“I loved you,” he says. His voice breaks.
He keeps the gun trained on her. My heart races and I close my eyes. My options are the same as they were thirty seconds ago. They’re all bad. All this power that Roger said I’d have, what a lie it was.
“Carrig, stop, please,” I beg. “You don’t understand.”
“Oh I don’t understand?” he says. “I’m the one who lives in the real world. Always did. But this is no surprise, you piece of shit. Let me ask you, Basement Boy. You ever even stick it in her?”
Chloe reaches for him. “Care, don’t say that.”
And now he’s focused on her again. “Oh for fuck’s sake, Chloe, can you just see things as they are for once in your fucking life? What are you even doing here? What were you ever doing with him? I loved you. I made room for you. This kid, he stands for nothing. Not even himself. Never even fought back. Just fucking slinked off into the woods. Do you know why the sub grabbed him?”
“Care, please, I’m begging you.”
“The sub grabbed him cuz he was weak, Chloe. A waste. How do you not see that?”
The weirdest thing is that I understand where he’s coming from. Because Carrig is holding the gun, it feels like he created this mess, but we’ve been building this together since we were kids. The three of us. We each held up our side of this triangle. I’m the mystery of his life. He doesn’t understand why she loves me, how it works between us. Roger Blair is the worst thing that happened to me, but I’m the worst thing that ever happened to Carrig Birkus.
Chloe is still trying to get through to him, pleading. But there’s nothing she could say that would ever make him happy. Nothing she could say that would convince him that she wants him, not me. She could have married him. But she didn’t.
“Life is comparison,” he says. “It’s choices. Me or him. You don’t get to have it both ways and I want you to say it.”
She’s on her knees, sinking into the carpet. He’s circling her.
“Say it!”
I see their relationship all at once, how hard they worked to make a life, to overcome her feelings for me, how horrible it is for them both to realize what a fool’s errand it was. And I feel guilty somehow. If I didn’t exist, if I had never existed, if she had never known me, she would probably be someone else. She would love someone else. Maybe she’d even love Carrig.
She doesn’t answer and he breaks. “Fucking A, Chloe, my whole goddamn life, I don’t understand. Make me understand. Why? I just wanna know why.”
“That’s the thing about it, Care. You can’t understand it. It’s not yours to understand.”
It’s the words, it’s her voice, it’s something in the combination that puts him in a new place. He’s colder now. Calmer. He aims the gun at her forehead. I don’t breathe. I can’t breathe.
“That’s all you got for me? That I can’t fucking understand it? That I’m stupid?”
I don’t know how she’s able to speak but she murmurs, “You’re not stupid.”
“I live my life for you. I go to New York for you. Even after you dick me around, I try. I think, Now things’ll be different. Maybe if I have a cool place and maybe if I take her to restaurants and maybe if I get her a ring and maybe if I get my fucking bonus, maybe one fucking day she’ll stop pining for that pussy and be with me.”
He turns his head for a nanosecond and she grabs his leg and pushes. He kicks her in the stomach and she curls up. She’s rolled over. She’s in pain. Carrig spins back to me now.
“I suppose you’re judging me. I suppose you’d never fucking hit a girl.”
He’s like a boat at sea, listing. Coming toward me. I raise my hands. “Carrig, I’m not judging you. I get it, man.”
“Don’t call me man.”
He eyes the doorknob.
“Don’t,” I say. “You gotta believe me. You can’t open that door.”
He points his gun at the Plexiglas in front of me. “But you can,” he says. “This whole time you hide in there and you don’t come out here. This is it, bro. This is fucking it and it’s all we get and this is how you choose to do it? You hide. I’m out here and you’re in there and somehow you’re some kinda hero?”
I’m sweating. Tense. My jets were never this hot. “Carrig,” I say. “You guys should go. I was wrong to show up.”
He looks at the doorknob again. “See, that’s the difference between you and me, I’m not winning by default,” he says. “It doesn’t fucking count when you do.”
