by Blake Crouch
I peered down through the glassless windows, saw the Kites rounding the stern. In five seconds they’d be climbing the stairs.
Rufus dropped bullets on the deck.
I rushed toward the front of the lounge.
The Kites’ footfalls on the steps now.
As I reached to open the door it swung back.
Luther faced me, smiling and unscathed, his Windex breath warm on my nose.
"You’re a lousy shot, Andrew," he said as his mother entered wheezing through the back of the lounge.
I tried to punch him in the throat.
He caught my fist and I was tumbling down the steps.
I lay dazed on the concrete deck, my head throbbing, left arm sprained or broken.
The Kites came down the stairs.
Luther grabbed me under my armpits, dragged me to my feet.
They surrounded me at the starboard bow, backed me up against the railing.
The wind cold and blasting.
Everyone squinting in the sunlight.
Maxine aiming the shotgun at my stomach.
Rufus at her side, one arm around her shoulder, the other holding his jaw.
Their son stepped toward me.
"What’d you think, Andrew? No hard feelings? We all just go our separate ways?"
"Wasn’t necessary to kill everyone on—"
"Couldn’t have you borrowing someone’s cell phone, having the police waiting for us at the dock. You killed these people, Andrew. No one would’ve died if you’d let us go. Now we’ve got a little swim ahead of us, so…"
I noticed Orson’s bowie knife in his left hand, thinking, So that’s how I end.
"What about Violet?"
"She’s amazing," he said. "I look at her and think maybe she’ll make me different."
It happened so fast.
Engine revving.
Screech of tires.
Heads turning.
Luther and I dove out of the way as the Chevy Blazer clipped Rufus and Maxine and slammed them into the railing, Violet gunning the engine, the tires pressing the crushing weight of the Blazer directly into Sweet-Sweet and Beautiful.
She shifted the vehicle into park, pinning the Kites solidly against the railing.
Stepping out, she lifted the shotgun from the deck.
Luther back on his feet.
Running.
She shouldered the twelve gauge.
He leapt over the portside railing as the shotgun bucked and boomed.
We dashed over.
Violet pumped the shotgun, trained it on the water.
"Where is he?" she asked.
"I don’t see him."
The ferry was still drifting, the spot where he’d gone in falling farther and farther behind.
We ran back to the stern, leaned over the railing.
"You hit him, right?" I said, scanning the churned water in the ferry’s wake.
"I’m not sure."
The light gleaming off the chop made it difficult to see but we stood watching, the water reflective and glimmering, a smashed liquid mirror catching all the colors of sunrise.
"Andrew," she said finally.
"What, you see him?"
"I hear sirens."
69
I hurt everywhere as I followed Violet to the bow, the Kinnakeet foundering seventy-five yards off the soundside shore of Hatteras, bottomed out on a sandbar.
The sky filled fast with daylight, the sun halfrisen from the sea.
Sirens wailing in the distance.
We approached the Blazer.
Violet stopped at the bumper, Rufus pinned at the waist, head resting on the hood, Maxine glassyeyed and fading, struggling through sodden inhalations.
I reached into the Blazer and killed the ignition.
Violet let the steaming barrel of the twelve gauge graze Rufus’s mouth.
Her eyes were glacial.
"I’m not going to ask if you know what you took from me."
Her finger fidgeted with the trigger.
"All I want to do is cause you pain."
"Do it," he croaked.
The shotgun clicked.
Violet looked down at her trigger finger, incredulous, as though the digit had acted apart from her will.
"You took everything from me."
She pressed the barrel into his face, pointed across the deck—a floating battlefield.
We could see three dead from where we stood, the crewman, the captain, and the passenger Rufus had executed.
"Why did you—"
"Because we could," Maxine hissed, unable to produce anything louder than a whisper. She expelled a long breath, eyes enameling with death.
Her chin fell forward onto the grille.
Eyes rolling back in her head.
"Beautiful," Rufus rasped, trying to turn his head. "Beautiful!"
I told him she was gone.
"Don’t you say that to me. You don’t…"
The old man closed his eyes and whimpered. His left hand was free. He reached over, felt his wife’s paling face, stroked her disheveled white mane.
