Chapter Fourteen
Tony stands in place at the shooting range, ear protectors on, his Sig held loosely in both hands. He doesn’t shoot. Not yet.
He’s waiting for the flashback to hit and clear before he starts his practice. It will come. It always comes. Sometimes it’s slow, and he thinks it’s gone and not going to happen. This is something he dreads more than the flashback itself.
The memory is his punishment, purgatory, and salvation. It keeps him on the straight and narrow. Reminds him of the price he’s sworn to pay and the path he is set on. If the memory doesn’t hit him hard enough to shred his guts and threaten to drop him, then he knows he is in danger.
Every Sunday afternoon he comes to the shooting range to go through this ritual. It’s been ten years now, once a week, fifty-two times a year. All the other regulars know his routine. They assume he’s meditating before he starts to shoot. They think he’s a badass for this, a sharpshooter. Some of them think he was a sniper in Iraq.
Nobody knows the real reason he comes here, regularly, every week. Nobody asks.
Once, there was a new employee, a little too nosy, who started in with questions.
“Hey, buddy. Whatcha doing? Praying your shots don’t miss?”
“Tallying my sins,” Tony says. “Making peace with my dead.”
And the guy had laughed, as if this was high humor and Tony was a joker. But the next week when Tony came in for his ritual, the owner walked over and told him the kid had been fired. “Not a place for asking questions,” he’d said. “My apologies.”
Today the free fall into memory is delayed. Instead, Tony remembers a different gun and a pair of wide eyes not quite blue or green, as if they can’t decide what color they ought to be. God have mercy. He has no space in his life for this, for the way a small thought about Maisey accelerates his heart and sends his blood rushing to places it has no business. And now his brain has followed, and he wrenches it back.
Here. Now. The gun in his hands.
As if it is aware of his betrayal of attention, the memory ambushes him from behind and very nearly drops him. One ragged breath gets away from him before he’s back in control, because that is part of this exercise.
To let the onslaught take him back to that day, that hour, that minute, that second when his finger pulled a trigger. It is his penalty to himself to relive it, fully and completely, once a week for the rest of his life.
His awareness fragments into two: the man standing here at the shooting range and the child he once was in another place far from here.
To his child-self, the gun is heavy, an unfamiliar weight. His hands are shaking, heart pounding, but he knows what he’s doing. Knows, when he pulls the trigger, what will follow.
And still. His finger tightens, curls back toward his thumb. There is a recoil. A sharp crack that hurts his ears. His eyes are clamped shut, so he knows only what his body feels and what his other senses tell him. Shrill voices screaming. A gasp. Moaning. The weight of something heavy hitting the floor.
Hands trying to pry the gun from his locked fingers. Fingernails tearing at his skin. Frenzied. Frantic. His mother’s voice.
“Give me the gun, Tony. Give it to me. Let go. It’s over.”
The gasping, whimpering, pitiful, blubbering breaths of a dying man. The stink of gunpowder not quite overpowering the tang of blood, the putrid gaseous stench of shit and piss.
I did this, he reminds himself. I pulled the trigger. The bullet hit him. He is dead.
Ritual completed, guilt and retribution program firmly reinstalled, Tony pulls himself out of the flashback. He knows the drill. Focus on what is. The feel of the floor beneath his feet. The gunpowder smell of the shooting range. The ongoing blitz of rapid-fire shots. He drags air in and out of his lungs in steadying breaths.
Only then does he open his eyes, fix on his target, and begin to shoot. As usual, his bullets hit the target in tightly clustered groups at head and heart. He’s a deadly shot. And this is why he does not, cannot, will not carry a gun or have one in the house. Why he couldn’t take the gun away for Maisey.
He is not to be trusted with women any more than he should be trusted with guns.
On the way out, he secures his weapon in the locker he rents for that purpose and then says, casually, to Brent behind the desk, “I hear Leah Addington passed. Know anything about the funeral?”
“Wondered where she was,” Brent says. “Damn. She was just getting good. Hope nothing bad went down?”
“Some kind of stroke or something,” Tony says. “May she rest in peace.”
Following a hunch that a woman with a gun like that, loaded and ready, might want to know how to shoot it, he’d asked the question. He’d like to ask how long she’d been coming to the range but knows better than to show curiosity. Still, he’s earned a couple of important pieces of intel. Leah Addington has not been shooting guns for her entire life, and Brent has reason to believe her death might be from something other than natural causes.
Tony isn’t sure if he should tell Maisey—what would be the point? She was obviously shaken up by the fact that her mother even had a gun. What he wants to know is why a woman like Leah had a gun in the first place.
“Her daughter and granddaughter are at the house,” Tony says. “Any reason to believe they’re in danger?”
“Nothing specific. Look, since she’s dead, I’ll tell you this. She came in here a few months back and asked if someone could teach her how to shoot. Determined little woman. Didn’t talk much. Certainly didn’t look like the gun-owning type. But something had made her twitchy. Asked questions about shooting to kill.”
“Thanks. I’ll keep an eye out, then.”
He wonders, though, as he walks out to his car. What kind of threat could appear out of the blue to spook a woman like Leah? Briefly he weighs the possibility that Walter is the danger, but just as quickly discards this. You can tell a lot about a man by the way his daughter treats him.
Tony will have to keep an eye on the family, just in case. A wave of pleasure sneaks up on him at the idea of spending time with Maisey. It’s tempting to entertain it, to justify it, to tell himself it will do no harm. But he doesn’t believe this. Not really.
A real relationship is a thing he cannot allow. He will help her as if she was one of his sisters, but that will be the end of it.
Chapter Fifteen
Dad sits in a chair, looking mindlessly toward the window, clearly lost inside himself. When we arrive his gaze comes around to us, but there’s no light in his eyes. Elle hugs him, installs herself on the edge of his chair, and begins the sort of chatter only a twelve-year-old girl is capable of. Every word draws him back to us, away from whatever mindless zone he’s been drifting through.
When an aide brings in a dinner tray and sets it up for him, he actually eats most of it. Every time his hands forget what they’re doing, Elle reminds him.
It’s the dessert that does us in.
He takes one bite of hospital apple pie and makes a face. “What is this supposed to be?”
“Pie,” Elle says, poking at the rubbery crust and crunchy apple pieces with the fork. “At least, I think it’s pie.”
“That’s not a pie,” he protests. “We’ll get Leah to make you a real one, just as soon as I get out of here.”
My mom’s pies are legendary. With his words I taste an intoxicating bite of salty, tender crust, tart but buttery sweet apple, cinnamon, and brown sugar. It melts in my mouth but sticks in my throat.
There will be no more pies. Not one. Not like that. Nobody else, anywhere in the world, makes pies the way my mother made them.
Dad sees it. I watch the knowing steal a little more of the strength from his face, as if the very bones of his cheeks and jaw are being eaten away by my mother’s absence.
“I’ll make you a pie, Grandpa,” Elle says into the suffocating silence that follows his words.