The East End

by Jason Allen

  He’d wait to pull the trigger. And by waiting a few extra minutes he might even feel there had been the slightest silver lining to this miserable goddamned weekend, a brief bright spot in his altogether dark and unfulfilled life. He could leave this all behind with less guilt—if, and only if, when he held the barrel to his temple sometime later, he could at least look back on his final hour and know that he’d helped her up first. If he could say to himself that he’d done at least one small, good thing.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Kneeling on the wet grass, Gina hunched forward to shield her phone from the rain and dialed her sponsor. It rang three times, and then she felt as though a shard of glass had wedged in her throat when the voice-mail recording kicked on. She squeezed her eyelids closed, breathing in deeply. She didn’t want to leave a message, sure as hell didn’t have any idea how to sum everything up in thirty seconds or less, but then her phone buzzed right when the recording ended with a beep, and she pressed the icon to answer the call-back from Maryanne.

  “Glad you called, hon. How’d the rest of your day go?”

  Gina responded with a half snort, half shriek sort of exhausted laugh. “Well,” she slurred, “the biggest news is that my boss just fired me.” She couldn’t keep from sobbing into the phone as she went on. “But there’s a lot more that’s happened since I talked to you aside from being let go from the job I’ve had for the past twelve years. It’s all gone to shit. Sheila had every reason to fire me.”

  “Calm down, hon. What happened?”

  “It’s a lot to catch you up on, but basically I got drunk and took a bunch of pills during the past two days here. I’m drunk and stoned on their property right now and I can’t even decide how I’m going to get home. I guess I’ll ask my son to drive me. At least the rain just stopped, but I’m already wet.”

  “It’s good that you called. We can figure this all out together.”

  “I’m sorry to be bothering you with this, and sorry I didn’t call before I drank. I’m sorry to you and to everyone else who’s been around me lately for being such a fucking mess. I wouldn’t blame you if you fired me, too.”

  Maryanne said something that Gina sensed was an attempt to comfort her, but she didn’t hear the actual words since a man’s voice had just called out to her from behind. She turned and fell onto her side, the wet grass slippery as she fought gravity and tried to resituate herself on her knees. With her head angled she squinted up at Leo Sheffield, who for some reason stood a few yards away from her barefoot and bare-chested and dressed in nothing but a loosely tied robe.

  He waved at her as he approached and repeated what she thought she’d just heard him say: “You’re not fired.”

  Maryanne had continued talking, but Gina cut her off and said she’d call her back, her own voice sounding so small, as though she were half-asleep and just barely able to piece together her words after awakening from an unsettling dream. She clicked off, lowered the phone from her ear and managed to kneel once more, staring up at Leo while he stared down at her.

  “How long were you listening?”

  “Long enough,” he said, helping her up.

  “I deserve to be fired.”

  “Whether you deserve it or not, you’re not going anywhere unless you want to. I need you. Forget what Sheila said. You’ve got this job for life if you want it for that long. You’ve looked out for me plenty. I’m glad to return the favor now.”

  “Mr. Sheffield, I—”

  “Save it, I know what you’re going to say. But I’m the one who should be thanking you. You have no idea how much of a relief it is to focus on someone else right now. I’ve been in a very dark place this weekend, as you know, though particularly tonight. I suppose we both have, huh?” He paused to reach out to her and placed his hand on her shoulder. “Strange as it might seem, seeing you so upset and coming down here to see if I could help has just helped me.”

  “I do need help,” she said, and brought both hands to her face.

  Leo hugged her while she kept her face covered. “Hey, hey... Easy...” he said, and after a minute or so she let her hands down and ran a finger under each eye. Leo pushed some wet strands of hair from her face, left his hand where her neck met her jaw and kissed her cheek. “You’re going to be okay,” he said.

  She sniffed, staring up at him with watery eyes before she wrapped her arms around him and rested her head on his shoulder. They hugged like that for quite some time, the unexpected comfort allowing Gina to stand upright, even as they shuddered together and turned toward the lake at the first explosion and the bright flashes in the sky.

