“Stop talking now, Tommy.”
“Have you seen him fight? He looks like a truck with wings. Honestly, I could not believe how good he was. It was like—”
“Stop talking, stop talking, stop talking,” I say, intending a snarl or something similarly fierce and suddenly finding nothing but an exhausted ache. There might even be tears on my face—a fact that Tommy notices enough to stop his silly gushing.
“He’s okay, right? He said it would be fine.”
“And you believed him?” I ask, but really all I’m thinking is that I believed him. I thought that gotta go was for real. I threw away months of love and living and being with him over two flimsy words—words that now ring out hollowly in my head. “You just believed him? You believed he would be okay?”
“Well, yeah—he must be the toughest guy I ever met.”
“You just said you thought he might have been killed, Tommy.”
“He probably hasn’t been. I mean, he must be okay, right?” he asks, and I think it’s the right that really does me in. Even he can’t make it sound plausible. It sounds as if his vocal cords just squeezed it to death.
I think something is squeezing me to death.
“I haven’t heard from him in two weeks. I thought he was just busy. I thought he might have been bored of me. I thought it was probably lies. Tommy, I thought it was lies. What is wrong with you? Why are you like this? Is it not enough that our lives were the way they were without you doing this to us—no, not to us, to me, goddamn it, to me? Don’t I deserve some peace?” I ask, even though it feels selfish to do it.
Still, it feels so selfish.
Just to want one tiny thing.
One little bit of joy for myself.
“I’m sorry, Bea, I thought—”
“I don’t care what you thought. You’ve fucked everything up,” I tell him as I stand on wobbling legs to leave. I need to be out of here, before I do something I regret, like say I never want to see him again or get hold of that shirt of his or even worse, admit what the real problem is.
The real thing that comes out of me anyway as I walk out the door. It bursts right up from my gut, half choked with tears and tearing me apart to say it. God, it makes me sob to say it. “I’ve fucked everything up,” I say, voice so strained it no longer sounds like my own.
I know it doesn’t, because he calls after me.
“Bea, come back. Bea, I’m sorry!” he hollers.
But I keep going.
—
I tell myself that I will be perfectly businesslike about this. I will simply go to his home and give him the money and then take my polite leave. After all, he may honestly have no feelings for me. Just because he took on my brother’s debt and probably almost got himself killed doesn’t mean he really does love me. That he was just trying to spare me this whole mess. That it hurt him terribly to do it.
Only a fool who believes in fairy stories would think that was true. Some girl called Saffron with corn-colored hair, forever in a flowered dress on the front of a book—she can let those ideas sink in. She can let her heart pound as she walks up the steps to his home, sure and safe in the happy ending that awaits her. Her life has been so empty of disappointment that the ending could never be anything else.
Whereas my life is like an anchor around my throat. For a second I think I’m swimming, only to sink again. I am sure when I get to his door I will sink again.
That might even be why I do what I do. Most normal people would probably wait when they hear frightening things going on inside. Saffron would no doubt call the police and wait calmly for them to show up and save the day. Maybe she would even be the one who needed the saving, at the hands of a hero who only sounds like he’s being beaten to death with hammers. He only sounds like it, in her book. But in my book there is only me and my will as strong as the depths of the sea and the second I hear him, I don’t think.
I don’t wait for someone else to save the day.
I burst in the way he burst in for me, barely stopping for things like doors and guns. They have guns, but I hardly care. The only thing I see is him and blood and the sudden stark possibility of always being without him. Not just separated from him by a few callous-seeming words, but going on in a world where he no longer exists. No chance of ever seeing him again. No hope of hearing his voice one day sometime far in the future, when I am old and married to someone else and he just thought he’d stop by.
And that thought is just unbearable to me—so much so that I realize in a great rush what I should have seen much sooner. I do believe in the fairy story and the sunsets still. I believe so much that I’d rather take a bullet than stop. They could kill me now and I would be okay, because at least I would go with my dreams of a better life completely and perfectly intact.
They are just waiting for me, forever, right over that hill.
I might even make it to them. They turn but they don’t gun me down. They just tell me to get lost, like I’m some kid getting in the way of adult business. And I guess in some ways, I am. I still look silly for this sort of stuff. I have on corduroys, and my face is soft and eminently beatable. I say the wrong things and do the wrong things, and I can feel myself shaking.
But when I speak, my voice is steel.
It’s the voice of the girl hiding inside me—the one who mentally answered back to every cruel thing he said and refused each order he made and always told him just what she thought of him. The one who has been silently getting bigger and stronger inside me until right now, right at this moment when I need it the most. I thought that girl was a ghost, but she isn’t. She steps to the man standing apart from the others, and tells him Stop.
Even though said man is just about as scary as Satan himself.
