The Way It Ends

by Marnie Vinge

  The neon of the sign that now reads NO VACANCY hums like a bug zapper. A car rolls past on the main drag and I turn back to look at the little town one more time. I wonder what it would feel like to have your world flipped upside down by something like what happened out at Revelation Ranch. The name itself is so absurd to me. Something only someone with Tom’s level of delusion could come up with. And something tells me that his self-aggrandizement has only worsened in the time since I’d cut him out of my life like a cancerous growth.

  I walk, eyes up and hands on my keys, back to my room. I make sure to look around before looking down to unlock the door. Once inside, I bolt the lock and secure the additional chain mechanism. Something about the place, however quaint, gives me the creeps. It reminds me of every motel I’ve ever seen featured on an episode of Forensic Files. Something that Wes used to call murder porn.

  The thought of Wes stings like alcohol poured into a wound. But maybe, if I keep pouring it on, eventually it will burn away all the remaining nerve endings and the burning will stop. I can’t help but think about Wes. I feel like he was right about me. I’m a leaver. I run at the slightest provocation. Here I am, running again. Except, I remind myself, this time, I’m running to something.

  If true crime is murder porn, I’m about to make my film debut.

  IONE

  7 YEARS AGO

  Early fall of that year was still unseasonably hot enough that all I needed was a light cardigan. The cold had tried to come in and had been banished back once more by a warm front toward the end of the month. Oklahoma had the unpredictable mood of a teenager when it came to the temperature. Anyone living in the state for more than a year could tell you if you didn’t like the weather, stick around a few minutes, it’d change.

  The combination of the sixty-nine-degree air and the pools of fallen leaves unsettled me. It didn’t seem right. Something seemed off the night of the last party that I attended at Tom’s house.

  As I got ready that night, the voice I’d worked so hard to quiet during the weeks of our affair had refused to be silenced any longer. Don’t go, it whispered as I threaded an earring through a much-neglected ear lobe piercing. I stopped and looked at myself in the mirror, almost certain that I’d heard the voice just next to me. But I was alone.

  Birdie had stopped attending the parties and we’d stopped hanging out quite so often. The two of us knew that my affair with Tom had created a rift between us, but neither of us was willing to budge an inch on the ground that we held: her that I was in the wrong, and me, that I’d fallen in love.

  So, I hushed that voice. The one that had fought so hard to make it back to the surface after months and years of conditioning it to be quiet. That ever-present voice that every woman knows. Her intuition—her gut—that tells her when something just isn’t quite right. Instead of listening, I got in my car and drove over to the west side of campus where castle Wolsieffer stood.

  I walked down the block and approached a woman walking her dog. I stepped to the side as I passed her, treading on someone’s lawn. I smiled and she smiled back. I noticed she was visibly pregnant, and I entertained an irrational thought: what if one day I had a baby? Tom’s baby, to be more specific. It horrified and thrilled me. I wasn’t ready to be a mother by any stretch of the imagination, or sure that I even wanted that. But infatuation disguised as love seeds some incredible thoughts into the fields of your mind. Sometimes they sprout up in the most unexpected ways.

  I turned up the walk to the house and entered the backyard as Tom had told me I could. It was the way I came and went when we met up there some nights when his wife, Vanessa, was working late. He left the patio door unlocked for me on those nights and sometimes I wondered about that. As a woman, I’d never dream of leaving a door or a window unlocked. Not even for a lover. But for Tom, the world wasn’t a scary place—it was a playground.

  It was well past the beginning of the party when I arrived. Some people had already come and gone; others lingered like fog on a windshield after a heavy make-out session between two high schoolers: unwelcome evidence of things that probably shouldn’t be going on.

  These parties functioned as bacchanals, probably wilder than some of the frat parties going on not far from here, but much more exclusive and sought after by the student population of the writing department. I’d come originally to witness the debauchery—to see what kind of party a professor could throw that had become campus legend—but I’d stayed when Tom had gotten his hooks deep into the marrow of my bones, now inextricable, it seemed.

  On the back patio, I spotted him.

  A group of girls—probably freshmen—stood, hanging on his every word like he was a good-natured priest giving casual communion. They listened with intent that betrayed their true motives. I hung back and observed, irritation making my skin itch in a way that couldn’t be scratched.

  Tom’s eyes flicked upward, catching mine. He locked them on me for a moment as one of the girls continued to talk to him. I held his gaze, the line of our sight felt like it held its own gravity. I let myself sink into it, and as though I’d been summoned—the warlock’s familiar—I walked over.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the three girls. Drink in hand, he turned to me and dismissed them just like that. Miffed, one of them turned up her nose at me, but the three of them soon decided it was better to go mingle or refresh their drinks than stand and watch over Tom’s conversation with me.

  “Hey,” I said. The greeting was so informal, and even though I’d run my hands through his hair and dug my heels into his backside, it felt inappropriate.

  “Hey, you,” he chanced a fleeting touch of my face. Something that could have been noticed by any of the students there. Something that felt infinitely dangerous and just as exhilarating. “I wanted to talk to you about something. Come with me.”

