“What about the people upstairs?”
“They’re rich, right? They won’t even notice. Rich people live in a different world.” I want to live in that world. I want to live in a world where I can step over a body, not look need in the eye, where I can be free of want, free of me.
He gets to his feet.
“What are you doing?”
“We’re doing this. We’re doing it now.”
I move to stop him; then I stop moving. He’s right. If I’m going to do this, I need to do this now. And I need his help.
Her keys are by the door, where she dropped them when she came in. She has a BMW with an automatic unlock button. I can walk up to the street and find her car. I can park down below the yard. We can load up her body, take her to the camp, take her anywhere.
Maybe I can trust Michael. He has looked out for me. He directed me to a tent the night I was too sick to keep walking. In a way, he has kept an eye on me all along.
He saw me even when I was invisible. It’s unfortunate that this is the best I can get.
“Okay,” I agree.
He smiles from one end of his mouth to the other.
He walks to her body, kneels down over her. He peels back her sleeve, weaves his fingers around her wrist. “You idiot,” he says, and I think he is talking to her. “She’s not dead.”
And then he slides his huge hands up her face and cracks her neck.
DEMI
I am screaming inside, screaming so loud I can’t hear anything. And it’s like I’m dreaming. Then it’s like I’m too awake. Then I’m dreaming again. And I have a choice: wake up or keep dreaming.
“What do you mean, she’s not dead?” I rush to the body. It feels warm. Warm all of a sudden and she tricked me, she lied to me, she made me believe she was dead. “She’s alive?”
He sits back on his haunches, stretches toward the bottle of wine. “She was probably in a coma or something. Brain-dead.” Had she really been alive this whole time? Did I know? How could I not?
I touch her and she’s cold again and I don’t know what to think. Maybe it was the blanket that made her seem warm. I didn’t even check her pulse when I found her on the floor. I just dragged her away so I could pee in private. “What did you do?”
“You saw me do it.”
“What did you do?”
“You saw me do it.” He sips his wine. “This could make you.”
“Did you just . . . kill her?”
He shrugs “I helped you. You asked for my help and I helped you.”
I stand up, move away from her. My body is shaking, wildly shaking, but that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that I know it will stop eventually. All bad things do. It will stop. And this will just be yet another bad thing that happened to me. Add it to the list.
I shake my head. “This is my fault.”
“This is your blessing.” He takes his foil from his pocket, gently unfolds it. “That’s the problem with you, y’know? You’re poor-minded. You look at things and see the worst.”
“You killed her.”
He slips his straw between his lips. “Be optimistic.”
I gag.
He lifts the foil. “Everything happens for a reason.” He flicks his lighter on and chases a thick black line. “Be the reason.”
* * *
THE TRUTH IS, nothing has changed. Whether or not she was dead before, she is dead now. My options are the same. My need of Michael is the same. I can’t bring her back to life if she is dead again.
Instead, I find a hammer at the back of the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. Michael agrees to knock out her teeth if I will cut off her hands.
“And her feet, just in case,” he adds.
At first it is sickening, wrenching and disturbing. But slowly it becomes just a task, just something you do, like anything: right.
“You’re fucking it up,” I say. “You can’t leave pieces. You have to take the whole tooth.”
“I’m taking most of it. Do you know how deep roots go? I should just detach her jaw.”
“No.”
And later: “They keep breaking! I want to keep one for a necklace, but they keep breaking.”
“You’re not keeping one for a necklace.”
After we are finished—or at least at “good enough”—we bag everything; then we shower.
It’s well after midnight when I help him carry the body into the yard, where we split up. I go above to find the car while he slides the body down the hill, through the trees and undergrowth. I find the car by clicking her proximity key until the headlights flash.