Rage Against the Dying

Thirty-four





I should have realized it would happen sooner or later, but I was still surprised that relationships end so fast. You spend more than a year getting to know each other, building trust, and in three minutes it’s over. In my defense, I might have been thinking more clearly if Zach hadn’t just died in my arms. Standing in the laundry room I had been like a boxer still reeling from a jab to the gut, being decked with a sharp right to the jaw immediately after; that one-two punch got me. My mind seemed to slip out repeatedly, have a look at whatever I was doing with a detached interest, and slip back in when it was good and ready. That sensation of draining out of myself.

I didn’t fully realize my state until I was out of the house and driving south on Oracle, in the left lane, about ten miles under the speed limit. A Chevy flatbed, red and tricked out with all the extras, tailgated me, maybe had been tailgating me for a while without my noticing. When that didn’t make him feel any better, he expressed his concern with his horn. I glanced at my tote bag beside me and considered putting a bullet in his front tire, but decided on restraint instead—besides, there were witnesses. When I got to the stoplight at Tangerine Road I put my car in park, got out, and went to the driver’s window of the truck. It was closed; in this heat windows would always be closed and the AC on full tilt. I hit the tinted window once with the palm of my hand.

It slid down slowly to reveal a neatly dressed man who should know better than to honk his horn indiscriminately in traffic. He stared at me with apparent alarm.

I thought it was because he’d never had a woman respond to his honking in quite this way. “Okay, you got my attention. Now what the f*ck do you want from me?”

He looked at my chest, involuntarily raising his hands as if to protect himself. In that moment I saw in his eyes what he saw, a crazed woman wearing a blouse with blood on it. Without saying more he raised his window, backed up, and drove around me. He did not squeal his tires.

As I watched him pull away, I could feel my heart pumping in my ears and my breath rasping. Road rage that, motherf*cker.

I got back into my car; pulled it off the road to let the rest of the traffic go by; and, taking a whimsical shirt with dancing javelinas from the plastic bag, did a quick change with the top I was wearing. I wadded up the bloody one and shoved it under my seat. Then I pulled into the traffic again and, without being fully aware of where I was going or how I got there, ended up at the Sheraton downtown. Maybe I was flying in the direction of my last simple encounter with someone who knew the real me and wanted that place to run to ground. Upon my arrival at the reception desk I asked if Zach’s room, room 174, was still free.

Eyeing the garbage bag I held, the girl at the reception desk told me it was. Glad I had had the presence of mind to at least change my shirt, I gave the girl my credit card, got my little plastic swipe key, and scuttled my bag into room 174 before anyone could spot me. I had to get a room somewhere. If I kept driving, I risked killing myself and someone else with my car.

Zach had taken everything with him the morning before when I dropped him off at the airport. He’d probably left his bag there. I wondered for a moment what he had done all last night—drank in some bar, or just wandered. I could feel his presence in the room, sad but at least honest. I sat down on the bed, thought what I would have done to that guy on the road if he hadn’t backed down, and tried to get a grip.

You’d think all women must get suddenly serene, their anger draining away with their estrogen. That the rage at even a lifetime’s worth of death such as I had known will dissipate into scrapbooking and volunteer work with Humane Society fund-raisers.

Well, maybe I’d been kidding myself that I could be that woman. Maybe that’s not how it always is, maybe not how it should be. Of the half dozen lines of poetry I know by heart, there’s, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Howl, howl … or rage, rage … against the dying of the light.”

This is Brigid Quinn, a woman of a certain age, raging.

How to express my feelings in that moment, my hatred for that man who had destroyed so many lives and had come back all these years later to destroy mine as well. This man, who was responsible for destroying my life and the only real happiness I’d ever known, was making me mad.

Mad enough to kill him.

Kill him and gnaw his still-warm flesh.

Whoa, Quinn. Slipping off the grid, are we? It’s something Dad used to say, along with twenty–thirty years from now, you’ll laugh at all this.

Well, Dad, just think. Twenty–thirty years from now, we’ll both be dead. Ha, ha. Isn’t that a scream?

I paced back and forth, back and forth in the room, wanting to connect and not wanting to connect with another soul. Brother, a Fort Lauderdale cop with a wife with MS, no. Sister with the CIA, who knew where, no. Mom? Not Mom. I dialed their number at the Weeping Willow Retirement Center anyway, the drifting part of my mind slipping out and watching me hit the numbers.

“It’s Brigid, Mom.”

“Are you all right?” Her voice took on that tone of someone who suspects that bad news is the only kind there is, that I was calling from a hospital and the only moving part left was my mouth. Maybe that’s how it is for a mother when everyone in your family is some kind of cop. She always said, “are you all right?” rather than “hello.”

“Sure, Mom.”

“Good, because sometimes just the sound of your voice gives me an attack of colitis. I worry about you all the time.” Before I could make this something like a dialogue she went on. “I won thirty dollars at bingo last night.”

“That’s great. Congratulations.”

“So how’s Carlo?”

My voice caught in my throat, and I couldn’t speak. Why the f*ck did I call her before I was strong enough to hear about how I got to be fifty something and still couldn’t do a grown-up thing like keep a marriage together? Or remember that I gave her nervous colitis at the best of times? But it was okay because I didn’t have to go into any of that. She turned from the phone, and I could hear her talking to Dad, could almost hear the impatient ice cubes in his glass, almost smell the bourbon. When she turned her mouth back to the receiver, she said, “Listen, honey, it’s dinnertime. Daddy wants to take me down to dinner now. Could you call back?”

“Sure. Sure, Mom.” I hung up, trying to get back the several decades of maturity I’d misplaced during our few minutes of conversation.

That exhausted family. I couldn’t trust myself to call Sigmund, afraid I might tell him things he would have to testify to later at my trial.

I looked around the room for the first time. I was sitting on one of two double beds. I tried not to imagine the body fluids that would show up on the bedspread under an infrared light. Over each bed was a large print showing a watercolor of a cactus, one a prickly pear with dark red fruit practically bursting from the paddles. I pictured the fruit popping like blood blisters and running down the wall. The other was a saguaro, that tall kind of cactus with arms, capped with little white blossoms at the top. I won’t say what that picture made me imagine.

Despite this being the safest place for me, I didn’t want to be here. I figured I could keep myself from draining out of my head long enough to reach a bar.