The Way It Ends

by Marnie Vinge

  A door slammed; footsteps followed the sound out onto the concrete.

  Walking towards them from the patio was Tom.

  “What are you two up to?” Tom asked almost casually. He stepped up to the side of the pool so that he was no longer just a silhouette in the darkness, but instead a person, illuminated by the green light casting upward from the water.

  “Such a nice night for a swim, don’t you think?” he asked sarcastically as he shrugged out of his sweater.

  “Tom, stop,” Vanessa’s words were soft as dough, pliable against Tom’s ire.

  Tom stripped from his pants into his boxers and ripped the buttons out of his shirt in a fury to get it off.

  “Tom, we can talk about this,” Mark said.

  Tom dove, hands parting the water for him and came up only a foot short of Mark. When he stood, he arced back a fist and, Mark, who had turned to face Vanessa again, was blindsided by the punch.

  “Fuck!” Mark howled.

  Blood poured from his nose. The liquid iron feathered into the green water, tendrils reaching out for Vanessa’s waist, reminding her of the wine she’d spilled in the pool the night things started with Mark. She stepped away from it.

  “Tom, stop!” she yelled. Then she rushed towards the two of them, punches flying in both directions. She grabbed Tom’s arm and he shoved her back into the water. She went under.

  When she came up, the fight had stopped. Both men had bloodied noses and lips, each of them had retreated to lick their wounds.

  “Let’s just forget this ever happened,” Vanessa pleaded with both of them.

  “How long has it been going on?” Tom demanded.

  “How long have you been fucking that student of yours?” Vanessa barked back.

  Tom whipped his bloodied face back to look at his wife.

  “I’m not a moron, Tom,” she said.

  “You should go,” Tom got out of the pool and tossed Mark’s pants to him. The legs barely skimmed the surface of the water before Mark caught them.

  “I never want to see you here again, understand?” Tom hissed at his friend as the man redressed in the grass. Mark chanced a look at Vanessa. She wasn’t sure what she read there: regret? Annoyance at himself for getting caught? Or a true heartbreak? Most definitely not the latter.

  No, the true heartbreak was yet to come.

  Vanessa got out of the pool and grabbed her clothes. She walked through the party, unconcerned with the stares from Tom’s students. She went to bed alone that night. And when she woke, she was by herself.

  IONE

  My head pounds like I’ve got the hangover I started this whole adventure with. For a moment, I’m disoriented. The hardwood floor sticks to my cheek as I push up with my arms and peel my face away from it. I reach for the back of my head and can feel a goose egg—the place where Tom hit me with the award. It’s fitting, I suppose.

  I struggle to my feet, grabbing at the desk with shaky hands. I lean over it for a moment, the papers scattered, the phone thrown across the room. My legs are like two pool noodles beneath me, no more supportive or stable. I rub the spot on my head, a fever growing there as blood rushes to the freshly bruised spot. I immediately wonder if I’ve got a concussion.

  When I draw my hand back, there’s blood on my fingertips, fresh and vibrant red. It makes me think of how my mom once told me that bright red blood meant one thing, but dark blood could mean something much worse. At least I’m awake and alive, I tell myself.

  Things could be worse.

  I take a moment to find my footing and it dawns on me that I have to find Birdie. Regardless of what else Tom might do to me, whatever he has in store for that baby is worse.

  I reach for my waistband. The revolver is gone.

  With that in mind, I stumble to the French doors that lead into the study and hover for a moment, listening for anyone that might be lurking in the house, but it’s empty. After a sufficient waiting period, I go for the front door, which stands ajar, and step into the night.

  The desert air is surprisingly cool at night. The porch is completely darkened, a double seated swing to my right creaking in the low light conditions, making an eerie sound, like someone is sitting there, watching me.

  I dismiss the thought, though dread knots itself in my stomach expertly. I look out across the property. Flood lights beam into the compound from over the fence by the road. They’re getting ready. I wonder how ready Tom and his people are for whatever might come next. I wonder for a moment if anyone will die. I think about that day in town, how the word Waco hovered on the periphery of conversation, no one willing to speak it, like it was some sort of curse.

  I step off of the porch and begin walking down the road that leads to the main house. I have no idea where to begin. I hope that I’ll hear something, that Tom won’t sneak up on me in the darkness and take me by surprise and finish what he started in the study. I keep walking in the direction of the main road.

  And I know that he’s armed.

  There is a copse of cedar trees to the right and I hear a voice, female.

  “Birdie!” Vanessa calls.

  Footsteps fall somewhere within the grouping of trees, thick and dangerous in the night. It’s entirely possible that snakes and worse inhabit the little patch of woods, hidden just beneath fallen leaves or a rock upturned by a root. But there are two entirely human predators that I’m more worried about tonight.

  I crouch behind a trash barrel that stands beside the road and listen.

  I hear Vanessa call out to Birdie. I hear her footsteps and then I hear someone else’s.

  But I can’t tell what direction they’re coming from.

  My only choice is to keep moving. And so, I do.

