The End of it All

by Ed Gorman

  "That's some great relationship you've got there."

  "It's pretty sick and believe me, I know it."

  I felt tired standing in the shadowy bedroom, the only light the December quarter moon above the shaggy pines. "Kendra—"

  "Could we just lie down together?" She sounded tired, too.

  "Of course."

  "And not do anything, I mean?"

  "I know what you mean. And I think that's a wonderful idea."

  We must have lain there six, seven minutes before we started making love, and then it was the most violent love we'd ever made, her hurling herself at me, inflicting pleasure and pain in equal parts. It was a purgation I badly needed.

  "She's always been like this."

  "Your mother?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Competitive, you mean?"

  "Uh-huh. Even when I was little. If somebody gave me a compliment, she'd get mad and say, 'Well, it's not hard for little girls to look good. The trick is to stay beautiful as you get older.'"

  "Didn't your dad ever notice?"

  She laughed bitterly. "My father? Are you kidding? He'd usually come home late and then finish getting bombed and then climb in bed next to me and feel me up."

  "God."

  Bitter sigh. "But I don't give a shit. Not anymore. Fuck them. I come into my own inheritance in six months—from my paternal grandfather—and then I'm moving out of the manse and leaving them to all their silly fucking games."

  "Is now a good time to tell you I love you?"

  "You know the crazy goddamned thing, Roger?"

  "What's that?"

  "I really love you, too. For the first time in my life, I actually love somebody."

  On the night of 20 Jan, six weeks later, I went to bed early with a new Sue Grafton novel. Kendra had begged off our date because of a head cold. I'm enough of a hypochondriac that I wasn't unhappy about not seeing her.

  The call came just before two a.m., long after I was sleeping and just at the point where waking is difficult.

  But get up I did and listen at length to Amy's wailing. It took me a long time to understand what the exact message her sobs meant to convey.

  The funeral took place on a grim snowy day when the harsh, numbing winds rocked the pallbearers as they carried the gleaming silver coffin from hearse to graveside. The land lay bleak as a tundra.

  Later, in the country club where a luncheon was being served, an old high school friend came up and said, "I bet when they catch him he's a nigger."

  "I guess it wouldn't surprise me."

  "Oh, hell, yes. Poor goddamned guy is sleeping in his own bed when some jig comes in and blasts the hell out of him and then goes down the hall and shoots poor Kendra, too. They say she'll never be able to walk or talk again. Just sit in a frigging wheelchair all the time. I used to be a liberal back in the sixties or seventies, but I've had enough of their bullshit by now. I'll tell you that I've had their bullshit right up to here, in fact."

  Amy came late. In the old days one might have accused her of doing so so she could make an entrance. But now she had a perfectly good reason. She walked with a cane, and walked slowly. The intruder who'd shot up the place that night, and stolen more than $75,000 in jewelry, had shot her in the shoulder and the leg, apparently leaving her for dead. Just as he'd left Kendra for dead.

  Amy looked pretty damned good in her black dress and veil. The black gave her a mourning kind of sexiness.

  A line formed. She spent the next hour receiving the members of that line just as she'd done at the mortuary the night before. There were tears and laughter with tears and curses with tears. The very old looked perplexed by it all—the world made no sense anymore; here you were a rich person and people still broke into your house and killed you right in your bed—and middle-aged people looked angry (i.e., damned niggers) and the young looked bored (Randy being the drunk who'd always wobbled around pinching all the little girls on their bottoms—who cared he was dead, the pervert?).

  I was the last person to go through the line, and when she saw me, Amy shook her head and began sobbing. "Poor, poor Kendra," she said. "I know how much she means to you, Roger."

  "I'd like to visit her tonight if I could. At the hospital."

  Beneath her veil, she sniffled some more. "I'm not sure that's a good idea. The doctor says she really needs her rest. And Vic said she looked very tired this morning."

  The bullet had entered her head just below her left temple. By rights she should have died instantly. But the gods were playful and let her live—paralyzed.

