by Hannah Tinti
“You think Maureen ever hurt anybody?” Talbot blew air out of his cheeks. “And look how she went. Over a fucking watch.”
“You’re the one who shot her.”
Talbot kept his eyes on Hawley, but he moved the pistol so that the muzzle was now pointing at the baby. Lily started to get up from her knees, as if the gun had a rope that was pulling her toward it.
“Stop,” said Hawley. He raised his hands out of the water. He took another step closer to shore. “You’re right. And it’s your right to come. I won’t give you any trouble. But you need to let them go.” He waited to see what Talbot would do next. He didn’t want to move again until the old man was ready. But Talbot just leaned back in the lawn chair and took another sip from the orange soda.
“Her name is Louise,” Lily said. “She just got baptized yesterday. We call her Loo.”
Talbot said nothing in response, but Hawley could tell he was listening. He put down the can and pressed his palm against his knee, wiping the condensation onto his jeans.
“She swam for the first time today, just before you came here.” As she spoke, Lily lifted her hands and inched toward Talbot and the baby. “She sleeps through the night, and she’s started eating real food. Rice cereal. Mashed bananas. She cut her first tooth last week. And she laughs. If you kiss her hand, she laughs.” Lily leaned over and smiled at the baby. Loo’s crying slowed, and then stopped at the sight of her mother. Talbot was watching, out of the corner of his eye, not really looking at them but looking. Lily took the baby’s hand and bent down, her face so close to the gun Hawley’s stomach ached, and pressed her lips against Loo’s tiny knuckles, making a big, exaggerated mwah.
The baby’s eyes went wide, and all at once her mouth opened and a small noise came out, so perfect and clear it was like a made-up sound of a baby laughing. Then Loo lifted her hand all on her own, like a queen, so that her mother would kiss it again.
Talbot looked embarrassed. He shifted the baby onto his other knee, as if Lily were a stranger, bothering them in a supermarket line. “Get out of the water,” he said to Hawley. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
Hawley made his way slowly out of the lake, thinking of ways to wrestle the gun away from Talbot, and dismissing them all. Either the baby or Lily was bound to get shot. He calculated distance, tracking escape routes. It was too far to the tree line. Even if he could snatch Loo away from Talbot, the old man would have time to shoot all three of them before they reached the woods. Hawley’s eyes went down the length of the dock and rested on the metal canoe. And then he remembered there weren’t any paddles. He stood dripping in front of the blanket. A breeze swept down and his skin turned cold.
The trees shifted overhead.
“You can pick one,” said Talbot. “One gets to live.”
Talbot’s words joined them all tightly together. Hawley could sense every tremor and thought of Lily, frozen in fear on the blanket, every breath of their child, warming Talbot’s lap, every shift of the old man’s finger on the gun.
But Hawley was made for decisions like this. And he didn’t hesitate.
“My wife,” he said. “I pick my wife.”
For the first time Lily’s eyes left the baby. She stared at Hawley like he’d just pulled off a mask. “No,” she said. “No.”
But Talbot seemed satisfied. He slid to the edge of the lawn chair. He bounced Loo on his knee, then waved the gun at Lily.
“Tell her not to call the cops.”
Hawley said, “Don’t call the cops.”
“If she does I’ll come after her, too.”
“You’re a terrible person,” said Lily.
“Tell her to go now,” said Talbot. “Or that’s it for chances.”
There was no time to waste. No time to let the old man change his mind. Hawley grabbed his wife by the arm and yanked her from the blanket. When she struggled to get away, he slapped her in the face and shoved her toward the path. And when Lily spun and came back pushing at him, he hit her harder. Hit her with his whole fist. She stumbled and fell to the sand. She stared up at him.
“Get the fuck out of here,” said Hawley.
Only then did she seem to get it. Hawley did not have to hit her again. She was up and hurrying across the beach and barreling into the forest, toward their house and Hawley’s guns. If Lily ran the whole way she could make it home and back in fifteen minutes. When she reached the top of the hill she paused and glanced over her shoulder. He tried to think of a way to say he was sorry, but all he could do was touch his forehead, like he was tipping a hat that wasn’t there. His wife stood looking ill for a moment and then she wrinkled her nose and turned away, and she was gone.
