How It Ends

by Laura Wiess

  I worried about all the things I’d wanted to tell him in our golden years that now I couldn’t form the words for or even remember.

  I worried about the widowed volunteers, friendly, attractive ladies who made eyes at Peter while feeding him lunch and told him of wonderful senior-citizen sponsored bus trips into New York at Christmas to see the Rockettes or down to Atlantic City to gamble or out to Pennsylvania Dutch country to mingle with the Amish.

  I would tremble with outrage when this happened, and my involuntary movements would grow agitated and spastic, and the nice volunteer would sigh and glance at Peter and say, She’s so lucky she has you, and bless his heart, he would reach over and take my spasming claw and say, I’ve always been the lucky one. The volunteer would raise an eyebrow and say, It’s not every husband who would take on such a heavy burden, and then Peter, gaze gleaming, would release my hand and let it flail, inevitably knocking over my drink cup or sweeping my plate from the tray, and the volunteer would hustle over to clean it up, and he would wink at me and I would try to smile and fail, and die a little more inside.

  Because I knew what the volunteers said was true.

  My pills had no refills without a follow-up office visit, but I would not go back to the doctor because I knew the moment he saw me he would either advise Peter to put me in a care facility or, if I looked bad enough, might even commit me himself.

  It might have been my terror-fueled imagination talking, it might never have actually happened, but if it did, I knew I would never get out again.

  Peter got the doctor to refill my medication once by phone anyway, lying and saying I’d knocked the open bottle into the toilet by mistake, but the doctor wouldn’t do it again, so we were forced to begin cutting my pills in half to make them last longer, trying to stretch the time in between doses.

  The results were a hell I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

  Fall came, the days cold, gray, and bleak.

  Peter closed off all the rooms but the few we were using downstairs. He slept on the couch, as we couldn’t share a bed anymore and hadn’t since I’d come home from the hospital. My involuntary thrashing had not only made it impossible for him to sleep but had also left him bruised and, once, with a bloody nose.

  Most days he managed to get me into the wheelchair and set me by the window so I could see the deer and the cats and all I’d once loved, but I had stopped caring, wrapped in endless pain and confusing thoughts and a great, heavy weariness. I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t tell him how sorry I was to have let him down like this, to be such a terrible burden and carve such deep anguish into his face, to never have said one last Thank you for gently brushing my hair or washing me or shouting only when the frustration of seeing me dying grew to be too much.

  I wished I had whispered one last I love you while I still could or asked him to sing me one last song or could spend one last sweet night in his arms.

  I wished I would die in my sleep like my mother had, wished I had thought to gather medication while I still could drive and speak, while I could have visited several different doctors for enough different prescriptions to amass the correct and lethal doses, but still, that thought terrified me, too, because what if I did manage to swallow enough pills—a gamble because I could barely swallow at all—but didn’t die? What if I just went into a coma and was committed to an institution and left to lie there, to languish for another ten years? What if I ended up in worse shape than Mrs. Boehm had been in, because at least she was able to move and speak, at least she’d been in her own home in her own bed with her own husband when she’d passed…

  I was trapped, caught between never wanting to leave and only wanting to leave, and being helpless either way.

  And at night, tormented by insomnia and a claustrophobia born of being unable to escape the tight constrictions of my own body, the smell of decay rose around me and there was no escaping that, either.

  I watched the deer, the does and yearlings, grazing in the back and wanted to warn them that they’re in mortal danger, that mothers will die and fawns become orphans, and nothing I can do or say will stop it or save them.

  I’ve tried to protect them but I’ve failed.

  Now, even in writing, my voice will be still. Peter will FedEx this to the self-publishing company I’ve chosen, and it will return as an audiobook, because so few people make time to curl up in a cozy chair and read anymore.

  When the questions come—and they will—you will have answers.

  I love you with all of my heart, and I would not leave you as I was left.

  I waited, but nothing happened.

  No more narrator.

