That Night by Alice McDermott

bottle of rum, toward the lowest part of the fence.
    Once over the fence, you would only have to choose your niche among the trees. A police cruiser would pass through each night at about twelve or one, but it would never leave the road that circled the baseball diamond and so it was easy enough to avoid its headlights.
    Sheryl and Rick would sit down together on a sloping bit of dirt and grass. Rick would open the bottles of Coke, pour out half, open the flask bottle of rum. In the semidarkness (there were two or three tall night lights in the park, some small bit of light from the surrounding streets), he would match the lips of the two bottles carefully, pour the rum with a precise and steady hand. (“This is what my old man does for a living,” he told her. “Pours piss and blood from one bottle to another.”) They would sit shoulder to shoulder, their knees raised, the bottles in their hands.
    She might tell him then: “I used to think it was stupid that people you really loved could just die ...”
    Moving her hand across the dirt and the grass, she might say, “If one of us died.”
    He would tell her about the car accident he had been in before he met her. An older friend had been driving. They had cut school and smoked some reefer. They had been drinking all day. At about nine o’clock that night, in a town not far away—his friend had been looking for the house of some girl he knew—they turned a corner and hit a parked car. Neither of them knew how or why. They both might have been asleep.
    They were laughing when they crawled out, one through a window, one through a back door. The engine was nearly in the front seat. Rick’s father said that if they’d hit a tree or a pole, something that couldn’t have rolled with the impact as the car did, they both would have been killed. His father had said it would have served them right.
    Sheryl would whisper, “Before me, you would have been forgotten.”
    Or perhaps by then she would no longer have to say it. By then, he would understand it himself, even as he told her the story, as he remembered his father’s tired, angry voice, his mother’s dazed indifference. If he had died then, before he met her, who would have loved him enough to make his disappearance from the earth illogical?
    Perhaps by then he understood only that when she spoke of dying he should turn to her, loosen the scarf at her throat or her waist, gently push her back onto the grass.
    He lay beside her, his cheek to the cool ground, his arm across her waist. She studied the sky, speaking softly and with that same sure tone. Beyond her were the two empty Coke bottles, his wallet, opened flat, the ripped silver paper from the condom, the circle of her scarf.
    He watched the line of her profile, the shadowy movement of her dark lashes as she whispered to him, her face to the sky. The police headlights passed through the trees, but they hardly made her pause; she was afraid of nothing in that world that seemed only, even superfluously, to begin at the end of these woods. Speaking softly but with that same assurance, she would name for him all the things that didn’t matter to them, that didn’t have to matter to them, and it seemed to him that she started at the foot of those woods and worked outward, dismissing, obliterating, the entire world: not friends, she told him, not family, not school, not getting older or getting married or finding a job. Not car accidents or hospitals, not any kind of luck, good or bad, not dying.
    She turned to him and even in the darkness he saw that same brightness in her eyes, a hard, challenging gleam. Only they mattered. They loved each other. It would not be logical for love to bring them to anything else. And later, when she sat up, laughing, draping her scarf over her bare shoulders like a shawl, he reminded himself that she knew things no one else seemed to know.
    In a town not far from ours, there was a school run by the Salvation Army or the Baptists and