Blackbirds (27 page)

  A wife chopping up her husband was a big deal.

  It made national news for a while – just a blip, but an important blip.

  It attracted Ingersoll to me.

  They went to transfer me to the courthouse for trial, but it's not like they had me under intense scrutiny and security. I was an early-thirties housewife who had quietly gone along with everything they asked.

  They didn't expect a truck to broadside the van.

  They didn't expect me to be extracted and whisked away.

  But that's what happened. Ingersoll found my story, and believed that something very important – something very useful to him – could be found in me.

  He was right. He's been spending the better part of ten years grooming me. Cultivating my cruelty the way you might prune a bonsai tree. It's more about what you cut away than what you leave behind, I assure you.

  That's where I'm at, today. I owe him everything. That's why what I'm going to do today, with you, pains me so very much. The last thing I want to do is disappoint him.

  But this is what he instilled in me.

  I do not enjoy competition. Too many mouths and not enough food. You see?

 
 

 

Miriam's blood is an icy slush. Its sluggish passing beneath her skin leaves a trail of gooseflesh above.

  "I get it," she says, quiet.

  "This organization doesn't have room for the both of us."

  Miriam tilts her head and wipes her bloody, drooly chin on her hyper-extended shoulder.

  "This book," Harriet says, picking up the diary off the toilet lid. "I read everything you've written in here. You and I come from a similar place. Small town suburbs. Repressive family life. A yearning to do and be more than what your life allows. With just the right push you could come to love the things you can see and do as a result."

  "I'm not cruel. I'm not like you."

  Harriet raps her knuckles against the diary's cover.

  "One difference does exist," Harriet notes. "Even Ingersoll's steady hand and my life experience would not – could not – pull you out of this nosedive you've created for yourself."

  "Nosedive."

  "Yes. I know how to read what's on the page and what you've written between the lines." Harriet's eyes are now alive, alive in a way they weren't when she was physically hurting Miriam. This hurt, the hurt that's coming, is going to cut way deeper.

  "And what did I write?"

  "You're planning on killing yourself."

  Miriam says nothing. The only sound is her breathing – labored, whistling through dry nostrils, sucked in through bloody lips.

  "I never wrote that in there," she finally says.

  "Not a convincing denial."

  "It's true. I never wrote that. Don't know where you get the idea."

  "You make it as clear as possible without ever coming out and writing it. You note the number of pages left in nearly every entry. You even hint that you're counting down to something. That it could be all over. That it's the end of the line. Pair that with the fact you hate yourself, hate what you can do and
see
, and the conclusion isn't a hard one to reach. Am I right?"

  "It's bullshit."

  "Really? I think your suicide is one last grab for power. You talk a lot about fate in here. But you still don't know how you die, do you?" Harriet grins. "Suicide is you taking that power for yourself. It's your way of saving that little boy with the balloon."

  A pair of tears runs down Miriam's cheek, warm over the bruises and blood.

  "It's okay," Harriet says. "I understand."

  It's true
, Miriam thinks. This has been her plan all along. The end of the diary is an easy target. Any time she visits someone's death – and steals from them like a thieving magpie or chewing maggot – she writes an entry in the diary: one more page down, one more page closer to the finale. She never knows how it will happen. When the time comes, she'll do it by whatever means are at hand. The world offers its residents a billion ways to die: knife, gun, pills, fire, step in front of a car, fall backward over a cliff, swim out to the center of a frozen lake, kick a gang thug in the junk. She can grab a fistful of gravel on the side of the road and eat it. She can steal a cop's gun and run into a Gymboree full of kindergarten kids. Dying is easy.

  She has no specific scenario in mind, because it feels smarter that way, like she's surprising fate, sneaking up on it with tiny footsteps. It's the same reason she never comes out and says it in the book. If she never says it aloud, never writes it down, fate can't know.

  Silly logic, she thinks. But some part of her wonders.

