Fifteen Minutes to Live

by Phoef Sutton

  The idea of this structure Martin was creating to let her live out her last days in tranquility and ignorance finally repulsed him. “I’m Jeff, Jesse, I’m your brother.”

  Martin tried to push him aside, angrily, but he slipped by him and moved nearer to Jessica, who stared at him in wonder and almost knew him.

  “They say you’re sick. That there’s something wrong with your brain, but I don’t believe it, I think you’re just dead inside and you need to wake up. You need to feel what’s going on!”

  She backed away but he kept moving towards her.

  “You know that it’s me, Jesse, I can see it, you recognize me. Let me help you. You can’t jus throw it all away, you can’t hide from it, that won’t work.”

  She was whispering at him now, “You’re crazy, you’re fucking crazy.”

  Martin tried to pull him back to the cabin, but he shook him off and kept at her. “You know I’m not crazy. I’m Jeff. Do I have to prove it to you? We used to cut school when Mom was working and break into our house and spend the day watching TV, I caught you with your shirt off with Carl in your room once and you made me swear never to tell…”

  “Jeff,” she whispered. “What have you done with Jeff? Where is he?”

  She was on him, then, scratching at him and slapping him. He tried to grab her hands and stop her and make her think.

  “I’m Jeff, I’m your brother and I love you. I want to help you, I want to let God help you. Jesse, listen to me!”

  But now Martin was there too, trying to restrain her and then all Jeff saw of the world was a flurry of arms and hands. He was trying to tell Jessica about how God was the only one who could help her and Martin was telling him to shut the fuck up and Jesse just kept asking what they’d done with Jeff.

  “If you’ve hurt him, I’ll kill you,” she said.

  Somehow she had the whittling knife in her hand and she slashed out with it, cutting at Jeff’s throat. It didn’t hurt, but from the way the blood started pumping out of it, he knew it was an artery, though he couldn’t remember its name. He’d seen this wound before and he knew where to put the pressure to stop the bleeding, but it was hard to find the spot on his own throat, especially when it was glistening with hot blood. It didn’t take long, he knew, seconds and his veins would be empty. But his fingers kept working the wound and he just couldn’t find the damned spot and all he could hear was his sister screaming his name.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The cold desert wind was already beginning to cut at Frank as he struggled with the shovel to refill the shallow hole. The coyotes would find it, he supposed. Let them have it. I’ll do some good that way. His own arm had been thrown into a landfill somewhere, he supposed. Better to feed the coyotes than rats.

  He turned to walk back to the cabin, dropping behind a stunted shrub when car lights washed by from the highway. They disappeared; someone driving to somewhere, paying no attention to him. But he had to be safe. Tomorrow they’d be across the border and they’d keep driving till they reached a place where no one knew they were both dead.

  He stood up and walked on, the landscape cold and blue under a huge half moon. As he moved he saw it all again in his mind, the way he did so often. Jeff, hysterical, was chanting some inane religious diatribe at her. Jessica struggling, lashing out at him with the knife. Her screaming at him, screaming Jeff’s name while his blood pulsed out at her. He’d never known if she’d recognized him then, if in his pain the face of the boy had come back, or if she was calling for his help. He hoped she hadn’t known, but either way it hardly mattered.

  Frank had grabbed for her, trying to comfort her, but they were all attackers to her then, and the horror of what she’d done, even if she’d thought Jeff was a stranger, was too much. She broke from him and jumped into the water. He’d tried to go after her, but Martin held him back. It was better this way, he said. There was really no hope for her now. There’d be a hearing, a trial perhaps. She’d be taken away. Put in a home where no one cared for her. And even if the miracle happened and she was cured, how could she ever live with what she had done?

  They watched her swim away from them in terror. The fishing boat they’d seen before was gone. There was nothing but empty water to swim to, but to her that still seemed safer than staying with them.