"My joy," he murmured, eyes redrimmed and leaking, voice strained, deflating with suffocation.
His last breath came like a sad sigh.
A half mile up the sound, blue lights flickered near the docks.
Violet looked so tired, so much older than a week ago, her clothes a shamble of ripped and soiled fabric.
"Violet." The detective gazed up at me, pushed her dirty yellow hair from her green eyes, the sunrise lending false warmth to her pretty broken face. "I have to go."
She dropped the shotgun, sat down on the deck, buried her head in her arms.
"You gonna be all right?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"They’ll take care of you."
"Just wait a second."
"I can’t."
Leaning down, I kissed her forehead.
"Take care of your baby."
And I headed for the starboard railing. It was a four foot drop to the water. I straddled it, glanced back at Violet—the tiny blond sitting at the bow, staring off toward the distant commotion on the docks, an eerie silence settling over the ferry, all quiet save the Stars and Stripes flapping from the mast.
I looked down into the dark water.
I jumped in.
The pain was exquisite.
I came up gasping, freezing saltwater stinging my burns.
Cormorants had congregated on a nearby sandbar, squawking, divebombing fish in the shallows. My howls scattered them into the waking sky.
The pain mellowed as I swam shoreward, my left arm aching with every stroke.
The south end of Hatteras lay before me, uninhabited, all marsh and beaches.
Halfway to shore I crossed a shoal, rose up shivering out of the water, standing kneedeep in the cold sea.
Something splashed behind me.
I turned, faced the Kinnakeet.
Violet resurfaced, legs thrashing, arms flailing, moving toward me with a gawky stroke that somehow kept her afloat.
At last she climbed up onto the shoal with me.
"What are you doing?" I asked through chattering teeth.
She was shivering so hard it took her a moment to find the words.
"They killed my husband."
She was wet and she was crying.
Her breath smoking in the cold.
"What are you talking—"
"I saw him, Andrew! Max was hanging in this terrible room!"
She looked into my eyes with something akin to desperation, as though she were praying I would tell her a beautiful lie.
I wrapped my arms around her, our bodies trembling in the bitter dawn.
"I have nothing to go back to," she said.
"You have family and friends and—"
"None of that works without him."
I cupped her face in my hands.
"Tell me what you want to do, Violet."
"I don’t know but everythin
g’s changed. I can’t go home."
She pulled away and glided off the shoal, beginning the last forty yards to Hatteras.
I followed her.
The sun lifting free of the sea, in full radiant bloom.
My head grew light.
My limbs cumbersome.
The world dim.
I slipped under, fought my way back to the surface, thinking, Next time just stay down.
Violet had reached the shore where she stood crying in the beach grass.
It finally registered.
She’d been made a widow, witnessed things that, outside of war, few people ever see.
Monsters had set her adrift in a lonely desert.
But I’d been there.
And I’d found a way out.
I could show her.
E P I L O G U E
I would like to unlock the door,
turn the rusty key
and hold each fallen one in my arms
but I cannot, I cannot.
I can only sit here on earth
at my place at the table.
—Anne Sexton, "Locked Doors"
N i n e M o n t h s L a t e r
VIOLET awoke.
She rubbed her eyes.
It was morning.
Max was cooing.
At the kitchen table in a threadbare flannel robe, Andrew sat hunched over a pile of pages, pencil in hand, scribbling corrections on his manuscript. He’d built a small fire in the hearth that had yet to drive the nightcold from her corner of the cabin.
The place smelled of strong coffee.
"Morning," she said.
Andrew looked up through a tangle of shaggy hair.
"Morning."
She crawled to the end of the bed, reached down into the crib, and picked up her son. As she lifted her undershirt, his little wet lips opened and glommed onto her brown nipple. Leaning back against the smooth timbers, she watched him nurse.
The infant gazing at its mother through shiny orbs.
Andrew got up from the table, started toward her.
"What’s wrong?" he asked.
Violet shook her head.
"It’s all right. These are good tears."
The pond was dark as black tea, steeped in tree roots, clear to the bottom, and rimmed by black spruce—a glade of water in the forest. Even in mid-August the pool carried a cold bite except at noon, in the middle, where sunlight reached all the way to the soft and silty floor. There, the sunbeams made a shaft of luminous green, warm as bathwater.
