My mother spoke, her voice strangely calm. “Roy, you did the right thing with Brody. He was suffering. You did the right thing. It hurts. I know. We all loved him. Now, let Nells go. We need to bury Brody.”
My father was weeping harder, shoving Nells around the kitchen, trailing Brody’s blood.
He was muttering how maybe he should put us out of our misery, do us all a favor. Every time Mom or I made a move, he yanked Nells’s arm back tighter, dug that SIG Sauer deeper. After a while, Nells quit sobbing and her eyes went dead.
Mom kept talking, soft, soothing, like he was a kid in bed hallucinating from a high fever. She told stories from when we were little, the camp-outs and barbecues, the school plays and dance recitals, going back and back till she was going on about meeting him at a school dance when they were sixteen.
“You kids wouldn’t believe your dad back then. I’d never seen a boy dance like that. Remember, Roy? The names you made up? The Snake? The Jumping Jellyfish? Your father could move.” He laughed a little and seemed to relax. But when he saw the hope on our faces, he jerked Nells’s arm like it was a crank, like he was aiming to squeeze out that whimper of pain. The war inside him was building again. All the little twitches and curses and sweat beading on his forehead, it crushed the breath right out of us.
Then something shifted. He let Nells go. Mom rushed to her, held her. Nells didn’t seem like Nells anymore. She looked like a rag-doll version they hadn’t made quite right. Dad watched Mom stroking her hair, his hands limp at his sides, his mouth hanging open. After a few minutes, recognition came over his face, like he was remembering who we were. And with it came the agitation, rising like sewage in his eyes.
“Jesus,” he said. “I have to take a leak so bad. The last goddamned thing I’ll ever do, and I’m going to end up pissing my pants.”
That’s when he put the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.
As I walked the final block to the truck, I understood I’d witnessed my father’s last battle with his monster, the end of his lifelong war with evil. He’d wrestled it into submission but knew he couldn’t keep it down for long. Knew he only had seconds to save us.
My father sacrificed everything for us.
My monster? It’s already murdered Daniel. I have to be brave like Dad. I have to stop it at that.
* * *
—
IT’S A SHORT DRIVE TO THE SHERIFF’S STATION. I circle the place, making sure everything is dark, and park in Sheriff Barton’s spot at the side of the building abutting a stone wall. It’s a narrow passageway, just a few dumpsters and the sign ABSOLUTELY NO PARKING ANYTIME. If you’re driving by, you can’t see whether he’s there or not. He likes how he can sneak out a side door as certain people enter the front.
Sheriff Barton needs to find me. He’s always been nice to my mom, especially when Dad died. I’m sorry for the mess I’ll make, and it’s important that he deal with it, not Mom. He’ll be the one to tell her. He’ll hold her when she falls.
It’s four fifteen. Unless there’s an emergency call, it’ll be hours before anyone arrives. From the pack, I pull out the contractor bags and duct tape, spend the next ten minutes covering the seat, back cushions, and floor, even the windows and dash. Maybe Mom can make a buck or two off this old truck even yet.
When everything is covered except the driver’s-side door, I pull out the SIG Sauer and set it on the seat. I check things over and get out. I don’t notice if the trees are swaying or the clouds sliding in front of the moon. I’m not hoping to spot skittering bunnies or meandering deer, don’t even glance toward the Sound. I’ve said good-bye to all that.
I go behind the dumpster and take a final leak.
68
Evangeline was being rushed down a long hallway, the gurney clattering as if it were broken.
“Dr. Taylor just arrived. We’re going to try a spinal.” The woman’s voice, which came from behind Evangeline’s right shoulder, was directed not to her but to others Evangeline couldn’t see, people who jogged near, who seemed in need of direction.
A spinal. She’d be awake for the surgery, then. She imagined a blade filleting her like a fish. Not that it scared her in the slightest. A scalpel would be a kindness compared to the claw that was digging its long-spiked nails into her muscles and guts. But even this pain, pain that would have been the end of her a week ago, was of no consequence. She was no longer Evangeline. She was simply a body—two bodies—in need of emergency repair.
The gurney burst through double doors into an OR. She was stripped and swabbed. People entered and left. A needle was driven deep into her low back. And again she didn’t mind. Not a bit of it. Not until a nurse dropped a drape like a wall at her chest, dismembering her lower half.
“You’re going to feel some pressure now.”
There was pressure, but it was removed. She was half a woman on a table, alone with sounds of flesh being cut somewhere out of sight.
A terrible begging started up in her mind, an unrelenting pleading for her mother. If only her mother would appear, the long-ago mother who’d held her, whispered words of love—I could just gobble you up—before the addictions to drugs and Jesus and men; if that mother appeared, then everything would be all right.
But this begging failed to return her mother to her, and Evangeline tried bribing whoever it was that decided such things. She wouldn’t lie or steal or screw around. She’d study her ass off, get a good job, be the best mother ever. Still, there was no one—no mother, no Isaac, no Lorrie—and she’d run out of inducements. She was left with an inner chanting: You’re a body, just a body. Over and over she repeated, Just a body, just a body.
She told herself that the rest of it—the pain and fear, the mystery of everything that was approaching, everything that would transform her life—could wait. Right now, she was an animal who needed to survive. Only she kept remembering who she was, that she was sixteen, giving birth alone, no one at her side who knew her, who cared if she bled out on the table. No one who cared if the baby lived or died.
She might actually have spoken. She might have said some of these things out loud, because a voice came from behind her head.
“I’m here,” Isaac said, not as reassurance but as apology, as if saddened to have only himself to offer.
She twisted at the sound of his voice.
“Stay still!” came from behind the curtain.
She straightened, and Isaac moved forward, took her hand. He was gowned and gloved and masked, but it was him, and it didn’t matter that she couldn’t really see him, didn’t matter how or when he’d arrived. He was there, and that was everything.
“I’m scared,” she whispered.
“I’m right here.” His voice carried the same pain as it had with Rufus, and she wondered if soon he’d begin to sing. Remembering the words, she pictured herself as the ocean, her lungs swelling like waves, rising and falling, rising and falling. And she wanted to fall away, fall from her wounded body, fall from the world itself. She’d only ever stayed on this planet by clinging with all her might. What a relief it would be to just let go.
She caught herself as if waking. “The baby,” she said.