  No more words.

  I looked at Gran, but she was thrashing and offered no answers.

  Got up, grabbed the CD case, and wrenched it open, searching for another CD, because there had to be another one, there had to be.

  There wasn’t.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head, dropping the case, and glancing around the room, searching for something to make sense of this. “That can’t be. No one ends a book like this! Oh my God, I can’t believe it. That’s it? Are you kidding?”

  I was so freaked, I didn’t know what to do, so outraged and let down and full of pent-up anger at such a total betrayal, at some stupid writer who would draw me in and carry me along and make me love her and be anxious for her and want so bad for a happy ending, for a miracle or, Jesus Christ, at least a comment at the end or an author’s note or something so that I wasn’t just left hanging, going, Well, what happened? Did she live? Did she die? What happened? that when Grandpa finally got home, I was just like, “Next time I’m picking the audiobook, okay? And it’s going to be a nice, normal murder mystery because I can’t take another book like this one!”

  And he just smiled and slowly unbuckled his crossing guard vest and watched as I gathered up the food for the cats and for the deer’s last feast and stomped out, and when I was halfway across the yard, he came out onto the porch and called, “Good night, Hanna.” I stopped, still mad and caught up in all the infuriating, unanswered questions the stupid book had left me with, yelled, “See you tomorrow,” and just kept going.

  “That book?” I said to my mother at supper. “Forget it. It has no ending.”

  “It has to have an ending,” she said, looking puzzled. “Everything has an ending.”

  “Yeah, well, not this,” I said crankily. “It’s a stalemate, okay? It leaves you in total limbo with no answers, and what am I supposed to do, imagine what happens? Just…” I scowled down at my burrito and felt myself cracking.

  “Hanna?” she said worriedly.

  “Just don’t read it,” I managed to say and waved her away and went on scowling down at my refried beans because I had a pounding headache, and I started wishing Crystal’s brother was still throwing parties because all I wanted to do was wipe my mind clean and just be happy with Seth and not caught in this horrible, bleak cycle where death was coming as soon as the sun rose again.

  I googled Louise Bell Closson and got nothing. Went to Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble and Borders and Books-a-Million and every indie bookstore I could think of, looking for her or, in case I spelled her name wrong, How It Ends and got so mad even typing in the title that I just shut the computer down and went to bed.

  I didn’t sleep for a long time that night.

  All That Remains

  Sounds: the finches squabbling in the pine tree, made anxious by the empty bird feeders. Lon whispering a promise. The constant, rhythmic swish of dry skin sliding across worn satin sheets.

  Sights: the deer grazing out back along the path, their rich, tawny summer coats faded to the gray-brown of dead foliage. A prescription bottle marked NO REFILLS. The truth, confessed and titled How It Ends in its case on the table.

  Smells: the comforting drift of Evening in Paris furled in grief. Lon’s dependable Lipton-tea-with-honey-and-lemon exhales. The earthy, sun-baked straw scent of the shy, scrawny stray cats in
for a visit.

  Sensations: Lon’s callused hands fumbling the damp nylon nightgown up over my head and the cool wash of air that follows. A thigh muscle seized in a rigid, trembling cramp. Choking, trying to swallow the lukewarm trickle pooled at the back of my throat.

  Emotions: relief, like a silver ribbon of promise wending through a razor-thorn maze of despair. A merciless yearning for what was, and never will be again. Terror, a smothering, black hood stitched to a body bag, zipped up, locked down, and nearly sewn shut.

  Chapter 31

  Hanna

  My alarm goes off before sunrise and I roll over, wincing as the remnants of last night’s headache throb to life.

  “God,” I whisper, peeling back the covers and stumbling out of bed. I feel awful, thick and foggy, grim with a vague, low-level dread like a lingering nightmare, and I pause, frowning, trying to figure out why, and then remember. “Ugh. It’s opening day.” I plod into the bathroom to get ready for school.

