I look over at my mom’s staring fake eyes and then I look back to my dad’s tired face and then I stab him through the heart. It’s as easy as that. His eyes open wide and he sees me as he fades away. The blood bubbles up around the knife, and it is surprisingly quiet and peaceful, as far as murder goes. It’s nothing like with Carrie’s dad, which was brutal and bloody, I think. And maybe that’s fitting. Maybe that’s right. He had a bloody, violent end as punishment for the things he did, whereas my dad had a bloody, silent end to go with his sneaking, ugly ways.
He’s dead, and so is Mr. Brown, and both our moms are still sleeping on as if nothing has happened. It’s all so fucked up.
Carrie and I go back outside, and we sit on the back porch steps and we stare up at the moon.
There is blood on my hands and blood on my jeans and blood on my soul.
I’ll go to hell for this, I’m sure, I’m certain, but Carrie says not. She says God would be pleased about what I did. Because I ended her suffering and I stopped them from hurting others.
I think she may be right.
“What now?” I say.
“We leave,” she says, her gaze avoiding mine. “I’ll go pack my things and you can pack yours. I’ll meet you back here in an hour and then we’ll leave this place forever. Okay?” And she smiles, and even with the blood of her father on her face, she is beautiful. The moonlight glows down on her, and her hair shines, and for the first time in so long, I see hope in her eyes.
“I love you, Carrie,” I say.
And I do. I love her so much.
“I know,” she says as she turns away from me and starts to walk back home.
And I wish she’d say it back, just this once.
Chapter fifty-six:
“Where did you go?” I ask her.
Carrie looks up at me. She’s sitting with her legs over the edge of the table, staring down at her feet. But now she looks up at me, and I see the same look in her eyes that I saw so many years ago. It’s both hope and thankfulness. It’s both yearning for freedom and escape, and still feeling trapped. I make her feel trapped, I realize.
“I got the night bus to Chicago. But I moved around quite a bit.” She smiles, her mind far away, back on that bus in the middle of the night. “I went home and showered quickly and then I left. I’d already packed my things earlier.”
“You knew you were going to leave without me?” I ask, and there’s no anger there because I’m finally understanding, and that can only be a good thing.
“Yes,” she says. “I didn’t want you to come with me.”
And I am still a pussy because I cry now. Why the fuck not? My heart’s been torn out, and I have a feeling there’s more to come.
“You—” she starts, but stops and then starts again. “I never loved you.”
“But the things we did?”
“It was just sex, Ethan. I had sex with lots of people I didn’t want to back then. It was a way to get what I wanted. That’s how it started with your dad.” She looks away, ashamed. “I seduced him thinking he would help me with my dad, but it didn’t work out that way.”
I frown. “What happened?” Because I don’t want to know, and yet I do. I need to know how my father, who was once so wholesome and good, turned into the monster that I killed.
“My dad found out and began blackmailing him,” she laughs. “The irony was that he then became my dad’s best customer. It seems I awakened a desire in your dad that he didn’t even know he had.” She swallows, and I hope she chokes, because this was her fault—she turned him into the monster.
She looks up and sees my angry glare. “You can hate me all you want, Ethan. He was still the one at fault. He still raped a little girl, because that’s what I was. A child. But you men are all the same!”
“We’re not!” I yell back, and I need to do my counting but I can’t think straight, so I tap the nails of my left hand onto the ones on my right hand, over and over. “I’m not like that, I loved you.”
“I know you did, but you also took what you wanted whenever you wanted it. Even now you’re still doing it, Ethan. Even now you’re still demanding that I love you, that I touch you, that I fuck you. I don’t love you. I don’t even like you. I used you to kill my dad. We were friends and then I was a victim and I used you to help me get free!” She screams the words at me, and I let them absorb, let them really sink into my skin.
“They blamed me for killing you,” is all I can come back with.
“I know.”
“They asked me over and over where I had hidden your body.”
She says nothing, but her eyes say everything.
“You,” I say with tremors running through my body as I let myself speak the truth I have tried to deny for fifteen years. “You set me up.”
She lifts her chin high, no fear in her eyes. “I did.”
“You made it look like I killed you, and your dad, and then my dad.”
My dad didn’t ignore me. My dad was dead.
How could I have forgotten that?
Maybe I did deserve to be in the hospital.
Maybe I didn’t deserve to get out.
“You ruined me.”
It’s like thunder in my ears as I say the words out loud. As I admit the truth I’ve tried to deny for so long. I’m not stupid; I think I always knew. It was all too perfect, really. But love makes you blind, and I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to think so badly of her. To believe that she would do something like that. They told me that I must have blocked out her murder. That the trauma had wiped the memory away. Her mom lied and said that she saw me do it, but both she and I know that’s not true because she never even woke up as Carrie butchered her dad.
“The police, they blamed me for everything, Carrie. The things that happened to me inside. My poor mom!” I wail, angry and sad and confused.
“I’m sorry,” she replies. “I had to, don’t you see?”
*
I see the lights before I hear the sirens.
