THIRTY-FIVE
Choosing Life
For Miriam, choosing life is nothing so grand as seeing the vast reservoir of potential that a continued existence would allow. Her mind's eye does not play movies of kids on swings and a dog in a yard and the warm glow coming off a golden pond.
No, as it is so often with Miriam, her decision to live is one based on spite and anger – a mouth full of vinegar that drives her once more to sabotage her own plans.
She really was going to kill herself.
It made sense. Harriet spoke true.
Her life was shit. She was fate's bitch. She was a fly munching on a turd, or mold consuming a perfectly good banana.
It was time to die, she decided.
Lying on the cold, bloody tile, Miriam felt the gun on her chest. With tiny pushes, pushes that took far too much effort, she spun the weapon so that the barrel was nestled right under her chin.
She thumbed back the hammer so that the trigger pull would be nothing at all, just a little tug, the barest whisper of movement. Just to be sure, she pushed her chin down on the barrel.
But then she saw –
Two shadows underneath the bathroom door.
Two shadows that equated to two feet. Harriet's feet.
She's listening at the door, Miriam thought.
And that pissed her off.
This was her moment. Her death. Harriet had lent it a poetic veneer, but now the twat was standing on the other side of the door, snickering like she had stuck Miriam's hand into a cup of warm water while she slept?
She raised the gun. It felt like her muscles were about to tear from their moorings along her arm bones and go sling-shotting against the broken mirror.
She didn't aim, didn't try to imagine where it was that Harriet was standing. It was all automatic. A total reflex.
She fired, bang.
Seconds later came a mumbled statement (carpet noodle), and a thump.
Miriam steps over the body. It takes her a while to get there, what with her body feeling like hammered shit. She sees herself in the mirror before she leaves the bathroom – her face looks like a gray pillowcase stuffed with softballs, and her already pale skin makes a terrible contrast with the endless streaks of drying red.
She looks like a murder scene.
But she's alive, she thinks, as she stands over Harriet's body.
The stocky woman lies with her mouth open, her blood and brains emptying onto the carpet and soaking in real good.
Miriam looks down at the gloves on Harriet's hands.
"Guess we know how you die after all," Miriam says. It sounds like she's got a mouth full of rocks and molasses. She tries to laugh, but it pains her too much. She coughs. She's afraid her ribcage is going to come up her throat or out her ass. Every square inch of her body throbs.
She nudges Harriet, half-expecting Little Napoleon to lurch up and start biting at her Achilles' tendons, but the woman experiences no such miraculous resurrection.
Now: Louis.
Miriam doesn't really believe she can save him. But she knows she's there when it happens. The vision showed her that.
The question is: where?
No. Wait. The first question is: when?
Miriam bends over – ow, ow, ow – and finds Harriet's cell phone in the pocket of the dead woman's black pants.
4.30pm.
Louis dies in three hours.
Cell phone in hand, Miriam staggers through a moldering kitchen in 70s décor and out through a half-cocked screen door. Outside, gray skies pass above an endless vista of bent and meager pines, each a bleak needle, each a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.
A gravel drive circles the ramshackle cottage, cutting through the pines.
Nearby, on a crooked fencepost with no fence, a fat crow sits staring.
"I don't know where I am," she tells the bird. The crow takes to oily wing. "Thanks for the help."
All right, think, she thinks. The New Jersey Pine Barrens. That's like, what? Only about a million acres of scrubby pineland and sandy loam. And Louis dies in a lighthouse. New Jersey doesn't have too many of those – ohhhh, only maybe two dozen. I'm sure I can hit all of them in the next three hours, right after I make a beeline for civilization. Which is assuredly right around the corner, and by "right around the corner," I mean, "miles from this place."
This is an impossible task.
It can't be impossible! she thinks. I'm there. I somehow manage to show up. What fate wants, fate gets, and fate wants my ass in that lighthouse. Think!
But she can't think. Her brain hits a dull wall, a dead-end – and it keeps hitting it, like a bee against a windowpane. Maybe it's the pain that's blunting her brainpower. Maybe shock and trauma are merrily skipping in tandem to drag down her thought processes.
She's looking for a sign. If fate wants her to show up, fate will have to give her a ride.
The cell phone in her hand rings.
It vibrates, too, and it scares her so bad she almost throws it into the woods like a live hand grenade.
Luckily, she bites back that impulse. She looks at the phone.
Frankie.
Her heart seizes.
She answers the phone.
"What?" she asks, trying to mimic Harriet's matte tone. Her sore throat and swollen lip seem to help.
"How's the girl?" he asks. The signal's weak, but she can still hear him.
"No trouble," Miriam says. She embellishes a bit: "That cocktail kicked her ass."
Frankie pauses.
Shit! Dummy. Don't embellish. Harriet wouldn't embellish.
"You okay?" he asks, suspicious.
"I'm fine."
"You sound different."
"Said I'm fine."
Another pause. "You sound like you wanna do something to that girl. Hurt her, maybe."
"Don't push me."
"Okay! Okay. Jesus, don't get creepy."
Miriam winces, and decides that this is her only shot.
"Where are you at?" she asks.
"We got the trucker. I forgot that he was a big boy. Needed two of the cocktails to put him down, but it worked. Ingersoll's got him in the Escalade, and I'm going to take the truck and go burn it."
"Where you taking him?"
"Ingersoll's got a bug up his ass for somewhere with a little verticality. He says a storm is coming, and he wants to harness its power and, uhh… how'd he put it? 'Read the skies.' We got a line on a lighthouse under construction. I guess they're putting in a new… big giant light, or whatever the fuck it is you need to replace on a lighthouse."
"Where's the lighthouse?"
"Why?"
Fuck! I don't know why!
She clenches her eyes shut, and tries: "I don't answer to you."
"Sorry," he says. "Uhhhh. Barnegat, I think. Long Beach Island. Wherever it is, it smells like dead fish and medical waste."
"I have to go. The girl is waking up."
"Give her a kiss for me," Frankie says.
"Don't be cute."
Miriam hangs up.
She holds the cell phone in her hand. The pain is still present in her body – it's beating her like a drum – but it no longer bothers her. Miriam feels alive. Present in the moment. In the deep distance, thunder clears its throat with an acid rumble.
Taking a deep breath, Miriam strides out to the driveway.
She gets about ten feet, then turns around.
She's in the cottage for thirty seconds.
When she emerges anew, she has the pistol in one hand, her diary in the other, and the cell phone nestled in her pocket.
She starts walking.