I don’t remember if I could feel a stone, exactly, but I could feel something, so I nodded.
“There’s an old saying that a person who goes looking for revenge should dig two graves. Have you ever heard that before?”
I shook my head no.
“It means that you’re not solving the problem by getting revenge. You’re only making it worse. You’re making it just as bad for yourself as for the other person. You see what I’m saying?”
As she spoke, I relived getting thrown into that wall and I could feel the anger crawling up my throat. My eyes began to tear up, and I wanted Nancy out of my room. I didn’t want her to see me cry. She didn’t say anything more as she cut and taped gauze to my arm. I know now that she was letting her words sink in.
When she’d finished, she returned her supplies to the kit. Then she turned to me and said, “Tomorrow, when you go to school, you do what you think is right. But don’t do it because your father told you to do it or because I told you not to. You’re the one who has to live with what you do.”
The man at my feet moans again and I’m pulled out of my thoughts, Nancy’s words fading into silence. I curse myself for letting that memory find daylight. I’m not ten years old, and this isn’t about a skinned-up arm. It’s about much more.
But what if he doesn’t understand? What if the man at my feet doesn’t know which of his many sins has brought him here? What if I kill him and he doesn’t understand why? He needs to know why. Her name must be his last thought—its echo should be the last sound he hears before darkness chokes him.
Snow, thin like fire ash, is falling on the man’s face, pulling him back to consciousness. I tap my leg with the ax handle. It would be foolish to let him wake up to continue our fight. But I’m not ready to kill him yet. I know that now. I knew it back when I couldn’t strike that third and final blow, only I didn’t understand it then. I need something from him—something more than just his death. I need to hear him admit that he killed my wife.
CHAPTER 2
Minneapolis—Three Days Ago
It was only three days ago that I first listened to the two men as they planned my wife’s murder. Their conversation, a slow, drawling phone call that bounced off of satellite towers four and a half years earlier, had been preserved on a compact disc—insurance against faithless co-conspirators was my guess. Now that disc spun inside my laptop, their small words filling my house, their cold, rusty voices ripping into me, gutting me, leaving me hollow and weak. These were the men who killed my wife.
When the recording ended, my house fell silent except for the sound of my own breath billowing through my nostrils in short bursts. My mouth watered as though I were going to throw up. Maybe I was going to throw up. Chaotic thoughts broke against my skull, words careening off bone and leaving behind a twisted muddle. These two men were talking about Jenni. They were discussing how they were going to end her life, and they were doing it with the nonchalance reserved for weather chitchat or reading a lunch menu.
I stood up from the couch because my legs demanded it. A sudden burst of energy sent me walking in circles around my living room. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to kick and tear and destroy things. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, anything to purge the anguish from my body. I raised my hand to punch the wall, but stopped short, grabbing my head instead, my hands squeezing into my temples. I clenched my teeth and swallowed the explosion that fought to get out. I pressed everything inward, holding fast to a rage more pure and more acrid than anything I have ever before tasted. I kept it all in. The time would come for that to be unleashed, but not yet.
When I opened my eyes, I was myself again, calm, steady, thinking, breathing. I stepped to my front door and opened it a crack to let in some cold air. Eighteen degrees below zero. Not unusual for Minneapolis on December 31st, but this winter seemed colder than normal. I breathed in, filling my lungs with what felt like raw ice, and then slowly exhaled. Outside, the afternoon sun had already started its slide toward the horizon. Evening came so early this time of year.
I had no plans for that night. Even before Jenni died—before she was murdered—we rarely went out on New Year’s Eve. We had refined our tradition to a simple evening of popcorn, old movies, and a kiss at midnight. That was my idea, or my fault, depending on who you asked. Jenni, the free spirit, loved to dance and dress up and enjoy a well-prepared meal at a nice restaurant. She was the one who found significance in the small squares on the calendar. I once told her that I didn’t see the need to celebrate the arbitrary end of another rotation around the sun. On this score, she ignored me completely, and we celebrated birthdays and anniversaries and a plethora of lesser occasions.
After Jenni’s death, those occasions, even the lesser ones, remained my connection to her. I found her thread woven through almost every part of my existence, a tapestry once vibrant and alive now in danger of fading away. But it didn’t fade. I wouldn’t let it. Every turn of the page brought some new reason to remember her: our first date, the day I told her I loved her, the day I proposed, birthdays, holidays, the day she died.
I didn’t watch old movies that first New Year’s Eve without her. The wound—a mere five months old—was still too fresh to relive such a tradition alone. Instead, I drank scotch until I threw up on myself. I did a lot of drinking that year—not the steady drip of sneaking shots into my coffee cup. No. My drinking came in torrents—binge sessions that amplified the tiniest memory into a mind-numbing cacophony. I could go from breaking the seal to bed spins in less time than it took to play one of her favorite CDs.
I probably would have continued down that path had it not been for the scene I’d made at the cemetery on the first anniversary of her death. It was whiskey that night, enough that I passed out hugging the grass above Jenni’s grave. Security guards had kicked me out of the cemetery when it closed earlier, but I wasn’t done talking to my dead wife, and I still had half a pint of Jim Beam. I retain a vague recollection of climbing back over the wrought-iron fence, relying more on luck than skill to keep from impaling myself on the railhead spikes that surrounded the cemetery.