There, Andrew surfaced. He treaded naked, basking in the direct Yukon sun, contemplating how his autobiography should end, wondering if perhaps it should conclude here, in this pond in this valley at the foot of the mountains.
Everything had been chronicled: the desert, Orson, the Outer Banks, the Kites, the Kinnakeet. All that remained was to bow and step behind the curtain.
Andrew waded the last few feet to shore and climbed up onto the bank. He pulled his hair into a ponytail, wrapped himself in a towel, and flopped down on a sunwarmed blanket. Violet handed him his pair of sunglasses and he slid them on and lay flat on his back and closed his eyes to the sun.
"How was it?" she asked.
"Amazing."
"Think I’ll take a dip." Violet set her son on Andrew’s chest. "Don’t look at my pooch, Andy," she warned though her belly had nearly contracted back to its pre-baby girth. Violet had given birth to Max just three weeks ago after a long labor at Whitehorse General Hospital. Andrew had not left her side.
Now he stared at the bundled and sleeping infant while Violet stripped.
"All right, I’m going in," she said.
"It’s warm out in the middle."
"No peeking."
She stepped down from the mossy bank and eased into the water, her short hair kindling in the sunlight—champagnecolored and traced with strawberry.
Max woke, emitted a tender microscopic cry.
Andrew shushed him.
The baby yawned, its eyes flittering open, taking in the familiar bearded face.
"God it feels so good in here!" Violet yelled, laughing from the middle of the pool.
Andrew thought of the ending to his book:
Vi’s panic attacks are fewer and farther between, though I occasionally wake up in the night, hear her crying into her pillow. Sometimes she calls for me to come down from the loft and sit with her. Sometimes she wants to cry it out alone. We rarely speak of the Outer Banks. We have no future plans. She needs very much to live in the present. As do I.
What a strange and beautiful summer with Vi in these woods.
I haven’t known peace like this before.
The sky had begun to pale toward evening when they started back for the cabin—a quarter mile hike through the woods on a moose run.
Andrew stayed out to split firewood.
Violet went indoors.
She laid her son down in the crib and sat at the kitchen table with a pen and paper.
Not knowing what to say, she spent most of her words describing Max.
She imagined Ebert and Evelyn in the North Carolina countryside, reading this letter about their grandson. It would be dusk and they’d sit out on the big wraparound porch of their white farmhouse, the pleasant stench of manure present in the mist.
She could smell her father’s pipe, see the long view from the porch—rolling pasture, barns, the soft bluegreen horizon of lush deciduous trees that would not survive one Yukon winter. For a moment, Violet felt as homesick for those eastern woods as she did for her parents.
I miss your trees, she wrote.
Andrew made dinner while she rocked Max to sleep, the cabin filling with the incense of tomatoes and garlic and boiling pasta.
They dined on the back porch, their sunburned faces lit by a solitary candle, its flame frozen on this windless night.
Though it was after ten light dawdled in the sky.
This far north in late summer, true darkness doesn’t come until after midnight.
There had been a passing shower some time ago and the smell of the wet spruce was sharp and clean. Firs crowded the porch, their lowest branches draping within reach.
Andrew set down his fork and took a sip of the excellent Chilean wine.
"I finished the epilogue while you were in the shower."
Violet stared at her plate.
"Vi?"
When she finally looked at him across the rickety card table, he noticed her hands were shaking.
Andrew had converted the loft into a bedroom, managing to fit a mattress where his writing desk had been.
It was very late and dark and quiet.
Moonlight came through the windows and bleached the floorboards.
Violet had calmed down.
They lay awake, Max between them, the infant snoring delicately.
"Is it hard for you?" Violet whispered.
"What?"
"You know. Lying here with me…doing nothing."
Andrew smiled.
"Go to sleep."
He almost said go to sleep angel.
Her head rested in the crook of his arm.
She rubbed her cheek against his.
"What are you doing?"
"Max never had a beard. I like yours. I like how it smells."
"You gonna keep me up all night?"
"I just might."