  Tom turned and I followed him as he walked down, off of the patio and into the garden, meticulously cultivated and illuminated by a series of delicate string lights. I wasn’t sure they would survive a storm come the spring.

  Away from the crowd and obscured by a rose bush, he pulled me to him. His hand brushed my face and his kiss tasted like everything we shouldn’t be doing here and now. Whiskey infused his breath and I wanted to get drunk on it. He pulled back, a smile on his slightly parted lips.

  “I want to select you for the Headlights award,” he said. “And subsequently, the Gorman Fellowship.”

  The words were like a marriage proposal. The thrill washed over me. The possibilities of the future ebbed away and then crashed back down on me in that moment. But something unsettled me about it, much like the fallen leaves in the too-warm weather.

  “Tom, I can’t—”

  “You can, and you will,” he said.

  “I don’t—”

  “You do deserve it. This has nothing to do with—” he let the sentence hang in the air, unfinished. My worst fear dangling from the unpunctuated end of it. The idea that Tom would choose me simply because I’d slept with him. I recoiled from the thought, terrified of its veracity.

  A crumpled smile broke across my face.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You don’t have to thank me. You’ve earned it.”

  I leaned in to kiss him and he stopped me.

  “If we start, I won’t be able to stop, Ione. I—” he grabbed my hand. “You know how I feel about you, don’t you?”

  “We don’t have to—”

  “Yes, we do.”

  The weight of the moment bore down on me like an anvil.

  “I’m crazy about you,” he said. “I’m in love with you and I can’t help it.”

  Tom squeezed my hand.

  “We’d better get back to the party.”

  I followed his lead, emerging from the garden to see the three girls looking our direction. One of them glared at me while another sneered knowingly. I pressed imaginary wrinkles from my blouse, suddenly self-conscious in front of them. I shook it off and left to make mys
elf a drink.

  Inside, the party raged on. The music was louder than usual, the hangers on a little drunker than they would have been had I arrived a few hours earlier. I poured a whiskey and sat the bottle back on the counter.

  The house shuddered with the slamming of a door. The music stopped.

  “Party’s over!” shouted a female voice.

  I saw her through the glass-walled cabinets in the kitchen that looked out over the living room. Tall, thin, wearing scrubs. She had reddish-blonde hair pulled back in a loose bun. Beautiful. And furious. There was no doubt in my mind that this woman was Vanessa, Tom’s wife.

  Students scattered like cockroaches before her. As the house emptied, I sat my drink down, eager to make my own exit but also disgusted at myself for being afraid of her. It spoke to the fact that maybe Birdie was right.

  As I rounded the corner that led from the kitchen into the front hallway, she stopped me, almost colliding with me.

  “You’re her,” she said it as though the knowledge had just come over her by some unseen force. I couldn’t imagine how she could have known who I was. “You’re the girl my husband is fucking.”

  Even as she said it—those words so desperate—she was entirely self-possessed. Her eyes didn’t betray a hint of tears and her voice didn’t shake. She said the sentence as though she’d been looking for me for a long time. All her married life, perhaps. I stood, dumbfounded by her confidence.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked.

  My lips parted to speak, and she swung a hand up from her side. She slapped me hard enough that it cracked throughout the house. I reached for my cheek.

  “Get out,” she said.

  I scurried around her, beating a hasty retreat to the safety of the sidewalk outside. But before I made it out the front door, Tom stopped me.

  “Ione,” he said.

  Vanessa came out of the kitchen.

  “Go, I’ll talk to you later.”

  “There you are,” she said to him.

  I swung open the front door as they confronted each other. The shouting reached the street and before I could pound my first step down the sidewalk, I heard the sentence that would echo in my mind until I saw Tom again.

  “You asshole,” she sobbed. “I’m pregnant.”

  VANESSA

  A good day starts with a clear mind. It’s a philosophy Vanessa has long espoused, probably since she first learned to meditate in yoga class so many years ago. The place where she learned—Lotus Studio, in Norman, not far from the university—became a refuge during a time in which her relationship with Tom had transformed from a shelter into the storm itself. It had been before Tom’s affairs and well before the whole debacle with Mark. Somewhere in those middle years of their marriage, they had lost their way to one another. And now, it seems to Vanessa that the path that could lead her back to Tom had become too overgrown with resentment and dashed expectations to ever be successfully tread again.

  On days like this, when she wakes to this heaviness, she returns to her practice in silence. Though there is a part of her that has grown too worn to care, she grabs her threadbare yoga mat and heads for the sweat lodge just as dawn peeks over the hills.

  The compound is quiet—not many have stirred yet—but minimal sounds of activity, conversation, and life bounce like rubber balls over the flat ground of Tom’s ranch by the mesa. Vanessa looks up, away from the path, toward the direction of the voices. She squints and then opens wide her eyes, trying to get the most information she can from the pre-dawn light. She sees, beyond the pasture and the fence, two vehicles. The small distant forms of people move from one to the other and she knows.

  They’re here for Tom.