Hawley returned to the blanket and stood in front of Talbot.
“Now what?”
The old man gestured at the cooler.
“You got any food in there?”
“Sandwiches and pie.”
“Ham and cheese?”
“Baloney.”
Talbot grunted his approval. He made Hawley pull the cooler over to him and open it. He transferred the baby from the crook of his arm onto his lap so he could keep the gun pressed against Loo’s stomach while rummaging inside. He pulled out some sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil and cellophane and the small plastic container that held the pie. He never took his eyes off Hawley, feeling blindly and throwing the food out onto the blanket. He told Hawley to unwrap the cellophane from one of the sandwiches and Hawley did and gave it over. Some mustard slipped out from the bread as the old man took a bite and landed on his fishing vest. He didn’t seem to notice.
“I brought Maureen to the clinic in Oak Harbor,” said Talbot. “The bullet was from my gun so they thought it was some sort of domestic dispute. The police locked me up so I wasn’t with her when she died. Then they found your car, and some of your blood in the house. They let me go after that. But once they did, I wished they hadn’t.” Talbot took another slurp of his soda. “Hand me some of that pie.”
Hawley opened the plastic container. He found one of the forks they’d packed. He imagined sticking the tines in Talbot’s neck. The old man took the fork from him and ate the crust and peaches with a slow and exhausted look, like it was the last course of a giant meal he’d been making his way through for days. Like the pie was something sweet he didn’t need or have any desire for but felt he had to finish.
“We’d been together a long time,” said Talbot. “And I didn’t know how to breathe without her. Everyplace I looked there was a part of her and I just about lost my mind with thinking about her and going over everything in my head of what I’d done wrong. And that dress. That fucking wedding dress. I dragged it out to the cliffs one night and threw it over the edge. Almost threw myself over, too.”
Talbot dropped the fork into the container. He put the container on the ground. “You’re still a young man and you don’t know anything,” he said, “but one day God is going to remember all the things you’ve done and then He’s going to bring down His judgment and teach you more than you ever wanted to learn.”
“It was just a job,” said Hawley. But already he was remembering Talbot’s wife, and the way her violet eye turned cloudy as she clutched her veil.
Talbot took a sip of orange soda.
“You know I’m not the only one looking for you.”
At the end of the dock, the canoe stretched the length of its rope and then swung back, bumping against the worn-out wood.
“I heard you bungled things in Alaska.”
“Something like that.”
“You’re lucky I found you first,” he said. “King wouldn’t have given you a choice.”
Hawley wasn’t sure what to say about that. In his mind he tried to count the minutes, each second bringing Lily closer to the guns. He tried shifting, bit by bit, hoping Talbot was so caught up in talking that he wouldn’t notice. The old man poured the rest of the soda out onto the beach. The liquid sizzled and fizzed, darkening the color of the sand. He stared
at the spot.
“Know where we went on our honeymoon?”
“No,” said Hawley.
“Rome,” Talbot said. “But Maureen didn’t want to visit any of the normal tourist places, like the Vatican or the Colosseum. She wanted to go to a chapel made out of human bones. It was the creepiest thing I ever saw. But Maureen loved it. Some of the bones were broken apart and made into patterns. Maureen said it was the patterns that made the place beautiful. Showed how everything in life is connected and repeated and reflected in each other. That a hip bone or a piece of vertebra can look the same as a flower. She said that it made her believe in God.”
Talbot was running his fingers through his sideburns, over and over, like he was searching for something caught between his chin and the frazzled gray hair. The old man’s face was drawn, his shoulders hunched around the baby in his lap. But he still carried the same dark edge of violence he had on Whidbey, and his time spent searching for Hawley had only sharpened those corners of himself. There was a pinned hardness to his eyes, like he was taking in all the smells and sounds of the world and also walling himself against them. Loo began twisting around and kicking her legs. She reached out and touched the muzzle of the suppressor. Talbot looked down at the baby but did nothing to stop her. And that’s when Hawley realized that the old man planned to kill himself, once he’d finished with them. All along, that’s what he’d been working himself up to. That’s why he was stalling.