This is Mr. Smith, I think, even though he looks nothing like the way I imagined he would. Somewhere in my mind I was still picturing the Mob, but there is nothing that screams organized crime about him. Instead, he seems like the CEO of a really important Swedish bank, right down to the impeccable suit and the still way he stands and his neat little glasses on his strange, waxy face.
And then he speaks, and it seems I’m right somehow about that.
He has a faint accent, as tidy as the rest of him.
As cold as that basement on some November night.
“Well, what have we here?” he asks, and everything inside me comes to a screeching halt. He just seems so offhand about it. So kind, if kindness was a thing that often gave people nightmares. It’s giving me nightmares now, and I’m not even asleep.
So it seems amazing to me that my voice is still steady when I speak.
“Let him go,” I say, and in return I get an eyebrow raise.
I hope the eyebrow raise means something good.
“Just like that? Just let him go, despite the interest he still owes? That hardly seems a savvy business move—and you must know that first and foremost, I am a businessman. If someone agrees to a deal with me, it is only correct that they follow it through.”
“The deal wasn’t his to make. It was mine,” I say, and get a shout from Serge for my troubles. One of them has to hit him with the butt of his gun, almost rendering him unconscious, but thank God, not quite. If he had gone down, I might have, too.
And I have to stay standing for this.
The shock wave of it needs me to brace.
“I see. Then you are the sister. The one he rushed to protect—do you know he allowed an extra ten thousand to be put onto his debt for that little altercation with my associates? Strange what people will do when they care,” Mr. Smith says, while I do everything I can to not show the horror all over my face. It cost him ten thousand dollars to save me from those thugs. It cost him an extra God knows how long of fighting for this cruel corpse of a man, and yet he never said a word about it.
My kind, good man, I think.
And then I find the strength to plow on.
“So you know he does. You know he would risk his life for me.”
I do and I just shoot on through.
“And you understand that I would risk my life for his?”
“Even stranger to me, but yes, I can imagine that is true,” he says, and then, oh, then, I have him, please let me say I have him. Let what he said be true. Just this once let it be true.
“Then you’ll take my money and go.”
“What on earth would make you think so?”
“Because you just said you were a businessman. And if you threaten him again, if you try to force him to carry on or hurt him or do anything to him, I’ll stand in your way. You can shoot him for refusing to do whatever it is you want him to, but you’ll have to go through me,” I say, rushing through each word because I know what’s going to happen next.
Serge is dazed and beaten and probably beaten to death, but I see the truth of what he feels as clear as if he had said it. I can read it in their faces, never mind his. He loves me and will never accept me standing in the way.
A thing I think this creepy man understands all too well. “That hardly seems like an issue,” he says, but I see his eyes almost slide over to Serge the second he roars a protest. “Don’t you fucking dare. Don’t you listen to her. Don’t do this, Bea, just fucking go, just go,” he shouts. But all it does is prove my point.
“It will be, if you kill me. Most likely he’ll try to kill you, in return.”
“But naturally he will fail. We could gun him down where he kneels right now—a thing he seems singularly unable to accept,” he says, and my mind goes to what must have happened here. Him refusing to back down. Them refusing to back down.
Dear God, what would have happened if I’d arrived five minutes later?
I can hardly stand to imagine—and thank the Lord, I don’t have to.
Now I get to say this, over the sound of Serge struggling.
“Exactly. He will die, and never be able to make another penny for you. Not to mention the bodies you’ll then have to deal with, and the people who know exactly where I am right now. All such a ton of trouble for something that will end with you still short on what you’re owed. Whereas if you just take what I have…well, I hope you can do the math,” I say, breathless with my own daring and half sure it will never work.
He even lets me think so, for a moment.
“You are a clever girl, Beatrix. I enjoyed the effort you took there to cover all of your bases quite a bit. But tell me, what is to stop me from simply taking your money and forcing you both to do whatever I please anyway?” he says.
After which, all I can do is play my final card.
“The rules. You made a deal with my brother, and now I’m here to pay the price. So shake my hand and let us be,” I tell him.
And then I wait.
I wait to live.
I wait to die.
Really, it’s not any different from all the other days of my life. The only difference here is that right when I get to the top of that hill with the sunset gleaming and glorious in the distance—I keep going. He takes my hand and shakes it, and says I can see now why he likes you as he strolls out the door with my bag of money. And then the door shuts behind me like someone breathing out, and all there is ahead are endless roads.
Endless roads forever, right into the fading light of the sun.
—
Bullet wounds are not the way people act like they are in movies. For a start, you absolutely cannot apply a manly shoulder bandage to them. I think manly shoulder bandages might be impossible. They probably only get applied by makeup departments to macho actors. Doing them in real life is complicated and bloody—though that might be more to do with the guy I’m trying to apply them to.
He keeps bellowing in agony and moaning that I should not have to deal with this.
Like I didn’t cause it. Like I could just leave him bleeding on his living room floor.
Honestly, I think he might be an idiot. In fact, I know he is, because this is what he says to me first, “You came here to do this even after all that bullshit I said to you on the phone?”
