by Lee Child
Years had passed, but she could still remember the shame she had felt when she’d had to ask him for lunch money because she’d run through her allowance before the week was out.
He had refused her request and told her to be more careful the next time.
“I left . . . you . . . something.”
She tried to keep her anger down, saying, “I told you I don’t want your money.”
“Not money,” he said, his lips twisting in a half smile. “Better.”
“Don’t give me anything, John. I don’t want anything from you.” Why had she come here? Why had she agreed to get on a plane and fly all the way out here?
To watch him die. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had known it all along that she wanted to watch him die, watch John succumb to something over which he had no control. She had wanted to see death wipe that knowing smirk off his face, and she wanted to be standing over him while this happened, watch him realize that there was one thing out there that he could not get the better of. Let the world think of him as their loving healer, but let Pam watch him die with them both knowing what a lying, conniving piece of shit he was.
The heart monitor gave an irregular beep and the oxygen mask cleared of fog from his breath. She waited, counting . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . until he took a gulp of air into his lungs, the machinery of life moving forward.
Pam felt ashamed. What kind of person was she that she could take such plea sure in his pain? How could think these things about the father of her child?
John’s chest rose with effort. “Need to tell you . . .” he tried again.
“No,” she said. She couldn’t hear his apology, not now, not after hating him for so long. “Please don’t.” She could not bear more shame.
He waved his hand out, saying, “Sit.”
She went to his desk to get the chair, but stopped when she saw the stack of old notebooks piled on top. She recognized the journals, remembered them from their married days when he would sit in his chair, scribbling down his private thoughts. Pam had been tempted, especially after the affair, but she had never read them, never violated his privacy.
Pam started to roll the chair over to his bed, but he waved her away. “No,” he said. “Read.”
“I’m not going to read your journals.” She didn’t add that it was hard enough reading his damn book.
“Read,” he insisted, then, “Please.”
Pam relented, or at least appeared to. She rolled the chair back, her hands gripping the soft leather. God, he had probably paid more for this chair than she had for her car.
She sat at the desk and opened the first book she put her hand on. She did not want to read the journal, could not handle the further blow to her self-esteem of reading his early diatribes on her failures. Her fingers found a letter opener, and she winced, jerking back her hand as she felt the sharp edge slice her skin. The letter opener was actually a stiletto. The small knife looked to be made of brass. Jewels decorated the handle, and the blade was finely sharpened as if John needed to defend himself from strangers entering his office.
The only person he would ever need to defend himself from was Pam.
“Read . . .” John admonished, his voice weaker than ever. “Please . . .”
Pam sighed, giving into curiosity as she picked up one of the journals. She thumbed to the first page. It was dated three years into their marriage, and she skimmed the parts about whiny students and a blister he’d gotten from grading papers.
Her eyes stopped on one word: Beth.
Pam finished the journal in under an hour—a year of John’s life encapsulated in the blink of an eye.
Another year, another name: Celia.
Year six brought two names: Eileen and Ellen.
The door opened and Cindy asked, “Everything all right?”
Pam could not open her mouth to speak. She nodded.
“He just needs to check,” she said, letting in the man Pam had seen in the living room. He went to John, pressed a stethoscope against his chest for a few minutes, nodded, then left.
Cindy told Pam, “We could use some help out here with the ice if you’re—”
“No,” Pam said. Her tone of voice was alarming, the kind she used to stop students in their tracks and elicit confessions of chicanery and cheating.
The door clicked shut and Pam returned to the journal.
Mindy. Sheila. Rina. Yokimito.
Blowjobs, finger fucking, ass fucking, sixty-nine, and a position that, even with her doctorate in human biology, Pam would have needed a diagram to understand.
She turned the page.
He had drawn a diagram.
From the bed, John wheezed. Pam thumbed through the journals, looking for the year of Zack’s death. She found the day before, February sixteenth. John’s cramped scrawl revealed that he had finally found love. He had been with a woman named Judy the day before their son died.
Judy Kendridge, the math teacher down the hall. Pam had tutored kids with the woman after school. They had both complained about their corns, their aching backs, their husbands.
The date on the next page was May third, three months after Zack’s funeral. Pam recognized it as the first line of Biological Healing. “The biggest obstacle to overcoming the death of my son was finally admitting to myself that I could not be the perfect father, the perfect husband.”
“No shit,” Pam hissed, slamming shut the notebook.
She pushed herself away from the desk and walked over to John’s bed.
“Wake up, you bastard.” He didn’t comply, so she poked him, then violently shook him. “Wake up!”
Slowly, his eyes opened. He glanced at the journals, then back to her.
“What does this accomplish?” she demanded, anger and humiliation bringing tears to her eyes. “This is the ‘healing’ you needed, dragging me all the way out here so I can read your deathbed confession?”
An eyebrow went up. She could have sworn he was enjoying this. He pushed the mask from his mouth and she saw it then: the smug smile on his lips, the twinkle in his eye. All of his self-help bullshit and his healing from within and his millions of dollars slapped her in the face like a wet rag.
“You . . .” he said, his breath coming harder from the effort. “You . . .”
“I what, John? I what?”