“You broke her nose,” said Talbot. “She had such a beautiful nose.”
Hawley slid his hand the rest of the way across the blanket. He gripped the fork tight in his fist. He couldn’t wait any longer. There was no more time. Hawley took in a breath. He held half of it back. And then he swung out long and hard and jammed the fork into Talbot’s leg with all his might. The old man screamed and sprang up from the lawn chair. He dropped the baby but not the gun.
Hawley snatched Loo just as she hit the sand. And then he was running down the length of the dock. The baby felt light in his arms, like nothing at all. Loo’s mouth was open but she wasn’t crying. Her breath was wet against his cheek, smelling of formula, and her fingers clutched the skin of his neck. He set her in the bottom of the canoe, and yanked the rope free and shoved the boat adrift with all his might. The canoe shot out some thirty feet, then caught the current and started floating across the lake. He could see Loo’s chubby legs kicking underneath the elephant blanket. He’d done it all without thinking. Without even looking back. Then he heard the sound of Talbot coming up behind him.
Because of the suppressor there was no bang or boom—just a huff of air and the shots whizzing past him. Hawley crouched to protect his head and gripped the dock. Even with a gun trained on him, he was afraid to get into the water. Then Talbot tagged him with two bullets. Snip. Snip. Right in the ass.
Hawley would have thought it was funny if it didn’t hurt so much—the pain bursting out of his flesh and flying up the base of his spine. His knees buckled, and he sensed his body falling, falling, falling, falling until he was ready to scream for the water to come. His shoulder hit with a crash, and everywhere was white froth and bubbles. Hawley tried to push himself deeper, tried to remember the lessons Lily had given him, to keep his fingers together as he scooped his hands, to let out tiny bits of air instead of blowing it all at once.
He stayed under as long as he could. Then his lungs began to fail and he surfaced beneath the dock, gasping. The pain threaded around his thighs whenever he moved his legs. With one hand he gripped the underside of the dock and with the other he pressed the wounds, trying to stop the blood. Overhead Talbot was dragging his injured leg along the boards.
“I know you’re under there.”
Hawley tried not to move. Not to make a sound. It was too dark to see and so he just stared at the slits of light. The floats under the dock were covered with slime and smelled of rotted foam and cobwebs and the hollow casings of dead bugs and spiders and the years that had passed since the boards had been placed there and all the waves that had run through. It smelled of being caught and being left behind and it smelled of being forgotten.
Hawley couldn’t get his footing—the reeds were tangled around his knees and the sand was full of silt and washed up bits of life and then the dragging noise stopped and he heard Talbot slide another magazine into the pistol. The first shot went long and broke through a board five feet ahead of him. The second and third were two feet away, and left holes that immediately shone circles of light on his skin. Hawley took a deep breath and pushed against the dock and sank as far as he could, hoping that if he kept moving and if he went deep enough Talbot would keep missing, until the gun was ready for the next magazine and that by then he might figure what to do next.
But Talbot didn’t miss—the fourth shot went past Hawley’s face and took off the bottom of his left ear, and the ear bled so much that it became hard to see through the clouded water. As he kicked, the bullets in his ass seemed to dig farther into his tailbone, until he could barely move his legs for the pain. Soon his lungs were pushing for air again. Hawley knew he’d have to surface and when he did Talbot would kill him.
The current churned gold and red, and Hawley’s chest twisted hard with the desire to open—to air, to water. The reeds at the bottom of the lake were waving in the gloom, and Hawley pushed down and grabbed for them. The tendrils wrapped around his wrists, slimy and seemingly sentient, until it was hard to say if he was anchoring himself or if the reeds were pulling him down into the shadows.
