The sound of a gunshot crackled in the air and I screamed. I waited for pain, for blood. But a moment passed, and I felt nothing at all.
I opened my eyes, and Catherine stood a few feet away from me, a gun smoking in her trembling hand. George was on the ground, the top part of his head in pieces. A sight so gruesome and revolting that I turned away and gagged.
“I killed him,” Catherine said, her voice stretched in disbelief. “All those times he hurt Myrtle, and now… I killed him.”
George had been wrong. She did have the guts to shoot a man, and thank goodness for that or I’d be dead. “You had to do it,” I said softly. “You had to do it.”
“Daise!” Jordan’s voice shot out of the woods, somewhere just behind us. Catherine and I were still standing there, eyes locked, unmoving. Somewhere in the background a siren wailed, and then another.
Jordan ran out from the trees, saw me. “Oh my god, Daise, I heard the gun, and I heard you scream.”
“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m really okay.” But my voice trembled so much my words came out more like gibberish.
Her eyes suddenly caught on George’s bloody, broken head.
“He was going to kill me,” I said. The sirens swirled closer. “Myrtle’s husband… he thought I was responsible for her death and… he wanted to kill me.”
“I had to do it,” Catherine echoed my words back, her voice sounding far away, raspy.
Jordan looked at me and then at Catherine. She opened her mouth, closed it again, and then took a breath and walked toward George. It was only then that I noticed she was holding a gun too. Why was Jordan here? Why did she have a gun?
Jay Gatsby’s dead. Someone else got to him first.
“Jordie,” I murmured her name. “Oh, Jordie. What have you done?”
She wiped her gun with the skirt of her dress, wiping away any trace of her. Then she positioned it in George’s hand, raising his limp arm to his head.
She stood, brushed off her hands, looked at me, then at Catherine again. “I didn’t do anything,” she said. “None of us did anything.” She swallowed hard and met my eyes. “Jay Gatsby drove over Myrtle. And then this poor bereaved man. He came here and killed Jay to avenge his wife’s death. Then he went out into the woods and he shot himself with the very same gun.”
“He shot himself,” Catherine repeated, stunned. “With the very same gun.”
“We’re gonna turn and walk out of these woods one by one, and then we’ll never talk about this ever again,” Jordan said firmly, looking hard at both of us. “Promise.”
“I promise,” I said.
“I promise,” Catherine echoed.
* * *
WHEN I GOT back to East Egg, I was numb and exhausted and still shaking. I’d run to my car in Jay’s drive as the sirens had approached, and then I’d sped all the way back through the Eggs to my estate. Now I wanted to speed away, farther, faster. Put the whole entire summer, the whole entire awful ordeal, behind us. Jay was right about one thing: I could not go to jail. I would never survive there.
We’ll never talk about this ever again, Jordan had said, just an hour ago in the woods. And all three of us strangers or friends or murderers, we had agreed on that. Wherever Jordan had driven away to when she left the woods, it hadn’t been here. I wasn’t sure if or when I’d ever see her again, and that thought sank inside of me, a weighty, terrible sadness.
Tom was at the house, though, waiting for me in the dining room, with a bouquet of yellow roses on the table in front of him. Their stems were unevenly cut, and I guessed he’d gone out to the garden and trimmed them himself. “I’m so sorry, Daisy,” he said, looking up, when I walked in. “Forgive me.”
So many times, and so many promises, and never had I wanted to believe him more than I did right now. All those thoughts I’d had earlier about being in control. But it would be so much easier to cling to Tom now, to cling to the power that came with the Buchanan money and the Buchanan name. Nothing could touch me with that, with him. He would never let me go to jail.
“Oh, Tom.” I carefully picked up a rose and held it to my nose. The sweet floral scent washed away those other horrible ones: gunpowder and burning flesh and the overwhelming metallic odor of blood. “Would you hate me if I told you I had a little spree of my own, and that we had to move away from here? Immediately.” I spoke softly, urgently.
Tom frowned. I imagined he pictured my little spree was with Jay Gatsby. Soon enough Tom would learn of Jay’s death and take a strange sort of sadistic delight in it. But in that moment, I didn’t correct him.
When he finally spoke, his voice was thick and earnest: “I could never hate you, Daisy.”
He came to me and wrapped me in a hug, his arms powerful and tight. They were sometimes suffocating, but now they felt strangely freeing, too. Nothing could touch me when I was with him. He wouldn’t let it.
He kissed the top of my head. “How do you feel about Minnesota?” he asked.
Catherine January 1923
CHICAGO
I WASN’T BORN TO BE a farm girl. And I was never going to be a farm wife.
As much as Father begged me to stay in Rockvale after we buried Myrtle next to Mother, to reconsider Harold Bloom and his dairy farm, city life called to me. No matter how much Father fretted about the dangers, about Myrtle’s fate becoming my fate, I couldn’t stand the thought of being isolated on a farm, or, becoming anyone’s wife. My years in New York, the men I’d known there—Jay and Tom and even George, especially George, made me understand the only thing I wanted out of life was to never tether myself to any man at all.
Myrtle had become a victim of her own terrible circumstances. We women still had fewer rights, less control than men. And what would the rest of my life be if I stayed in Rockvale? If I did not keep on trying to fight for women like Myrtle. For women like me, I told Father.
“But Harold Bloom could give you such a safe and steady life,” Father protested.
“I don’t want a safe life,” I told him, much to his chagrin. “I want a good life. I want a meaningful life.”
I kissed him good-bye, promised him I’d be careful and that I would come back soon and often to visit. Then, in the beginning of November, Duke and I got on the train headed for Chicago.
* * *
CHICAGO WAS ALMOST as expensive as New York, and after all my years living in that god-awful shoebox with Helen, I wanted more space to call my own.