He spins around and points the gun at Chloe again. “On your feet.”
“Carrig, no.”
“Up,” he says. “I’m sick of this shit. I wanna see it with my own eyes. Get in there, Chloe. I wanna watch. I wanna see what’s so fucking special that you choose this over me.”
She looks at me. I’m sorry.
He digs the gun into her back. “Go.” He looks at me. “Piece of shit, open the door or I open it.”
He’s marching, pushing her toward the door, the doorknob that she tried to open when she arrived. Time is running out and if he shoots that door they die. My heart races and my eyes fix on the glass, on her handprints, on mine, the way they play in the light in the middle of this nightmare. I run up to the glass wall and put my hands where they were. I pound my fists. I say the magic words, the words that will make him point the gun at me, the words that will free her to run from here, to live.
“Carrig, you fucking tool, you stupid fuck, I’m warning you. Don’t open that door.”
He shoves her aside and scowls at me. This is what a broken heart looks like. This is the plane going down. This is a whole life of mistakes. Loving the girl who doesn’t love you is stupid and he knows it and he knows I know it and this is why he pulls the trigger. The glass blasts apart.
I hear her screaming and there is smoke. I hear his heavy boots on the floor. He goes out the way he came in and there is blood pouring out of my chest. He missed my heart but he got an artery. I can’t see. I can’t breathe and then I smell her. Even now, I know her scent. Chloe Smells Like Cookies.
She is hovering over me. I am blinking. Screaming. “Chloe, no.”
“You’re dying,” she says. “Jon, we have to get you out of here.”
I shake my head and I feel the tables turning, my jets working fast. She’s woozy, she’s wheezing and I’m strengthening.
I point at the door. “Leave.”
She is crying. Her little hands are reaching for me and it’s an impossible thing to do but I have to do it. I kick at her. At the air around her. I pull my shirt up and I let her see what’s happening. The bullet hole is already starting to close.
“Jon,” she says. “I can’t.”
“You have to.”
But then I remember the way it was in high school, in everything, in every talk, in every moment. I’m the one who leaves. Not her. I look at the door and it’s too far away and there’s a force field between us I’ve never known, but at the same time it’s something I’ve always known. She’s fighting to save me and I’m struggling to save her and time slows down.
I have to get out of here. I have to.
EGGS
I am just coming out of the bathroom when I hear it. A pop. I freeze, just in time to hear footsteps, someone’s running and now I’m running. I know that pop and I know how important it is to run after that pop, to believe in your gut, in the sense you’ve been honing.
Down the end of the corridor I see the sign. ROLLING JACK’S SPORTING GOODS. I smell the gunpowder. The door to Jack’s isn’t closed all the way and it’s no use chasing the shooter. He’s a goner. I see headlights, I hear the unmistakable sound of rubber burning, a man on the run.
I bust into the door of Rolling Jack’s without a word, without a warning. My gut was right after all because here he is, Jon Bronson.
He put
s his hands up and he’s screaming before I even have a chance to take him in, Jon Bronson, no more beard. “Take her you have to take her you have to take her now,” he yells.
The girl. The Sayers girl on the ground, is she breathing? I squat down. I listen.
The Bronson kid smacks the glass. “Listen to me you have to listen to me you have to listen to me you have to take her you have to get her out of here or she’s gonna die.”
“Now hold on.”
His eyes are giant. “I can’t,” he says. “She’s dying.”
I say his name to his face for the first time in my life. “Jon.”
And he hears me say his name and he swallows his tears, the lump in his throat, the goodness in his heart, his young heart, his shaking heart, his hands on that glass, trembling. He is crying. There is blood on him. Is it hers? He is crumbling and begging you have to take her you have to go she’s gonna die she can’t die.
He is closing in on himself. He is the Beard. Suspected murderer. But he did not hurt this girl. He loves this girl. I should cuff him. I should lock that door, I should do a lot of things I always said I’d do if I ever found him. But what good is your heart if it’s not open? Your mind. Your gut.
