The Way It Ends

by Marnie Vinge

  His smile crawled under my skin and stayed there like a disease. Tom was a chemical burn that couldn’t be washed off. I wouldn’t shake him for years to come, if ever. In one of those moments where I felt enveloped in his expression, he stood and walked to the bookcase behind me.

  “I have another book you might like,” he moved the other chair to have better access to the bookshelf. I turned in my seat and watched. He stood on his toes and pulled a worn copy of something from the top shelf. He handed it to me.

  “Sophie’s Choice,” he said. “Another of my favorites. I think you’ll like it. But don’t expect to feel good after reading it,” he added with a smile.

  “My favorite kind,” I laughed in return.

  He stood, his arms supporting his weight as he leaned against the bookshelf. He stared at me for a moment longer than felt comfortable and I could sense the weight of his gaze as it traveled over my body. I stood from the chair.

  “I should—” I said.

  He grabbed my wrist lightly.

  “Don’t,” he pleaded.

  I looked up into his eyes. The blue seemed lighter, more like the sky, in that moment. He guided my hand up slowly and I felt myself bend to his will. I relaxed against his touch. He brought the inside of my wrist to his mouth. His breath fanned across the skin, hot and alive. He kissed me there and I felt the strength of will to leave that room evaporate out of my pores into nothingness. He could have led me into hell just then and I’d have gone willingly.

  He moved his kisses down to the tips of my fingers and I traced his lips. His mouth parted and I stroked the side of his face, rough with stubble. His hand traveled up my arm to my shoulder and down my back. He pulled me into him, our bodies gently meeting between the back of the chair and the bookcase.

  I pressed a hand against his chest and felt his heartbeat. I wanted to turn my head and listen to it. Instead, I kept my eyes locked on his. He leaned down and pressed his lips to mine. The kiss turned into another, and another. Our hands searched for something to grip. Mine found his shoulders and his found my beltloops. He ground his hips against mine and I could feel him hard against me.

  I broke away, breathless.

  “We can’t—”

  “I don’t care,” he said.

  That was all it took.

  We slept together that night. Or made love. Three times. On the desk, in the window, on the floor. Like two teenagers that couldn’t get enough of one another. And when it was over, I lay beside him and placed my head on his chest as I’d wanted to before that first kiss. I listened for his heartbeat as he stroked my bare shoulder.

  Maybe it was the blood pounding in my own head, but I heard nothing.

  BIRDIE

  She wakes to the rhythmic throbbing of her left shoulder. It’s a reminder of what’s transpired in the last few days, and a searing notification that time is running out. Birdie reaches for her upper arm, but her hand makes it no higher than her elbow when pain radiates out from the wound like a collapsing star, blinding her. She moans in the dark room, light obscured by blackout curtains that Vanessa insisted on when she and Tom moved into the house. Something about headaches. For now, Birdie is grateful for them, unsure if she could tolerate the full blast of sunlight that no doubt beats down on the other side of that thin barrier.

  Birdie’s hand falls back to her side and she worries at the knobby fabric of the knitted blanket that covers the rest of her body. Little nubs find their way between her fingers, giving her something to focus on for the moment. The tactile sensation is overwhelming, and she feels her pulse in her fingertips, each beat of her heart reminding her that infection is spreading.

  She needs a doctor. A thought returns to her like a boomerang, thrown out a day earlier: she hasn’t felt the baby move. Its stillness worries her, bringing to mind images of stillbirth, and worse, her own death that seems somehow inextricably linked to the child’s.

  Someone knocks on the door and Birdie attempts to sit up, but her body gives up on her before she can put most of her weight on her uninjured arm. She collapses back into the pillows as the door swings open. Vanessa.

  She moves with a feline grace and shuts the door, sure to close it so softly that it makes no sound. No one knows she’s here.

  “I came to check on you,” she pads on bare feet towards the bed and sits on the edge, her weight shifting the mattress enough that it tugs at Birdie’s wound. She whimpers. “Still in pain, I take it?” No false empathy colors Vanessa’s words.