  Frank had fallen to the deck, clinging to Martin’s leg, crying, not able to watch her die. When she was out of sight they washed Jeff’s blood off the deck and dropped his body into the sea, resolving to tell no one what she had done. They must protect her memory, Martin had said, and he hadn’t even meant it as a joke.

  Carl crouched below the window and looked around the corner of the cabin. Frank was still out there, looking at the moon. It would be better if he was further away, but there might not be another time. He pulled his sweater off, wrapped it around a rock and smashed out a windowpane. He picked out the jagged glass, reached in and opened the French doors. He ran through the bungalow, throwing open doors till he found one that was locked.

  “Who’s there?” she said from inside.

  Carl leaned against the door in relief, breathing heavily, watching for Frank to come bursting in on him.

  “It’s Carl.”

  “Oh thank God, I know this sounds crazy but I don’t know where the hell I am.”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t trust his ability to kick open the solid oak door, so he looked around for the key, praying that it wasn’t in Frank’s pocket. He spotted one on an end table by the front door – an old skeleton key, black with age.

  He grabbed it, clumsily, and rushed to slip it in the lock, terrified that he’d break it. It rolled over with a loud clank and he pulled open the door. She was on him in a second, kissing him. She had another white dress on. Frank must be partial to the style.

  “Carl, I have to tell you something,” she said.

  “We have to get out of here,” He tried to pull her arms off him.

  “I think I’m pregnant.”

  “I know and it’s okay. We’re going to get through this together.” He turned her toward the French doors, but stopped when he heard her gasp.

  Frank was in the living room, leaning on a sand caked shovel.

  “Hi, Carl,” he said.

  Jesse tried to pull away. Carl held on to her. “It’s okay,” he said, “this is a friend of mine.”

  Frank sat down, limply, at the old mission library table in the corner, chin in his hand, looking at Carl in weary irritation. “How the hell did you know?”

  “When you hit me, you shoved me into the sprinkler, so I wouldn’t see your face. So you had to be someone I knew. And you had to drop the board before you grabbed me and then pick it up again. If you’d had two arms you wouldn’t have had to do that. Also, when you saw her at my house you knew she’d changed her clothes, even though I never told you what she’d been wearing. I have to admit, that didn’t occur to me till just now.”

  “But didn’t you think I was dead?”

  “Well, that stumped me for awhile, but then I thought…well, love finds a way. That was Ryan’s body, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah…” he frowned and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I really thought that would work. You haven’t told anyone about this have you?”

  Carl didn’t answer, and Frank smiled. He turned his eyes to Jesse.

  “You see, I figured if people thought we were both dead, we could really go our own way. But it always came down to getting a decoy body, and how the hell did you do that? I couldn’t see killing someone just for the sake of my happiness. Then I met Ryan and well…I’d’ve killed him for no reason at all.”

  Jesse knew enough to be frightened. She held onto Carl’s arm. “What’s he talking about?”

  Frank smiled at her. “Oh, don’t ask him. He hasn’t understood what was going on from the beginning.” He started playing with the drawer on the desk in front of him, absently opening and shutting it. “Martin didn’t try to kill anyone. I made that up…or you
did, I can’t remember which. She tried to kill herself – I’m sorry Jesse, but I have to tell him this, I owe him that. Afterwards…I couldn’t function. I couldn’t see how I could live through the next day, the first day without her. I just sat in the living room of her house, staring at the door, praying for her to walk in. And she did.”

  “Martin was gone, I should say, doing something responsible with the police or the Coast Guard or something. He felt it was important to keep busy. I didn’t. I didn’t feel much of anything.”

  “So there was a knock on the door, as I said, and it was Jesse. I thought I’d gone mad, but it was really her. There was a terrified woman with her, a Mexican, I think. They’d picked her up in front of the fishing boat and from the blood all over her, they’d known something was wrong. They were illegal and they were afraid to get mixed up with the authorities so her man wanted to just drop her off on shore, but the woman felt sorry for her. She talked him into letting her stay that night. In the morning she tried to take her home, but the place she said she lived wasn’t there anymore.”

