by Marian Thurm
The man is shaking his head sorrowfully. The gun is still pointed at her as he says, “Get real, Stacy, you’re a social worker! Your salary was peanuts. You think you can rescue us with whatever pitiful money this imaginary job of yours is going to bring in? Listen to me—there’s no way out.”
Though he may think there’s no way out, Stacy can’t possibly let herself believe that he’s right. Under other circumstances, she already would have said, How dare you insult me and my career like that! But these particular circumstances don’t allow for hurt feelings, she understands. And so she tells this man whom she no longer recognizes just how much she and Olivia and Will love him, never mind his business failures. Which are nothing to their children, nothing to her, she repeats. “They do nothing to diminish you in our eyes, baby, you understand that, right? We adore you!”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Stace,” he says, but he sounds unconvinced.
She asks him, quietly and politely, in a whispery voice, for a drink of water.
Backing into the adjoining bathroom, with his 9 mm semiautomatic pistol still aimed at her, he fills up a Lucite cup with southern Florida’s idea of cold water and offers it with a hand that trembles slightly.
This much he can do for her.
Stacy takes a few sips, and, using both hands, sets the cup on the floor next to the bed, on the moss-green textured carpet where she is sitting on her knees, her back rigid against the side of the king-size mattress. Drops of water fly over the top of the hard plastic cup as she sets it down with those shaky hands and hears herself pleading for her life now.
And the lives of her children.
Their children. Olivia and Will.
Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasedontdothis. Imbeggingyou. Beggingyoupleasedont.
“Olivia and Will,” she says. “Will and Olivia.”
She’s struggling painfully to talk and breathe at the same time, but, even so, she reminds the skinny man with the gun how much he loves these children of theirs.
But that, he explains to her—with genuine, profoundly felt sadness evident in his voice—is precisely why he must do what he must do.
Because he loves all three of them more than life itself.
~ 41 ~
Listening to Stacy beg for her life is one of the hardest things Roger’s ever had to endure. Right up there with the death of his sister.
The look of absolute astonishment on her face—nicely tanned from the Florida sun, her nose a little burned—when he actually puts the pistol to her head, well, that, too, is terribly hard to take.
Absolute astonishment turning to pure terror, and who can blame her?
No matter what he says to Stacy, no matter how much effort he invests in trying to explain himself, it’s clear she just doesn’t get it.
She keeps telling him that his thinking is distorted, completely wrongheaded, just plain crazy. And keeps pleading pleading pleading until both of them are worn down by her appeals, and he has to ask her, as graciously as he can, to please, please shut the fuck up.
~ 42 ~
As he presses the muzzle of the Glock against the left side of her head, where she can feel a vein pulsing feverishly, she allows herself to believe that her beloved children will be spared. Because she just doesn’t have it in her to believe otherwise—that this man she no longer recognizes will do exactly what he says he’s going to do.
Not to her children.
And not to her.
This man she’s loved every day of her life for the almost-nine years of their marriage.
Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.
She has the feeling she’s talking out loud but she’s not sure; her head is filled with ugly static and it’s so hard to think.
~ 43 ~
In the smallest of voices, Stacy asks him now if she can please go to the bathroom; like a child, she simply can’t hold it in any longer. He is patient with her and says, “Of course,” then walks with her—the Glock still held to the side of her head—the few yards to the bathroom. She raises the bathrobe slightly, and he stands there with the pistol pointed straight at her, gazing at her lovingly for a moment, then turning away. Because even though the two of them have had, in his estimation—and hers, too, he thinks—a pretty wonderful marriage, it was never the sort where either of them would feel comfortable watching the other one pee.
And he knows, even as he turns away from her, affording her a momentary opportunity to grab the gun, that she will never do it, never reach for it. Because her thinking is warped by terror and confusion, and she’s just not capable of altering his plans.
~ 44 ~
“Remember our wedding?” she asks him. Anything to remind him of the best parts of their life together, their history. Anything to persuade him to let go of the gun he’s raised to her temple, to let go of the very idea of the gun.
“Nine years ago,” he says.
“Nine years ago next month,” she corrects him, and thinks vaguely about the trip to Paris and Vienna and Berlin they’d once—before things went south—planned to take in celebration of their anniversary.
“Lots of great food,” he says. And, to her surprise, enumerates, like a well-schooled waiter, the filet mignon, the truffled halibut, the Seafood Newburg filled with lobster, shrimp, and scallops . . . For their vegan pals, let’s see, there was chickpea polenta cake with roasted vegetables.
But the desserts were the best, she reminds him, and together they’re able to conjure up the peanut butter ice cream with Concord grape sorbet and caramel popcorn crunch, then the lemon ice cream with raspberries and almond nougatine.
“This is almost making me hungry,” he says, smiling slightly.
“Me too,” she lies—lying through her teeth, really—and suggests he go out and get some dessert for them right now; you know, a quick trip to Baskin-Robbins, or maybe Carvel?
“I’m sorry,” he tells her, and he really does sound regretful. “I wish I could, but I’m sorry, Stace, no can do.”
“Are you sure?”
