The first thing she removed was her watch. Then her necklace, the same one he’d bought her in the mall three weeks back. Kicked off her shoes. Pulled off her windbreaker, followed by her T-shirt and her jeans. Put everything on the table with the gun she’d used.
She moved past Caleb and went down into the hold. Just to the right of the door, she found a flare gun and a first aid kit but no flashlight. Farther down the counter, though, she found one encased in yellow plastic and black rubber. She tested it. Worked beautifully. She checked the base—solar powered. If she’d had time to look for an oxygen tank, she could have stayed down there forever. She went back out on deck, found Caleb waiting for her by the rail.
“Listen,” he said. “He’s dead. And if he’s not—”
She brushed past him. She stepped up on the rail. Caleb said, “Wait,” but she dove into the bay. The cold seized her heart, her throat, and her intestinal tract all at the same time. When it found her head it drilled down through her temples, rolled through her sinuses like acid.
The flashlight beam was even brighter than she could have hoped for, though, and illuminated a lime green world of moss and seaweed, coral and sand, black boulders the size of primitive gods. She descended through the green and felt alien, very much the unnatural intruder into the natural world. The world before the world, so old it pre-dated language, humanity, conscience.
A school of cod passed within feet of her. When they were gone, she saw him. He sat on the sand about fifteen feet below by a rock as old as the world. She swam down to him and treaded water in front of his corpse. She wept, her shoulders convulsing, and he stared back at her with sightless eyes.
I’m sorry.
A thin rope of blood pirouetted along the rim of the hole in his chest.
I loved you, I hated you, I never knew you.
His body was canted to the right, while his head was cocked to the left.
I hate you. I love you. I’ll miss you for the rest of my fucking life.
She stared at him and his corpse stared back until her lungs burned and her eyes burned and she couldn’t take it any longer.
Good-bye.
Good-bye.
As she swam up, she saw that Caleb had turned the boat lights on. The hull bobbed on the surface, twenty feet up and about fifteen yards to the south of her. She kicked for the surface and was halfway there when something grazed her thigh just above the knee. She slapped at her leg but nothing was there and all she managed to do was drop the flashlight. It dropped faster than she rose, and the last she saw of it, it had settled on the sandy floor, a bright yellow eye looking up toward the world.
When she broke the surface, she took a great guzzle of oxygen, then swam to the boat. As she climbed aboard, she noticed a tiny island off the starboard side that she hadn’t been able to make out in the dark. It was an island for birds and crabs only, barely big enough to plant one butt cheek on, definitely not two. A lone and sickly thin maple pointed up from the bedrock, bent about forty-five degrees by the elements. Several hundred yards away, as she’d guessed, sat Thompson, a bit more clearly defined but just as lightless as before.
On the boat, she took her clothes with her into the cabin, ignoring Caleb, who sat on the deck with his hands between his knees and his head lowered. She found a small bathroom with a sliding door just past the bed. There was a picture of them hanging over the toilet, one she’d never seen before. She remembered when it had been taken, though, because it was the first time Brian met Melissa. They’d had lunch in the North End, then walked over to Charlestown and sat on the grassy hill by the Bunker Hill Monument. Melissa had taken the picture, Rachel and Brian with their backs to each other, the monument rising behind them. They’d been smiling—no news there; people always smiled in photographs—but the smiles were genuine. They were happy, radiant. That night he’d told her he loved her for the first time. She made him wait half an hour before she said it back.
She sat on the toilet seat for a few minutes and whispered his name a dozen times and wept noiselessly until her throat clogged. She wanted to explain that she was sorry because she’d killed him and she wanted to explain that she hated him because he’d played her for a fool, but the truth was she didn’t feel either of those things one-tenth as much as she felt the loss of him and the loss of who she’d been with him. So much of her essential wiring had been shorted in Haiti—her empathy, her courage, her compassion, her will, her integrity, her sense of self-worth—and only Brian had believed it would come back. He’d convinced her the shorted wires could be re-fused.
“Oh, Rachel,” she heard her mother say, as she’d said more than once, “isn’t it sad that you can only love yourself if someone else gives you permission?”
She looked in the mirror and was shocked to see how much she resembled her, the famous Elizabeth Childs, the woman whose bitterness everyone always mistook for courage.
“Fuck you, Mother.”
She stripped off her bra and underwear and dried herself with a thick towel she found on a shelf. She put her jeans, T-shirt, and windbreaker back on, found a brush and did the best she could with her hair, staring in the mirror again at her mother around the time The Staircase had been published, yes, but also at a new version of Rachel. A killer. She had taken a life. The fact that the life had been her husband’s didn’t make the fact worse or better; the act itself was empirically grave no matter who was killed. She was the agent of removing human life from this planet.
Had he been raising his gun?
She’d thought he had.
But would he have pulled the trigger?
In the moment, she’d been certain he would.
Now? Now she didn’t know. Was the man who’d given his coat to a homeless man on a night of drenching rain capable of murder? The same man who’d psychologically nursed her through three years of illness with nary an impatient word or frustrated glance? Could that man commit homicide?
No, that man couldn’t. But that man was Brian Delacroix, a falsehood.
Brian Alden, on the other hand, could slap an old friend with imperious calm. He could kick his partner and best friend with enough fury to suggest he’d never stop kicking until that friend was dead. Brian Alden had raised that gun toward her. No, he hadn’t pointed it directly at her and no, he hadn’t pulled the trigger.
Because she hadn’t given him the chance.
She went back out on deck. She felt calm. Too calm. And she recognized it for what it was—shock. She could feel herself in her body but not of it.
She found her gun on the deck where he’d dropped it. She tucked it in her waistband at the small of her back. She lifted Brian’s gun off the table. She walked toward Caleb with it and he narrowed his eyes at her, too late to stop her from whatever she planned to do with it.
She flicked her wrist and tossed it past his head into the ocean. She looked down at him.
“Help me wash the blood off the deck.”
24
KESSLER