  The thought does something to Vanessa. It stirs within her a desire to protect—a maternal instinct that she’s felt only once before, long ago in what feels like a distant echo of her current life. The desire wills her to protect not Tom, but Birdie. Tom’s weakness disgusts her. She knows that this spells the end for him. But for her, it might only be the beginning.

  She treks on to the lodge, eager to spend some moments in the quiet solitude that her practice affords her. Something that has become harder and harder to come by as more people have made a home on the ranch.

  She pulls back the wool curtain, and inside it’s not yet scorching hot with the mid-August heat. It’s warm though, and after a few minutes of light stretching, Vanessa breaks into a sweat.

  She loves to sweat. Like fire or tears, it cleanses. After an early morning yoga session in the heat followed by a cool shower, she knows she’ll feel better. And there’s something else.

  She reaches into her pocket and retrieves something small, wrapped in a napkin. She unfolds the paper cloth and ingests what she considers to be a meditational tool. Something to up the ante, spiritually awaken her, and allow her to access the second sight.

  She begins and she waits for that first glimmer of the surreal to overwhelm her.

  It comes on slowly. At first just a feeling of fever, like her blood has begun to run hotter in her veins, which feel somehow too constrictive for the life force that surges through them. Then, she knows she needs to open her eyes for the next part.

  She looks forward, across the sweat lodge. A bead of perspiration finds her eye and burns it, but she doesn’t blink or flinch because across the room, in the darkness, she makes out a shape—the silhouette of a person—that’s at once jarring and familiar.

  Mark.

  That life that felt so far away in the quiet hours of the morning stares back at her, pinpoints of light in his pupils like confetti shimmering on New Year’s Eve.

  He speaks. A constant stream of gibberish that Vanessa strains to make coherence of. She knows she must—that the words he speaks are the very thing that has brought her here this morning.

  Vanessa watches as the form that is and is not Mark moves toward her. She’s glued to the worn yoga mat, unable to go to him or step back into the real and present moment. Transfixed, she struggles to make out anything in his string of non-words. And slowly, something emerges.

  The baby.

  He’s speaking about the baby. His face contorts in sorrow. He’s telling her something about the child—it’s in danger. There is a stillness to it. Sometimes, Vanessa has thought she could sense the energy of the baby. But now, as Mark pleads with her to summon it to her, she can’t. All she feels is emptiness, like an abandoned crypt, lonely and hollow.

  As she looks on at the image that is and is not Mark, she feels the hot pulse of a tear roll down her cheek.

  “Tom,” the Mark-thing speaks.

  How many times had she heard Mark speak Tom’s name? Over dinner telling a joke, over the phone asking if he was available to talk, and then all those times in private, his lips to her ear, begging her to leave him. And God, how she wishes now that she had.

  The form of the thing that is and is not Mark comes close. His face—the face she knows still as well as her own—is inches from hers. She feels his fingers in her hair and smells his cologne. That scent that always reminded her of a fresh rain. She lets his energy envelope her like a dust devil, swirling over one of Tom’s precious fields.

  Mark speaks Tom’s name again. But this time Vanessa feels something else—not just longing, but a sensation of reality folding in on itself, and then, the heaviest sense of darkness she’s ever known.

  Time passes. Maybe minutes, maybe hours.

  She blinks, catching one last glimpse of Mark before he disappears, leaving the structure empty save herself. She can feel her mind begin to retether itself to the grounded anchors of reality, and she comes down.

  In the darkness, she sees daylight, or the first whispering breaths of it, peeking into the lodge at the places where the wall meets the dirt floor. She sits down, legs crossed, and listens for the sounds of life beginning to stir on the compound. Sweat soaks her t-shirt and leggings, giving them the feel of wet plaster sticking to her skin. She basks in the moment,
like a small snake absorbing radiant heat from a rock minutes after sunset.

  Outside, a mild breeze cools her skin. A few people have begun to rattle around in various parts of the compound. In the still of the morning, she’s aware. Aware that there is a darkness surrounding the baby and aware that it has a name.

  Tom.

  IONE

  The panhandle of the state embodies the edge of the southwest. I contemplate this as my wheels roll west, the tread of the tires bearing down on the scorching asphalt. This part of the country holds out no welcome to tourists. It’s a rough and barren landscape that begs you to turn back. But I don’t.

  Tumbleweeds wash over the road like little dried up clichés. The biggest of them could outsize basketballs. A roadrunner darts in front of the car and I check the breaks, my stomach plummeting at the thought of hitting the bird. He escapes unscathed, but my heart’s a little worse for the wear. I’m jumpy, I think. The entire thing has me on edge.

  Out here, the journey is marked in rock formations. As I draw closer to my destination, I spot things that I read about before coming: the Old Maid – a rock that looks like the bust of a woman—and the bridal party, or three rocks that could be construed to look like women in waiting. I think for a moment about the wildlife in this part of the country – what sorts of creatures lurk in these hills at night? Coyotes, no doubt. But we’re no stranger to those back in the city. Out here, though, I wouldn’t be shocked to see a bobcat or a mountain lion. But I have no desire to encounter either after dark. I’m already on the trail of one predator.