The Killing Lessons (3 page)

The world stopped and Nell flew through it. A non-silence like when you put your head underwater in the bath, the loud private quiet of the inside of your own body. She ran through the darkness and with every step knew she couldn’t take another step. It was as if his hands were on her and yet she was still moving. How could she still be moving if he had her? Perhaps he’d lifted her off her feet and she was just pedalling air. Like her mother’s bare legs kicking slowly in the blood. Her mother’s blood. Leaving her. Spreading on the floor. So much blood. When blood came out it didn’t go back in. Never again. You’ll never see…

The trees ended. A deeper cold from the ravine came up, sheer air and the sound of the rushing river far below. The snow was coming down faster now, at a wind-driven angle. The bridge was fifty feet to her left. Which meant she was half a mile from home, going the wrong way. But she couldn’t turn back on herself. When she thought of turning back on herself the only image she got was of him stepping out from behind a tree and the warm thud of her running straight into his body, his arms coming quick around her.
Gotcha
. She could hear him saying that.

She ran to the bridge. There was, incredibly, a parked car a few feet away from it.

Whose car? Empty?

She stopped.
His
car? With someone else in it?

She peered through the falling snow.

There was no one in the car. Could she hide under it? No. Stupid. First place he’d look. People nearby?

She scanned the ravine’s edge. No one.

There was no time. Move.

She ran to the bridge head.

A red sign with white lettering: BRIDGE CLOSED DANGER DO NOT CROSS

Rusted metal struts driven into the walls of the ravine. Wooden sleepers she remembered wobbling the few times her mom had driven them across in the Jeep. A mile to the west, she knew, the ravine narrowed to barely twenty feet before flaring out again. Last year an ice storm had brought a Douglas fir down across the gap. Teenagers proved themselves by crawling over to the other side and back. You had to go there and back. That was the thing. Josh and his friend Mike Wainwright had spent a whole morning working up the courage. Daring each other. Double daring. In the end neither of them had done it. Two hundred feet. The ravine’s dark air ready. The river waiting.

She edged around the sign. Her wet jeans were icy between her legs. The creases bit her skin. Her feet felt bruised. The snow here was above her knees. How far to the other side? In the Jeep it took seconds. She seemed to be wading for ever. There were invisible weights on her thighs.

Halfway across she had to stop and rest. She wanted to lie down. She could barely see an arm’s length in the slanting snow. The distance between her and her mother and Josh hurt her insides. She kept imagining it being morning, the grey daylight and the warmth of the kitchen, her mom turning to her as she walked in and saying, Nell, where’ve you
been
? I’ve been out of my
mind
…

She forced herself to move. Three steps. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. The end of the bridge. The back of a metal sign, identical, she supposed, to the one at the other end. A broken spool of barbed wire hung between the railings and dangled into the emptiness of the ravine.

‘Goddamn you,’ the man’s voice said. It sounded as if he were inches behind her. She turned. He was at the BRIDGE CLOSED sign, struggling to squeeze past it. It seemed impossible that she’d be able to get her legs to move.

She staggered forward. Two more steps. Three. She was almost there.

Something made her stop.

Apart from the whisper of the racing snow and the intimate din of her own breathing there was nothing to hear. But it was as if she’d heard something.

The actual sound, when it came, wiped everything from her mind.

And when the world fell from under her a small part of herself felt a strange relief.

This part of her – her soul, maybe – flew up out of the fall like a spark with the thought that at least it was over, at least wherever her mom had gone she would go too. She believed in heaven, vaguely. Where good people went when they died. Some place where you could walk on the clouds and there were white stairways and gardens and God – although she always imagined she’d rather just know he was around than actually meet him. She’d sometimes wondered if she was a good person, but now that it came to it, she wasn’t afraid.

Far away was the sound of grinding, metal against rock.

All around her the gloom and the snow somersaulting, slowly.

Then something rushed up at deafening speed to strike her face.

It was still dark when Nell opened her eyes, though she had no idea how long she’d been out. Her first confused thought was that she was in bed, and that the comforter was wet and freezing. Then her vision cleared. Not the comforter. Snow. Three or four inches on her. It was still snowing.

As if it had been waiting for her to realise this, cold rushed her, seized every molecule and said:
You
are freezing. You are freezing to
death
.

She pushed herself up onto her elbow. Too fast. The world spun. The sky’s soft chasm and the looming wall of the ravine churned like clothes in a tumble dryer. She rolled onto her side and vomited, and for what felt like a long time afterwards just lay there, though her body not only shivered but occasionally jerked, as if someone were jabbing her with a cattle prod. Through the cold she was aware of two pains: one in her right foot, one in her skull. They throbbed together, in time with her pulse. They were bad, but she knew they weren’t as bad as they soon would be. It was as if they were telling her this, with glee, that they were just getting started.