“I said, no can do. Case closed, babe.”
~ 45 ~
She finds herself wishing she believed in God, or Jesus Christ, or Buddha or Allah or Krishna or Vishnu or Shiva— any one of them will do, any deity at all who will rescue her and her children.
When the doorbell rings, it isn’t God, of course, but only Mrs. Feinsilver. The old lady rings the bell two, three, and four times, yelling out their names until finally Stacy says to the man holding the gun, “She’s going to wake up the kids. We’ve got to answer the door.”
He rests the barrel of the gun against the base of her spine and instructs her to get up and walk toward the front door. He’s right behind her, and gives her a hand as she rises from the bedroom floor. She walks obediently, on wobbly legs, to the door, and, with his permission, opens it.
Help me! she mouths, but Mrs. Feinsilver isn’t paying attention.
“Oh, thank God, I was worried you weren’t home,” the old lady says. She’s here to return the two bucks she owes them. Stacy reaches for the dollar bills, and thanks her, her hand trembling so violently that Mrs. Feinsilver asks if she’s all right.
Stacy opens her mouth to answer, struggling to seize upon just the right words, just the right gesture, anything at all that will arouse Mrs. Feinsilver’s suspicions but not the gunman’s fury.
HELP me! she tries again, but clearly Mrs. Feinsilver is no lip-reader. The old lady may even be a little out of it, Stacy thinks, but she tries once more, opening her mouth wide, shaping the two simple words more deliberately this time. HELP ME! And hears herself say, “Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee?”
“What the fuck?” the gunman murmurs. The barrel of the gun is being pressed painfully into Stacy’s lower back now as he says, “Actually, Mrs. Feinsilver . . . we were just getting ready for bed. Maybe another time, okay?”
“One of the washing machines swallowed my money but wouldn’t start,” Mrs. Feinsilver complai
ns. “Don’t you hate it when that happens?”
No one responds.
The sound of Stacy’s pulse ticking is deafening, but why is it that no one else can hear it? She considers grabbing Mrs. Feinsilver by the arm and yanking her farther into the apartment, but then what? What is she thinking? That this shrimpy little octogenarian with her too-short housecoat and those pale, vein-laced legs, is going to knock the gun from the madman’s hand and save the day?
She shoots Mrs. Feinsilver what she hopes is a look fraught with sheer desperation, a look that shrieks 911! Mrs. F., however, gives no sign of having received her message, and is already halfway out the door.
“Okay, back to the bedroom, you,” the man with the gun orders Stacy; he’s still behind her and puts one hand at her waist to turn her around, then steers her, with a surprising gentleness, in the right direction. “A cup of coffee? Really?” he says, and it almost sounds as if he’s laughing.
Olivia and Will are asleep in their beds no more than twelve feet from the living room. Stacy wants, more than she’s ever wanted anything, to gather each of them to her and then take flight. Right out the eighth-floor window, the three of them flying, on their own steam, through the night sky and all the way home.
But there’s a loaded pistol nudging the small of her back, and the only place she’s going is where that pistol leads her.
~ 46 ~
“Please, no!” Stacy is telling him.
As she speaks, her breath so close to his face, he can actually smell what can only be described as the scent of fear; he would never have known that there is such a thing, but, he’s discovered, there really is.
“Dontdothis to us! Pleasedontdothistoyourself.”
What Stacy fails to comprehend is that he doesn’t have a choice. He has been over this numerous times with her tonight, but, smart as she is—and don’t forget she spent four years at Harvard—she just doesn’t get it.
He’s been patient with her, this woman he loves more than anything on earth.
But his patience is running out; there’s just been too much talking back and forth. He needs to get down to the terrible business at hand, though, God knows, he wishes he didn’t have to.
~ 47 ~
First the doorbell, now Stacy’s phone, which is playing her new ringtone, acquired just a few days ago—Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” From her seat on the bed, she can see the phone there on the night table, and that she has a call from her sister, probably just something about double-checking their flight number or arrival time tomorrow.
Stacy asks if she can take this call, please, but the answer, unsurprisingly, is Sorry, babe, I can’t let you do that.
She asks the gods to bestow upon Lauren the miracle of clairvoyance, for the power to see, from a distance of thirteen hundred miles, what must be fixed here.
“Look, why don’t you sit down?” she suggests to the armed and dangerous guy standing over her, hoping he’ll relax, let go of his gun, and, perhaps, his devastating lunacy.
The Glock still in hand, he pushes a brocade armchair toward her, and settles himself in it, close to the side of the bed where he’d instructed her to sit.
Not for a second in the fifteen minutes or so since the gun has been in his hand has it been pointed in any direction but hers.
