Chapter Twenty-Six
Pax
“You have a call,” the man tells me, bringing my phone into the room.
I stare at the phone in confusion.
“It’s him,” he adds.
Him.
Leroy.
I reach out my hand.
“What?”
“What a nice greeting for your old friend. I hope you’ve been enjoying your time there.”
I’m silent.
The room is spinning, and I’m not quite sure if my head is sitting straight on my neck.
“Keep going,” he encourages me. “Once you get to the end, once you finish all the boxes, you will achieve two things. First, Zuzu will be sent back to her mother. Second, I will tell you what you want to know. Your mother’s last words. Keep going.”
The line goes dead.
He clearly didn’t want me to say anything incriminating on the recorded prison line. He took quite a chance to get me on the phone at all. He must’ve thought I was too doped up to focus.
That’s partially true.
I do pushups to pump the drugs through my veins faster.
I need to work it though my system so that I can get to the end.
I have to finish.
I have to save my daughter, and I have to hear my mother’s last words.
I don’t know why I want to hear them.
I just do.
It’s a need at this point, as real to me as my need for heroin.
Slowly, methodically, throughout the day, I work my way through the boxes.
One
By
One
By
One.
I am focused on that.
No matter how the room spins, or the blackness threatens to overtake me, I continue.
I lost consciousness
Once
Twice
Three times.
When I wake, it is night.
Early evening, I think. The light is dying on the lake, in oranges and golds and ambers. I stare at it, watching it flit to and fro, and I put my hand on the window.
I loved this place once. I loved the views of the lake and the seclusion.
I can feel Mila here, even still. One of her pictures hangs on the wall, a breathtaking painting of the sun. It is an explosion of abstract vision, and I wish I was in the canvas, and away from here.
But I’m not.
And I only have a short way left to go.
I reach for the last box.
If I finish this, they’ll bring me the very last one.
It will be over.
I will have won.
Even if I die, I won.
28
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Mila
It’s been twelve hours since Roger left.
The minutes have ticked past slowly. Natasha brought me a dinner tray, and it was all I could do to act normally.
Surely, something will happen soon.
Did Roger believe me?
Maybe he misunderstood.
It’s easy to be paranoid when I’m here alone.
Every sound lifts my head.
Every time, it’s nothing.
Every time, I’m crushed.
I pray. I pace. I pray. I pace.
Nothing happens.
I shower, I go to bed.
It’s the middle of the night before I hear something.
Something distant, something in the house.
It’s not a screech, it’s more of a crash.
A loud one.
I lunge from the bed for the first time in days. My legs are weak, and they almost give out, but I make it to the door, and I bang on it, screaming.
Through it, I hear a commotion. Scuffling, yelling, a loud shot. A shot?
Then,
It’s quiet.
Then.
Then.
“M’am, stand away from the door.”
It’s a man’s voice, assertive and loud. I step away, scurrying to the bed, and my door comes splintering in, loudly and forcibly, and the pieces fall onto the floor. Everything next happens in a blur.
People surround me.
Everything is buzzing.
My heart pounds.
There are so many people. Police, EMTs.
“Where is my daughter?” I ask someone. They are taking my blood pressure, taking my vitals, wrapping a blanket around my shoulders. My teeth are chattering, and I didn’t even realize it.
“We don’t know yet,” the EMT says. “Don’t worry, m’am.”
“And my husband? What about Pax?” I demand, and my voice is loud, and I might be screaming.
“We don’t know anything yet,” someone else says.
“Is he alive?” I ask, and I’m scared, terrified. I yank away from the EMTs.
“I don’t know yet, m’am,” she says again. It’s easy for her to be calm, because it’s not her life, her family, that we’re talking about.
I break away and run from the bedroom, and there is a body covered by a sheet in the living room. A giant bloodstain seeps into the floor, and through the sheet, and oh my God, that is Natasha. I know it. She’d dead. I know that, too.
I pause in my tracks, and my hand is over my mouth and my breath is in my throat, and then…
Then…
“Mila?”
My sister is rushing toward me in a jacket and she smells like the cold outdoors. She grabs me tight, scooping me into a hug.
“Oh, my god,” she moans into my hair as she rocks me to and fro. “Oh my God. You’re safe now. You’re safe.”