  I watch my step in the woods as best I can, not just hoping to avoid snakes but also to avoid snapping branches on my way. I place each step cautiously, the fallen green of the cedar trees providing a cushion for my footfalls. And then I come to the clearing.

  A small white cinderblock building stands a dozen yards away.

  The clearing is small, but I’ll be entirely unprotected when I enter it. I look to my left, over my shoulder and into the woods. I see nothing. No hint of a pair of eyes sighting down the barrel of a revolver. I gather my thoughts. I’m reminded of the Nike ads from when I was a kid: Just do it.

  It doesn’t feel that simple, and yet, it is.

  I try not to think about it too much more. I try not to let the idea of a bullet burrowing through my skull keep me from moving and finding Birdie. I step out of the forest and into the clearing. Moonlight bathes my skin. I glow. A moving target for hunters in the night.

  I quicken my step, trying to keep my footfalls soft as possible. But it’s hard even on the dusty red dirt path. Once I reach the little building, I sigh in relief, realizing I’d been holding my breath. I look over my shoulders once more.

  I take a deep breath, steel myself for whatever waits inside, and I walk up to the door. I grab the handle and pull.

  VANESSA

  Vanessa tramps through the cedar-branch-lined floor of the little bit of forest. She can’t help but let her mind wander back to what Jeff had once said about them catching on fire. All it would take is a sturdy lightning bolt and a stiff wind. They’d be done for.

  At the edge of the tree line, she can see the group of FBI agents preparing themselves. They aren’t going to wait much longer. One of them holds a bull horn. He brings it to his mouth.

  “Tom,” he says. “This is Wyatt. We need you to come out right now.”

  Time is limited, Vanessa realizes. She has to find Birdie. There has to be a way. She’s thought about this for so long—wanted a child for so long—and now it’s her time. She was meant to be a mother, as some women are. She was never meant to be the wife of a professor, entertaining grad students and graciously looking the other way when he cupped their asses with more tenderness than he’d ever shown her. She was meant to be with someone like Mark. Someone that cared about the ide
a of a family together under a roof, loving each other, and never ever lying.

  Except she knows that wasn’t entirely true. She and Mark had done their fair share of lying. But she also wonders if they had met in some other manner, if any of that lying would have been necessary. Could they have been faithful to each other? Could she have been true?

  She thinks so.

  The thought alone is enough to keep her feet moving forward. What if she could get back to the city? What if she could get back to Mark with this baby? A peace offering for what happened in the end.

  The idea is nebulous, the ways in which it connects itself to reality are frail, but Vanessa clings to it like a lover in the darkness.

  “Tom,” the FBI man’s voice booms over the loudspeaker. “I’m trying to help you out here. We just want to help the girl who’s pregnant and the journalist. Just let the two of them come out.”

  Ione could die in a firestorm of bullets for all that Vanessa cares. Hell, she might even like to watch. But Birdie is another story. Birdie carries something precious to her, and to Tom. And it’s that thought which spurs Vanessa to strain her eyes. She has to find the girl before Tom does.

  She turns her back on the flood lights that are unable to penetrate through the cedar trees. She steps carefully, though twigs and branches snap beneath her weight. She hears something to her right. Someone else. She stills herself.

  In the darkness, she can only make out a shadow. Male or female, she can’t tell.

  Crouching, her muscles begin to cramp, and she quickly loses her footing, falling to the ground in the copse of trees.

  “Shit,” she mutters.

  The shadow figure is gone before she can get another look, leaving her seemingly alone. The little imitation of a forest is anything but quiet. Things—animals—rustle on the ground and birds call to each other in the trees. She wonders if they’re warning each other. What would they have to be afraid of so high above everything?

  She listens for a moment. The sound of someone else is gone. She’s alone once more.

  Vanessa steps through the cedars, each branch tickling her arm in an unwanted caress. She continues to move forward. Finally, she sees a break in the coverage. The little white studio stands not too far away. She can see it again.

  The clearing seems large, vulnerable. She has to chance it.

  With a quick step, she jogs across the red dirt to the building.

  Vanessa grasps the splintered wooden rod that serves as a handle on the rickety screen door. Behind it, she fights with the rusty brass doorknob, surely installed more than half a century ago. For a moment she realizes that the doorknobs in the house they have built will look like these someday. The thought is funny to her in a strange way. She smiles to herself and turns the knob. It creaks, screaming with the pain of years of abandonment. She lets the door squeal open on its aching hinges, arthritic from so many winters exposed to the elements.

  “Birdie?” she calls the girl’s name softly.

  She hears a stack of paintings clatter to the ground and begins to walk to the easternmost side of the building.

  The scurry of feet pricks her ears like a dog’s. She’s alert, ready to hunt the girl down. Ready to take what’s rightfully hers.

  VANESSA

  7 YEARS AGO

  Tom and Vanessa had tried for a child before. They’d never successfully gotten pregnant and it was something that made Vanessa’s heart ache with a hollowness she couldn’t describe. But two weeks after the explosive fight with Mark at the party, Vanessa threw up at approximately 5:45 in the morning one Saturday.