“Okay,” I say. “You stay put, Jon.”
He looks up at me. He nods. “I’m so sorry.”
And then he’s crying again.
She is a small girl, but everyone is heavy when they can’t do for themselves. Everyone is weight. I count to three.
Jon says it again. “I’m so sorry but you gotta get her out or…”
“I’m doing it,” I say, and then I do a count again, one…two…three. And then I scoop her up into my arms, I am on the move. I am saving the girl’s life, the boy’s life too.
Already he isn’t the Beard anymore. He’s the boy. The Bronson boy.
In the parking lot I look down at the girl in my arms, no entry wound from a bullet, no nothing. Looks like a heart attack. Looks like nature’s way. I think of the video, Bronson getting his ass kicked on Thayer Street, showing up at Lovecraft a few days later, fresh-faced. Fine. How does he do it?
I’m losing my breath, possibly my mind. The girl is in my arms, weighing me down. My body lurches, aches, but that’s on me. Not her. Carry on. Carry her. She needs you, Eggie, right now. Go.
I trip on my own shoelace. Motherfucker.
Go on, Eggie. Go.
Panting now, sweating, soaked. An old man. A sick man.
I run around to the side of the car. I open the back door.
Spiraling, heaving. Come on, Eggie. Go.
My gut stings, sings. My knees buckle as I squat, as I lean, as I ease her into the backseat.
She’s in. She’s safe.
I close the door. I puke.
I get into the car. I start the engine.
Go on, Eggie. Go.
JON
I am in the woods again but death is different this time around. There is sun in the sky. There are no leaves on the ground. The leaves are on the trees. Electric green. Jelly bean green. Slime green. The color of the carpet in Rolling Jack’s.
I walk on soft earth, it’s quicksand that doesn’t pull, it only pushes. There is life everywhere you turn. Bunnies scamper and birds chirp. There is peace in these woods. She is here even though she isn’t. That poem from grade school. I carry your heart in my heart. She’s inside of me and she’s still out there. In a hospital, breathing and scared. I live in her now too. She misses me. She’s sad for me.
But this is meant to be. She will be okay and I will be gone. We said our I love yous. We know it. There’s so much we didn’t get to do. I never got to hold her. I never got to be in bed with her, never got to wake up to her, fall asleep with her, never got to go to a bad movie with her, a good movie, never held her hand in the dark, never smiled for no reason and shrugged when she asked why I was so happy, never got to answer, No reason, just you. I am not dead yet. Every now and then there is a mist. A red mist. Blood. It brings me back into Rolling Jack’s. The floor hardens on me. The quicksand turns to tile.
I fight the part of me that longs to live. I tell it to calm down. Life isn’t good for us.
But then the leaves drop all at once, the electric green canopy collapses onto me, cuts through me, it’s below me now. There are hands on my chest. Two of them. I’m not in the woods anymore. I’m in Rolling Jack’s and someone is trying to save my life. Pulling at me. Pushing at me.
But I don’t need to ask who it is. I know. I recognize his breathing, in through the nose, out through the nose, something I’d forgotten until now. I’m coming back to life and he’s slipping out of it and I’m the strong one now. I grab him by the throat as I sit up, as he falls back.
“Roger. Tell me how to fix this.”
He’s not breathing so good. He shakes his head. “No,” he says, his breath coming in rasps now. “I did fix it.”
“No,” I say. “You don’t get to do this. Tell me how to fix it.”
There’s a string of words dribbling from his mouth. “I’ve…been…I see you…”
“I need you to help me.”
“I did,” he says. “I made you…You…”
I am louder. “I need your help.”
“You’re my miracle, Jon.”
His eyes bulge. He smiles. The words snake through my mind. You’re my miracle. As if I belong to him. He mutters again, softer now, says he was watching me.
“Providence,” he says, coughing. “Lynn.”