  The dull throb stays with me as I go downstairs. My stomach is roiling and something’s wrong, something past the headache and the tension of hunting season, but I can’t pull it out of the fog so I grab two aspirins and sit down at the table across from my mother, who’s already well into her second cup of coffee.

  “Happy days are here again,” she says grimly and hands me the ugly pink fluorescent knit hat we’ll both wear from now on whenever we go outside.

  “Joy,” I say, pull it on, and go over to the counter to pour a bowl of cereal. Pause, gazing out the window over the sink because there’s a light on over at Gran’s, and the ribbon of dawn is just beginning to thread through the trees.

  Lon Schoenmaker finishes the first cup of caffeinated coffee he’s had since his original heart attack so many years ago and rises, wincing at his arthritis. He sets the cup in the sink and goes to the table in the living room, where a thick envelope of documents awaits.

  He withdraws his will and then Helen’s and lays them out on the table. Next the deed to the house, a life insurance policy, their birth certificates, and last, a Post-It note.

  He picks up How It Ends, fastens the Post-It note to the front of the shiny red CD case, and sets it out on the back porch. Straightens, a hand at his back, and stands a moment breathing in the crisp air, the faint scent of wood smoke, the rich beauty of all he loves. Looks at the thin strip of daylight glowing through the bare tree branches, turns, goes in, and locks the door behind him.

  I don’t know why I’m pouring cereal, because I’m not even hungry, but I need something in my stomach to take these aspirin, so I pour the milk, and my stomach is sick, my head is pounding, and out of the corner of the window, over on the land next door, I see a hunter, flashlight and fluorescent hat bobbing as he weaves through the trees, and I could just cry because dawn is coming and the does are out there like they always are, grazing, living, standing with their yearlings, just trying to make it through, and they don’t even know that death is on the march.

  Lon walks into the bedroom and stops at the edge of the bed. Looks down at Helen, wide awake, trembling, twitching, head and neck, hands and arms, legs and feet twisting and writhing, unable to stop, her mouth moving without words, and he leans over, touches her face, strokes her cheek, and she sees him, she knows him, because her eyes fill with tears and her gaze clings to his, terrified but trusting him the way she’s always trusted him to be there, to never leave her, and he won’t.

  He takes the Ciro’s nightclub souvenir picture from the end table, shows it to her and, when he’s sure she’s seen it, smiles and lays it on the pillow beside her.

  “Your medication is gone, Helen. There is no more.” He says this quietly and watches her closely, sees the awareness in her gaze, the fear and the acceptance and finally the relief. He strokes her hair back as best he can because she’s moving so violently and says, “No more, I promise. I’ll be right behind you…”

  And then he rises and goes to the closet and pulls out the shotgun that has never been fired, and like the gunsmith’s son he began as, he opens the box of shells and loads it.

  “The hunter’s in the field next door,” I say to my mother, dropping into my seat and toying with the now soggy cereal. I force myself to eat a spoonful because otherwise the aspirin will kill my stomach. “It’s going to be an ambush.”

  Lon shuts poor bewildered Serepta in the bathroom and stands at the side of the bed gazing at Helen, seeing not the wreckage Parkinson’s has wrought but the woman he’s loved most of his life, a sweet, strong, doe-eyed sixteen-year-old girl, a graceful young woman who went off to waitress and who would turn, cheeks pink and gaze shining, as he stood on the porch singing her away, wooing her back, and so he tries to sing as the memories come, tries to sing her one last love song, but the only one he can think of is “All Things Must Pass” and sees the tears slip from her eyes, sees her in his memory, dancing light and lovely in her slip, luring him with a smile like sunshine and unashamed, unreserved love into her arms, a woman who sprayed him with the hose and ran shrieking when he chased her straight into the pond, a woman who held his hands to her lips when he said he would never stay without her, that he would take a bullet for her, that he would never ever leave her, and he whispers the words, I will always love you, and lays a hand on her cheek and she gazes at him, trusting, waiting—

  I get up to put my bowl in the sink.