  Another crack and thunderous boom was followed by a shimmering sound, the two of them standing side by side, speechless during the next few minutes of artillery shell bangs and brilliant colors igniting high above and reflecting off the lake water.

  Gina had been lulled into a much calmer state, semi-mesmerized by the streaks and flashes and winking cinders falling all across the sky. But then she looked to the side as she saw something moving, someone running way off in the distance. She strained to focus, realizing as she wiped rainwater from her face that it was Corey. Her eyes followed him racing between the sculptures toward the gates while she stood in the rain like a mannequin, and in the next moment she noticed another figure running the opposite direction. It was Angelique, running toward him with a bag over her shoulder.

  Gina muttered, “What the fuck are they doing?” Then everything suddenly telegraphed back, and in the brief space between the next burst of fireworks, she lost sight of her son. A man’s voice had shouted her name. She blinked water from her lashes, saw the man moving toward her before she recognized his face. But a moment later it was all too clear.

  Ray stomped closer. Shouting like a lunatic. Although his voice had been mostly swallowed by the fireworks bursting overhead, Gina wished she hadn’t heard what he’d said.

  He’d shouted for her to get her ass over to him, and for her half-dressed boss to turn around.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  As far as Leo was concerned, the man was a stranger. Roughly twenty feet away, he approached with uneven steps and kept shouting, but Leo couldn’t hear him over the steady procession of fireworks. The longer Leo looked at him the less he believed that he’d ever seen this man before, and yet he couldn’t be sure because saturated shades of green and purple and red continued flashing all around, throwing shadows down from the oak branches.

  The man moved closer, jabbing his finger at them, accusing one or both of them of some offense, shouting wordless threats that couldn’t contend with the bomb blasts over the lake. After a few more steps, he’d closed in enough for Leo to decipher from the movements of his mouth that he was shouting Gina’s name. A pause between explosions, and then Leo finally heard what the wild-eyed madman had been so hell-bent on saying to him, finally realized that this was the husband Gina had been borrowing money for and bailing out.

  He shouted at him once more to let Gina go. Before Leo could think of how to respond, Gina moved a step away from his shoulder and shouted back, “Goddamn it, Ray, what part of us being done don’t you understand!”

  Gina’s husband continued stomping toward them, the man Leo had heard only bad things about each time Gina had sheepishly asked him for a small loan. Another burst of sound over the lake coincided with phosphorescent streaks raining down, flashing red across Ray’s face.

  He didn’t respond to Gina. Instead, he calmly reached back. And in the next flash, he brought his hand up—and in the next, he leveled the gun at Leo’s chest.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Leo raised his hand from his bathrobe pocket and squeezed the trigger the same instant that Ray fired at him. As if suddenly immersed in a time-lapse video, through a series of flashing shadows and light, his chest opened on his in-breath. He watched Ray’s arms drop to his sides, his eyes filled with pale yellow fire. He’d ceased shouting
, and now stood stock-still, gazing with the same expression of surprise that Henry had had just after Leo abandoned the compressions and mouth-to-mouth and cradled him in the pool. Then, as if his bones had suddenly turned to ash, Ray seemed to crumble in the strobing colors.

  Gina screamed through another series of explosions overhead, though for Leo the volume of the world had begun rapidly turning down, shrinking finally to a needle-tipped sound, a piercing frequency. Then all went silent. His fingers released the gun to the lawn. The man who’d fired at him, Ray, lay on his side a few yards away, his body contorted, his head lolling. Between lazy blinks, his eyes fixed on Leo.

  With his first exhale, Leo coughed. Confused by the way the earth had opened up beneath him, he tasted metal. Warmth spread between his ribs as he looked down. His fingers pressed against his chest, his fingers wet against petals of a blooming rose.