I’m watching for Carrie’s shadow running between the houses, her bag slung over one shoulder, but she hasn’t come. It’s been over an hour now and I’ve been tempted to go to her house and find her. But I stayed where I was, waiting.
Scared half to death to go back to the house of blood.
She’d be back soon, I told myself.
I changed my bloody clothes and packed them in a plastic carrier bag. I have them with me; I’m going to get rid of them on the way.
The lights bounce from house to house, red and blue and red and blue, and the sirens blare to life. A scream in the still night air.
The police car comes to a stop at the sidewalk and an officer gets out and puts on his hat. He hasn’t seen me yet. Another car stops at Carrie’s house. ‘Oh shit,’ I think.
I stand up slowly, my bag over my shoulder, and I take a cautious step away from my house, hoping to be swallowed up into the darkness. But he sees me.
“Stay right where you are,” he yells.
I take another step, seeing one of the officers going inside Carrie’s house. A flashlight shines through the windows, a spotlight in the darkness.
“I mean it, stay right where you are or I will shoot you.”
I feel sick. I feel dizzy. I feel numb. I feel heavy. I feel lost. I feel found.
A scream erupts from my house.
My mom woke up.
She’s seen my dad, dead, stabbed through the heart while she slept with her unblinking eyes.
But I don’t run.
Because there’s nowhere to run, not without Carrie.
Chapter fifty-seven:
I am a pussy, I think as I cry in my hands. I am a God-damned pussy, and Benny would be ashamed of me.
Carrie says nothing while I let out my grief. I cry until I’m not even sure why I’m crying anymore. Is it the loss of my mother or the death of my father? Is it the memory of so much blood as Carrie’s knife tore through her father’s flesh, or the emptiness in her eyes
when she walked away? Is that she let me rot in a cell? That she took my life and blamed me for it all? Or is it the loss of a love I never had?
“My dad is dead,” I say.
She says nothing. Because she knows; she was there, and she saw it all. How did I forget all of that? How did I make that memory go away? God, how I wish I could do that again.
He never came to see me in prison because I killed him. My mom moved away because she wanted to start afresh, away from the dead perverted husband and the murdering son. I hope she got her fresh start, I think.
“You never loved me?” I say through my pain.
“No, Ethan.”
“Not even a little bit?”
“No. Not even a little bit.” And the way she says it makes me know that she’s telling the truth.
“But you let me touch you!” I say through clenched teeth.
“I let a lot of people touch me,” she retorts with a laugh.
“We made love!”
She shakes her head. “No, you made love. I was fucked.”
Her words are cold and dead. Lifeless, just like she is.
“How could you be so cruel?” I shake my head and then I grab my hair and pull on it as if I could pull her answers out of my own skull. I don’t really expect an answer from her. How can you answer such a question? She took my life. Her father’s. And then she made me take my father’s too. She destroyed everyone and everything that night. Even if she just wanted to escape. To be free.
It could have been so perfect, I think
“I was made that way,” she says, and she stands, her foot touching the cold, hard floor as she looks around us. “I could have been anything,” she says. “I could have done so many amazing things with my life, but he took it all away from me. He ruined me.”
“I tried to give it back to you,” I say, heartbroken words tumbling from me.
She smiles, and it’s the first true expression I’ve seen on her face since I found her again. “I know you did, but you can’t give back what you didn’t take away. He stole my innocence and my future. You didn’t. So you can’t give it back.”
“You ruined my life,” I say, and I feel like I’m drowning as reality and memories collide. “You ruined everyone’s lives, Carrie!”
“And everyone ruined mine,” she replies coldly.
And there is no love in her voice.
For me or for anyone.
I don’t know what to say to that. She’s right—this was all him. He did rob her of everything, but she got away, she could have started again. But she didn’t. She just became the very thing she’d escaped from. I don’t say that though, because what’s the point? There isn’t a point to any of this anymore.
Not to me, or her. Or an us that never really was.
I still love her though. That won’t go away, but I know it’s one-sided. I know that, yet my heart still reaches for her. It yearns for her love.
“Where are we, Ethan?” she asks, her voice sounding frightened.
The sun is beginning to rise and the soft orange glow of the morning burn is shining in through the hole in the roof. She sees the hooks and the metal tables and the rollers and the signs on the walls. And the odor that she could smell finally makes sense to her.
She looks at me with wide eyes and horror on her face.
“Are you going to kill me now?” she says, and the horror is gone and a calmness envelops her pretty features. She’s a little girl once again, and I am a little boy. We are playing in the mud, and she is chopping off worms’ heads. And she is telling me how they will grow a new head and everything will be okay, even if it hurts for a little while.
Am I going to kill her? I wonder. Is that why I brought her here? To kill her? Because if I can’t have her, nobody can? Is that how strong my love for her is? Is that how deep it runs?
“I should,” I say. “You ruined my life. You turned me into a murderer, but I never murdered you, or your dad. I never did those things.”
She nods like she knows, like she understands, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t know shit. So I tell her that.
