“Yes.”
He slips quietly out of the car and shuts the door in such a manner that the sound stays put, like a cough suppressed in your throat. I clamber over the gear box into the driver’s seat and look up to whisper good-bye, but he’s already gone, gulped up by the teeming Florida night, and I have nothing to do but wait.
I thought I had memorized the territory around Simon’s house on Cocoa Beach when I came here yesterday afternoon, squinting in pain at the sun. I sketched out the dirt road and the edge of the mangrove, the placement of the dunes and the other solitary houses, the exact number of steps between the road and the stone fountain in the center of what had once been Simon’s courtyard (where the Ashley gang are to lie in wait), and the possible positions where Mr. Marshall and his men might station themselves: the watchmen stalking the predators.
But the darkness disorients me. I become aware of the stars, and the skin of black ocean at the horizon, boiling with phosphorescence. As the minutes pass and nothing else emerges, no shapes resolve from the shadows, charcoal on midnight, not the mangrove nor the beach nor the nocturnal beasts that surely prowl and scurry over the earth around me, I begin to lose myself. I’ve forgotten the effects of a blackness this intense, so thick you feel as if you’re pushing it aside at every breath. How are you supposed to know your distance and your direction in a soup like that? Only the ocean saves me, the crests of the waves, the foam that returns just enough light to the universe, just enough sound and fury that I can at least find east, and if I can find east, I can find west, north, and south.
Can’t I?
My hand hurts. The thick bandage applied by the doctor is now just a slender wrapping of gauze atop the neat sutures—eight of them—holding my flesh together. I cradle the right hand with the left and close my eyes, and it’s too peaceful, too sacred, as if a human tragedy isn’t about to play out—isn’t right this moment playing out—a quarter mile away. On the beach. Simon’s beach. Simon’s house, and at this mere echo of his name in my head, a tremor strikes my chest, a blow of anguish. I bend over, sobbing, thinking of Evelyn, of how we made Evelyn, Simon and I, and now I have destroyed the father of my daughter. Evelyn, who never even knew him, and the Chateau de Créouville, the courtyard there, and the smell of Simon’s cigarettes. The fountains dancing on the canals of Versailles. The tulips that thrust from the earth on my wedding day. The taste of Simon’s skin. And I cannot push them away, cannot cleanse myself of these impressions, which are part of my flesh, the molecules of Simon invading the molecules of Virginia, and I have killed him. I have destroyed him. And he is my husband, he is the father of my daughter.
I spill, somehow, from Samuel’s Ford and stagger down the road, toward the beach. It’s too late, I have made the most awful mistake, he is wicked and only wants to deceive me, only wants my money, but I can’t let him die. Cannot return to a world in which Simon does not exist. His molecules are my molecules; his wickedness is mine. Let him have my money. Let him have what he wants, but let him live. For God’s sake. He is Evelyn’s own father. And my throat revolts, my hand throbs in fear, but I cannot bear him to die. To die. His skin torn. His blood in the sand. By my hand.
Except I’m too late.
I know this, as I plunge through that darkness, that terrifying absence of light, except for the glimpse of ocean ahead. I know I have already set this train in motion, that I can’t stop the inevitable crash ahead, and still I push forward, desperate now, wanting to reverse the flow of time, to send the earth spinning in the other direction so I can take it all back, return to the beginning, and that’s when the gun cracks the air, a single shot and then a whole volley, rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat, the familiar deadly cadence of a Thompson submachine gun, and out of the blackness before me emerges a bouncing yellow light, a shadow behind it, a figure, a person, a man, and I can’t see his face but as I stop, feet planted in the dirt, I know who it is.
The beam of his flashlight catches my chest an instant later. He skids, checks. The beam jolts to my face, and I cry out at the sudden blindness, and Simon says, “Virginia!”
Only a yard away. Alive. Slight glint where his hair should be—maybe the starlight. The lurid yellow glow of the flashlight illuminating his features like a monster’s.
“Simon!”
He starts forward and snatches my arm. “Come with me!”
“No!”
“Now!”
I struggle free and reach for my pocket, and Simon swears foully and takes me around the waist, hoisting me over his shoulder, making me scream in agony as my injured hand strikes his back.
But my other hand. My left hand. Contains the gun.
The Ford’s only a short distance up the dirt road, maybe fifty yards. Simon carries me along, almost at a run but not quite, and my torso slams against his shoulder and the muscles of his back, while I wriggle my left arm helplessly, trying to maneuver the gun into some sort of position, some angle by which I can strike him. But his bones are too hard, his arm too heavily braced around me, and instead I just pound the gun against his kidneys, over and over, thinking if I could just get him to drop me, drop me, and then Simon makes a noise of joy, sees the Ford probably, and the next thing I’m swinging through the air to land over the passenger door, crosswise into the seat, my head bouncing against the cloth.
“Sorry,” he grunts, and jumps in after me.
I don’t know how I scramble upward, brain sloshing in its case, dizzy and sick, but I do. I scramble upward. My left hand grips the gun and brings it shaking up to the level of Simon’s ear and I say, STOP! I’LL SHOOT!
He turns his head and says, What the devil.
“Get out of the car.”
“Virginia! My God. It’s me, for God’s sake! It’s Simon!”
“Get out. Now.”
“Don’t be stupid. They’re right behind me.”
“I’ll shoot.”
“No, you won’t. You won’t shoot me. You can’t.”
My thumb lifts the safety catch. “Out!”
“Virginia, it’s me. It’s Simon.”
“I know who you are.”