All the time I was tracking him, he was following me. It hits me hard. He is close to death and he is unafraid, guiltless. He is the grandfather who dies surrounded by his grandchildren, his own children, at peace with his contribution. I am that to him, his child, his grandchild. I plead again. Again he shakes his head. Proud. Defiant.
I don’t ask the right questions and drool slides out the side of his mouth as he points at me, locks eyes with me, his words more deliberate now. “You read the book, Jon. Wilbur terrorizes everyone.”
Something like a smile takes over his face. Magnus. I remember waking up in the basement, reading the letter he wrote to me in the book about Wilbur. For a second I’m not in my body. I’m back in the basement, poisoned by his words, a secret cross to bear, an invisible scar. I walked around the mall—this mall—promising myself I would keep his secret as if it were mine. You’re welcome, Jon. He is the dodder vine and I am the helpless host. And now he’s trying to turn it all around, comparing me to Wilbur, the violent semi-human, the monster.
I grab his collar and shake him. “Don’t do this. I can’t live like this. I can’t.”
He’s gasping, but he’s driven, “Sure you can.”
“I want you to fix me.”
He smiles. “Don’t worry, Jon. You know what becomes of Wilbur.”
EGGS
Chloe’s gonna be fine.
I was right. It was what the doctors call a heart attack. The Bronson boy, he’s the attacker, but in a twisted way, a poisoned way where he doesn’t mean to be. His heart attacks another heart.
The nicest of the nurses offers me a cup of coffee. “Thanks,” I say, taking it.
I try to imagine how he does it and then I try to imagine how Roger Blair did it and I sip the coffee. I don’t know how people drink this stuff. There are some things on this earth you can’t ever understand. But you can know. You can know.
The same nurse knocks on the door. “Hey, Mr. DeBenedictus, they’re calling for you.”
* * *
—
Outside, I’m meeting up with the local cops, going back to the mall.
“You sure you don’t want to ride up front?”
That’s our leader for this evening’s activities, the initial responding officer, O’Keefe, just a kid, a nice kid.
“I’m good back here
,” I say. “Thanks though.”
And I am good back here. Normally, you drive to a crime scene, you don’t know what to expect. You’re hyperaware of what it might be, where will the blood be today. I remember going to see Krishna that night, that morning-night. I remember wondering the next day why the Beard wasn’t at any of the local hospitals.
And now I know.
“I’m gonna go ahead and take the back roads,” O’Keefe says. “There was an accident up some ways, best thing we can do is avoid it. Might take a minute longer, but you know, we roll up in that, we get stuck.”
“You do whatever works.”
He nods at me in the rearview. Good kid. Also, I’ll take any extra minute I can get right now. Gotta memorize my story, the one I told these guys at the hospital. It goes like this: I had a fight with the wife. I drove out here. I’m mall walking to blow off steam. I hear this girl screaming. I go into Rolling Jack’s, this girl’s hovered over this body. Late twenties. Male. He’s clearly been shot. Two bullets. The girl goes into arrest. I grab the girl, rush her to the hospital where they confirm the arrest. They stabilize the girl and we get into this car. And now we pull into the parking lot of the mall.
“You said there was no gun, yeah?”
“Not that I saw.”
“And you don’t think she shot him.”
“I know she didn’t. Bet my life on it.”
O’Keefe picks something out of his teeth with his tongue. He’s a chatty guy. “You know she and I went to high school together,” he says. “She was gonna marry this prick.”
“Bronson?”
“No,” he says. “This other prick. Carrig Birkus. I used to be friends with the kid. Worst years of my life. My wife dragged me to their freaking engagement party this weekend, you know, him and Chloe.”
Now I’m listening. “You were there?”
“Yeah,” he says, not picking up on my inquisitive tone. “I never see the douchebag anymore. But you know, the wife likes a party. Good news is we don’t have to go to the wedding. My wife says Chloe called it off. Boo ya, Birkus, you cocky shit.”
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