“Don’t you hate this place, Carm?” she said tauntingly. “Why didn’t you leave?”
“Why didn’t you?” Carmelita said.
“Victor’s dead,” Elise said. “He’s not going to come back and lock you up anymore. Who’s going to treat you like a dog? My submissive husband?”
“He has potential,” Carmelita said, carefully keeping the gun pointed at my wife’s chest as Elise took two steps toward her. She was wearing Victor’s Gore-Tex jacket, its stiff gray fabric rustling in the museum quiet of the room.
“Where’s the key?” my wife said. “Give it to me and I’ll lock you up right now. We won’t feed you for days. You’ll never know if we’ll even come back.”
Something had changed in Carmelita’s determined expression. I could see that her hand was trembling, and then her whole arm, to the point where the handgun began to visibly vibrate, as if a train were barreling just underneath the warped floorboards.
Elise took a step closer and had the audacity to touch a black strand of Carmelita’s hair, letting it fall through her fingers.
“I know what you like,” Elise said. “Don’t I?”
“She tied me to a tree,” Carmelita said. “When I was a kid.”
“Are you going to shoot her right now, Scott?” Elise said. “Or listen to this campfire story?”
“I’m listening.”
“Victor drove up with Elise and said he had to drop her off,” Carmelita said. “My mom begged him to stay a few nights before he left.”
“Her mom was a real loser,” Elise said. “Real low-wattage.”
Carmelita lifted up the gun again and pressed the muzzle to my wife’s temple.
“Say something else about her,” Carmelita said. “You’ll be dead before you get to the end of the sentence.”
Elise thought about this carefully. Her skin had turned whiter and I could see that she was breathing faster.
“I was jealous, C,” Elise finally said. “At least your mom was still alive.”
Carmelita lowered the gun again and took a step back from my wife.
“She pretended it was a game,” Carmelita said. “There was a ball of twine and she tied me to an oak tree and when I couldn’t move an inch she told me she was going to set me on fire. That’s one of the hundred secrets I was going to tell you.”
“Maybe you could just email us a list,” Elise said. “Save us a little time.”
“I could hear everyone laughing when it got dark. And then I saw them walking toward me along the pasture fence. She was guiding her father by the hand. And then she stood there and watched.”
“Watched what?” I said, turning toward Elise. Hadn’t they both been there?
“It was pathetic,” Elise said, her neck turning red. “The little sounds she made, before he even touched her.”
The shot was fired so suddenly, I didn’t immediately know what it was. It sounded more like a large book had fallen to the floor than something fatal. But Carmelita had missed by a yard. A dime-sized hole winked at me from the sliding glass door and she seemed just as transfixed by it as I was. Thank God for her trembling hand, I thought, watching her shakily raise the gun to Elise’s face.
My wife brought the iron poker down toward her skull without mercy. At the last instant, Carmelita moved toward me and the heavy iron hook slammed against her shoulder. I could hear the sound of her collarbone breaking and then saw it protrude from, but not break, the surface of her skin. I had the insane urge to touch it and try to push it back, make everything okay.
“Christ, Elise,” I said, but my wife was already swinging the iron through the air again, catching all of Carmelita’s wrist and sending the handgun flying through the air. It landed underneath the liquor cabinet, but Carmelita made no attempt to retrieve it. She was crouched near the foot of the staircase, touching her jutting collarbone. It seemed to move away from her fingers underneath her skin, and then it popped up again underneath the collar of her sweatshirt.
“It’s broken,” she said to Elise, as if her assailant had nothing to do with the awful situation.
I kept the gun pointed at my wife. I felt it was the only thing keeping her from again attacking Carmelita, whose hands were now gripping the wooden rungs of the banister. I could hear the squeak her hands made as she made a tighter fist. It was as if the whole house was about to spin into space and she was grabbing hold of something before it all disintegrated.
“We’re going to work this out,” I said, growing a little more confident. “Like grown adults. The bad guy is gone. The asshole. There’s plenty of money to go around.”
Happiness dead ahead. Share a little bit of the wealth. Let’s be friends. I was jumping at each cliché, almost giddy now. For the first time in a year, a tangible moment of grace and forgiveness seemed possible, and I would lead us to that place. I could see it, like a sun-struck clearing in some woods. All I had to do was get two victimized women to believe that there was a way out of this. We didn’t even have to wind up being wonderful additions to planet earth, but just willing to realize that a dead man had set a terrible chain of events into motion, long ago. There, it was right there on the tip of my tongue.
“Point of no return,” I said, taken aback by how hard it was to give the most important speech of my life. I had become oddly stiff and formal again. The man who grimaces as the guests clink their glasses and wait for his speech. “This night has a good ending. You know, for once, I can feel it in my bones. We’re going to surprise ourselves tonight.”
“Shoot her,” a voice said. I was so tied up in my own thoughts that I thought I had just imagined it. But then Carmelita quietly said it again, looking at me imploringly. She must have realized this wouldn’t be enough, so she took a deep breath and skipped all the secrets I’d never hear until she got to the best one.
