I’m gone. I shout, “Do you not see that invading the place with a gun makes it likelier someone gets shot?”
She has complete, steely focus and equally complete irrational determination. “It’s my house! And he says I’m next? Think again. I live in that house, and nobody gets to make me scared to be there.”
“Nick! If someone in there wants you dead, you’re supposed to be scared.”
75
Nicolette
We park by the lake and walk into the woods. The sun is starting to set, the sky lavender and orange, the path dappled with shafts of dying light.
Home.
I touch the moss on the trunks of the beech trees, hear the water lap against the shore as we hike toward Green Lake. Smell the almost moldy, loamy aroma of the place. The remnants of a campfire.
I live here.
I’m not hiding out in a converted garage in California ever again. Or wherever. No one is driving me out of here. My life is my life.
I want it back.
If everything goes right, this ends tonight.
Nicolette, one. Challengers, zero.
If it goes wrong, God help us. Literally, that’s what it would take.
Jack says, “Slow down.”
He’s the one loaded for bear this time, prepared to break into a fortress. He has ropes and knives and, for some reason, an Allen wrench. Weighted down by instruments of mayhem.
I tell Jack, “I’ve been sneaking in and out of here since I was thirteen. You can offload a bunch of that stuff.”
I know where the spare key is and which door you can open with a credit card. How to run across the dark part of the yard to slip back in at night. Which windows squeak and which don’t.
“You really weren’t a very good girl, were you?” Jack says. “You said, ‘Night, Pops,’ and cut out through the back door?”
“I said, ‘Night, Papa.’?”
“You called Mendes ‘Papa’?”
“What was I supposed to call him? Plus, who doesn’t sneak out occasionally?”
“Try sneaking out past my mother,” Jack says.
I’m trying to stay strictly focused on what we’re doing. To avoid consideration of what God or anybody else would think about it.
To avoid thinking about the Steve who was my mostly nice dad and focus on the one who helped bury a body and said he was going to kill me.
To blot out the memory of him buying me pink summer dresses or signing off on notes that said I talked in class.
To avoid thoughts that might lead to crying. Anything that could keep me from getting this done.
But when I think about going in through the French windows (which I’ve done a thousand times), seeing his back at the desk in his office, I feel mushy. Thinking about how much I missed home, and him, and being in a family. How much I wish I didn’t have to put him through this.
Then I think about the dead girl and how she got that way.
When we get in there and things go even worse than Jack imagines, I can’t be that mushy girl.
When things go bad, I have to be on top of it.
This is what Jack is for.
He’s so pissed at his scumbag brother and everyone who had anything to do with this thing, he’s good to go.
He can talk up peace and love and backing down all he wants. But bottom line, if some guy threatens me, he’ll take him out. I think.
Jack says, “Anytime before he sees us, you can bail. We don’t have to do this.”
I’m literally pulling him toward my personal horror show. “Let’s just do this. I want to hear him admit it to my face. Then I can die happy.”
Jack says, “You’re not dying tonight.”
It’s all on me.
I can’t let anything go wrong.
I picture Steve clammy and corpselike, and I start to shake. I hear the words, It’s not my kid, echoing in my ears. It. Useless. Whore. It.
Tear my insides out through my eardrums, why don’t you?
What was I supposed to think?
I’m glad that I’m in front of Jack because my face is crumpling. Tears are streaming down my cheeks.
This better go just right.
At the edge of the woods, the trees thin out at the clearing where our house stands in the middle of a lit-up lawn.
Jack says, “Odd to say this when we’re in a reasonable facsimile of a yellow wood, but you could still take another road. You could still walk away. But if I use this gun on Steve . . . no matter what he did . . . Just think about it, okay?”
Oh God!
I think about it.
Jack says, “Now what?”
Between the coiled rope and the holster, there’s a space against his chest I can fit into. His hands find the small of my back.
One hot failed assassin who gets to retire in a couple of hours.
But first, I have to make this whole thing stop.
76
Jack
She’s lost it. It’s as if she feels omnipotent when she’s on the trigger side of flying bullets. When I mention that geese don’t shoot back, she won’t listen.