, lined with trees and Victorian houses and charming brick apartment

buildings. The narrow sidewalk was buckled here and there by tree roots and long winters. Wendy wore her oldest, most comfortable

jeans and a new sweater she’d bought the day before at Filene’s Basement in downtown Boston. There was chimney smoke in the

air and the ground was covered with fallen leaves, and Wendy, as she’d felt years earlier when she’d briefly lived in New

Hampshire, knew that this was the part of the world in which she belonged.

As she got closer to the university, Oxford Street widened, concrete academic buildings replacing houses, and wide swaths of campus replacing tiny front yards.

It took her a while to find the museum, only because there were three museums all in a row, housed in imposing brick structures.

She paid her entrance fee and shuffled in between two large families.

She was early—their meeting time wasn’t until noon—but Wendy genuinely wanted to walk around a little.

Before entering the main exhibit she got caught up looking at a display of glass flowers—tiny, delicate specimens.

She had never been particularly interested in either glasswork or even real flowers—that was her mother’s passion—but something about these pieces, created over a hundred years ago, was fascinating.

A voice was speaking to her, and she came out of her reverie.

“I’ve been coming here every day for ten years,” he said, and she turned to look into the face of a very old man, dried spittle in the corners of his mouth.

She nodded and smiled and left the exhibit.

By twelve o’clock she’d wandered through most of the rooms and wound up in the Great Mammal Hall, feeling as though she’d

stepped out of her own life and into Victorian England. There were taxidermied giraffes and great apes, and several whale

skeletons hung from the high ceiling. There was a balcony level that ran all the way around the room, displaying hundreds

of stuffed birds and allowing a closer look at the whales. She was on the balcony when she spotted Thom, entering the hall

below her, his hands tucked into his front pockets, walking slowly, looking like a typical New England college boy in jeans

and an unbuttoned peacoat. His hair was longer than the last time she’d seen him.

He pulled his hand out of his pocket and checked the time, then scanned the crowd of other visitors on the lower level, clearly looking for her.

Wendy stood still, watching, enjoying the feeling of spying on him.

She could tell he was dazed by the majesty of the room, just as she had been.

He was slowly moving—he hadn’t even looked up yet—then settled in front of a large glass case that contained a stuffed lemur.

He bent at the waist to get a better look.

Then he mussed his hair a little and she realized that he was looking at himself in the reflection.

She was just about to leave the balcony to meet him when he suddenly looked up, his eyes seeing the enormity of the room for the first time.

She stayed put and he found her, a smile creasing his face.

For a moment she saw herself through his eyes, poised on a balcony, a Juliet surrounded by dead animals.

She was about to come to him, but he was already moving toward the steps that would bring him to her.

Later, in the hotel room, he came out of the bathroom and stood naked for a moment just looking at her lying on the bed. She

was propped up on all of the pillows, naked as well, a sheet pulled up over her legs and lap. “What are you doing?” she said.

“Memorizing this.”

She pulled the sheet off her legs so that he could see all of her, striking a sexy pose, trying not to laugh but failing a

little. But he didn’t laugh back, just clambered onto the bed and worked his way toward her.

“I keep thinking in clichés,” he said, twenty minutes later.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I want to say things like I’ve never felt so alive as I do right now, and looking at you stops my breath, and

how you are the most perfect creation I’ve ever seen. Do you know what I mean?”

“I know that I will only ever be happy with you,” Wendy said.

“See. Clichés.”

“I don’t care. They’re clichés for a reason. And it’s not like we’ll ever share them with anyone else. Just ourselves.”

“How long can you stay here?”

He’d already asked her this as they walked from the museum to the hotel room he’d rented, less than half a mile away.

“I told Rachel I’d be back around dinnertime, but I can call her. She has some new boyfriend she’s into, and I can tell that

she’s not exactly thrilled that I’m here for the weekend.”

“Just tell her you ran into an old boyfriend and you’re the happiest you’ve ever been.”

“I should. I could. But I don’t know, she went to my wedding, she knows Bryce. I don’t want anyone to know about this except for me and you.”