“You want to hear the ugliest secret,” Carmelita said. She wasn’t trembling at all. This was a better weapon. Lighter than air, one always kept in the chamber.
I was turning toward her, eager to hear what she would say, when I saw Elise leap. She brought the black iron down toward Carmelita’s skull again. At the last instant, Carmelita covered her head with her hand and screamed. A tiny wooden chip found my left eye, and I stepped back as the two women went out of focus. My eyes were slathered with their own stinging water now. I wiped them with the back of my hand, and when I could see again, I saw that Carmelita had pushed my wife to the floor and was stabbing at her face with a key she’d pulled from her pocket. She held it as tightly as she could in her hand and went after my wife’s eyes, even as Elise violently twisted her head from side to side. I pulled Carmelita backward by her hair and she scrambled to her feet again.
Even though it was for only a moment, Elise looked dazed, two small gashes on her forehead quickly welling up with blood. I watched a sudden arc of spit land on her face and then I saw Carmelita kick her in the head. Her sneaker made a dull slapping sound as it connected with my wife’s cheekbone.
I fell on top of Elise like the Good Samaritan I never was, still holding the shotgun with my left hand.
“Put it in her mouth,” Carmelita said. “I’ll pull the trigger.”
But when I lifted up the gun, it was Carmelita I was aiming at. First her chest, and then her back as she walked unsteadily toward the sliding glass door, and then she was on the patio, her blood left on the white handle.
“We can’t let her go,” Elise said.
I walked past my wife without saying a word, following Carmelita onto the flagstones. Her left hand was pressed against her collarbone again, as if she were pledging some strange allegiance. For a few seconds, before she moved out of the light cast on the stones, I could see how much pain she was in, her mouth curled downward. The faces injured children make when they’re waiting for an adult to comfort them. She stood still for a moment, and then, hearing the distant throttle of a truck on 27, turned and started to walk that way.
“He married her,” Carmelita said so
ftly. “He actually gave her his dead wife’s ring and she wore it all summer. Or maybe she stole it.”
The shock of her injury had made her dizzy and she lost her balance for a moment. I caught her just before her knee hit the frozen ground, and she righted herself again. I knew that Elise was right behind me and was carefully listening to everything the girl said. I was terrified that if I said something too sympathetic my wife might bludgeon me next. Even after all the violence that had happened, when I spoke my voice sounded detached, as if I were reading from a transcript Elise might approve of.
“I want to hear all about this,” I said. “But it’s freezing out here. Let’s go back inside the house.”
“Ask her where she keeps the ring. I bet she never threw it away. Her dead mother’s ring. Ask her about her mother.”
But her voice was trailing off now, as if she realized her survival was more important than wasting the ugliest secrets on me.
I followed her around the far corner of the house, past the shrouded BBQ grill that Swain had once used, and then onto the gravel of the driveway, the fibrous branches of a willow tree clacking in the wind. She waited there, only a foot from me, waiting for another sound from the highway. Was it a minute or two minutes that we waited there, the ocean fizzling restlessly behind us, some distant airplane blinking over the house? Elise, I know, was sobbing. I could hear her behind me.
The next sound was just a passing car, nothing more than that, its headlights now visible over the wooden fence that separated Swain’s property from the highway.
“I need your help, Scott,” Carmelita said. “I’m in so much pain. I can feel the bone moving in my shoulder.”
“You’ve got to come back to the house,” I said. “You can’t leave now.”
She looked at me as if I were crazy, and then, realizing I meant it, stopped in her tracks, just as I had asked her to.
“Good girl,” Elise said, just a foot behind me now.
For another second, maybe two, Carmelita considered this vicious compliment, and then she began to walk away again, taking two tentative steps in the gravel of the driveway, then a third.
I raised the gun and pulled the trigger, just before she took the fourth step.
—
There was an old wooden bulkhead that sat beneath Swain’s property. Elise and I dragged Carmelita to the edge of the overgrown lawn and then let her roll down the hill toward the water. Then we walked across the gully and grabbed a flashlight and shovel from the shed under Victor’s deck.
Elise and I hardly said a word to each other as we made our way back to the bulkhead, walking along the bay. When I saw the lights from Swain’s living room on the bluff above me, I ducked into the gap in the wrecked wall and painted the underbrush and sand with the flashlight until the beam found her hand, her arm twisted behind her back. I stopped there. I didn’t want to see what the blast had done to the back of her head. Handing Elise the flashlight, I began digging into the sand, listening to the distant sound of a boat’s engine.
Turning off the flashlight, Elise stood by me and we waited until we couldn’t see the red and green running lights of the fishing boat slowly making its way to the inlet.
“Maybe this isn’t the best place,” Elise said, flicking the flashlight back on and cupping it with her hand. She pointed it down at the hole as I shoveled out more sand. I hit a long tree root and whacked it in half with the edge of the shovel.
“Too late to take her anywhere else,” I said numbly.
I leaned over the shovel and tossed another clump of sand aside, focusing all my attention on the hole. The only thing I’d buried in my life up to then was a parakeet, adorning its tiny mound with intricately arranged pebbles.
By the time we’d pulled Carmelita into the hole and covered her with sand and seaweed and dead branches, I thought the sky was turning paler.