  Harriet opens her cell phone, and thumbs a button a couple times.

  Then she lifts the phone and shows it to Miriam.

  It's a blurry camera phone image. It shows the back of a tractor-trailer.

  Miriam knows whose it is before Harriet tells her.

  "They found your friend. They're trailing him right now. It'll all be over soon."

  
Eyes. Brain. Rusty fish knife. Lighthouse.

  Miriam blinks away the tears, but those fuckers keep on coming.

  Harriet holds up the diary. "Nine pages left."

  Then she tears out the blank pages, one by one.

  Each is like a knife slash across Miriam's heart. Each
rip
– which Harriet draws out, accentuates as if for its beautiful music – cuts deep.

  Harriet flips the blank, ragged pages over her shoulder.

  She comes to the last page.

  "Dear Diary," Harriet says, as if reading real words on a real page. "This is my last entry. My trucker boyfriend died a painful death at the hands of my new employer. Life is very hard. Fate is fate and blah, blah, blah."

  She tears out that page.

  It's stupid, but Miriam can't bear to watch.

  Miriam hears, but does not see, the flap of the page as Harriet throws it into the air. Then the sound of the book dropped to the floor.

  She opens her eyes. Harriet's right in her face, holding a gun and a small lockback knife.

  "What are you doing?" Miriam asks.

  "Time to get docile."

  In one swift motion, Harriet reaches up and cuts the zip-tie binding Miriam's hands above the showerhead. Miriam's not ready. Her still-bound feet – on tip-toes, always on the tip-toes – can't get balance, and she launches forward. The way her muscles ache, the way they've been stretched and tingle from the lack of blood, doesn't give her enough feeling or movement for her to stop her fall –

  
Wham.

  She cracks her head on the side of the faucet and tumbles, belly-down, into the tub. Her eyes go blurry. Dark spots float in her vision. She feels her feet lift up, not of her own volition, and something tugs at them –
snick
. Then her feet hit the porcelain, the zip-tie between them cut in twain.

  "I–" Miriam stammers. "I don't unner-understand."

  She hears Harriet's voice at her ear: "I said, I need you docile."

  The butt of the pistol cracks down on Miriam's collarbone. Pain explodes. Harriet flips Miriam over and starts hammering her with the gun – literally. Harriet's got the gun barrel in her pudgy doll's hand, and she brings the butt down again and again like she's trying to bash nails through boards. The gun-butt slams into Miriam's ribs, her stomach, the side of her neck, everywhere. Her body is a thousand nodes of agony.

  Blood back in her hands, she does it before she realizes it –

  She punches Harriet right in the ear.

  The little Napoleon stumbles out of the tub, clutching the side of her head. Miriam struggles to clamber over the lip of the porcelain and falls to the tile floor, shoulder-first.

  "Maybe you're not clear," Harriet growls, "on the definition of
docile
."

  She grabs Miriam by the hair, slams her head into the side of the tub.

  Miriam's world rings like a goddamn bell. It barely even hurts anymore. It's mostly a dull
thudding
, like she's just a bag of sand that someone keeps hitting with a cinderblock. Part of her thinks,
the pain is over, at least
, but it turns out that this is an entirely inaccurate sentiment.

  Before she knows what's happening, Harriet's got her on her wobbly feet, and Miriam wonders why she sees herself standing in front of her.
Is this a near-death experience? An out-of-body moment?
She stares into her own eyes for a moment, blinking.

  Then she rushes to meet herself, like maybe she's going to give her own lips a drunken, sloppy, blood-bubbled kiss –

  
Crack.

  Her skull feels like an apple that's been split with a camping hatchet. It occurs to her:
Harriet just slammed my head into the mirror.

  Sure enough, she sees herself fractured into a thousand little shards, the spider in the center of a jagged web. Pieces drop away. Blood soaks her face.

  Harriet – now surprisingly gentle – rests Miriam on the floor, face up.