  “Yes,” Birdie croaks, barely audible. She tries to adjust herself and fails. Vanessa stands and reaches for Birdie, who recoils.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Vanessa laughs. “Why would I do that?”

  Birdie can think of a hundred reasons—a thousand, even. Now, at this woman’s mercy, she regrets every time she crossed her—every time she said bitter and cruel things, every time she took Tom’s time, stolen from Vanessa—and hopes that Vanessa’s compassion will extend beyond the line where Birdie thinks it ends.

  Vanessa reaches down again, and Birdie allows it this time. She readjusts the girl, helping her find a more comfortable position and Vanessa goes back to sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “How are you?” Unlike her earlier inquiry, now Vanessa seems genuinely curious.

  Suspiciously, Birdie answers.

  “Fine,” she says. Her voice almost catches in her throat on the lie. She’s terrified.

  “I’d wager to say that’s not true,” Vanessa ventures slowly, her eyes roaming the room. Birdie wonders if she’s searching for something to report back to Tom. Some way in which Birdie isn’t towing the line. Birdie’s eyes follow Vanessa’s, sweeping the room in search of any evidence that betrays what she feels in her heart.

  Birdie wanted to leave before the shooting. She’d kept secret her desire to leave the ranch—to leave Tom—but once she became pregnant, it was an impossibility. Tom wouldn’t have let her leave any way but feet first.

  Birdie says nothing as Vanessa’s eyes return to her own.

  “It’s all part of the plan,” Vanessa says. Her eyes are two hollow orbs, their darkness sucking Birdie in like a black hole. The gravitational pull she feels at Vanessa’s side is catastrophic. It’s the kind of force that could destroy worlds.

  She goes on and Birdie listens, her captive audience.

  “I know it doesn’t make sense to you,” Vanessa says. “But it will. All of this will have meaning when it’s over. But I think you know why this happened to you.”

  Birdie shivers.

  “Sin,” Vanessa says. “I know Tom isn’t fond of the word, but it’s as real as anything else. A living, breathing force that moves on us all. And it’s moved on you, Birdie. I can sense it. I feel it in your aura.”

  Birdie knows what Vanessa’s implying. And she isn’t wrong. If she’d never gotten involved with Tom, if she’d never come here, there wouldn’t be a bullet lodged in her shoulder and a lifeless baby interred in her womb.

  “How’s the baby?” Vanessa asks after a pause. She locks her eyes on Birdie’s, a human lie detector.

  “Fine,” Birdie says and looks away. She grimaces as pain snakes it way from her wound down her spine and grabs hold of her core.

  “Good,” Vanessa says, her tone holding a threat that she finally voices. “It would be a shame if something were to happen to the child. Especially for your sake.”

  Vanessa reaches out a hand and takes Birdie’s in her own.

  “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you,” Vanessa professes. Birdie has her doubts. If the shoe were on the other foot, she knows she would harbor a lot of ill will towards the woman. It’s hard to imagine that she doesn’t hold a grudge after so many years. After what her life has become. And part of that is Birdie’s doing. “I just want this baby to be safe,” Vanessa says. “And you, too, of course,” she adds as an afterthought with a vicious smile.

  She stands and retreats out of the room, closing the door behind hers
elf silently, her exit reminiscent of one of Dracula’s brides. Birdie is unsure for a moment if Vanessa was ever even really there. She stares at the ceiling, a prisoner in a fortress that is partially of her own making.

  Birdie wonders what’s being said about the situation in the outside world. She wonders if this has made the news—if her name has come up. And if it has, she wonders who might have heard it. Who among the people that she used to know might have seen a broadcast and thought, Why, I used to know that girl. How did she get there?

  She’s not sure she has an answer for them.

  Mostly, though, she wonders if anyone will care at all.

  IONE

  Sand crunches under my slip-on flat as I exit my car. The asphalt is still hot to the touch, no doubt. A fine grit of dust rests on top, giving the parking lot of the Cactus Flower Motel the texture of sandpaper against the soles of my shoes.