“You’ve got her blood on your cheek,” Elise said softly, pointing the flashlight at my face one more time. I nodded, too tired to offer my thoughts about this particular issue. I watched myself walk down to the edge of the water, where small waves barely flopped onto the sucking sand. I watched myself kneel down and cup my hands in the bay, lifting its stinking water to my skin, again and again. Over the inlet, like suspended flecks of dark blue inside a marble, the clouds on the horizon became distinct. Elise was already walking back to Victor’s with the shovel in her hand, turning toward me and violently waving at me to join her.
It was at the end of that same month, January, that Elise and I allowed ourselves one brief weekend in Miami, unable to relax for one moment. Conspicuously pale and exhausted, we ordered one round of mai tais from the pool bar and then abandoned them by our deck chairs. We spent most of the time on our concrete balcony, trying to read the paperbacks we had picked up at the Hudson News at LaGuardia.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” I said, staring at the tinted windows of the high-rise condo across from us. It had started to rain, but neither of us moved. Inside our room, a football game was playing on the flat-screen television, but I’d already forgot who the two teams were.
Elise was wearing a gauzy silk wrap, her feet kicked up on another chair. Although she still stared down at her Harlan Coben thriller, I knew she’d been stuck on the same page for half an hour.
“What if the water reaches her body?” Elise finally said. “Won’t it loosen the sand? Maybe someone passes by and sees some fabric. Or that stupid dog…”
“What do you suggest we do about it? Fly back tonight and start hacking her to pieces?”
The word hacking made me feel funny. Sick to my stomach, actually. I wasn’t going to dig up Carmelita under any condition. How much had she decomposed underneath the sand? What kind of winter larvae were feeding on her? Her corpse would be bloated now, the skin stretched blue and black in places.
“Someone’s going to find her,” Elise said, finally closing the paperback and tossing it on the ground. “The sooner we deal with it, the better.”
The rain had become steadier now, but after months spent on freezing Shinnecock Bay, the warmth of the heavy drops didn’t bother me at all. I stood up and leaned over the balcony, where I could see a sliver of the harbor through the buildings. Two WaveRunners sped past, two rooster tails of water arcing behind them. I was so tired that my shoulders ached, and yet it had been impossible to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time. The only consolation had been that when I turned over on my side and faced Elise, her eyes had been open too.
But now, when I turned toward her and gently suggested that we go inside, she didn’t move at all. I took a step in her direction, raised her sunglasses and saw that her eyes were closed, her mouth parted, the rain rolling down her forehead and cheek. I bent over her and gave her a kiss on the top of her head.
I was on the verge of wrapping my arms around her, with the idea of gallantly carrying her into the room so she could finally get some rest, when I had a flashback of what it felt like to carry Carmelita’s body toward the edge of Swain’s property. It’s true what they say about dead weight being so much heavier. She kept on slipping through my arms, as if she somehow had some last idea about escaping. I reached under her armpits again and again and held her as tightly as I could, looking for the best place to let her roll down to the sea.
“Elise,” I said, looking down at her. “Let’s wake up, okay?”
I watched her stir for a moment, then change position in the chair, letting her head fall slowly onto her other shoulder. Inside the room, her cell phone was ringing. I picked it up and stared at the 347 area code, then I answered the call.
“Merry Christmas,” the voice on the other end said. “Is my sister there?”
“It’s almost February,” I said. “But thanks.”
It was the first time I’d spoken to Ryder, and considering I was his brother-in-law, and the fact we’d exchanged exactly zero words up to that point, I thought I might ask him a few questions. The first one was the most important. Was he
still in jail?
“No, sir,” he said with an ironic politeness. “I am a free man. Overcome with the possibilities of the unconfined day.”
“I’d love to meet you someday,” I said.
“I’d love to meet you,” he said, smashing back my hollow pleasantry. “Shake your hand for putting up with that dying prick. Buy you a beer at least.”
“Beer sounds great,” I said, noticing the steadier drops of rain falling on the concrete balcony. Elise was awake now. She stood up and arched her shoulder back, only gradually realizing I was on her cell phone.
“I’m going to have to let you go,” he said. “I have a thing or two to say to my sister.”
“Yeah,” I said, already irritated by the way he’d manhandled the conversation. “Merry Christmas too, Ryder.”
I handed the phone to Elise, but she didn’t even come inside the living room. Whatever it was he was telling her was important enough that she let the rain drench her body. Behind the closed sliding door, I watched a liquid streak of lightning fork on the horizon. Drops of water rolled off her chin and she turned away again as she realized I had begun to try to read her lips.
—
We cut the Miami trip short, of course, and spent a fortune changing the flight. I guess I shouldn’t have given it a second thought, considering we had cashed out 112,000 of Victor’s preferred Hensu shares, worth a little over twelve bucks each. But we had yet to experience a single moment of joy. In the week since we had “protected ourselves,” as Elise put it, we found it harder and harder to sleep each night. In small ways we had become intensely paranoid.
It was Elise though who really started to lose it first. As we were standing in line before security, she had become increasingly agitated.
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