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.
I’ll never see my mother again
. It brought back the time she was very small and got separated from her mother in a department store. Suddenly all the unknown adults and intimidating heights, the panic, the full horror of herself in the world alone. The world had been hiding how terrifying it was. It drew back again half a minute later, when Rowena found her, but there was no forgetting it. And now here it was again.

Nell pushed herself back up onto her elbow and looked down. She was lying on a narrow shelf that stuck out from the ravine about fifteen feet from the top. If she’d rolled another eight inches she’d have gone, two hundred feet down to the dark green river and its scattered rocks. On the opposite side, struts mangled, the bridge hung, ridiculously, from one of its huge rivets.

The golden hare bracelet had snapped its chain. It lay in the snow next to her, in flecks of blood.
You’re old enough, now
. The hare marked the edge of her fall. Another few inches and she’d be dead. She imagined it had a certain number of times it could save you. This was one. She wondered how many. Very carefully, she closed her fingers around it. It seemed to take a long time to work it into her jacket pocket. Safe travel.

She got to her knees. The pain in her foot turned up its volume. She clamped her teeth together. Her head went big and solid and hot, then cold and fragile. Her scalp shrank. She couldn’t stop the shivering. She could feel the sheer drop behind her like a weight pulling at her back.

I wish you’d stop climbing everything. I’m worried you’ve got monkey genes.
Nell had thought monkey
jeans
(chimps in little Levi’s) until Josh, rolling his eyes, had explained. She hadn’t really grasped it even then.

The ravine wall was frozen black rock, veined white where the snow held. Not quite vertical. Not
quite
vertical, but still.

I’m going to be all right but you have to run
.

She reached up for the nearest handhold. Her fingers were numb. Her face flooded with heat. And when she tried to stand the pain in her foot screamed.

Paulie Stokes was in agony. His fall had brought him with the full force of his body’s weight up against what had turned out to be a two-foot tree stump half buried in the snow. His bent left knee had hit it hard, and now, back within sight of the house, the pain was so bad he was beginning to think it must be broken.

He’d thought she was dead.

He’d stood there for maybe fifteen minutes. Until her head had lifted. He’d watched her body get its bearings. He’d watched the little bitch climb.
Climb
, Jesus.

Xander couldn’t know.

Xander could not and must not know.

Which Paulie knew was an insane decision to have made – but he’d made it. There were a lot of decisions he made this way, with the sense that the thing they were intended to avoid couldn’t be avoided. He did this with a mix of lightness and terror and fascination. He lived a light, terrified, fascinated life slightly to one side of Xander. But the longer he hung around Xander the smaller and less reliable that life became. So now in a kind of looped dream he told himself Xander mustn’t know about the girl and Xander would find out and Xander mustn’t know and it was only a matter of time before Xander found out and he wouldn’t tell him and then the dream-loop dissolved like a skyrocket’s trail in the night sky and he took a few more excruciating steps with no room for anything but the forked lightning of his shattered knee until in spite of that the dream-loop started again and Xander mustn’t know and Xander was guaranteed to find out and he wouldn’t tell him and it would be all right and it wouldn’t.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Xander said to him, as he limped into the living room. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

The wooden blinds were down and two table lamps were on. They gave a gentle buttery light. The room had a friendliness to it, from the corduroy couches to the scattered kids’ DVDs and the thick hearthrug with its pattern of squares and rectangles in different shades of brown. The woman was lying on the floor on her back where Xander had dragged her. Her pale blue panties lay nearby, stained with blood. She was still alive. Her mouth was moving but there was no sound. The thought of what would become of him if Xander left him reared up in Paulie, a feeling like the one he got in the dream of the tidal wave he used to have as a kid, where he was standing on a bright boardwalk eating an ice cream with his back to the ocean, and the sky darkened, and when he turned there was a thousand-foot wall of black water coming towards him, flecked with sharks and shipwrecks. At the same time the fact of the woman’s helplessness, the look of ebbed strength in her bare limbs, filled him with a kind of nourishment, as if fabulous proteins had been rushed into him.

‘I thought I saw someone out there,’ he said. ‘But it was a deer. Hurt my goddamned leg. Need to strap it up or something.’

‘A deer?’

Paulie had actually seen a deer on his stumble back through the trees.

‘You shouldn’t have left her,’ Xander said.

‘She wasn’t going anywhere.’

‘You don’t know that. This is your problem: you don’t think. Not going anywhere? Women lift fucking trucks when their kids are trapped underneath. You don’t
think
. I’ve told you.’

‘OK, OK. Fuck, man, how’d it be if there
had
been someone? You’d be thanking me.’ Paulie had to turn away as he said this. Xander looked at you and your lies crumbled. His hands were wet. The pain in his knee was a blessing, since it kept short-circuiting everything else.

‘Go and strap your leg,’ Xander said. ‘Don’t come back in here till I tell you. And for Christ’s sake shut the back door, will you?’