He even sounds sick with regret about it, and tries to explain as I search the gory furrow in his flesh for fucking shrapnel. Apparently, letting me know that he didn’t mean a word of it is the number-one priority, ahead of his copiously bleeding shoulder wound. Well, that and telling me off for giving them fifty grand. “I had it covered,” he says, and I honestly have no idea what to say to that.
I want to laugh.
But I cry instead.
It just comes on me in a sudden wave, as though I built a wall of indifference and amusement and not really caring inside myself, and one final absurd word from him knocks it all down. I could take Mr. Smith and seeing him on the floor and the guns and the blood. My hands are tacky with it; his bathroom sink is full of it. But I can take it. I am steel before it all.
And then he tells me he had it covered, and I crumble.
I do it in a way I never have before. Not even down there in the dark or on the day of his funeral. This is some other thing, some kind of exorcism thing, each sob so brutal it sort of sounds as though someone reached down through my body and wrenched it right out of me. It’s so awful I want to put my hands over my face to hide it, and almost do despite the blood. He has to speak really loudly just to make himself heard, but even after he has, I can’t answer.
I can’t tell him that this isn’t pain.
Saying that it is relief seems ridiculous. No one sounds like this when they are relieved. They laugh and skip away into their sunny future. They don’t break someone’s heart with their racking sobs. “You’re killing me,” he says, yet somehow I keep going. I only just manage to shut it off when he pulls me into his arms, though even that is a close thing. I feel his big chest against my cheek and his sheltering arm around my body, and for a second it gets worse.
I think of how close I came to never feeling this again.
I think about him dying; I think about how I believed his goodbye.
I think about him making it up just for me.
And then it hangs on for a little while longer. In fact, it only really dies when I realize what he’s saying. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” he says, after which I have to do something other than cry. He needs me to be stronger than this. I have to make him understand.
“You have to stop being sorry.”
“I know what I said was cru—” he starts, that beautiful face of his all broken up with pain at the thought of the small thing he did just to keep me safe. He thinks it was cruel of him, to keep me away from all of this mess.
He thinks he did a bad thing.
How can I start to tell him otherwise?
“You have to stop being sorry for you. Stop thinking everything you do is wrong or dangerous and that I shouldn’t have to deal. Stop thinking you’re a bad person, stop believing that you’re not worthy, stop imagining that you have to do it all on your own. Thinking that almost got you killed,” I try, but even that doesn’t seem like enough.
I know it isn’t, because then he tells me this:
“Trying to get out of fighting almost got me killed, Bea. It could have gotten you killed, too—that’s why I tried to keep you away from it. I should have realized it would get worse the second I asked for an out. I should have seen that it was selfish to want that legitimate life. I should have known—”
And I just have to cut him off. Not just because it cuts my heart in two to hear him say it, but because as he does, he touches me. He can’t seem to stop. He touches my hair and my cheek and my lips like all of them are a wonder to behold—or else something he’s gone without for far too long. So I speak, before all of it bursts my insides.
“The only thing you should have known is that I had the money to pay that debt—my brother’s debt, not yours—and that you should have let me
. It was bad enough that you wouldn’t when you told me the debt was yours but knowing that it isn’t makes this worse, Serge. I don’t need all that money for college. I still have enough to carry on there just fine. What I don’t have is enough to carry on if they murder you. Do you understand what would happen to me if they murdered you?”
“You would go on with your life. You went on when worse happened,” he says, but he has to know that’s not true. After all, I seem to be touching his face the same way he’s touching mine. I seem to be holding on to him the same way he’s holding on to me.
Can’t he see that?
Can’t he hear it in my voice?
“There is nothing worse than that. There would be nothing worse than knowing you died because of a debt I could have paid or a job you wanted to stop so you could have a legitimate life. Your life is legitimate now. You know that, right? Please tell me you do.”
“People just pointed guns at you because of my legitimate life.”
“People would have probably pointed guns at me anyway.”
“Not if I’d just kept away from you. Just taken the debt then stayed away, but Christ, nothing in my life has ever been as hard as that. Every time I heard you were in trouble or knew where your brother was, I just had to help out, and then every conversation only made it harder. That’s why I had to do what I did—they threatened you. The only way was to be so cruel that you would never want to see me again anyway,” he says, and for a second my brain stays on the exact same track it was before. I think of reassuring him again, right before every thought I have jumps to a different track altogether.
Not just a different track.
A different country.
A different planet.
A whole new contraption designed by aliens that runs on rails made of spaghetti and has carriages you can see straight through.
Did he just say…?
“When did you start paying this off?” I ask, because seriously I think that’s what he just said. He said knew where your brother was, even though that seems way, way before the point I’d assumed he’d taken this on. So far beyond it, in fact, that my voice sounds funny when I speak. I’m practically poised on the edge of my seat, waiting for him to laugh or shrug it off or something.
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