“Rhee-a,” Fritz said. He moved the butt of the gun just left, so it was over his heart.
She pulled the trigger.
He fell back. Went down. It happened so fast that it didn’t feel real. Her ears rang. There was blood. Or water. Or perhaps the dense splatter from a black hole. She knew then that she had control over this. These people, her children and husband and everyone she’d ever loved, they belonged to her. With her mind, she kept them safe.
The sound still ringing, her hands hot, she heard her son, FJ, scream, “Mom! No!”
The boy was in the middle of the street, his eyes bloodshot. An autopsy would show his blood alcohol content at .3 percent, with lesions in his brain from chronic abuse. Like Rhea’s father, he’d been born with alcohol-induced epilepsy.
Rhea pointed. He wobbled too much to run. Before he was able to get inside 118 Maple Street, she fired. A miss. He lurched, unable, somehow, to go inside. He headed for another house （which house?）， but couldn’t decide. She fired again. It lodged in his neck and he went down, too.
The next one. For this to work, she needed them all. Ella was frozen on the Wildes’ stoop next to Julia. Rhea pointed and shot. A miss. The second was perfect. Straight through Julia’s protective hand, to Ella’s head.
Belly heavy and with a sore back, Gertie ran, placing her body between Julia and Rhea. Rhea charged to intercept her, loping and running on one good leg and one useless one. Panting, like two embattled animals, they deadlocked.
For the first time, Rhea saw Gertie for what she was. She was a woman and a mother and a wife and a mediocre Realtor. She was nervous and damaged and she dressed trashy. She was an ordinary slob, who had never offered salvation. She was a friend. Like the ocean before a tsunami hits, the murk receded and everything became clear.
The Black Hole was just a movie, and a crappy one, at that. Her thesis was slightly above average. Her father had been a drunk, not a saint. The sinkhole in the ground was just a hole. The kind that were happening more and more, all over the country. It was not magic. She was not so special, so extraordinary, as to have birthed it from the weight of her own feelings. Those feelings had not stolen the person she loved most, the only person who had ever seen her and still loved her. The person she’d wanted so much to protect and keep close that she’d crippled her: Shelly Schroeder.
She’d made mistakes and then repeated those mistakes. She’d carried them, imagining that they accrued, an infinitely dense stain on her person. But there was no murk. There was no monster. There was only Rhea Schroeder. The woman who’d murdered almost her entire family.
She’d seen patterns where they didn’t exist and forced their reiteration. Jessica. Shelly. FJ. Ella. Fritz. Arlo. Gertie. Larry. Maple Street. Any one of her actions against these people was unforgivable, and she’d committed all of them.
“Please,” Gertie begged, a sentry in front of her own front stoop.
“Help!” Rhea cried. But there was no changing course now. No possibility for redemption. She’d transgressed a very real event horizon. It engulfed her then. Thick and impossibly heavy, the unbearable wave of murk. It dragged her down and she gave up struggling.
She cocked the trigger. Gertie gasped, her hands protecting her belly while Julia cringed behind her.
Those watching would think that this decision was rooted in mercy, or because she only had one bullet left. She did it because she’d finally figured out how to go back in time and right all the wrongs. How to come out the other side, clean and new and as the loved, and adored, and perfectly special person she’d always wanted to be.
In her mind, Rhea Schroeder was about to enter one of those perfect family photos people send out on Christmas. There was Gretchen, tall and bright. A laser of ambition. There was FJ, cheerful and sweet and searching so hard for some girl to raise on a pedestal and treat like gold. There was Shelly, a smart, pretty pistol who kept them on their toes. There was Ella, Rhea’s Mini-Me; serious and snappy and a little bit mean. There was goofy, successful Fritz, so grateful for this life she’d given him. There was a ghost girl from the Hungarian Pastry Shop, small and innocent, caught half in the picture, moving on with her life. There was her father, white-haired and jolly as Santa, always free to babysit. And in the center was Professor Rhea, devoted to all of them, the loves of her life. These were the Schroeders.
Rhea put the gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger.
From Obituaries, The Garden City News, August 3
Maple Street will host a memorial service tomorrow for the Schroeder family at the Dunn and Nally Funeral Home from 9–noon. Those who’d like to send flowers are asked to donate instead to the Maple Street Recovery Fund.