I lost the thread, distracted by thoughts of Mara as a child. I want to know all her secrets. She keeps them buried deep. I’ll have to be the first one to break out a shovel.
Taking a breath, I continue, “I was having conflict with my father. I wanted to go to art school. He was, of course, opposed, expecting me to take over his company. He already knew by then that he was sick.”
“What about Ruben?” Mara asks.
“Well, that was the contrarian in my father. If I had wanted the business and Ruben didn’t, then he probably would have given it to Ruben. Ruben was acting up, pissing him off. I was playing hard to get—or at least, that’s how he saw it. The more I turned away from him, the more determined he became to mold me in his image. But I had already decided he was a fucking hypocrite.”
“Why?”
“Because he thought he was this ruthless titan of industry. He taught me to avoid emotional entanglements—only family deserved loyalty. But he never gave a damn about my mother, and she was the one who should have been his family. He loved Ruben, while Ruben would have cut the heart out of my father’s chest and eaten it raw if it suited him.”
“Ruben didn’t care about anyone,” Mara says.
“That’s right.” I nod. “And that’s what we truly had in common. I looked like Ruben, more than my own father. Sounded like him, even. Most of all, I understood him. I knew he was stone cold inside, because I was too. He didn’t only hate me because he was jealous—he hated me because I saw what he really was.”
“Was he still trying to hurt you?”
“Worse. He convinced my father to make him my guardian. I was sixteen. My father was getting sicker all the time. If he died, the money, the house, the company, all of it would fall under Ruben’s control. I’d be fucked.”
Mara looks down at the framed photograph clutched in her hands, lifted off the wall. She glances between Ruben’s face and mine, equally handsome, equally cruel. She understands the havoc he could wreak, in the two years before my eighteenth birthday.
“What did you do?”
“I organized a hunting trip for the three of us, knowing my father would be too ill to come with us. Ruben knew it, too. I think he anticipated what I planned—or at least, he thought he did.”
Mara returns to the sofa, but she’s stiff with apprehension, unable to sit back against the ruined cushions.
“Then why did he go?” she asks me.
“He thought he’d turn the tables on me. And I let him think it. We went out into the woods of northern Montana, just the two of us. It was the coldest week of January. That forest is thick and wild. I had been there before, and so had Ruben, but not together. You have to leave long before sunrise to hunt mountain lions, tramping through snow up to your knees.”
Mara rubs her palms against her upper arms as if she can feel the chill.
“I was a teenager, skinny, half-grown. He was twenty-eight, bigger than me, stronger. He thought he was smarter, too. I let him load my gun with blanks, pretending not to notice. I let him walk behind me in the woods. I could hear his breath slowing, his steps pausing. I could feel him lifting his rifle, pointing it at my back …”
Mara has her fingers pressed against her mouth. I know she desperately wants to bite her nails, but she refrains for my sake.
“I heard the rifle blast and I thought I’d timed it wrong, I was dead. Then I turned around and saw the hole in the ground. He’d walked across the deadfall just as I hoped. The rifle shot went up in the sky, and he plunged down twenty feet into the pit.”
Mara lets out the breath she’s been holding, her sigh caressing my forearm.
“Was he dead?” she says.
“No. It took six more hours for him to actually die. I sat and waited. That was the hardest part. He begged and pleaded. Then he cursed and screamed. Then he pleaded again.”
“Did you want to let him out?”
“If I did, I might as well cut my own throat. It was him or me, long before the pit.”
“What were you waiting for, then?”
“I was making sure no one else came along.”
Mara’s throat jumps as she swallows. Even with everything she knows about me, my callousness shocks her.
“What about your father?” she asks me.
“I told him it was an accident. That I tried to run for help, but I got lost in the woods.”
“Did he believe you?”
“He knew I would never get lost.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘That was the only family you had left. When I die, you’ll be completely alone.’ ”
Mara takes my hand again. Not squeezing it this time, just holding it in her lap, her fingers linked with mine.
“And you were,” she says softly.
“I thought it was better to be alone. Safer. More pleasant, even.”
“But you still did this,” Mara says, looking around at my father’s office, smashed to pieces with a rage that still screams from every corner of the room, all these years later.
“It affected me more than I expected,” I admit.
Mara lifts my hand to her mouth, brushing my knuckles against her lips.
“I can’t blame you,” she says. “Your uncle sounds terrifying.”
I set her hand down gently on her lap, facing her and looking her in the eyes.
“That was the first time I killed,” I say. “But there were more. It’s like losing your virginity … the first time seems so significant. Each one after is less and less important. Until you barely remember their names.”
Her tongue darts out to moisten her pale lips.
“Who was the second person?” she murmurs.
“I was drunk at a club in Paris. Three men followed me out, planning to mug me. I fought one off. The second ran away. The third … I slammed his head against the alley wall until his skull cracked.”
Mara’s hand floats up to her mouth. This time she bites down hard on the edge of her nail.
“That was the only time I killed on impulse, without a plan. The others were more strategic.”
“How many?” she whispers.
“Fourteen.”
Mara makes a faint choking sound. Her cheeks have gone pale and grayish, her knuckles white.
“None were women,” I say, as if that will comfort her.
“Why not women?” she asks faintly.