Everyone is downstairs, drinking unicorn champagne and eating solid gold caviar. Whatever it is rich people do. Me? I’m walking into Mr. Danforth’s office like it’s my own.
The cabinet is locked, but I know he keeps the key in his desk drawer. Why wouldn’t he? His sons are grown and responsible. The lock is just a formality at this point.
I unlock the case. Skip over the rifles. Too big. Unnecessary.
Down at the bottom of the case are the handguns. The big Magnum and the small Colt, the girly gun.
I could do all the damage I need to with the Colt, but I take the Magnum. This began with a Magnum and it will end with a Magnum.
I tuck it into my waistband and blouse my shirt over the grip. Even unloaded, it’s heavy.
There’s a box of ammo, too. I tip a handful of bullets into my palm, then slip them into my pocket.
I drift out of the office and peer over the second-floor balustrade into the vestibule below. It’s empty. I have a straight line of escape from here to the front door.
I check the gun again to make sure it won’t drop through my waistband and down my pants. Then I head down the stairs, quick and quiet.
My feet have barely touched the vestibule below when another set of footfalls echoes softly from off to the left. I spin just in time to spot a server in a purple bow tie and black suit nearly on top of me, one arm raised to bear a silver platter.
He lowers the platter into my range of vision. “Canapé?” he asks. After a moment in which he takes in my sweaty, disheveled, black-tie-oh-so-optional clothing, he grudgingly adds, “Sir?”
The thought of food causes my stomach to crumple in on itself like a fist. “No, thanks.”
He nods and proceeds into the great room. For reasons I don’t understand, I pause, wasting a crucial getaway moment to listen for a cry of alarm.
Nothing.
I’m beneath notice.
As it should be.
I dart out the front door and then I’m gone as if I’ve never been here.
And soon, it will be as though I never were.
I am going to join Lola in the memory hole.
It is my proper place. It is where I deserve to be consigned.
Perhaps there’s some sort of memory hole equilibrium, and when I go in, Lola will come out. Maybe then Mom will look at pictures and dig out the baby shoes and allow herself to remember. Once she forgets me, maybe then she can remember.
And that, more than anything, will count as me doing something productive.
I almost don’t make it. The day has gotten cooler as night falls, but the air is still and sticky, making it feel hotter.
I coast down one last rise-fall in the road, then drift onto the shoulder, then onto the grass. Almost on inertia, almost like the tide, almost as though the world itself has turned in this specific way at this specific time to make it happen, I glide to the brush and scrub and trees near the trailer.
Hopping off my bike, I let it clatter to the ground. Then I lean against the poplar for a moment, catching my breath. The world spins some more, as the world is wont to do. I close my eyes against its motion, fumble for the Magnum.
It’s easy to load. I have more bullets than I need. I load them all anyway.
I take a deep breath, tree bark against my naked neck, tugging at my hair. The abrasion is good. It reminds me I’m alive, that I haven’t done it yet, that it still needs to be done.
If only it were raining. It would be the perfect night.
It’ll have to do.
My phone has been buzzing and cheeping. Texts and voicemails from Mom, finally home, wanting to know where I am, their character increasingly terrified.
I turn off the phone.
I feel light. Effortless. Gravity has no hold on me.
I’m going to do it. I’m really going to do it.
The last thing I’ll do.
I’ll do what I need to do.
And then I’ll put the barrel in my mouth and angle it up so that the bullet is sure to go through my brain and I’ll pull the trigger and at last it will all be over.
There’s nothing to stop me.
I’m amazed. There’s absolutely nothing to stop me.
I open my eyes. Take up my usual position. I watch the trailer for a moment, just as though this were any other night.
I inhale a deep, long, clean breath. I am pure and holy. The gun weighs nothing in my hand.
I approach the front door.
I knock.
Moments pass.
The door opens.
“Sebastian?”
I say, “Hi, Dad.”
He invites me in.
Of course he does. I’m his son. Why wouldn’t he invite me in?
He doesn’t know about the Magnum, now tucked into the waistband of my pants, cool and smooth against the small of my back.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” he says. “Wasn’t even sure you remembered where I lived. Been so long.”
He stumbles through the trailer. It’s not a double-wide, just a plain old trailer, and he seems gigantic within its cluttered confines, a stooping, looming troll from a children’s fairy tale, lurching around its own cave.
Sweeping empty chip bags and a dog-eared paperback from a chair, he offers me a seat.
“I’m gonna stand for now.”
He nods slowly, resigned, as though accepting a diagnosis. Then he settles himself onto a blue-and-gold love seat that has been weathered by years of the same body in the same spot, contorted into the same angles.
“Can I get you something?” he asks. “I think I have some Coke in the fridge.…”
He has sad eyes, my father. I never noticed them before. Or maybe he only allows them to be sad here, in his den, in his pauper’s castle, where the air is tangible with sweat and bad dreams and cheap beer and stale chips. Maybe in this place, his armor is at its weakest. Maybe.
“If I’d known you were comin’,” he says, filling the air now, clearly discomfited by my silence, “I’da cleaned up a little. Look, it’s, uh”—he checks his phone—“not even eight yet. Why don’t I take you to dinner or dessert or—”
I can’t take it anymore. I thought maybe there would be one last conversation, but I can’t take it. I reach behind me, draw the Magnum. It comes loose without friction, and I level it at him.
At this distance, it’s nearly impossible to miss him, even with the slight, surprising shake in my hand. I steady the gun with my off hand. My father’s face is split by the sight at the end of the barrel.
“Oh, Sebastian,” he says.
When I thought of this moment—and I’ve thought of it often, over the years, obsessing over it, designing it in my imagination over and over, tweaking and revising—I imagined him lunging at me, going for the gun. Not that it matters. In such a confined space, when I pull the trigger, he’ll take a slug. If the first one doesn’t kill him, it will slow him down enough for me to finish him off with the second.
And then a third, for myself.
At a distance, it’ll be no more than three pops. As remote as the trailer is, no one will suspect anything. Three pops, far off. Two in rapid succession, then a pause, then the third.
I wonder how long it’ll take them to find the bodies?