“Came,” he said. “You . . . came . . .” he panted with exertion. “You . . . stupid bitch.”
Pam’s mouth opened—she felt the jaw pop, the breeze drying the back of her throat. The first class ticket, the warm towel, the nuts. She had even sipped from the bottle of cold water in the car. She had fallen for it all without even thinking.
“You . . .” he began again, smiling, showing his teeth.
Pam stood there. It was five years ago. Fifteen years. Twenty. She just stood there the same way she had from the beginning and waited for the ax to fall on her head.
“You . . .” The smile would not go away, even as he struggled to breathe. “You’ve . . . gained . . . weight.”
The mask popped back on and he inhaled, his breath fogging up the plastic.
“I should kill you,” she hissed. “I should kill you with my bare hands.”
His left shoulder went up in a shrug, then he froze in place, his eyes opening in shock. The monitor went off, a piercing, metallic beep that signaled a flatline. The doors flew open and instead of doctors rushing in, the well- dressed man and woman entered, each carrying a cooler between them.
“Please step out of the way,” the woman snapped, elbowing Pam aside. They opened the coolers and started to pack the bags of ice around John’s body. Oddly, Pam wondered if the man she had seen out by the van was the person who actually chopped off the head.
“Mrs. Fuller?” the NuLife woman asked. Pam was about to answer when Cindy stepped forward.
“Yes?”
So, he had married her. He had married her in the end so that she would have all of his money. Pam wondered if he had put
her on an allowance.
“We need you to pronounce him,” the woman said.
“I . . . I don’t think . . .” Cindy faltered. She burst into tears, her hands around her face, shoulders shaking. “Oh, John! I can’t do it!” she sobbed, crumbling to the ground. “He can’t be gone!”
“Oh, for fucksakes,” Pam snapped, turning off the whining heart monitor with a snap of her wrist. “He’s dead,” she told them. “Look at him. He’s dead.”
And he was. Even without the heart monitor bleating its signal, any fool could see that John was gone. His eyes were still open, but there was no light there. His skin was slack—everything about him was slack, that is, except for that trace of a smirk on his lips.
He had gotten her. Even in death he had gotten the last word.
The NuLife woman opened the cooler and started handing bags to her partner. Pam watched as they packed the ice around John like a bowl of potato salad.
“Leave us alone,” Pam said. She had used her teacher voice, the voice that shook hallways and sent students running for their homerooms.
“You can’t order me around!” Cindy shrieked, but she wasn’t very persuasive sitting on the floor.
“Get out right this minute,” Pam commanded, and perhaps because she wasn’t much removed from her high school days, Cindy obeyed.
John’s beautiful library cleared quickly, but Pam took her time. She found herself staring out the window at the fountain, water burbling over into a copper bowl. There was a rock garden in the corner that she hadn’t noticed before, and chairs were scattered around for guests. He’d had parties here. She knew he’d had parties here. They had never had parties at home. John had said they were too expensive and that they couldn’t afford it.
Pam walked to the desk and picked up the knife. She couldn’t kill him—John had robbed her of that plea sure, but there was one thing she could do, one thing she could take, that he would sorely miss after his reanimation.
Until she died, Pam would always remember those last moments with John, the smirk on his face, his last words to her about her weight, the way he felt in her hand when she had walked out of the room and into the beautiful courtyard. She had crossed to the living room and taken a small lime-green cooler before leaving through the front door. The driver hadn’t asked questions when she got in. People who worked for millionaires had seen stranger things. The man had simply driven her to the airport where she easily changed her ticket and flew back home. First-class wasn’t full, so the cooler had even gotten its own seat.
She certainly drank enough for two.
A week later, Pam had gotten a certified letter informing her that John had left her something in his will. Two weeks after that, a cargo truck had pulled up in front of the house, blocking most of the road. Pam had been too shocked to say much of anything when the shiny BMW had rolled off the truck, and without thinking, she had signed the papers the driver handed her.
Every morning, she got into her six-year-old Honda and drove to school, her heart racing at the sight of the X3 parked in the street, exactly where the truck driver had left it. She was bound to let it sit out there until it either rotted or got stolen.
Then, one morning, her Honda would not start.
She would have gotten into a car with a convicted rapist with less trepidation than she felt when she first climbed into John’s BMW. When the seat wrapped around her body like a well-worn glove, she suppressed a shudder. At school, the window snicked down with the press of a button, and the security guard gave her a wink.
“Well,” the old fool had said. “Somebody’s moving up in the world.”
Pam was determined to get her old car fixed. The last time she had taken in the Honda, the mechanic had said the transmission was on its last leg. Pam had saved accordingly. Two thousand dollars and it would be fixed and the X3 would be back in its spot, waiting to be stolen. Maybe she would even leave the keys in the ignition.
