“It’s like a pressure,” he says out of the blue.
“What is?”
“You had asked why I do it. Before. You asked. And there is pressure. That’s why. The pressure builds. I relieve it.”
“Relieve it,” I repeat without expression.
“For a while, after, it’s okay again.”
I wonder but don’t ask what “okay” even looks like to him.
“And the garden?”
“Well, I didn’t ever want it to be just for nothing, you know? It felt like it could give their lives real meaning. More than they ever could have without it. Giving back to the earth in that way.” His voice has grown stronger with his explanation as he warms to the topic. He still doesn’t look at me, and I can tell he is attempting to articulate something he has maybe never tried to put words to before. I don’t point out the logic flaws. There seems to be no reason.
“And they were always kids,” I say, my voice only loud enough to travel.
“Not always,” he says, letting me know there is still another aspect here. “But mostly, yeah. And kids, well they’re easy, aren’t they? They’re small and pliable. Easy to get your hands on. And just so sweet.”
I feel my bile rising, but I hold it down. Steady the gun in my hands. Level it.
“You couldn’t not do it, could you?” I ask, and I realize I am thinking about him like he’s a vampire. One that must feed at intervals in order to ensure peak performance. I’m not asking because I am wondering about rehabilitation. That doesn’t even seem like a possibility.
“We are the same, you and I,” he says, surprising me with his words and by how closely they echo my own thoughts. “We are just the same.”
I just look at the back of his head, at the view beyond and, for a moment, I fall into this. We are the same, aren’t we? Then I mentally give myself a shake. We are not the same. To some people, the pieces might look similar, but the essentials? They’re not the same at all. A pressure, he’d told me. Nothing in me has ever been that. And then his garden, the highest usage of those young lives, he’d said.
I think about the wholeness I have felt at times when I’ve killed, but that was never the purpose of the exercise. Or was it? Now I am becoming confused. Even so, I know there has always been mercy in my hands. And the killings I have done were never of my choosing. Except when they were.
The world swims a bit, in front of my eyes.
We are alike, he said. We are the same.
But we are not the same. I know that now. I take aim, take a deep breath just as the stillness of the clearing is disrupted by the arrival of the team. Cameras are rolling and I hold my fire.
Atwater senses my hesitation and powers forward, stretching for the edge of the cliff.
“No!” I shout, raising the gun, cameras be damned. I don’t want him to escape, even in death. I vowed to kill him and, right or wrong, I want him to die. Even more than that, I realize, I want to know the job is done.
And yet, something holds me back. If I do this thing that I feel really should be done, am I still then better than him? How do I make that distinction? Who am I to decide? And I realize it is not a distinction I would have made a week ago. Two. I would have killed him without a second thought. The killing I have done has been business always. Cash—or bitcoin—on the barrelhead; someone killed by me when it could have just as easily been someone else. That doesn’t make it okay, but it makes it different. At least, I’ve always thought so. Now I’m not so sure. Now I’m questioning everything I ever was and am.
This dithering within me happens over the space of the beat of my heart. Even so, when I hear the bark of an unsilenced gun, the first thing I do is look down at the weapon in my hand. Not me. Then I look behind me, astonished to see gentle Curtis with a revolver, held in front of him in a two-handed death grip.
“I couldn’t kill him,” I say softly, but he hears me anyway.
“I know,” Curtis says. “I saw. But he had to die.”
“Yes, you’re right,” I say, nodding. He had to die. But somehow, after all I had been and seen, I knew it couldn’t be me.
There are times in all of our lives when everything is easy. When the road we are meant to take appears, and all of the pieces just seem to fall into place.
The dog and I leave California right away. We are back home at the forest’s edge before the sun has a chance to set twice.
The dog seems happy to be back. Relieved maybe, though I can’t imagine he knows how close a call we both had. Or maybe we had no close call at all. Maybe everything is written down somewhere and it all turns out just as it’s supposed to. That’s what I’m thinking now.
