by Paul Curtin
“She was wearing your coat, Sean.”
“I’m getting to that. She was cold—shaking. So I gave her mine. I went inside to get my other one. I said I would be right back, and she put it on.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Elise, I grabbed my other coat and was about to walk outside from the garage not a minute later and I heard a gunshot. I looked outside. I still had the coat in my hand and then Michael shot her again. There was nothing I could do. I swear.”
A tear rolled down her cheek.
“Michael thought it was me. He thought he was taking care of me.”
She clenched her fists and then slowly released the tension. The pieces seemed to come together, but she didn’t want to believe it. It was too neat. Too reasonable. Yet, she looked into the eyes of the man she loved, saw the sincerity there, saw how he wasn’t deflecting. He could be—
He said, “So I grabbed my rifle and I hid in the woods. I thought he might come out to finish me off, so I hid.”
“Finish you off with the shotgun.”
He nodded. “Elise, I did what I thought I needed to do. He was going to kill me.”
“He’s my brother, Sean.”
Sean said nothing for a while. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” Her cheeks were streaked with cold tears. As he placed his hands on her face, she stopped resisting and put her hands over his fingers. “I didn’t know what else to do,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“He was my brother,” she said, spittle flying from her mouth as she cried. “He’s gone.”
He pulled her close. Her body collapsed into his, but he held her up and allowed her to wail. She wondered how she could live with so much death, when safety was just an illusion and there was no hope for anything better. No hope of sunshine or green grass. No hope for spring to remove all that black, blood-stained snow outside. No hope for a life where betrayal and lies didn’t put people into the ground.
She dreamed of a better world and prayed for God to end the one she was in now.
Elise woke in a cold sweat. Under an array of sleeping bags and thick blankets, she should have been roasting, but her skin was cold and clammy. The walls and the ceiling seemed to move in toward her. She took in a stuttering breath.
She rarely left the living room or the kitchen. The air never changed, always smoky and hazy. When she opened her eyes, she swore she could feel every millimeter of her eyeball pulsating. She rolled over.
Her head throbbed so badly that even the dim light made it feel like lit gasoline was being poured into the curves and valleys of her brain. She closed her eyelids and tried to ignore the pain, but it didn’t yield even for a moment. She couldn’t get her brother and sister-in-law off her mind. She missed the conversations she and Kelly had been having. Some days, she would hear a man’s voice and her heart would leap, thinking it was Michael. But it wasn’t. She’d never hear that voice again.
Sometimes, she would follow the voice and find Sean playing with their son. He would look up at her and smile, but something in his eyes didn’t fit into place. Every day she watched him. He had great sincerity in those eyes, but there were moments, fleeting moments, where there was something else—a flash of calculation like a mathematical formula was running through his head. It was the worst when they ate dinner. For the first minute, he would watch her and Aidan eat. No words. Just watching. As if they were chewing what little he had left.
The headache persisted, so she got up and went toward the stairs. There were a lot of medicines closer in the reserves, but that was off-limits. God forbid Sean catch her there.
She snatched a flashlight off the coffee table and tiptoed toward the stairs when something behind her hissed. Her chest tightened, Elise spinning around and pointing the flashlight at Sean, sitting with his upper body sticking out of the sleeping bag. He put his hand up to block the light, and she diverted it away. Sean never left her alone for more than a few minutes. He was always asking where she was going, what she was doing, and why. Always hovering.
“Where’re you going?” he whispered.
“I have a headache.”
“There are pills downstairs.”
“I don’t want to search for them.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“No, I don’t want Aidan to wake up and find nobody here.”
“I can get them.”
That was it. He was trying to be nice, to help. “I’ll be back in less than five minutes. Don’t worry.”
He nodded and slipped back into his sleeping bag. Though the conversation was over, she felt his eyes on her back.
Always watching.
With her hand against the wall and the flashlight like a spotlight in the dark hallway, she rounded the top of the stairs and entered the bathroom. She planted her hands on the sink. Every few seconds the pain flooded into her temples and receded. She shifted over to the wooden cabinet and opened its small doors. When she brought the light up into it, she had to recoil at the sudden brightness.
She set the flashlight on the sink pointed toward the wall, grabbed at the bottle of extra strength pain killers, popped off the top, and put a few into her hand. She looked down at them and poured out a few more. One by one, she popped them into her mouth and swallowed them with her spit. Then she put the bottle back.
Movement. She sensed the flashlight tipping off the side of the sink. The light flashed across the wall as it started to fall. She took in a sharp breath, reaching out and bumping the cabinet, and grabbed the handle with her fingertips just as it was about to crack against the ground. She exhaled and heard the rattling of a pill bottle falling onto the floor. “Crap,” she said, expecting there to be pills everywhere.
Instead, just one bottle lay on the floor, unopened. She sighed with relief and bent down to pick it up. A prescription bottle. She had expected it to be Sean’s sleeping pills, which they kept in the cabinet, but it wasn’t.
