Ever since I’d found out that Claudia had checked herself out of rehab when Gorevale had died, I’d been pushing away a memory of her face. Not her wicked eyes or troublemaking mouth, but the face I’d seen lying on the floor of my apartment when she’d overdosed. Her skin was clammy and her lips were almost blue. She was barely breathing anymore and there was still a spike in her arm. She’d never told me whether it was an accident. We’d never really talked about it at all. After she came out of the hospital she moved in with me and that was that.

“Claudia came to my apartment a couple of years ago. I was out, but she had a key. She deliberately overdosed. I never understood why. I mean, why there?”

“Maybe she wanted you to save her.”

“She couldn’t have known I’d come home when I did,” I argued.

“Why’d you go back?”

“Claudia called me and she asked… she said, Remember that poem you used to recite for me?” I could still hear her voice, calm and composed, even though it felt like she was drifting further away with each syllable. I took a last, long drag on my cigarette and ground the butt out.

“What poem?”

“‘The Raven.’ That was what she meant.” It was hard to explain to another person. No one else would have gotten it. It was like our little in-joke, only it was sad instead of funny.

“Right,” Bruxton said. “You told me you both like Poe. All I know from ‘The Raven’ is Nevermore. I wasn’t such a hell of a student.”

“‘Distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, and each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor,’” I recited. It was from the second stanza of the poem, but Bruxton didn’t know the difference, or didn’t care. He smiled, and in the cold moonlight his angular face was wolfishly handsome. For a split second, I wished he would pull me close and kiss me. I wanted to obliterate thought and memory and drink him in. It was weakness to want to cling to him, and I was disgusted with that part of myself, but that didn’t make the craving go away. It was a relief when he turned his face to look up at the sky again.

“You ever hear the line, ‘Every junkie’s like a setting sun’?” he asked. I shook my head. “Neil Young. Vintage, but not enough for your tastes, I guess.”

“What made you think of it?”