No, you beg.
A consuming panic, as the poison floods your body.
Don’t. Please.
*
Outside this room, the beating world continues. The sun is low and pinking. Tall grass splays across endless fields. The air smells, out there, like spruce and river, like salt and hydrangea. You see it all, a flash of perfect omniscience: the whole of the planet, orbiting carelessly, indifferent and vivid and stunning and cruel. It blinks at you, briefly, before moving on.
*
As your hands lose sensation, as the edges of your vision water and dissolve, something seems to rise. A mass. It lifts from your chest and into the air, hovering above the blurry room. You want to reach out and touch—but you are immobile. The mass is the dark of you, the thing that tugs. In this last half-second, the very end of yourself, you understand both the tragedy and the mercy. You look it dead in the eye, the center of that raging storm. Cleaved from you, it seems so small. Powerless.
There is a millisecond of glory, in which you exist without it, in which you are bright, erupting. Full of love. This is it, you know. The sensation you’ve been missing. In this fading instant, it fills you to bursting—your life’s great and singular generosity.
One last shuddering exhale, one last rattling whoosh of breath.
A wide and awful lunge. Sweeping, wrecking. Blazing, glorious.
At last.
Elsewhere
In another world, they are sleeping. They are setting the table, or jogging through the park, they are watching the news or helping with math homework, they are working late, walking the dog, pulling clogs of hair from the shower drain. In another world, this is a regular evening for Izzy, Angela, Lila, Jenny. But they do not live in that world—and they do not live in this one.
*
Here is how Izzy Sanchez would like to be remembered:
She is lying on her grandfather’s sailboat, stretched long on a purple towel. The Tampa day is cartoon sunny. Her sister, Selena, is slathered in tanning spray, coconut-scented oil pooled in the dent of her belly button. Izzy’s fingers are sticky, her nails yellow from the tangerine she just peeled—she throws the skin off the side of the boat, watches it float behind in the wake. A manatee! her little brother shouts. Her mother holds him by the ribs to keep him from falling overboard—ten cuidado, peque?o. Izzy’s hipbones protrude like jutting jaws from her bikini bottom, and her fingers smell like orange and sunscreen.
No one remembers Izzy like this. Her sister, Selena, does, but only when she makes herself think past the horror. Usually Izzy—the real Izzy—is invisible beneath the shadow of what happened to her. The tragedy is that she is dead, but the tragedy is also that she belongs to him. The bad man, who did the bad thing. There are millions of other moments Izzy has lived, but he has eaten them up one by one, until she exists in most memories as a summation of that awful second, distilled constantly in her fear, her pain, the brutal fact.
From wherever Izzy is now, she wishes she could say: Before all this, my shoulders burned scarlet. I peeled off the flakes, flicked them into the sink. There were things I felt, before the fear.
I ate an orange in the sun. Let me tell you how it tasted.
*
Angela Meyer would have traveled to twenty-seven countries. Her favorite would have been Italy—not nearly as exotic as Malaysia or Botswana or Uruguay, but she would have loved the ancient heart of that country, entrenched proudly in tradition. She would have walked the cobblestones of Florence, Siena, Sorrento, licking plastic spoons of gelato, head buzzing from the wine. Angela would have taken her mother on vacation to the Amalfi Coast. They would have ordered vongole pasta on the balcony of their seaside hotel, the air tinged lavish with lemon trees and salt.
At the end of the trip, Angela would have tipped the housekeepers twenty percent. Those women, local teenagers, would have used the bills on shots of tequila at the nightclub across the street, not thinking of Angela, only thinking of the heat, their young sweating bodies, the pulse of the lights and the sound of the music, beating everything into oblivion.
*
Lila’s third child would have been a girl after all.
They would have named her Grace.
She does not exist, but if she did, Grace would have become the executive director of the Columbus Zoo. She would have managed eight hundred employees, ten thousand animals, and a five-hundred-acre property.
Grace’s favorite charge would have been the snow leopard: a lean, dignified animal with a lush coat of spotted white. After closing one night, a sweltering June, Grace would have found herself alone in the feline wing, the cleaning staff already gone home. She would have walked down to the leopard’s terrarium, intent on admiring before she said goodnight. She’d have stood at the entrance to the leopard’s high cage, stunned by the elegance of the animal—giant yellow eyes would have met hers. An invitation. She’d have unlocked the feeding door, her heart warning a patter as she inched forward, two steps. Forward, two more. The leopard would have watched as Grace slid to the floor against the interior wall, a smile snarling at its jaw. The leopard would have stalked slowly up to her, sniffed Grace’s outstretched hand in a whoosh of meaty breath. The animal would have unfurled its limbs, curled its long body into the nook where Grace’s armpit met her ribs. Together, they’d have slept.