At the scene, the team had worked swiftly, ignoring me, surrounding their leader. Covering for one of their own. There hadn’t even been a lot of discussion. No need. Atwater was dead. The world had killed him. I watched them agree that quickly. Curtis had held the gun, sure. But Atwater had never quite belonged in the world.
Afterwards, all of the news stations reported Atwater’s passing in stoic, heroic tones, like they’d had something to do with the outcome. Never knowing, of course, that one of their number had, indeed, put the outcome into place.
It’s been confirmed: Atwater has been killed by person or persons unknown. Killed by gunshot, but no weapon found. A vigilante, one reporter floated. Maybe a bereaved parent or someone else who held a deep concern.
Curtis Diamond of WBCC Los Angeles had been the first reporter on the scene. A lucky break. He and his crew had been nearby, following a tip, and had actually been there minutes after the shooting occurred. Diamond will probably win an award for breaking such a significant story.
“It’s important”—this from the same blond reporter with close-cropped hair and flat blue eyes I’d seen before—“to not take matters into your own hands. Always call law enforcement when you see something wrong. We have a detailed justice system perfectly designed to deal with these things in the right way,” and so on. Warning us, all of us civilians, to leave well enough alone. She’s right, of course. There is no place for vigilantism. The system breaks down if we don’t all play by the rules.
We need rules.
On my fourth day home, I push the television back into the garage, cover it with an old blanket. While I’m still in the garage, I get a text. I pull my phone out of the pocket of my jeans.
“Hey, sunshine! How’s life treating you?”
And I know it is a call to action. The beginning of an assignment. I stand there for a moment, in the musty gloom of the garage. I read the text carefully. Then I read it again. I don’t think deeply about what I will say, though I don’t send back the expected words: the words that are my code.
“Fine,” I text back. “I think I’m really doing fine.”
Then I carefully turn the phone off and push it under the blanket with the TV.
Outside, the sun is shining. The dog joins me in the yard.
“It’s so beautiful today,” I say to him, turning my face to the sun. We head into the forest near the house. He gallops ahead a bit, expending a bunch of puppy energy. Then he settles in at my heel and we just trot along.
Everything smells warm and green. And then a wind comes up. I inhale it. Feel it on my tongue. It tastes like hope.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE FIRST THING I’d like to acknowledge is that I’ve never killed anyone. Not in real life anyway. Now that you have read Endings, that might not be apparent, so I thought I’d just say it, right out front.
I’ve never even thought about killing someone. I’m not one of those writers who goes around fictionally killing people who have done ’em wrong. IRL, I have a lot of love in my heart. Enough, really, to make a cynic kinda nauseous.
That said, as I set out to write the short story that would eventually grow up to become Endings, I spent a lot of time thinking about what it would take for a “nice” person—someone, say, like me—to kill someone for money. And once that thing occurred, who
would I/they then be?
The story that emerged was deeply personal. And the readings from it I did at various literary events were passionate and prompted several of my colleagues to start prodding me: Sheena Kamal, Owen Laukkanen, Robin Spano, Sam Wiebe, and, in particular, Dietrich Kalteis all kept saying it had to be a book.
I didn’t see it. Lady goes around killing people for money. Boring. That’s not a book. “No, no,” Dietrich said on a long drive back from a library event in a distant town. “It’s about her redemption.”
And suddenly the book-to-be came alive. Back in my studio, I could see how it all would go. That feeling that every novelist knows. The feeling of illumination when before the room was dark.
Of course, books don’t get made by themselves. From darkness to full light requires so much support.
Many thanks to my wonderful agent, Kimberley Cameron, who saw even beyond the story I had.
I’m in love with Bob and Pat Gussin and the dangerously talented team they’ve put together at Oceanview. I am so happy and proud to be part of this lovely family.
Thank you to my husband, Anthony J. Parkinson; my son, the actor Michael Karl Richards, and his lovely wife, Kristen Houser; my brother, Dr. Peter Huber, and my brother-from-a-different mother, Roger Chow. As you guys know, I went the distance on this book. But I could not have without the support and belief that sometimes reached beyond my own.
Endings Page 24