  "There we go," Harriet says. "A docile little girl."

  Miriam tries to say something, but she only blows bubbles of red spittle. Her wet lips smack together. Sound reaches her ears too late, or distorted, like she's in an oil drum. And every time her heart beats, it's like someone pounds on the outside of that oil drum with a sledgehammer. Miriam's a piece of ruined meat. She feels raw.

  She tries to push herself up, but her hands won't even get underneath her. They just slide away, spread eagle, fingers curling in like the legs of a dead bug.

  Her head tilts, cheek against the tile – an act that occurs not of her own volition.

  The floor is cool, and she wants just to lie there and close her eyes and curl up there forever.
Maybe I'll die here
, she thinks, and not far away she sees one of the blank pages from her diary halfcurled against a radiator.
Maybe this is the end of the line.

  
Maybe that's okay.

  A heavy weight suddenly rests on her chest.

  Groggy, she tilts her chin and sees Harriet above, smiling.

  The gun is on her chest. Every time her heart beats, the pistol trembles.

  "Consider the gun a present," Harriet says. She sounds like she's speaking to Miriam from the other side of a burbling fish tank. "The diary is done. Your trucker boyfriend will be dead by dusk. You hurt all over. Make the pain go away."

  
Make the pain go away.

  The words echo.

  Harriet smiles and retreats from the room, softly closing the door behind her.

  The gun sits on Miriam's chest like a boat anchor.

  Her hand – numb, feeling like a giant pillow – flops up onto her chest and feels for the weapon. She tries to curl her finger around the trigger, but it's hard, too hard for such a simple action. Instead, the finger lies across the trigger guard, a worm on a sunbaked road.

  It's over
, she thinks.

  Louis is dead soon. She can't see the time, but she can feel it in her every thundering pulse-beat that the hour is nigh.

  The diary is done.

  She's been privy to so many deaths.

  Why not her own?

  This is her power. This is what she can take from fate. She can take her own life in her own hands, snatch it out of destiny's grip.

  Her finger curls around the trigger.

  Her mother's voice from the dream reaches her, floating to her like a distant song carried on a slow breeze:

  
"And thine eye shall not pity, but life shall go for life, eye for eye,
tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot."

  She hoists the gun.

 

Harriet listens, ear pressed tightly to the door.

  She hears the stupid girl moving around, slow and sluggish. The brush of her arm against the floor. A moan. The faint rattle of the pistol's mechanisms in an unsteady grip.

  Harriet smiles.

  This really will be her crowning moment.

  She's made people hurt before, but not like this.

  Part of her feels bad. That strikes her as disturbing. Yes, she felt some sympathy toward this girl, but guilt? She hasn't felt a pang of guilt since… Well, when was the last pang of guilt? Has she ever had one?

  A sour feeling strikes her gut. Guilt. No use for that.

  A sound interrupts the tiny song of remorse inside her: the sound of the gun's hammer being pulled back.

  
Good girl
, Harriet thinks. It makes sense. Pulling the hammer back is easier than just using the trigger. The girl's been worked over. Probably barely has the strength.

  She'll hardly have to lift the pistol. Just a pivot, a counterclockwise turn until the barrel is up under her chin, and then –

  Right on cue, the gun goes off.

  
Bang.

  Harriet's smile broadens.

  As the pistol fires the door shudders – probably the girl's leg kicking out. Soon will come the awful odor of voided bowels, a smell that is only pleasant due to the associations Harriet has with it, really.

  Harriet takes a step away from the door and feels a sharp pain in her head.

  She staggers, almost falls, when reaching for the doorknob.

  She tries to ask aloud, "Why is my shoulder wet?"

  But the words don't form. They can't. Her mouth won't response to her brain's wishes.

  Harriet smells something like burning hair.

  A small 'o' sits in the middle of the door. Smoke drifts up through the pencil-sized hole.

  Harriet reaches toward her ear and pulls away a wet, red hand.