Not for a second has he given her an opportunity to make a run for it, to make a run for their sleeping children, who are still at the other end of the apartment, in the den. She’s convinced herself that if it comes to pass (and she’s praying now to anyone who’s listening that it won’t) that she doesn’t survive this, Will and Olivia will thrive in Brooklyn Heights with Jefrie—their legal guardian as designated in her will—and Jefrie’s partner, Honey. A decision that was made shortly after Clare’s death, and made despite what Stacy knows will be Lauren’s hurt feelings over not having been chosen to take Clare’s place as guardian. The simple truth is that Jefrie, her best friend, is someone with whom she’s always felt more of a kinship than with her own sister; and, too, no way would Stacy consent to have her children raised in the suburbs! No way! And Roger finally, after all their years together, had come to accept this . . . Years from now, Stacy imagines—because she cannot and will not permit herself to believe that the lunatic in the room with her will actually take her children’s lives—Will and Olivia will attend a good public high school somewhere in the city with a couple of thousand other students and will do just fine, both of them, she believes, unusually bright kids who will make their way in the world with enthusiasm and confidence and discernment . . . But what about her cats, she spends just an instant or two thinking. What will happen to Keats and Shelley back in New York? They’re senior citizens, and they will be undone, in their way, if she disappears from their lives. They may very well stop eating, and even drinking, and spend all their time circling the apartment in bewilderment, looking everywhere for her.
If Will and Olivia end up with Jefrie and Honey, and if they beg hard enough, maybe—even though Honey is slightly allergic—maybe they’ll be allowed to take Keats and Shelley with them to the townhouse in Brooklyn Heights.
To their new lives.
But it’s impossible not to harbor hopes for an outcome even more miraculous than that. And so she wonders now who will rescue not just her children, but all three of them.
Who will throw them a lifeline? Jefrie? Marshall? Her sister? Her ninety-two-year-old grandmother? Rocco? Professor Dave? Every one of them safely up north in the New York metro area, thirteen hundred miles from her mother-in-law’s condo just north of Miami Beach.
Her pulse has gone haywire, but she will keep her wits about her and will not—WILL NOT—allow herself to surrender to this stranger who is going on and on and on about his in-fucking-surmountable problems, not a one of them that can be remedied, he keeps telling her, his voice grim grim grim.
Not one?
“That’s right, not one,” he says. He sounds very certain of this, very sure of himself.
When she tells him how much she loves their children, he reminds her that he loves them, too.
They’re the most precious things in the universe to him, he says mournfully. And he just can’t allow them to starve.
He is weeping now, standing over her, barefoot, in his sweatpants and Harvard B School T-shirt, with the Glock pointed straight at her—though the barrel is not, for the moment, touching her, and that, at least, is a relief.
For the moment, anyway.
The next moment may hold something entirely different.
Sure enough, after he switches the Glock from one visibly sweaty hand to the other, he leans over across the bed and places the barrel slightly above the slender tip of her left eyebrow, a brow so dark it is very nearly black.
She is paralyzed; she can’t even move her lips to speak, to say the simple word Don’t. She’s scared stiff, she thinks, able to grasp that these are words she has never really understood before.
Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasedontdothis. Imbeggingyou.
Beggingyoupleasedont, she wants to say but can’t. It’s as if she’s suffering from locked-in syndrome, she understands— she can think but she can’t move a muscle. Not even if it means saving herself so that she can save her children.
“You love me with a full heart, don’t you?” he says.
A full 100 percent, she thinks she hears herself whisper, and it hits her again that this man who loves her, who loves their children, won’t actually take their lives. It simply isn’t possible.
But now she hears him say, “Listen, you get that it’s just that everything’s spun out of control, right? You get that I love you, Stace, and wish to God there were another way out, but I swear to you there isn’t. There just . . . isn’t.”
Her heart has shattered, like fragile bone, into a thousand weightless slivers; this is the husband she’d loved so ardently, and now she sees that he means every word.
In the few moments that are left to her on this earth, just before he slips a
small throw pillow between her head and his gun, she is flooded with a terrible, sorrowful disappointment— there are no opportunities left for salvation. Not even one.
She longs for her parents, and wishes, without hope, that they were here to save her.
There is still time to absorb one last thing, and that is the crushing, unendurable thought that she will never again see her children, never again run her fingertips along the satiny skin of their darling, child-sized hands, their bumpy little wrists and knees . . .
Most excruciatingly, she will not be there to comfort them at the moment of their own deaths tonight.
She cannot bear it.
~ 48 ~
There are things he will remember from this night, things he would prefer to forget.
Watching the hope drain from Stacy’s eyes in the moment just before he set the pillow against her head to soften the sound of the gunshots.
The blood spatter that sprayed the bedroom ceiling.
The blood-soaked linens he left Stacy lying in.
After she died, he put his lips to the outline of the purple heart tattooed beneath her wrist.
Now that Stacy is gone, he discovers—greatly relieved— that it simply isn’t possible for him to kill his children, as he planned to. Seeing Will’s head resting on that red-and-yellow Winnie the Pooh pillowcase, Olivia’s against a lavender, star-sprinkled Tinkerbell, he just can’t. Cannot take the lives of his beloved children. When push comes to shove, he’s not up to the task. Not able to rise to the occasion.
So be it, as his mother likes to say.
Tiptoeing in his bare feet away from his sleeping children, he realizes, as well, mostly with embarrassment but also with a bit of relief, that he is not yet ready to die. At least not by a gunshot to the head. He thought he was ready, but then that moment passed, and it turned out he was mistaken.