  "Vic? Who's Vic?"

  "Our nurse. Oh, I forgot. I guess you've never met him, have you? He just started Sunday. He's really a dear. One of the surgeons recommended him. You'll meet him sometime."

  I met him four nights later at Kendra's bedside.

  He was strapping arrogant was our blond Vic, born to a body and face that no amount of surgery or training could ever duplicate, a natural Tarzan to my own tricked-up one. He looked as if he wanted to tear off his dark and expensive suit and head directly back to the jungle to beat up a lion or two. He was also the proud owner of a sneer that was every bit as imposing as his body.

  "Roger, this is Vic."

  He made a point of crushing my hand. I made a point of not grimacing.

  The three of us then stared down at Kendra in her bed, Amy leaning over and kissing Kendra tenderly on the forehead. "My poor baby. If only I could have saved her—"

  That was the first time I ever saw Vic touch her, and I knew instantly, in the proprietary way he did, that something was wrong. He probably was a nurse, but to Amy he was also something far more special and intimate.

  They must have sensed my curiosity because Vic dropped his hand from her shoulder and stood proper as an altar boy staring down at Kendra.

  Amy shot me a quick smile, obviously trying to read my thoughts.

  But I lost interest quickly. It was Kendra I wanted to see. I bent over the bed and took her hand and touched it to my lips. I was self-conscious at first, Amy and Vic watching me, but then I didn't give a damn. I loved her and I didn't give a damn at all. She was pale and her eyes were closed and there was a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead. Her head was swathed in white bandages of the kind they always used in Bogart movies, the same ones that Karloff also used in The Mummy. I kissed her lips and I froze there because the enormity of it struck me. Here was the woman I loved, nearly dead, indeed should have been dead given the nature of her wound, and behind me, paying only a kind of lip service to her grief, was her mother.

  A doctor came in and told Amy about some tests that had been run today. Despite her coma, she seemed to be responding to certain stimuli that had had no effect on her even last week.

  Amy started crying, presumably in a kind of gratitude, and then the doctor asked to be alone with Kendra, and so we went out into the hall to wait.

  "Vic is moving in with us," Amy said. "He'll be there when Kendra gets home. She'll have help twenty-four hours a day. Won't that be wonderful?"

  Vic watched me carefully. The sneer never left his face. He looked the way he might if he'd just noticed a piece of dog mess on the heel of his shoe. It was not easy being a big, blond god. There were certain difficulties with staying humble.

  "So you know Kendra's surgeon," I said to Vic.

  "What?"

  "Amy said that the surgeon had recommended you to her."

  They glanced at each other and then Vic said, "Oh, right, the surgeon, yes." He gibbered like a Miss America contestant answering a question about patriotism.

  "And you're moving in?"

  He nodded with what he imagined was solemnity. If only he could do something about the sneer. "I want to help in any way I can."

  "How sweet."

  If he detected my sarcasm, he didn't let on.

  The doctor came out and spoke in soft, whispered sentences filled with jargon. Amy cried some more tears of gratitude.

  "Well," I said. "I guess I'd bett
er be going. Give you some quality time with Kendra."

  I kissed Amy on the cheek and shook Vic's proffered hand. He notched his grip down to mid-level. Even hulks have sentimental moments. He even tried a little acting, our Vic. "The trick will be to get her to leave before midnight."

  "She stays late, eh?" I said.

  Amy kept her eyes downcast, as befitted a saint who was being discussed.

  "Late? She'd stay all night if they'd let her. You can't tear her away."

  "Well, she and Kendra have a very special relationship."

  Amy caught the sarcasm. Anger flashed in her eyes but then subsided. "I want to get back to her," she said. And Mother Theresa couldn't have said it any more believably.

  I took the elevator down to the ground floor, then took the emergency stairs back up to the fourth floor. I waited in an alcove down the hall. I could see Kendra's door, but if I was careful neither Amy nor Vic would be able to see me.