  It’s almost dawn.

  I stare into the dark field but don’t see the hat…no, there it is, settled in the branches of a tree stand. Oh God, my head.

  Lon takes a steadying breath because he has no fear now, he has always done what had to be done to love her and save her, to save himself the way he couldn’t save his parents, and the memory of all that came before this moment mixes with the sweet life that is almost over, and he draws one more ragged breath, stiffening his resolve, and puts the barrel to her forehead, but her forehead keeps moving, jerking and shaking, and he can’t get a clean shot, he can’t pull the trigger with her moving, because if he misses, if he misses…no, he can’t miss because this is their agreement, they would not be put away to die long and slow and ugly, they would go as they lived, their own way in their own home, so he can’t miss, but he can’t get a good shot if she won’t stop moving, and so he turns the shotgun, lifts it high, and smashes it down on her forehead, and she stops moving then, and sobbing, he turns the shotgun and presses it to her forehead and pulls the trigger

  The deer lift their heads.

  The shot explodes in the silence and I jump, dropping my bowl into the sink.

  My mother snorts and says, “Well, somebody just jumped the gun and scared all the deer away. There’s going to be a lot of pissed-off hunters out there this morning.”

  And my heart surges and my brain pounds and all of a sudden I know, I know, and I make a high, desperate noise and scramble across the kitchen, fumble with the door, fling it wide, and bolt out into the burning cold. I’m running and it’s almost dawn but not yet, not yet, and the light is murky gray mixed with pink and I hear my mother behind me yelling, “Hanna! No! What are you doing?”

  Lon Schoenmaker’s legs give out and he sinks to the edge of the bed next to his wife’s still form, turns the shotgun on himself and, closing his eyes, fires.

  The second shot explodes and it’s here, right here, echoing in my ears and my heart, and I stumble, ragged with terror and running as hard as I can through the break in the little woods, and I can hear the deer running, too, crashing into the woods all around me, and the guy in the tree yells, “What the fuck?”

  I run past the empty bird feeders and the cats streaking everywhere and finally, panting and half-blind with tears, take the back porch steps on my hands and knees. See a CD near the door with a Post-It with my name on it and grab it.

  Hanna,

  This is how, and why.

  All our love,

  Helen Louise Bell Closson Schoenmaker

  Lon Peter Schoenmaker

  I stare at it
, incredulous, and then a wordless wail grates from my throat like a rush of ground glass, leaving a thousand little cuts in its wake. I shove the CD into my hoodie pocket, push myself up, and grab the doorknob, but it’s locked, so I stumble to the window and the shade is down but the light is on inside, and frantic, I smear my cloudy breath from the glass and look harder, squint harder, and…no no oh no…and back away keening, holding my stomach, and clutching at the railing, and my mother runs up in her bedroom slippers and I cry, “Mom, Mom,” and I reach for her and she’s there.

  The police and ambulance come with sirens wailing, and the sun rises, and the deer run on, scattered to the winds, and no does or yearlings die here today, the only day in her life that Gran has finally been able to save them.

  One faces the future with one’s past.

  —Pearl S. Buck

  I didn’t tell anyone about How It Ends.

  I don’t know whether I actually forgot about it amid the shock or what.

  I really don’t.

  The newspapers screamed SENIOR CITIZEN MURDER/SUICIDE, and all these people who didn’t even know Gran and Grandpa spoke to the press, presenting all kinds of stupid, half-assed theories, and the papers printed them, and people went online and asked, How could this happen in our community??? like being private was an unforgivable sin and they should have advertised their intentions so they could have been deemed incompetent and put in a nursing home or under immediate psychiatric evaluation.

  Others tsked about how Gran just hadn’t believed in God strongly enough or decided there must have been abuse in the home because otherwise she would have been in a care facility like she should have been, and on and on.