She flashed the light on it, peering into the clear bottle from the back. Aidan’s seizure medication. She said a silent prayer that he would not need to use them again and paused. Her heart leaped, and her stomach dropped. Six pills. There couldn’t be just six left. She opened the cap as quietly as she could and looked into it.
Six.
She thought hard to Aidan’s last seizure. She was sure there were seven left. Seven. She was misremembering. Had to be. She forgot numbers sometimes. But she remembered talking with Sean in the basement afterwards. He said there were seven.
Seven.
Her head pounded even harder. Her legs wobbled like she was standing during an earthquake. Wincing, she turned the label over. Read it. She sealed her inner elbow against her mouth so she wouldn’t scream. Her eyes widened, and a tear rolled down her cheek.
The label explained what the doctor had told them: Don’t take a pill unless Aidan’s had a seizure. Side effects if taken at any time other than during a seizure: major organ failure and swelling of the throat.
Suffocation.
Sean
Elise was buying it. It was important that she did. Life would be a lot harder if she didn’t. They needed stability, firm ground on which they could navigate into the future.
Sean wanted her to see his dedication—his willingness to do what was necessary to keep his family alive, his love for her and Aidan. He took great pains to spend more time with them, which he enjoyed, but kept him from doing other vital tasks. She needed to see that they were his priorities. Sure, he needed to quantify the food supply and chop more wood and do repairs around the home and sort seeds and start projects, but she needed to know he was focused on them. Focused on keeping his wife on his side.
Not that he fully trusted her. The key to the gun safe always stayed in his pocket and the shells for the shotgun were all empty. He was no fool. The security camera for the rifle in Aidan’s room still ran every moment
he was outside. She was on his side, believing his dedication to her. But there was no point in taking careless risks.
He spent the afternoon shoveling away snow from his raised garden beds and planting mason jars filled with water into the soil—a technique that might allow them to grow food even with winter weather. If the sun ever came out to warm the ground. He came inside to a quiet home. Eerily quiet. Reached around his waistband for his gun. Edged closer to the living room. The fire crackled and the smell of steak, a familiar but almost forgotten scent, grew stronger.
He leaned his head into the living room to find his wife bent over the fire with a cast iron skillet set atop the smoldering coals. The rich scent of butter and pepper wafted toward him and filled his nostrils. It was steak.
“What is this?” he asked, his jaw dropped.
“What does it look like?” she said, straightening up.
Her clothes were nicer than usual. While she had matching under-layers and no exposed skin except her hands and head, she wore a red cotton dress that cut off just above her knees. She had on two sparkling earrings, and a gold necklace hung from her neck. With the fire backlighting her hair, she looked dazzling. “Wow,” he said.
She smiled. “Thanks.”
He looked back and forth from the food to his wife. The feeling was foreign. While the air was cold and a little smoky, it was as if he had stepped back in time, before the chaos happened. To a time of luxurious smells, of calm assurance. She dipped back toward the fire, slipping a mitt on her hand before pulling the skillet away. She removed the steaks, butter bubbling across their surfaces, and put them on plates.
“Where did you get steak?” he asked.
“I’ve been keeping a frozen packet under the deck since we lost power,” she said.
“You’ve been hiding food?”
“Just this. I thought I would save it for a special day.”
“A special day?”
She smiled. “Sean, it’s our anniversary.”
He rubbed his bearded cheek and chuckled.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I didn’t expect you to know what day it is.”
He had looked at the farmer’s almanac every day to reference the temperature. He knew what the day was—God, early May. His anniversary hadn’t even registered.
“Stop frowning,” she said. “I didn’t expect you to remember.”
“Where’s Aidan?”
“I sent him upstairs to play. I set up the last propane heater to keep him warm and told him not to come down unless he was bleeding or the house was burning down.”
He smiled, though his mind was so busy analyzing his next move it was shutting down from the traffic. So when she spoke, her voice seemed to emerge out of nowhere. “You all right?”
He didn’t plan for this. “I just feel like an idiot.”
“I just cooked us steak in butter. We should enjoy it.”
“Babe, this is too extravagant.”
“We need to feel normal for once,” she said, her voice catching. She wiped her eyes. Genuine emotion there. Genuine love.
All he ever wanted from her.
He thought of what he might get out of the evening, looking down at the steak, pulling Elise into his arms. A good meal. Maybe a little action. His loins stiffened at the thought. That would be better. The best was that she trusted him. He needed that more than anything.
She motioned for him to take a seat at the coffee table. He pulled a pillow from the couch, set it on the ground, and planted his knees on it. He watched as she went back and forth from the kitchen. First, she set out a few napkins. On the next trip out, she carried two clear water glasses.
His stomach sank, but he didn’t show it. She placed one in front of him and another next to her own plate, and he smiled back at her. “This smells amazing.”
“Thanks,” she said and disappeared around the corner.