  They left ten minutes after I did. Couldn't drag Amy away from her daughter's bedside, eh?

  In the next six weeks, Kendra regained consciousness, learned how to manipulate a pencil haltingly with her right hand, and got tears in her eyes every time I came through the door. She still couldn't speak or move her lower body or left side, but I didn't care. I loved her more than ever and in so doing proved to myself that I wasn't half as superficial as I'd always suspected. That's a good thing to know about yourself—that at age forty-four you have at least the potential for becoming an adult.

  She came home in May, after three intense months of physical rehab and deep depression over her fate, a May of butterflies and cherry blossoms and the smells of steak on the grill on the sprawling grounds behind the vast English Tudor. The grounds ran four acres of prime land, and the house, divided into three levels, included eight bedrooms, five full baths, three half baths, a library, and a solarium. There was also a long, straight staircase directly off the main entrance. Amy had it outfitted with tracks so Kendra could get up and down in her wheelchair.

  We became quite a cheery little foursome, Kendra and I, Amy and Vic. Four or five nights a week we cooked out and then went inside to watch a movie on the big-screen television set in the party room. Three nurses alternated eight-hour shifts so that whenever Kendra—sitting silently in her wheelchair in one of her half-dozen pastel-colored quilted robes—needed anything, she had it. Amy made a cursory fuss over Kendra at least twice an evening, and Vic went to fetch something unimportant, apparently in an attempt to convince me he really was a working male nurse.

  More and more I slipped out early from the brokerage, spending the last of the day with Kendra in her room. She did various kinds of physical therapy with the afternoon nurse, but she never forgot to draw me something and then offer it up to me with the pride of a little girl pleasing her daddy. It always touched me, this gesture, and despite some early doubts that I'd be able to be her husband—I'd run away and find somebody strong and sound of limb; I hadn't had all that plastic surgery for nothing, had I?—I learned that I loved her more than ever. She brought out a tenderness in me that I rather liked. Once again I felt there was at least some vague hope that I'd someday become an adult. We watched TV or I read her interesting items from the newspaper (she liked the nostalgia pieces the papers sometimes ran) or I just told her how much I loved her. "Not good for you," she wrote on her tablet one day and then pointed at her paralyzed legs. And then broke into tears. I knelt at her feet for a full hour, till the shadows were long and purple, and thought how crazy it all was. I used to be afraid that she'd leave me—too young, too good-looking, too strong-willed, only using me to get back at her mother—and now she had to worry about some of the same things. In every way I could, I tried to assure her that I'd never leave her, that I loved her in ways that gave me meaning and dignity for the first time in my life.

  Hot summer came, the grass scorching brown, night fires like the aftermath of bombing sorties in the dark hills behind the mansion. It was on one of these nights, extremely hot, Vic gone someplace, the easily tired Kendra just put to bed, that I found Amy waiting for me in my car.

  She wore startling white short-shorts and a skimpy halter that barely contained her chewy-looking breasts.

  She sat on the passenger side. She had a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  "Remember me, sailor?"

  "Where's lover boy?"

  "You don't like him, do you?"

  "Not much."

  "He thinks you're afraid of him."

  "I'm afraid of rattlesnakes, too."

  "How poetic." She inhaled her cigarette, exhaled a plume of blue against the moonlit sky. I'd parked at the far end of the pavement down by the three-stall garage. It was a cul-de-sac of sorts, protected from view by pines. "You don't like me anymore, do you?"

  "No."

  "Why?"

  "I really don't want to go into it, Amy."

  "You know what I did this afternoon?"

  "What?"

  "Masturbated."

  "I'm happy for you."

  "And you know who I thought of?"

  I said nothing.

  "I thought about you. About that night we were together over at your house."

  "I'm in love with your daughter, Amy."

  "I know you don't think I'm worth a shit as a mother."

  "Gee, whatever gave you that idea?"

  "I love her in my way. I mean, maybe I'm not the perfect mother, but I do love her."