“What about Pax?” I say simply, and she pulls away and looks at me.
“I don’t know yet.”
29
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Pax
I’ve used everything.
Everything is empty.
The boxes, my heart, my soul. All of it.
I am a vessel and I have been used up. Depleted.
Now, all I can do is wait.
I am sprawled on the bed, and I’m not sitting, or lying. I’m halfway in between. I don’t have the balance to do one or the other.
I am flailing in time, in the moment. I am existing, and not much more.
I am only waiting.
For the end.
For the last thing.
It is night.
I will die at night.
It’s fitting, I decide, as the door opens and the moonlight shines in on the floor. I will die in oblivion. It’s where I belong, anyway.
“You have done well,” the man tells me as he eyes the empty pile of cardboard. He has the last one in his hands. “Are you ready to finish?”
I nod, because I am. When I am gone, nothing can hurt Mila again. She can take Zuzu and start anew somewhere, with someone who isn’t fucked up like me. I will save them by doing this.
“This is how it will work,” the man says, and he sets the box next to me. “Everything you need is in that box, including the last journal page. It will tell you what you’ve been wanting to know. After you’ve read it, you will finish it. Once it is done, I will take your daughter back to your wife. They will live happily ever after. Do you have any questions?”
“How do I know you will stick to your word?” I ask and my words are sluggish and slurred from the drugs.
“You don’t,” he says directly. “But I will. I have nothing against you personally. I’m paid to do a job. That is all.”
I nod.
“Anything else?”
I think on that. “I want to leave a note for my wife.”
“No. That’s not possible.”
“Will you send a message to her?” I ask. “Will you tell her that I love her?”
“If she doesn’t already know that, then you weren’t living your life right in the first place.”
“That’s true,” I agree with my captor. I don’t know why, but he sounds logical and I’m swimming in a sea of doubt.
He leaves
, just like that, without another word.
I sit on the floor and I know it’s for the last time.
I won’t have to go through this cycle again. It will be over soon.
I open the last box.
There is a .45 revolver inside, and it gleams in the moonlight. I check the barrel. One bullet is in the chamber.
The last journal page is folded beneath it.
I take a deep breath.
The drugs have dulled all of my senses. I’m not afraid. I’m not even sad. I’m an empty shell, and all I need is the last piece of this puzzle. I need to know.
I put the gun on my lap, and I pull out the paper. The ink on this page is fresh, a vibrant blue.
I’ve thought a lot over the years about why Susanna had acted like she did that night.
She rejected me, and refused to go with me, and I have to admit, that was a surprise. It took the wind out of my sails.
I know now, though, why she did it.
She must’ve thought I would kill her son.
She didn’t trust me when I said I wouldn’t.
If it had only been her and I, I know she would have gone with me in a split second. I would’ve saved her from that life. But her son came in, and she had to put on a show for him. She had to act like she didn’t love me. I know it was a show. I saw how she’d looked at me every time I delivered their mail, day in and day out. She watched me, and she was lustful and she wanted me. I know it now, and I knew it then.
But some women, their instincts to be mothers overtakes everything else.
That’s what happened that night.
I’m sure of it.
She fought for that snot-nosed kid. And in the end, I asked her why. Right before he rushed in and killed her, I asked her why she was fighting so hard for him.
She looked up at me, and her eyes were so wide and full of tears. And she said-
The paper is ripped here.
Her response is gone.
Leroy Ellison, being the monster that he is, is going to deny me my mother’s last words. He brought me to the brink, then yanked it away. He was playing with me all along.
Rage billows in on clouds of red in my vision, and I find myself at the door, kicking and punching and yelling. No one hears, of course, and I turn, looking at the monitor. The men are in Zuzu’s room, and they are taking her by the hand. The one who does the talking looks directly at the camera, directly at me.
He waves goodbye.
A cold pang runs through my heart, and if they went back on their word with the journal, then they will go back on their word with my daughter.
They aren’t taking her back to her mother.
They are taking her out to kill her.
Fear for my daughter fights through the numbing fog of the drugs, and it emerges on top and I struggle with the door. I shout for Zuzu, to console her, to tell her that I love her, but it is all for nothing.
They are gone, and I am alone, and no one can hear me.
My Peace Page 18