Days went by, then weeks, then months. A year passed and she was still driving the BMW. The car had been John’s way of rubbing his success in her face. He knew that her old beater was on its last legs. He knew she would eventually end up having to drive the damn thing. What he could not have anticipated was that Pam would enjoy driving it, that she would look forward to getting behind the wheel at the end of school every day with the same eagerness that she had looked forward to seeing John in the early part of their marriage. The soft leather reminded her of his soft touch. The wood grain called to mind his masculinity. Even the air bag behind the steering wheel reminded her of the way he had made her feel safe, protected. Until . . . well, she didn’t let herself think of the “until,” did not dwell on what had happened at the end, the way he had betrayed her, the way he had exploited her after Zack’s death.
For almost two years, she had kept the cooler in the freezer alongside a much-contested slice of their wedding cake that her mother had insisted Pam keep until their tenth anniversary. When the anniversary rolled around they had found that freezer burn had claimed the cake and no one wanted to eat it. “Jesus, just throw the damn thing out,” John had said on those rare occasions when he had opened the freezer. “It’s just a fucking piece of cake.”
She couldn’t, though. They were having problems by then and she wanted to keep the cake, wanted to hold on to those early years of their marriage like a talisman. Throwing out the cake was the one thing she had resisted him on and in the end, it stood as a testament to her ability to stand up to him. Even after the divorce, Pam had kept the cake, moving it from their old house to her new one, tucking it into the top shelf of the freezer, where it stayed until five days ago, when she had bought a map and planned her trip during the summer school break.
Pam’s third and final trip out west had lasted several days, and now, as she drove the BMW into the parking lot of NuLife Laboratories (not such a secret location, considering the large sign out front), she was almost sad to reach John’s final destination. She smiled at the thought of the green cooler beside her, the piece of John she had taken sitting beside the piece of cake that represented their failed marriage. Pam imagined that in ten-or fifty-or a hundred-million years from now, if they ever figured out how to jump-start John’s body, it would be a small thing to sew his penis back on, and the slice of cake would let him know who had done him the favor. Her one act of disobedience would allow her the luxury of having the last and final word. John could visit her at the cemetery, could urinate on her grave, but he was a scientist at heart and did not believe in souls or angels looking down from on high. He would know that Pam was gone, that Pam had finally gotten the best of him. There would be nothing he could say or do to hurt her, and he would live the rest of his second life—perhaps all of eternity—knowing this. The anger would be like a new cancer, and it would eat him from the inside out.
She could still hear the deep tenor of his voice, the tone he took when he was teaching someone.
“Pam,” he’d cautioned her, his tone low as he tried to teach her an important lesson. “Don’t let anger ruin your life.”
She took out the cooler and shut the car door, smiling as the sunlight bounced off the X3’s windows. The paint was an electric silver that went from gray to blue to green, depending on how the light moved. She ran her hand along the curve of the door the way she would stroke a lover.
It took everything she had not to skip across the parking lot, let the braid beat against her back. John’s body would be rolling in its stasis tank right now, if he could see her. He would be doubly annoyed to know that the reason for Pam’s happiness was a product of his own devising.
She was happy. She was finally happy.
God knows it helped when you drove a nice car.
*
KARIN SLAUGHTER has written nine books that have sold seventeen million copies in twenty-nine languages. A New York Times bestselling author, Karin’s books have debuted at number one in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands. She lives in Atlanta, where sh
e is working on her next novel.
KAREN DIONNE
He shouldn’t be working in the woods alone. Jason knew better, running pole for his dad summers and weekends since he was ten; managing his own firewood business since he was thirteen. Jenny’d asked him not to come. Begged him, really. Claimed he’d promised to take her to the movies, though Jason couldn’t remember any such thing. He suspected he was being played—it wouldn’t be the first time Jenny manipulated him into doing what she wanted. Still, a movie about a woman who hooks the man of her dreams by cooking all of his favorite recipes wasn’t such a bad idea when you thought about it. He’d been about to give in, but then Jenny’d poked out her bottom lip like her mom always did when she didn’t get her way and started blinking real fast, faking like she was going to cry, and he lost it. Told her he couldn’t go through with it—not the movie, but the whole getting-married-before-the-baby-was- born thing—and bailed. Got in his truck, and she started crying for real.
Driving out, he felt bad at first. But then he got one of those out- of-body flash-forwards and saw Jenny twenty years from now, a clone of her mother: overweight, domineering, an unhappy woman whose only plea sure seemed to be making sure everyone else felt the same, and knew he’d done the right thing. Yeah, he shouldn’t have gotten her pregnant in the first place; he could admit his share of the blame. But adding to that mistake by making another was beyond stupid.
He stripped off his jacket and hung it over a bush. Reveled in the warmth and solitude of a sunny November Sunday, then started up the saw. Took out his frustrations on a skinny jack pine and smiled as the tree went down easily, branches snapping like toothpicks, the top landing exactly where Jason wanted it in the middle of the brush pile. He eyed the stand of mixed beech and maple that bordered his strip. The serious money was in hardwoods, but he wasn’t about to cut a single stick. Jenny’s father marked out the strips the way a dog marked its territory, making sure Jason always got the worst wood, as if Jason needed reminding who was boss. Man couldn’t wear the pants in his own family, so naturally, he took it out on him. Jason would’ve rather hired on with any other jobber, but woods work was suffering along with the rest of the country, and Olaf Anderson would do anything for his daughter, so here he was. Lucky him.