His smile faded as soon as she was out of sight. If this was a game, it wouldn’t work. He swapped the drinks. That would not happen. Not now. Never again.
A second later, she rounded the end of the couch, setting salt and pepper shakers on the table, grabbed her own pillow, and got on her knees in front of the food. He downed half the glass from his new water and smiled at her, just to let her know he trusted her.
Always multiple steps ahead.
She extended her hand out to him, and he took it. Another prayer. He didn’t understand how she couldn’t see that there was no God anymore. He was gone. Only a sadistic being would leave His creation without sunshine so that everything would eventually die and everyone would starve.
But he took her hand anyway. Appearances. She bowed her head and thanked her God for the steak. He bowed along just so she wouldn’t say anything about it. When she finished her prayer, she clapped her hands together and said, “Let’s eat.”
He took his fork and knife and separated the first piece from the rest of the slab. It was a deep red and steamed as he cut it. A good medium-rare. Perfect. He skewered the meat with his fork and placed the morsel into his mouth.
His face twisted. He knew the meat had been frozen, but it was bland, all pepper but not savory. “Did you salt this?” he asked.
She looked at him as if he had interrupted her greatest moment of ecstasy. “Yeah. Does it not taste good?”
He told her it was fine, even though it tasted like dog food. “Just needs a little more salt.”
He grabbed the salt shaker and covered his steak. Popped another chunk into his mouth. The luscious, salty flavor washed over his tongue. Now he was in ecstasy.
“Better?” she asked, looking hopeful.
“Much better.”
“I hoped so,” she said and took another bite.
Elise
Elise stuck the disgusting slice of meat into her mouth and faked as if it were the best thing she had ever tasted. She chewed, even moaned, but she was just trying to get it down.
She had to act like she wasn’t doing the hardest thing she had ever done in her life, but it needed to be done. Michael had been right. Sean wasn’t the same man she had married. He wasn’t even the same man who had protected them from the intruders. What he was now was a shell with everything inside rotting. That didn’t give her a right to kill him, but she saw no other choice.
Sean told her with confidence that the three of them had a food supply that would last them at least a year. He made it that way. He murdered Andrew, poisoning him and allowing his windpipe to collapse. Used the medicine designed to stabilize a seizure and relax his son’s body so it didn’t become so stressed that his brain had an aneurism. But when someone wasn’t having a seizure attack, it could stop the major organs from functioning. Sean knew this, and he used that knowledge to murder the boy.
One day, the food would get really low. He wasn’t the kind of man anymore to sacrifice his wellbeing for anything. He would kill them, she was sure. First, he would start with her and then he would kill his son. She knew it wouldn’t be cruel in how he did it, not like making Michael kill his wife, but death was death. As much as she looked forward to Heaven, she couldn’t imagine leaving her son back on Earth, alone, among all the destruction and death. In danger from his own father.
She still loved the man in front of her, or maybe the man he used to be, but she knew he didn’t love her the same way anymore. He loved the idea of her, and when that idea became irreconcilable in his plan for survival, she would be disposable. She knew that. She knew.
She knew.
She ate another chunk of steak and watched her husband chew. Sean always liked his meat salty. He sprinkled a little more onto his steak and took another bite, savoring it. Most men don’t get to die eating steak. It was a better death than her brother got.
He had switched the waters earlier. She planned for that. There was a small hairline crack near the top of the spik
ed glass, so she knew which was which. He took a sip from it. It was good that he was drinking it, but she had alternatives if he didn’t. It was a shell game. Put the water out first, and he would be so occupied with it, he wouldn’t consider the other options she might use.
Like putting crushed pills into the salt shaker.
Sean had thought of himself as steps ahead. She had to be better. As hard as that was.
Her husband pulled up his napkin and wiped the meat juice off the corners of his lips. “This might be the best thing I have ever tasted,” he said.
“I’m glad,” she said, taking another bite.
It would take a while for the sleeping pills to work. Longer than the duration of this meal. She would have to occupy him, make him think the symptoms were natural. If he got even the least bit suspicious, he would resist the sleep and his paranoid mind would jump to the right conclusions: that Elise had done it.
He slowed. “Is there something interesting about your plate?” Sean asked, swallowing a bite.
She looked up at him, but couldn’t keep the tear from forming along the edge of her eye. “Just thinking.”
“About?”
About you dying. About the grand sin I’m committing. “About things.”
He nodded. “About things.”
“I don’t want to ruin the moment.”
He took her hand and came around the coffee table. This was it. What had to be done. Her heart hastened, and she sensed her calm exterior withering. It wasn’t just about what she would do, but what came after. How this was the last time. She had thought it would be easier. He was murderous. He was a monster.
And she loved him.
So she relaxed into his arms and kissed his mouth. A few minutes later they were naked, bodies pressing against one another under the thick blankets. When he entered her, she couldn’t stop the tears. He paused, said: “You okay?”