  So far to fall. So many words unsaid. Still on his feet, yet falling—shot—time stuttering on now at one one-thousandth its normal pace—eye blinks, camera shutters, one giant aperture closing against the flares of fire—the holiday weekend, the reason for the fireworks, the violins and cellos—heat lightning—silence and light—his father had been wrong—no one survives.

  Say goodbye, Leo—to Sheila, to the kids, to the woman staring down...

  “I signed the letter—it’s upstairs,” he said to Gina, whose screams continued, silenced by the fires raining down. “You won’t need—to worry anymore,” he said, sinking deeper. Slow, shallow breaths. His lungs filling with blood. Choking, drowning. Exactly this, he believed he deserved. Each of us, he believed now, gets what we deserve. The pain left him. His hand slid from his chest. Floating now, out there on the water, a swan.

  He would move Henry somewhere safe, soon. But for now, the sky needed to explode some more. Shatter more stars across his eyes. The light, like a womb, pulsing all around. Light. Pulsing.

  His heart beat. Once more.

  And then.

  Nothing but light.

  MEMORIAL DAY

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Police and fire department vehicles blocked a long section of Gin Lane all morning and afternoon. The guests gone, only the family occupied the house while a slew of police milled about in the vicinity of Leo’s murder. The two detectives from the city had planned to arrive midafternoon to question him about Henry, but news of the violent event during the fireworks quickly spread and they’d headed out before dawn, now under the assumption that their investigation into Henry’s disappearance aligned with Ray. Leo now lay in the morgue. Ray had undergone emergency surgery and lay heavily sedated in a hospital bed, his wrist cuffed to a rail. Meanwhile, two uniformed officers continued redirecting traffic away from the Sheffield estate, offering no information for the local residents and vacationers who asked what all the commotion was about.

  At this point, Gina had answered the detectives’ questions to their satisfaction. Corey and Angelique were still the only other two people who knew that a body still lay on the property, and they were long gone, driving west on I-70 and already closing in on another time zone. Soon enough, though, the detectives would request a K-9 unit on-site. And soon after, the trained dog would lead its human partner toward the far corner of the vast Sheffield property, the detectives and a convoy of officers trailing behind. Soon after that, the dog would yelp and tug on its leash and direct them all into the pines, sniffing over the root-gnarled ground while pulling, seeking to run the rest of the way. And then the mound would appear, Henry’s clawed hand and half his face exposed. Detective Faraday would shout for the K-9 officer to hold the dog back, he and his partner would ask the other officers to set up a perimeter and evidence flags beside the scattered debris: the shovel, the bottle, the plastic bag and clothes. Then Faraday would kneel, holding Henry’s photo beside the dead man’s face, and would finally nod to his partner and say, “Yep, it’s him.”

  Later in the day, even before the detectives had their chance to question Ray about Leo’s murder and Henry’s death, a widespread Manson-murder-type fascination would then take hold of most everyone in the area, locals and visitors alike, but the wealthy vacationers would be left especially stunned, speaking of the poor Sheffield man while sitting poolside or in deck chairs or in glass-walled rooms with a view of the ocean, too preoccupied by the notion that they themselves could have been the target of such violence to notice their servants—many of whom, with their own drinks in hand, later recalling what their employers had been saying all day long:

  Can you believe it? Murder, in the Hamptons?

  WEDNESDAY

  2,400 MILES WEST

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Three days after Corey spoke to Gina on the phone and heard about Leo’s death and Ray’s hospitalization, he and Angelique continued adding more distance between themselves and the Sheffield estate. Still driving west just after sunrise, after another few hours of sleep in the truck at a roadside rest area somewhere in Utah, Angelique leaned over from the passenger seat and rested her head on Corey’s shoulder while he kept both hands on the wheel, both of them looking through the windshield with tired eyes as they wound their way along the curvy two-lane road, the final stretch to Bryce Canyon.