  It was when the sickness repeated itself the next day that she was thrilled. She didn’t dare let herself go down that primrose path without proof. She went to the drugstore and bought a three pack of pregnancy tests. She waited until the appropriate time and took them all, just to be sure.

  And she was.

  They all came back positive.

  Things were rocky between her and Tom. She doubted his faithfulness still, even after the fight with Mark. She had stopped seeing his former friend, but less out of loyalty to Tom and more out of guilt for what Mark might have to sacrifice for her.

  Before she told Tom, she wanted to be absolutely certain. She wanted a blood test. So, she got one. It, too, came back positive.

  Her heartbeat quickened when she got the call, and then a calmness descended over her. Maybe this was what they needed. Maybe this could save them. Absolution for their misdeeds in the most perfect form—a child that they had created together.

  They were still fighting though. And the night that she told him, he’d been throwing a party. She arrived home from the hospital, another late shift. She’d promised herself that she would stop taking them—that she would spend more time with him—that she would do whatever she had to in order to make this work. She would quit if it would stop the merry-go-round that was Tom’s fickle affection.

  After she told him, things did change.

  Tom stopped staying late at the office. For all she knew, he’d ended his affair with Ione Larsen. She hoped that he had. But there was a part of her that didn’t care, so long as it seemed like he had. She’d have gladly eaten his lies if they satisfied the hunger that she felt deep within her core. A hunger that he had starved for so many years, handing her crumbs and scraps. She wanted to gorge herself on the attention he lavished on her.

  Vanessa kept track of her pregnancy religiously in her planner. Appointments, milestones, the size of the fetus. And before that, she had tracked her cycle and the times that she had sex with Tom (marked with a black heart) and the times she had sex with Mark (marked with a red one). This secret code was just for her. Tom didn’t care enough to ask or even look at the planner and she never worried about it.

  Things seemed to be good between the two of them.

  “I’ve missed this,” she said to him one night, lying beside him after sex. Her hand stroked his chest, letting the hair run between her fingers.

  His arm wrapped around her shoulders, he kissed her on the crown of her head. But he said nothing. He was somewhere faraway.

  “Tom, what’s wrong?”

  “Do you think I’ll be a good father?” he asked.

  His eyes met hers. And she saw something there that she’d never seen: fear. Tom was genuinely afraid of messing this up. And there was something infinitely tender and endearing about that. She’d never seen him scared of anything.

  “Of course,” she said. “I wouldn’t have a baby with you if I didn’t think you would be.”

  Tom seemed to think about this and with a squeeze of her shoulder, he accepted it.

  Life went on and things were better than they had been in a long time. One afternoon, Vanessa got a text message from Mark.

  I miss you.

  Her heart raced at the thought that his fingers had hammered out the message on the other end of the line. The idea that he was staring at his phone, waiting for the little bubble to pop up, letting him know that she was frantically telling him the same thing. But she swiped left on his name, allowing the Delete option to pop up. She touched it and the message disappeared. The only record of its existence his number on their phone bill.

  But there was a part of Vanessa that felt sick about it. She had asked Tom not to tell anyone at work that she was pregnant yet. She wondered, though, what had been said to Ione. There was a part of Vanessa that hoped Ione was jealous that she was carrying Tom’s child instead of her. But she had her doubts that a baby was what the girl even wanted from Tom.

  There had been others before her, Vanessa knew that. But there was something about this one that bothered her especially. For so long, she’d been able to shut down the things that she felt about Tom’s affairs. The disgust and the irritation, the gut-wrenching grief that came with betrayal. It felt like a death. That was all she could compare it to. Except the thing that had died was the trust between them. It had been replaced by a mess of emotions that were tangled up in a ball that
might never be unraveled.

  When he’d begun to see Ione, something had changed. With the others, Tom had still loved Vanessa. She knew that. They had just been flavors of the month—or the semester—and they moved on and so did he. But with Ione, it was different. Something changed in Tom. He closed off part of himself to her. It was like she was only allowed to go into certain rooms within his heart and there was a giant padlock keeping her out of the deepest, most tucked-away closets.

  And that was where he kept himself.

  She’d hoped that it would resolve itself, but she had a sinking feeling in her stomach that it wouldn’t. And that was when Mark had come into the picture. He gave her the sense of security that Tom had ripped from beneath her. But now, they were working to rebuild what had been destroyed between the two of them. They were meeting in the middle.

  Tom was at work when Vanessa had her first ultrasound appointment. She didn’t mind going without him. The technician greased her belly with a Vaseline-like substance and ran the machine over the curve of her abdomen, still concave.

  The cool plastic made her shiver at first. An image popped up on the screen. The tech pointed to a small dot. Their child. Vanessa watched in wonder. Though her background was scientific, it amazed her that she and Tom could have made something like this together. For all the hate they shared, there was love there, too.

  And here was the manifestation of that.

  “Conception looks to be about eight weeks ago,” the tech said.

  Vanessa left feeling warm even in the cold. She placed her hands over her abdomen in the car, marveling at the life that brewed inside her. But something was bothering her.

  At home, she placed the picture of the ultrasound on the fridge, eager for Tom to look at it when he got home. She wondered what she might see in his face the first time he saw their child.