by Terra Little
I do not tell him about Vicky, that she did what I was cheated out of doing. I have told him that my sister is a nurse practitioner, and he is a smart man, so I say nothing. I don’t even let myself think about Tree and the drugs that he overdosed on because he couldn’t function without his mother to cloak his maniacal behavior. I conveniently forget about how the drugs came to be in his possession in the first place, and about who knew enough to administer a lethal injection capable of killing him—a speedball that had a deadly air bubble halfway between the beginning and the end of its impact.
The part of the story that centers around Tree driving himself to the hospital and being admitted stays with me. Vicky was working that night, but he doesn’t need to know that. And he will never know that Tree was dead less than five minutes after she slipped into his room. Probably coming face to face with Satan right about the time that she slipped back out and went to find herself an alibi, in case she needed one. She never told me what she did in that hospital room to coax him into planting his own fingerprints everywhere that they needed to be planted, and I never asked.
The one time that she does visit me in jail before my trial, she mouths the words I got him to me through the glass separating us, and I know. I cry the first tears of joy that I have cried since the day Beige is born, and I am stupid enough to think that I can begin again and do something positive with my life.
I don’t feel sorry for the body they find slumped sideways in the hospital bed the next day. They assume that he somehow stole the drugs to self-medicate, to help him cope with his grief. It is a plausible explanation, one no one cares to investigate very thoroughly, and the matter drops without so much as a slant of the eye toward Vicky, which is the way it is meant to be.
I don’t attend the funeral when I am given the option. Neither one of them.
Kimmick’s voice startles me, brings me back to the here and now with a jolt.
“You didn’t want closure?”
“I got closure,” I say and feel myself slipping back in time again. “Let me tell you the rest.”
I back away from the doorway and go back to the living room, where my grandmother is waiting for me. I stare into her empty eyes, and they are black marbles inside of a shell of flesh. I marvel at what I am seeing, and I wonder how an alien being can exist among humans for so long and no one sees it except me. And Vicky. She sees it too.
I am laughing because I nail myself to the cross and I do it willingly. It has to be this way, and I accept that. I make Vicky do what she does. I leave her no choice but to play a part, and so I have to keep playing God and follow through. In the Bible it is written that God’s eye is so keen and able to see everything that He can see something as small as a sparrow in flight. And if He can see the little sparrow, how can He not see the people who worship Him? Who need Him the most? I don’t exactly worship Him, but if I am playing God, then Vicky is the sparrow that I have my eye on. She needed Him, and He sent her me.
“My eye is on the sparrow, Kimmick. Even if God’s eye isn’t on me, mine is on the sparrow and it always has been. Always. That’s what’s funny,” I say.
“I don’t get the joke,” he says, looking confused.
I smile and shake my head. “It’s a private joke. I guess you had to be there.”
Effortlessly, I go there. The final nail that pins me to the cross plays itself out like this. . . .
I dial 911 and I wait for the police. I hear Vicky’s voice in my head while I’m waiting, asking me if I will stay with her, and then I hear my own voice in a quiet house that smells like old mothballs and feels like a morgue, whispering, “Don’t I always stay with you?”
I kneel down and gently close my grandmother’s eyes. I am sure she is on her way to hell, but I have no idea where I am headed. I close my eyes, trying to imagine what my future holds and working out what I will say to the police when they arrive. How I will explain the fact that I have done the world a service, rather than committed a crime. I suck in a sharp breath, release it slowly, and open my eyes.
I hear sirens outside and I feel the sudden urgency in the air. They are coming for me, and I have no choice but to be ready to go with them, wherever they take me. I drop the gun on the coffee table and wipe my sweaty palms on the seat of my jeans. Then I pick it back up, step over my grandmother’s body, and go to the door. I open it and step back so they can come charging inside the house.
“There was a report of a shooting here,” one of the officers says. Three others push past him and swarm to the living room. They see what there is to see, and then they turn to stare at me.
“Exactly what happened here? Did you shoot this woman, ma’am?”
My eyes travel down the hallway and come to rest on Tree’s bedroom door, and I open my mouth slowly. “Yes,” I finally say. “I shot her.” They make me feel so free, the words do. Even as handcuffs are snapped in place and my rights are read to me, I feel free. Like the world is a better place, like maybe there is such a thing as hope.
I tell myself right then and there that whatever happens cannot be any worse than what has already happened. I tell myself that I am ready for anything, that all I have to do is get off of the hampster’s wheel that I’ve been running around on all these years. All I have to do is close my eyes and—jump.
Notes
Urban Books, LLC
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Jump Copyright © 2011 Terra Little
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior consent of the Publisher, except brief quotes used in reviews.
ISBN: 978-1-5998-3177-0
This is a work of fiction. Any references or similarities to actual events, real people, living, or dead, or to real locales are intended to give the novel a sense of reality. Any similarity in other names, characters, places, and incidents is entirely coincidental.
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