  “The woman started to get more and more scared till she saw the necklace around Jesse’s throat with an address on it and brought her home. She said she hoped she hadn’t done wrong and then she ran off.”

  “Jesse didn’t know where she was, of course, or who I was. But I had her there, and no one else knew it. She’d come back to me, whether she meant to or not, and I wasn’t about to let her go.”

  “Martin was already a widower, by his own choice, so he had no claim on her. Whose was she, if not mine? So I took her home.”

  Frank was staring at the desktop as he spoke. Carl tried to move Jesse to the door, very slowly, trying not to make Frank look up. He didn’t look up – he just took an old revolver from the desk drawer and set it on the table in front of him. Carl stopped.

  Frank looked up at Jesse, spinning the gun like a top on the old wood table. “We’d talked about it many times before, of course, you and I going off together. Now I finally had the courage to do it.”

  “I kept you for a month and you never knew who I was. Sometimes you believed me when I told you your parents had left you with me. When I went out, I had to lock you in, but I hated to do that, so I didn’t go out much. I stayed with you nearly all the time. We didn’t talk much, because we had nothing to talk about. We could listen to music, but we couldn’t watch movies like we used to because you always forgot the story. Still, we were together. Like we always wanted to be. And in all that time, you never trusted me. You never trusted me for a moment.”

  “Then one time I had to go out and when I came back you had run away, you had…escaped from me. I wondered if I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing. Then Carl came alone and I knew I’d get you back. You’d come back to me once before, and now you came back to me again. So it’s obvious that, despite the relative hardships we’ve gone through, we are meant to be together. And I find that comforting.”

  Jesse’s fingers were digging into Carl’s arm as she listened. Carl was doing his best to move toward the desk without moving at all. “Why did Ryan’s body have only one arm?”

  “Oh, I cut it off.”

  Jesse gasped. Frank looked stricken and hurried to set things right. “I know it sounds grotesque, but I did it for you. And like most things that sound horrible, once you’re actually doing it… well, it just becomes part of life. I left the suicide note at my brother’s house first. Then I went to see Ryan…to apologize. I let him charm me for a while, I knew that would relax him. Then I took that out,” Frank picked up the gun and held it, for the first time, like a weapon. “I brought him out to my car. I made him drink a Coke with some Halcion in it and by the time we were in my garage he was sleeping like a baby.”

  “I had to do it without leaving any marks, and I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want to be cruel. So I took a hose and ran it form the exhaust pipe in through the window and left the motor going for an hour or so. I have no idea if it takes that long to kill someone, but I figured, better safe than sorry. After I made sure he was dead, I wrapped his arm in a garbage bag, used a hacksaw, and you’d be surprised how easy it came off. Then I doused everything in gasoline, set fire to it and left.”

  “I knew there wouldn’t be enough left to identify, but the missing arm would do it.”

  “What about the teeth?” Carl asked.

  Frank looked at him, surprised.

  “That’s how they identify burn victims,” Carl explained, “Dental records. Or DNA.”

  Frank shrugged. “Only if they’re suspicious.”

  “Suicide? Arson? Don’t they have to investigate?”

  “That costs money. Martin’s already identified me.”

  “Has he?”

  “It’s in the papers.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t play tricks with me.”

  “Be a shame if you killed him for no reason.”

  “There was a reason. He raped her.”

  “And you couldn’t.”

  Frank blinked.

  Carl went on, unblinking. “I know all about it. You never had an affair with her.”

  Frank laughed, a beat or so too late. “What are you talking about?”

  “I know what happened here. On your idyllic weekend. The one you’ll never forget.”

  Frank sat upright, looking stern. “Martin’s been telling you stories. He doesn’t know. I’m the only guy who knows and I told you.”

  “I didn’t get it from Martin. I got it from Jesse.”

  He glanced at her, confused, vulnerable.

