Christopher Ross

Among the many things those two anemically sourced newspaper articles failed to describe:

How when Hannah Reese arrived unannounced at his bungalow, Evan was on the phone with a fellow pickup artist, an attorney, and they were exploring creative ways to stick it to that feminist blogger. How when Hannah Reese arrived unannounced at his bungalow, words escaped her as congestion, her mouth a bloom of blood and her chin and her shirt and the tops of her freckled breasts. How one of her large and charming teeth had not come with her. How what she managed to say as Evan dropped the phone wasn't Bryan found out or We've been discovered but "Please help me. I'm frightened." How Evan could hear his elderly neighbor Mrs. Velazquez shouting from the sidewalk, "Evan are you okay I am dialing nine-one-one!" How, without knowing why, Evan wrapped Hannah Reese in his grandmother's old afghan, the heirloom that featured prominently in some of his most effective comfort-building stories, which had lured Hannah Reese, which had lured all the others, into Evan's bed. How as Evan led Hannah Reese toward the driveway, Bryan Reese's Dodge Durango, the color of lagoon water, howled to a stop in the middle of the street, right next to Hannah Reese's Civic with its driver-side door still open. How Evan tugged on the Afghan, shouted for Hannah Reese to hurry, and ran for his car. How the awkwardly wrapped Hannah Reese fell on the lawn and how instead of getting up and following Evan, she panicked and ran back into the house. How Evan didn't realize this until it was too late to stop her. How Mrs. Velazquez's husband's face looked—its compression, its divinity—as he threw himself in Bryan Reese's path, and how when Bryan Reese pushed him to the ground the shrieking Mrs. Velazquez threw fistfuls of gravel after him. How the gravel hitting the walls of the pink house sounded like the last grains of salt in a pretzel bag. How inside the bungalow Hannah Reese tripped again over that fucking Afghan and how in a flash of navy chinos and turquoise Polo shirt, Bryan Reese picked her up by the hair and beat her. How Hannah Reese's unhinged mouth gurgled. How between recovering from and bracing for each blow Hannah Reese struggled to escape, struggled to fight back. How she reminded Evan of a garter snake he'd once killed, how it had startled him on a youth group camping trip in the Adirondacks and how he had secretly dropped a heavy rock on it over and over and over again and how even as the shocked and broken snake tried to unstick its ruptured pale green bottom from the clay it continued to thrust its unhinged mouth at him. How Bryan Reese never once took a swing at Evan. How after Evan hit him as hard as he could with an Italian marble book end, Bryan Reese said unsteadily, "Okay, she's all yours, buddy, I'm done with her." How as Evan answered all the policemen's stupid questions in the front yard, Hannah Reese's Civic still sheepishly complained about its open driver-side door. How, much later, as he drove to the hospital, Evan's gaze returned again and again to the bulbous strips of butterscotch-pudding-colored foam the windshield replacement guys hadn't properly trimmed off the inside, never once in seven-point-nine miles connecting his recently smashed windshield—another husband in another zip code—with what he was doing in the car. How Evan drank Diet Cokes and ate raspberry-flavored Twinkie knockoffs and fiddled with his phone as he waited, out of sight, for Hannah Reese to get out of surgery, while other people, Hannah Reese's people, accumulated, prayed, endured the long night unalone. How Hannah Reese's people turned out to be Bryan Reese's people, how their praying focused on eliciting God's forgiveness of him. How it took days to pull enough strings to get into Hannah Reese's room and how Hannah Reese's eyelids through the expressionless anti-inflammatory mask were the color, texture, and convexity of peeled plums. How Evan cleaned up the blood stains in his bungalow and how this failed to erase the smell of violence. How Evan started painting, emptying the bungalow of everything he owned and drinking a shitty bottle of tequila and painting. How he painted white the bamboo floor, painted white the brushed steel refrigerator, painted white the bathroom mirror and all of the windows. How he hid for three days in the bungalow's darkened, empty chambers. How after the neighbors and curious passersby and garbage collectors had picked the lawn clean, Evan's silver MG and his cellphone were his last possessions in Los Angeles, and how on the third day he would gladly have traded the silver MG for a cord to charge the phone with.