His hands sifted stones and algae and trash, beer bottles and what felt like a piece of a grill, and then the dead bodies of creatures, fish and birds, half broken down and making their way back into the earth. Hawley plunged his fingers into the icy murk and thought of Loo. He hoped that he had saved her. He hoped that he had done enough.
The clump of reeds broke free and came loose in his hand. Hawley clutched another patch and another, but none would support his weight. He could feel his body coming adrift, drawn back toward the surface. The cold faded as he rose. A pattern of thuds radiated through the depths, footsteps along the dock, and then came a much louder boom—like a sudden crack of lightning from a storm, followed by an explosion overhead that Hawley felt more than heard, the water displaced by a torrent of bubbles. He turned his head toward the surface, and through the gloom saw the body of a man coming toward him.
For a moment it seemed like Hawley himself, or perhaps Hawley as he might have been, if he had lived to be an older man. Thick shoulders and gray hair, a flannel shirt and work boots. Hawley floated up into the lake and the man floated down into the lake and the two of them met in the middle. And then Hawley saw there was a hole in the center of the man, blasted through his chest. He could see right through the hole. He could see the gleam of sunlight coming down from the surface through the bloody water. He could see the edge of the dock, the flannel shirt blooming and the man’s guts trailing behind like the tail of a kite.
Talbot’s eyes were open and staring past Hawley, past the reeds and past the floor of the lake. He looked more surprised than angry about the hole, his mouth open and taking in water, the remains of his fishing vest torn to pieces. Hawley pushed at Talbot’s shoulders, and for a moment they were tangled in each other, arms and legs heavy, Talbot’s sideburns brushing Hawley’s cheek, the fishing vest casting hooks into them both, tying the men together, metal to skin. Then Talbot dropped down into the dark of the reeds and Hawley continued to rise.
His first breath was half water, half air. His lungs vibrated deep in his chest from the effort. His head knocked against the side of the dock and he was sputtering and thrashing, bile rich and deep snaking its way up his throat. He tried again and the next breath was easier, less pressure against his ribs, but his vision blurred and then he was under again.
The bullets burned. He could barely move his legs. He threw out his arm once more, groping for the float, and a set of thin, strong fingers snatched hold of him. Lily’s f
ingers. Hawley would know them anywhere.
She couldn’t heft him onto the dock and so she towed Hawley to shore, dragging him along the edge of the wooden floats until he felt the lake bed beneath his back, his whole body clenched around the pain. Lily pulled him onto the sand. She put her mouth on his but she didn’t kiss him. She squeezed his nose and blew down into his lungs. Hawley coughed. He turned to the side and retched.
“I’m okay,” he wheezed, the air ripping his throat. “I’m all right.”
And then Lily was hitting him, smacking his shoulders and his face. She was kneeling in the sand. There was blood spattered across her green bathing suit, across her face and shoulders and legs. Hawley couldn’t tell if she was screaming or crying. His right ear was blocked and the left was still ringing from where the bullet had torn through.
“Louise!” she shouted. “Where’s Louise?”
Hawley rolled up onto his elbows, an agonizing hurt threading along his spine. He peered across the lake. The canoe was nowhere to be seen.
“She’s in the boat,” he said.
Lily pushed to her feet and started limping back down the length of the dock, holding on to her right side. She scanned the horizon. Hawley crawled after her, the pain too much to stand, his mind whirling. They swayed together like drunks. Lily’s whole body was shaking. Her hands covered with blood as she lifted them to block the sun from her eyes. Hawley’s twelve-gauge shotgun was at her feet.
“You’re hurt.”
She looked at her own trembling fingers. Then at the dark stain spreading across the fabric of her bathing suit. “His gun went off when I pulled the trigger. I don’t think he meant to shoot me. It was some kind of reflex,” said Lily. “I don’t feel anything.”
“That’s the adrenaline.” Hawley reached up and put pressure on the hole with his fingers. There wasn’t an exit wound. He worried about the caliber and what it might have done to her insides. If the bullet had torn through her kidneys or liver. If it had ruptured her stomach. If it had nicked an artery or major vessel, she would bleed out right here on the beach. He pressed harder. Lily screamed.