Low Life by Ryan David Jahn Page A

looked up at him with her red-rimmed eyes and wiped at her cheeks and her nose with the back of her hand. She tucked loose strands of hair back behind her ears. Her eyes were alive with
emotion and beautiful for it. But as she searched his face, something behind them changed somehow. Something entered her eyes that Simon didn’t like at all.
    ‘You’re not – who are you?’
    Simon swallowed. His face got hot with blood but he tried not to show it, tried only to give Samantha a deadpan while he thought of what to say next. Like stealing a kite, half the trick was not
to give yourself away.
    ‘Who am I?’ he said with absolutely false humor. ‘Jeremy.’ He said this in the same tone he’d use to explain to someone that the sky was blue: it was so obvious it
didn’t deserve mentioning.
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re not.’
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
    She shook her head.
    The way a man held his shoulders, the way his mouth looked when he was relaxed, how often he blinked while lying or telling the truth, where he rested his hands – in his pockets or on his
lap or pressed against his hips – the way he scratched his face, whether he crossed his legs at the ankles or knees or not at all when sitting down: a man was more than his appearance. He
should have known he could never get away with this. He had known, hadn’t he?
    He licked his lips.
    He had to make her believe. She hadn’t seen him for weeks. Her memories of him weren’t fresh. He could make her believe. He had to.
    ‘Why?’ he said, then cleared his throat and swallowed. His tongue was sticking to the roof of his mouth. ‘Why would you say that?’ He smiled. ‘Who else would I be,
sugar bear?’
    She returned his smile then, only hers was real. Had he stumbled upon a correct phrase when he called her sugar bear? He thought he must have. He swallowed and then smiled again. This time his
was real too.
    There’s my sugar bear,’ he said.
    She reached out and touched the scar curving down his face from cheekbone to chinbone. She traced the pad of a finger across it.
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Your face.’
    ‘Accident,’ he said, guessing. ‘You remember.’
    She shook her head.
    ‘I remember twenty-five thousand dollars in surgeries to have it removed,’ she said. ‘What have you done to yourself?’
    ‘I don’t . . .’
    He shook his head.
    ‘Goddamn it,’ she said.
    She appeared to be on the verge of tears again, but then she looked away, blinked several times, and swallowed. It passed. She had the weary and ragged look of a woman who had suffered her
husband’s insanity for a long time. Simon hadn’t seen it on her before, but he saw it now. The tired eyes, the set jaw.
    He’d been insane. She had loved Jeremy Shackleford, but he had been mad. Maybe that was all there was to Shackleford wanting him dead. Maybe Shackleford had seen him on the street and
their similar appearance had been enough to send him over the edge. It could be that simple, couldn’t it?
    There was no rule that said things had to be complex. Didn’t Occam’s razor even state the opposite, that the simplest answer was usually the correct one – that you should cut
away all that was superfluous?
    But was that an answer? Simon wasn’t sure.
    ‘Why are you wearing your old glasses?’ Samantha said.
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
    She grabbed his face in both her hands and looked at him and said ‘Goddamn it’ again, and then she pulled his face to hers and kissed his hair and his cheeks and his chin and his
mouth and his neck.
    ‘Goddamn it.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You’re always sorry.’
    ‘I’m sorry for that, too.’
    ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you into a bath. You smell like you haven’t had one in weeks.’
    Simon stood barefoot on the cold tile floor. The bathtub was running hot water, and Samantha had put soap into it, so there was now a mountain of foam just beneath