  The Cactus Flower is the last place in town still sporting a lit vacancy sign. The sun sets above the horizon, and the moon is ready to come out and provide some ghostly illumination to these badlands. Illumination that I’m sure will provide ample information for predators in the area. I’m still forty-five minutes from Kenton, according to my GPS. But this town, Guymon, is crawling with people who I am certain do not reside here. They’re reporters, mostly. Some law enforcement taking a break from what I’m sure they’re afraid is going to turn into a siege.

  I walk across the lot, bag over my arm, ready to check in and reserve whatever room they might have left. A little annex, no bigger than my pantry, stands just beneath the breezeway like you might see in a motel in an old movie. For effect, a tumbleweed rolls across my path. I kick it and help it along.

  “How can I help you?” a disembodied voice floats up out of a tiny speaker lodged in the plexiglass front of what functions as a front desk.

  “A room, please,” I say, unsure of who I’m speaking with.

  A short, fat woman with glasses attached to a nylon cord that drapes over her shoulders stands up behind the desk. Her face is flushed, and she holds up a pen.

  “Got it!” she proclaims in a voice that would befit a witch in a children’s story.

  I smile at her victory. Some days the small ones are all we get.

  “So, a room, huh? You a journalist?” she asks and sits down behind the desk.

  “Something like that,” I say.

  “Got a lot of your kind out here since the other night,” she thumbs through some papers. “I’ve got one room left. Number thirteen, at the end over there,” she points past me to the far side of the parking lot. The last remaining room is also the furthest from her phantom toll booth. The perfect place for a solitary woman to be staying if she’s in the mood for an abduction.

  “I’ll take it,” I smile at her. “How much?”

  “Twenty-three for a night,” she says.

  I reach into my bag and produce enough money for a few days. She gives me my change along with a retro-style keychain with a physical key attached with a ring. She smiles and goes back to a crossword that she’d been doing before her pen vanished just before I arrived. I step out from under the breezeway and walk over to my home away from home.

  The key sticks in the door and I’m forced to rattle it loose before I enter the darkened room. I flip the switch on the wall and light explodes across the place from a too-bright and too-cool fluorescent fixture mounted to the ceiling.

  If there were roaches, they’ve scattered by now.

  A strand of the worn carpet snags on the toe of my shoe as I shuffle inside. After almost tripping, I sit my bag on the nightstand beside a rotary phone and a phone book. I open the nightstand just to check—yes, there it is: the motel standard Bible. It makes me think of Tom for a moment. I brush my fingers over the gold-leaf lettering and pull them away. I think about the hospice patients I’ve visited with in the last year and how they might have reacted to the text in Tom’s book. Encouragement to disconnect from family and friends would seem unthinkable to anyone staring down the barrel of a flatlining heart monitor.

  I close the drawer and grab the remote for an ancient TV that probably weighs two-hundred pounds. A relic now, it once would have been a prized commodity in the world of tube televisions. The screen flickers on, the color a little off and the image distorted in the middle, making the characters from Frasier seem to bend at the waist and lean slightly to the right. I turn it off and place the remote back on the nightstand.

  I reach for the phone book. A slim volume, its contents don’t take up more than one-hundred pages. I look through the names in black and white and when I reach the end, I flip to the yellow business ads and numbers. The pickings are even slimmer here. The list of restaurants in town leaves much to be desired for an out-of-towner used to the big city. I notice, however, that Pizza Hut claims to be open past eight on weekends. And it’s Saturday night in the big town, as beloved Gary England would have said.

  I grab my wallet and keys and head over to the free-standing pizza joint across the street. I jaywalk and it isn’t a problem—there aren’t enough cars passing down the main street for me to impede traffic.

  Every table in the place holds the maximum capacity of guests. I decide that if I can’t find a table by the time my order is up, I’ll take it back to the motel. Feeling optimistic, though, I stand in the corner and wait for a booth to clear. Finally, one does.