“No, I know. It’s for the best.”

“I’ll call her, though, and tell her that I’ll be back closer to eight. She’ll be fine with it. And I can come back here tomorrow.”

“I’ll be here, waiting for you.”

“Can I ask... What’s happening with your girlfriend?”

“Finito. We broke up. I did it as soon as I came back from Ohio.”

“You were living together, right?”

“Yes, but just renting. She had a friend who was looking for a roommate so she moved in with her. I’m still in the same place.

I can’t afford it, so I need to start looking around myself.”

“What did you tell her?”

He rubbed at an eye. Wendy knew that he didn’t want to talk about it, but part of her really wanted to hear what had happened.

She waited.

“It was awful,” he finally said. “It’s still awful. I told her that I just felt too young to settle down, that I wanted to

experience life as a single person, that it had nothing to do with her.”

“Cliché. Cliché. Cliché.”

He snorted through his nose. “Yeah, right. She didn’t buy it. She was convinced, she’s still convinced, that there’s someone

else. And she just wants to keep talking about it, going over what went wrong. I think what it comes down to is that she can’t

understand how I was in love with her once and now I’m not. I keep thinking that maybe it would have been easier if I was

just cruel to her, told her I had a one-night fling and that I was never that into her in the first place. Then I’d just be

the asshole ex-boyfriend. But I tried to be kind about it, and now she wants to keep getting together so we can rehash the

whole thing.”

“You can’t help what you are,” Wendy said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, being nice, not being an asshole.”

“I guess,” Thom said, then rolled over onto his side, propping himself on an elbow. “But I am an asshole. I did cheat on her.

And I lied to her about it. And if you only knew the dark thoughts I have about your husband...”

“Oh, yeah, like what?” She moved onto her side as well.

“Oh, you know, stuff like how we should murder him for all his money.”

Wendy surprised herself by how much that made her laugh. “My thoughts exactly. How would we do it?”

“Well, you’d have to be the brains behind the operation. I would be the muscle, of course. You tell me how we’d do it.”

“As you can imagine, I have given this lots of thought.” She realized she was talking a little too loud, in order to sound theatrical, so she lowered

her voice and continued. “Bryce is a perfect murder victim for many reasons.”

“Because he’s Bryce,” Thom said.

“Yes, number one, because he’s Bryce. Number two, he is a creature of habit. He pretty much does the exact same things every

day, at least Monday through Friday. On the weekends it’s a little different, but only because he drinks all day instead of

just all night.”

“So what’s his routine?”

“He gets up at seven in the morning and heads to the gym. He’s there for an hour, mostly in the steam room, I suspect, and

then he goes to work. He eats lunch every day at the same Chinese restaurant. In the afternoon he calls me to check in, and

to tell me that some friend of his, Dougie or Shroom or Big Dan, is in town and he’s going to grab a few beers with him. I

tell him fine, and he stumbles home at around eleven, hammered and incoherent.”

“He drives home?”

“Oh God, yeah. Taxies are for pussies.”

“And then what?”

“Then he pours himself a big glass of Jack and Coke and goes out by the pool and smokes a cigar.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Every night.”

“So, we just need an exploding cigar.”

“Yes, that would probably work.”

“What’s your idea?”

“Well, my secret dream is that he runs his Porsche headfirst into a tree on his drive home at night, but knowing my luck,

and his luck, he’d drive headfirst into someone else and kill them. Then he’d walk away without a scratch.”

“He is going to kill someone eventually,” Thom said.

“Oh, no doubt. It’s only a matter of time.”

“I feel like I’ve seen half a dozen movies where someone cuts the brake lines of someone’s car. Is that a real thing?”

“You’d know better than I do, but it doesn’t sound like a real thing.”

“So what else you got?” Thom said.

“I keep thinking about how I should just push him into the pool when he’s smoking his cigar. He’d sink like a stone.”

“He can’t swim?”

“I don’t think he can, at least not well. And definitely not if he was wearing clothes and drunk. The only time I’ve seen

him in the open water is on a Jet Ski, and he wears a life vest. If he gets into the pool at all, he walks into the shallow