  For the past mile or two they’d been the only ones on the road, cruising with the headlights still lit as they faced the fading sunrise colors hovering above alien hills. At the next curve, Angelique sat up and pointed out the window at a crumbling hillside and the rock formations jutting up from the orange sand. Corey slowed and downshifted into first gear, gazing out at three surreal pillars of perfectly stacked boulders looming over the shoulder of the road, each of the massive, fiery-red rocks rounded around the edges but flat, like mammoth skipping stones.

  “Let’s stop here and get out,” she said.

  Corey nodded slowly, his eyes still fixed on the martian landscape where she’d pointed.

  “Damn,” he said, stepping out of the truck and doing his best to rub the sleep from his eyes. “Thanks for suggesting that we come here.”

  They leaned against the front bumper between the headlights and Corey slung his arm over her shoulder while she leaned into him. He thought about his most recent call with Gina, how she’d put him on the spot about whether he’d been the one who’d knocked Leo over the head. He’d admitted to it, told her the whole story, in fact, and after a pause she’d said, “Promise me you won’t ever tell anyone else about that.” Although he’d agreed and said he understood why no one else should ever know, she made him promise again after updating him on all the drama, informing him that Leo’s funeral would take place later in the week, and that the detectives didn’t believe Henry had died in an accident. Ray was their number one suspect, quite possibly their only suspect. They’d questioned her about him, asked if she thought he might have come to the estate earlier in the week to kill Leo but had run into Henry instead. Although he enjoyed hearing that Ray was facing life in prison, now that he and Angelique were thousands of miles away, Corey heard his mother’s news from the Hamptons as details from a past life, as an epilogue to a story that no longer had anything to do with him.

  He huddled with Angelique against the truck bumper in the chilly morning air. Neither of them spoke for a few minutes. Then he looked up, and Angelique angled her head back as well, as a hawk swooped overhead and screeched on its way over the hill. They turned to face each other at the same time.

  “Amazing, huh?” Angelique said. “And this isn’t even the actual canyon. It’s just the road that takes us there.”

  “Incredible. Sorry you didn’t get to come here with your mom.”

  She looked at him, seeming to study his eyes, then answered with her head on his shoulder. “She would have liked you.”

  Corey smiled and stared at the curve in the road as a wave of heat entered his cheeks.

  “You ready to drive the rest of the way?”

  “Yeah, but sinc
e there’s a garbage can over there, let’s first get rid of some of the trash.”

  They each opened a door and started collecting the empty bottles and cans, candy bar wrappers and empty plastic bags, and when they were about finished Angelique pulled a crumpled paper from beneath her seat. “What’s this?”

  It took Corey a second to recognize it. “Oh, that’s an essay I wrote just before I graduated,” he said, realizing he hadn’t read it or thought about it since he’d parked at the ocean the night he broke into the Sheffield estate and had to hide from her under Tiffany’s bed.

  He jogged over to the garbage can and dropped the trash inside, and when he hopped back into the truck and they each shut their doors, she asked him to wait. She was looking down at the wrinkled paper. “What are these lines on the other side of the page?”

  “Nothing, just a poem I started a while back.”

  “Full disclosure,” she said, “I just read it. And I like it a lot.”

  “Thanks, but it’s nothing really.”

  “How about I read it out loud?”

  Without giving Corey a chance to answer, she spoke for him by clearing her throat and snapping the paper taut before her eyes.

  This doesn’t even seem real, he thought as he drove on, watching the landscape change with each curve, and then the hawk returning, soaring high overhead, circling back and diving across both lanes just a few car lengths ahead.

  “You ready?” she said.

  He nodded and kept driving slowly down the final road that would lead them to the canyon she’d shown him pictures of and spoken so much about during their cross-country drive, the inside-out caves, the sea of spires like thousands of stone cathedrals huddled together, all carved from rain. He couldn’t wait to get there, though he also felt they had all the time in the world now that she’d started reading in the voice he’d heard calling out to him from deep within, for all his life. He listened, her voice filling the truck cab with his words.