  I snag it and scoot in, surprised by the sheer amount of people making the place crawl. It would be nothing for a Pizza Hut in the city to draw a crowd like this. At least back in the 90s. Now, I’m not so sure if it’s a regular occurrence. At any rate, the amount of people inside the restaurant is disproportionate to the amount of people that I saw outside. Guymon is a place where they roll the sidewalks up at a certain hour every night—weekend or not—and I’m willing to wager that most of the people in here with me aren’t locals.

  I pull out my cell phone, still able to get a signal out here, and check my messages despite the fact that I didn’t have any the last several times I checked. Part of me hopes that when I open the texting app, there will be a message waiting for me from Wes. Come home. I was wrong. Even though he has no idea that I’m here.

  When I don’t find a message, I lock the phone and lay it down in front of me, steeple my hands and look around the restaurant. It occurs to me then that the place is a split crowd: journalists, most likely, and obvious law enforcement still in uniform or sporting polos with their respective agency’s logo on them.

  I notice that the booth in front of me holds a group of four, and each of them wears either a half-shed suit or a dark navy shirt with FBI screen printed on the shoulder blades. One of them wipes grease from his fingers as the other three finish off the rest of two large pepperoni pizzas.

  “This guy they’ve called in—what did you say his name was?” the fastidious one asks.

  “Wyatt Davis,” another says through a mouthful of pizza.

  “Real hotshot from Virginia. Still wet behind the ears,” says one of the other two.

  “I heard he negotiated a hostage situation in Berlin a couple of years ago. That one that was in the news. Guy driving a van threatening to run it into a café.”

  “I heard the same story. Thinks he’s hot shit.”

  I don’t know the name; I don’t think anyone would have. But I know the event. Two years prior, a guy had hijacked an airport taxi van full of American tourists and threatened to run it into a café in Berlin. Motivated by his inability to find a woman willing to sleep with him, he identified with the incel, or involuntarily celibate, community. This guy—the one whose name I didn’t recognize—had managed to talk him into surrendering. No one died. The fact that he’s been brought in on this jars me.

  I bring my phone up once more and unlock the screen to give me something to do with my hands and somewhere to look other than at the men in the booth in front of me. I want to keep listening.

  “This Wolsieffer guy’s a character,” says one of
them.

  “A real Jim Jones type,” says the clean freak.

  “You think he’s gonna have them drink the Kool-Aid?” one of the others laughs.

  The rest of them reciprocate the noise, but it is hollow. There is something in the question that makes me think they believe this is a real possibility. Gallows humor goes a long way to combating our ever-present knowledge that annihilation is just a hair’s breadth away.

  After a moment of silence at the table, the one who’d compared Tom to Jim Jones speaks.

  “If he doesn’t let that pregnant girl out, three deaths will be on his hands,” he says.

  The table falls silent. My fingers freeze and hover over the touch screen of my phone. That pregnant girl. Birdie. She has a name and I know it. She has a face that I’ve seen scrunched into concentration or relaxed in a laugh. She is more than just a news headline to me. She’s the whole reason I’m here.

  By the time my pizza comes, the FBI agents have cleared out, leaving behind a mess for the girl behind the counter to tend to now that things have slowed down at the restaurant.

  “What time do you guys close?” I ask her between bites when she comes to wipe down their table.

  “Normally, an hour ago,” she smiles. “But things are a little out of whack right now. Owner wants us to be good hosts for the out-of-town folks. Like you,” she adds the last with a bitter smile that indicates she’d rather be spending her Saturday night anywhere but here. I have news for her: there isn’t anywhere else to be in this town.

  I don’t return her smile. Instead, I hurry to finish my pizza and wipe my hands on my jeans. It’s a habit that my mother has tried to break time and again well into my adult years. It’s a hanger-on from childhood that I think a therapist might have a field day with. Something about comfort, I suppose. Or maybe control. I’m big on control.

  I clear out of the restaurant not long after finishing my pizza. I leave a tip on the table and walk back across the street to the Cactus Flower. The sun has officially sunk below the horizon, blanketing the little town in a darkness that I’ve never known in the city. There are still streetlights to pollute the sky, but not by much. I wonder what it would be like to be somewhere without any light pollution at all. And I know that the following night, I’ll get my chance to find out.