“Listen, I’ve done the research,” Jill said. “I know how to make it look as if you killed him and then killed yourself. I studied the forensics. What would be on your hands. What would be on his coat. How you decided to do it here.”
With every drop of resolve in me, I willed Stefan not to move. I couldn’t look at him, I couldn’t signal, but I tried to speak to him with my brain.
“You’re going to shoot us? Both of us?”
“Him first,” Jill said. “Stand up, Stefan.” Instead, he slouched forward, his hands capped over his head. I could hear sirens. Wouldn’t it be rich if somehow, Jep was suspicious, and sent police? If Stefan had found a way to reach into his pocket and dial 911? But no one knew where we were, back out of the view of the main roadway through this place, under the tree. Far back, behind the cemetery, there were houses on a ridge, but blocks distant from where we stood. Marines in assault gear could be standing at the gates right now, and they would not be able to get here in time.
“You don’t want to do this, Jill.”
“That’s what they say on TV, Thea, before the person jumps. I’ve thought about all of this. For months. Maybe for years. You have no idea how much I want to do this,” she said.
“What about forgiveness?”
“Oh, I fully intend to forgive him. But the only way that I can forgive him is if he’s dead.”
“Jill, listen. I get that you’re in despair. I get that it never goes away. Anniversaries are the abyss. Let today pass. Then see…”
“If I can get you to come back here another time to kill you?” She added then, “You get it theoretically. You get it in one of your storybooks.”
“How can you think about this clearly? Is this what Belinda would want? Is this what justice for Belinda looks like?”
“It’s not what she would want. It’s what I want. Bindy is with our Lord. The sufferings of men are not her portion. You don’t feel what I feel, Thea. Maybe I should just hurt you so badly you’ll never walk again, or you’ll never see again, and let you live. So you can live the rest of your life without him. So you can see him die.”
There was always an even-worse, and Jill reached down into the well of her madness and brought it up squirming in her old hand. I said, “Jill, that’s your portion too. You have lived as a woman of faith all your life…”
“Oh yes, even as my piece of trash husband embezzled money from my father’s church, the church my father founded, and dragged his name through the dirt,” she said. One of the first things Jill confided in me, when she moved to Wisconsin from North Carolina was how it took every ounce of spiritual strength she had to go on believing after Lowell’s death. In the shadowed gully where he’d fallen hard, fallen sixty feet down from the slope where they were skiing a sunset run, the two of them alone together, Jill held Lowell’s hand and sang to him as he died, knowing she couldn’t leave him even to summon help, his spine was severed, she couldn’t let him die alone. She waited until the light went out of his eyes, and only then did she make her way back up onto the track. She was an expert skier. What had really happened to Lowell McCormack? Was this Jill now or Jill always?
“If you’re going to do this, you don’t have to do it right this moment. There’s nobody here but us. Don’t I at least get to understand?”
“You’re stalling for time. In a story, this would work. But this isn’t a story. You don’t have any options.”
“But you do. Jill, think. As of right now, nothing has happened. You got hysterical, and who wouldn’t, and you made some threats, and nothing happened. This can stop, right here. Nobody has to know. It’s a mistake, not a tragedy.”
“So how do you suffer then?”
“Don’t you think he suffered in jail? Maybe not as much as you wanted him to…”
“And you? How do you suffer now, Thea?”
“I have to live with knowing what he did, all my life. I have to live with wondering how I raised a son who could…”
Jill lowered the gun so that it was nearly touching Stefan’s hair. I heard his breath catch, as it had when he was a toddler trying not to cry.
“Okay, you don’t have to live with that, Thea.”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you stupid?” Jill said, lower now. “I know Emily told you. I know she came to see you. I know she left town.”
“Told me what?”