  "Is that why you won't put any makeup on her? She's in a fucking wheelchair, and you're still afraid she'll steal the limelight."

  She surprised me. Rather than deny it, she laughed. "You're a perceptive bastard."

  "Sometimes I wish I weren't."

  She put her head back. Stared out the open window. "I wish they hadn't gone to the moon."

  I didn't say anything.

  "They spoiled the whole fucking thing. The moon used to be so romantic. There were so many myths about it, and it was so much fun thinking about. Now it's just another fucking rock." She drained her drink. "I'm lonely, Roger. I'm lonely for you."

  "I'm sure Vic wouldn't want to hear that."

  "Vic's got other women."

  I looked at her. I'd never seen her express real anguish before. I took a terrible delight in it. "After what you and Vic did, you two deserve each other."

  She was quick about it, throwing her drink in my face, then getting out of the car and slamming the door shut. "You bastard! You think I don't know what you meant by that? You think I killed Randy, don't you?"

  "Randy—and tried to kill Kendra. But she didn't die the way she was supposed to when Vic shot her."

  "You bastard!"

  "You're going to pay for it someday, Amy. I promise you that."

  She still had the glass in her hand. She smashed it against my windshield. The safety glass spiderwebbed. She stalked off, up past the pines, into invisibility.

  I didn't bring it up. Kendra did. I'd hoped she'd never figure out who was really the intruder that night. She had a difficult enough time living. That kind of knowledge would only make it harder.

  But figure it out she did. One cool day in August, the first hint of autumn on the air, she handed me what I assumed would be her daily love note.

  VIC

  CHECK

  FIGHT

  $

  I looked at the note and then at her.

  "I guess I don't understand. You want me to check something about Vic?"

  Her darting blue eyes said no.

  I thought a moment: Vic, check. All I could think of was checking Vic out. Then, "Oh, a check? Vic gets some kind of check?"

  The darting blue eyes said yes.

  "Vic was having an argument about a check?"

  Yes.

  "With your mother?"

  Yes.

  "About the amount of the check?"

  Yes.

  "About it not being enough?"

  Yes.

  And then she
started crying. And I knew then that she knew. Who'd killed her father. And who'd tried to kill her.

  I sat with her a long time that afternoon. At one point a fawn came to the edge of the pines. Kendra made a cooing sound when she saw it, tender and excited. Starry night came and through the open window we could hear a barn owl and later a dog that sounded almost like a coyote. She slept sometimes, and sometimes I just told her the stories she liked to hear, "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" and "Rapunzel," stories, she'd once confided, that neither her mother nor her father had ever told her. But this night I was distracted and I think she sensed it. I wanted her to understand how much I loved her. I wanted her to understand that even if there were no justice in the universe at large, at least there was justice in our little corner of it.

  On a rainy Friday night in September, at an apartment Vic kept so he could rendezvous with a number of the young women Amy had mentioned, a tall and chunky man, described as black by two neighbors who got a glimpse of him, broke in and shot him to death. Three bullets. Two directly to the brain. The thief then took more than $5,000 in cash and traveler's checks (Vic having planned to leave for a European vacation in four days).

  The police inquired of Amy, of course, as to how Vic had been acting lately. They weren't as yet quite convinced that his death had been the result of a simple burglary. The police are suspicious people but not, alas, suspicious enough. Just as they ultimately put Randy's death down to a robbery and murder, so they ultimately ruled that Mc had died at the hand of a burglar, too.

  On the day Amy returned from the funeral, I had a little surprise for her, just to show her that things were going to be different from now on.

  That morning I'd brought in a hair stylist and a makeup woman. They spent three hours with Kendra and when they were finished, she was as beautiful as she'd ever been.

  We greeted Amy at the vaulted front door—dressing in black was becoming a habit with her—and when she saw Kendra, she looked at me and said, "She looks pathetic. I hope you know that." She went directly to the den, where she spent most of the day drinking scotch and screaming at the servants.