“Don’t you nod at me like you get it, like you have any idea what it’s been like. You don’t know shit, Carrie Brown.”
She looks away with shame.
And I am angry now. Furious, even. Because how dare she nod and presume to know what she put me through. Seeing my mom’s heart break over and over. Being beaten and abused in prison. But worst of all, the feeling of that blade cutting through my dad’s chest, through bone and skin and muscle and then heart. That feeling hasn’t gone away. It did for a while. I blotted it out. But it’s there now. I can feel it running up my arm. The sharp tug as I pulled the blade back out, and bone and muscle cling to the blade in the hopes of resurrecting life out of his body.
It wasn’t her fault. But it wasn’t mine either. Yet I suffered for her all the same. She made me suffer for her. But then, when I think of her life now, of how little she has achieved and how grown-up Carrie is just the same as little-girl Carrie, I wonder if she suffered just like me too.
“Well?” she says. “Are you?”
I stand up and I go toward her, and even though I’m full of rage and hate for her, my hands still want to run through her soft hair. They still yearn to stroke her smooth skin. To feel her thighs wrapped around me while I move in her and on her, feeling her hot breath against my neck. To hear her say she loves me. To finally hear the words that I’ve been chasing for so long. So long that it feels like forever.
She watches me come toward her, and she doesn’t cry though I know she’s afraid. And when I am in arm’s reach, I stop and we stare at one another for a long time. The silence permeates around us. The echo of our entwined breathes bounces off the cold metal walls of the slaughterhouse, and the gun in my hand that burns my palm.
“If you’re going to do it, then just do it,” she says, and though her words are full of defiance I can hear the sadness in her tone. The grief at a life unfulfilled.
Really, it would be the humane thing to do for her. To put her out of this misery.
I feel the trigger under my finger; just one little squeeze and it would all be over. For both of us. This torture that we put ourselves through would be over. No more pain. No more anything.
Just one little squeeze.
“Ethan?” She whispers my name just as a car backfires outside, the abruptness of the bang so loud in my head that I startle.
Carrie startles too.
Her eyes grow even wider with both shock and fear, but she’s brave and she holds my gaze steady and she waits like a good girl. Because she is, deep down, a good girl. Things just got all messed up, and I get that. It happens to me a lot. But hey, maybe that’s just life, right?
I’m not used to holding a gun. The metal is warm against my palm, the gun heavy. My arm is aching from holding it, shaking under the strain.
She sobs. Her lips are quivering, and I frown as the car backfires again.
But, ‘It’s okay, Carrie,’ I soothe. ‘Everything is going to be okay now. Because I’m going to set you free—I’m going to set us both free.’
Epilogue:
I sit on the bus and it’s raining and cold again.
I hate the rain, and I hate the cold.
They remind me of things I want to forget. Things that are better left in the past.
‘Don’t look back, Ethan. You should never look back.’
And so I don’t. I look forward; the way that I am going. Away from here. Away from all of this. Away from the past, and the present, and toward a future where things will be better.
I am going to go somewhere warm. Somewhere the sun will kiss my skin often and the coldness can’t hurt me anymore. Somewhere where the people are nice and polite, and hold the doors open for others. Where they smile and use their manners.
And I am not going to be sad anymore.
There is nothing before this day.
There is no me, or her or him or them or us.
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I am free, finally.
I am finally free of everything.
The End…or maybe this is the beginning.
A final note
This is a book that should never have been.
Seriously.
Somewhere near the end of 2016, I got an image of a man sat in the rain, his gaze on a woman climbing into a cab with another man. The night was dark, but not as dark as his view of the world, and yet I felt, underneath those first layers, there was a man who had a story to tell. A reason, if you will, for his negative and jumbled view of people and life. So I put my current WIP to one side and continued to write about this man. Ten days later I finished writing Ethan and Carrie’s story.
To date, it’s the quickest that I have ever written a book, and to date, it’s one of my very favorite books ever.
I subbed “Beautiful Victim” out to a couple of publishers, under the name of “The One Who Watches You,” and it got rejected several times under the guise that it was ‘”too dark”, “too negative”, and Ethan was just “too unlikeable because of his narrowed view of the world”, and told that, commercially, it just wouldn’t do very well because there were no clear cut heroes and villains. Yet I loved the story so much and believed that there was so much more to Ethan than just these things. He’s like Marmite, I guess (which I love… most days).
I left the manuscript on my laptop for a year, but my thoughts would always wander back to it because I didn’t want to let the story go. Roll on 2018 and I decided “screw it!” I wanted—no, needed—my readers to read this book and love it for all its glorious darkness, no matter what the outcome. Because, publishers don’t give readers enough credit. They think you want everything black and white. But life isn’t black and white. It’s red and green, it’s dark and it’s light. And I, unlike publishers, know that as readers this is what we want from a story.
So yes, Ethan is negative and yes, he can be unlikeable, but peel back those layers…because he’s so much more. This book is so much more.
Beautiful Victim Page 25