When Paulie had hobbled out Xander moved to stand over the woman on the floor. The feeling of wrongness, of not having what he needed to do this properly, was still with him, but it was made negligible by the pounding richness of his body and the bristling aliveness of the world. Every detail of the room, whether it liked it or not, said that whatever this woman’s life had been up until now, he had all of it in his hands. His controlled impatience was a delight to him. It was like holding back a horse he knew would win every time, no matter the competition. There was a sort of hilarity to it, the certainty of power, the certainty of victory. There was a moment of balance, between holding it back and letting it go. You had to wait for that moment and make it last as long as possible, because the surrender to it was the sweetest thing of all, a sweetness that went through your every cell so that all your movements were perfect, every bit of you was perfect, from your fingerprints to your eyelashes, and so much of the exhaustion simply fell away like a rotten harness and you were free.

‘What?’ he said to the woman, getting down on his knees and putting his ear next to her mouth. ‘What are you saying?’

Rowena Cooper had been in and out of consciousness. She remembered waking at the bottom of the stairs to find herself soaked and heavy. A terrible delayed understanding that she was soaked and heavy with her own blood. The gun’s butt had hit her like a meteor. Those last fragments of thought: that they’d find Josh; that if only Nell heard and ran; that Nell
wouldn’t
run, that she’d come in, see, scream – and they’d have her, too.

Then blackness.

She hadn’t heard the gunshot. She didn’t know.

But when she’d surfaced again there was a frank silence upstairs. A dead intelligence had replaced her son.

Then Nell, close, smelling of snow and the forest, the little face that was like a brand on Rowena’s heart. The appalling energy it had cost her to get Nell to run.
Run
. Saying she’d be angry if she didn’t and seeing in her daughter’s eyes that the child knew the anger was a sham to hide something much worse. It was an understanding between them. Her daughter’s strength in that moment had fractured Rowena with love and pride.

The last image, after the red-haired guy had picked himself up off the floor, was of him going after her, towards the dark line of the forest.
Go on, baby, keep going. Hide, hide in the good trees.

She’d sunk into nothingness again, and when she returned was being dragged by her ankles down the hallway and through the living room doorway. The liverish stink of her blood mixed with the Christmas tree’s smell and the waxy odour of gift wrap. She was cold and thirsty. (She thought what a long time it had been since she’d lain on the floor. When you were a kid the floor was part of your perspective. You forgot the view from down here, the skirting boards and secret spaces under the couch with their lost items and fluff.) She could see the fireplace Josh had set ready for lighting earlier that day. Only ever lit at Christmas. It was one of the rituals he’d taken over a few years back, with shy masculinity. The first time he’d done it without asking, Rowena had walked into the empty room and seen it and stood there swallowing back tears. Her husband, Peter, had died in a car accident when Nell was only four years old, Josh seven. All the ways in which she’d worried she wasn’t enough for her children. And then her son’s quiet act of compensation. She’d felt such an access of tenderness and loss.

The reality of death came to her through the cold and the thirst. The immense sadness of the fact. Her time going like the last grains of sand sucked through the hourglass’s cinched middle. Going. Going. Images from her past detonated: childhood in Denver; the little house’s parquet flooring and weedy yard; her father reading
The Hobbit
to her when she was ill; the heady first weeks at college in Austin; the certainty when she’d met Peter, the happy sensual pigs they’d made of themselves that first year, love and pleasure like a ridiculous fortune they’d inherited; the thrill of telling him she was pregnant and the astonishing casual knowledge that he wanted it as much as she did, that this was really their life, shaping itself; Josh being born, Nell, the messy, ordinary, unappreciated gifts of having a family. Then the accident, the shredded life, the incremental acceptance. The dull practicality of the insurance payout and the move back to Colorado. Last house on the road. A peaceful corner to raise the kids and heal your wounds.

She felt the sprawling idea of the future – Josh and Nell growing up, college and love affairs and houses and children, phone calls and the ache of their absence and the peace of putting her arms around them when they came home, the things she still wanted (maybe a man again; her body had been telling her, lately, saying enough was enough, she was still only forty-one) and through all of that the imagined relationship with the taken-for-granted physical world, of sunlight and red leaves on a forest floor and the breathtaking first whiff of the ocean – she felt all of this dissolving into blankness, pointlessness, a bereavement she couldn’t accommodate. She had an odd, flimsy image of Nell’s half-painted bedroom. Nell had been sleeping with her these last nights while the redecoration inched forward. It would never be finished now. It had been sweet being close to her daughter through the nights. She wanted to say goodbye to her children. Above everything else she wanted to see and smell and hear and hold them one last time. And all the while the darkness came and went, and very vaguely a confusion of wondering if there was anything on the other side and would she, after all the horror of grief, see Peter again?

‘What?’ the man said, his face close to hers. ‘What are you saying?’

But a blood bubble formed and burst between her lips. She saw the ceiling’s central light, the gold tinsel sparkling, felt the cold turning to warmth as the image formed of Nell running through the shadows in the snow.