  “She wrote him a letter,” Carl pulled it from his jeans. “Told him the whole story. How you tried to seduce her up here. How she tried to turn you down, gently, and you tried to force yourself on her. Only you couldn’t get it up, so you just wound up lying on the floor, crying, like a little boy, she said. Sobbing into the little piece of white dress you’d ripped off her.”

  Frank’s eyes shot from Carl to Jesse, looking for some confirmation or denial. All she gave him was fear. “She never wrote to Martin. Martin didn’t know, he never said anything.”

  “They didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” He unfolded the letter and began to read.

  “God, I don’t know what to do. Part of me wants to call the police, but another part feels like such a bitch for even telling you about this. I don’t think he would ever have really hurt me, but at the same time I was there and I know what he tried to do. And God, the way he cried and apologized all the way home. Three hours never felt so long. And then when I got him home and pulled into his driveway to drop him off, he actually tried to kiss me, like we’d been on a date or something. I know what he’s been through, I certainly don’t want him to have another breakdown, but how can I deal with this? He’s your brother. He’s my friend, when I think about all the time I spent helping him fix up his house and his garden, trusting him, liking him. And I still like him. I just want to pretend this never happened. But will he let me do that? Can I do that?”

  Carl raised his eyes from the letter. “So that’s your affair. That’s the story of your life.”

  Frank was still looking at Jesse. “Don’t listen to this,” he said to her.

  “When she got sick,” Carl went, “you started telling people you’d had an affair with her. And since nobody particularly liked Martin, they were ready to believe you. The more you told people and the more they told other people, the more real the story became. It was almost as good as having the affair for real, and a lot less trouble. It gave a poetry to your whole life. And it successfully erased this embarrassing scene,” Carl gestured on the letter. “And even if you do create a memory out of thin air, if you believe it enough to really remember it, who’s to say it didn’t happen?”

  Frank’s face lighted with sudden inspiration. “That letter’s a lie. It was an excuse she came up with when she thought he found out about us.”

  “I don’t think so. Tell me, when you had her hidden in your h
ouse for a month, were you able to get it up then?”

  Frank was silent and his face seemed to sag with age. Then he whispered, “I never intentionally hurt her.”

  “But you did screw her?” Carl tried to make it sound as ugly as he could.

  “I love her,” was all Frank could say.

  “I know you do. That’s why you want to take her away from all of this, so you can spend the rest of your life raping her and feeling guilty watching her forget.”

  “And you haven’t been fucking her?” Frank snapped back.

  “No more than she wanted me to.”

  Frank stood up, the gun shaking slightly in his hand. “Jesse, move away from him.”

  She clung to Carl tighter.

  “What are you going to do with her?” Carl asked.

  “Take care of her. Live with her. That’s all I’ve wanted. And whether the memory is false or real, that doesn’t change the way I feel about her, or the way we are together.”

  “The way you are together is she’s terrified and you’re crazy. She loves me. I’m the only one she feels safe with.”

  Frank glanced down for a second, thinking. Then he was back. “I don’t care. She’s the only thing in my life. I’ve killed for her. I want her for myself.”

  “What did you do to Jeff?” Carl asked. He felt Jesse flinch.

  Frank glanced at her nervously. “You were wrong about that. He’s in Peru.”

  “Jeff,” whispered Jesse.

  “I don’t think so. Did he find out you were hiding her? Was he the first one you killed?”

  Frank smiled. “That’s right, I’m a psycho killer. Now tell Jesse to move out of the way so I can kill you too.”

  Jesse stepped in front of Carl. “No, listen,” she said, her voice quavering, “I don’t understand this, but you say you love me. You must know I’ll never forgive you if you hurt Carl.”

  “Yes, you will,” Frank said.

  She jumped toward Frank. Frank stumbled and Carl grabbed for the gun, feeling it jerk in his hand and heard a loud explosion. There was a hot pain in Carl’s stomach. He fell back against the wall and slumped to the floor.