He followed her eyes. They were no longer on his wife and his daughter. She was looking beyond them, beyond the car and the driveway, down to the corner where their little street met Pondfield Road. There, at the very intersection where almost every day of his life he or his wife made a left-or a right-hand turn in their vehicles, and where—just once—his Audi had rolled backward and driverless, a ghost car, was a black Escalade. It was just like the one that had brought this Alexandra into his life. It was emerging from the driveway beside the now empty house where their neighbors, the Habeggers, had once lived. Where, apparently, it had been parked. Waiting. Watching. It hadn’t been there when Richard had returned home; he would have noticed it. It must have arrived in the last hour or two. But none of that mattered, none of that mattered at all, because now it was moving inexorably toward him, toward them, rolling almost in slow motion past the realtor’s blue and white “For Sale” sign on the Habeggers’ front lawn.
“Run!” He barked the word at Kristin and Melissa, and he pointed toward the trees on the side of their home, denuded and autumnal now, and the houses behind theirs. For a second they didn’t move, not understanding what he saw or why he was yelling. But then, either because he yelled once more to Go! Go now! or because Kristin had spotted the car and understood that this was connected to the girl and the dead who were now forever a part of their family’s life story—dead men (two), a dead girl (one)—she pulled her child by the hand like she was but a small dog on a leash and started to run.
And then, almost at the same instant when once more he was wishing he had brought home a rifle, words crossed his mind the way that subtitles flash across the bottom of a foreign film: God. This is how it ends. This is how I am going to die.
But then the girl opened the glass storm door and used both her hands to push him so hard back inside the house—through the doorway and into the front hall—that he fell into the colonial side table and then onto the floor. A ceramic bowl with an autumn-scented potpourri fell beside him and broke, the spices and scraps of evergreen and faux pumpkin scattering onto the floor like confetti. She pulled shut the wooden front door so she was outside alone on the steps. He was just starting to push himself back to his feet to get her, to drag her inside, too, when the world seemed to explode and he heard the gunshot and the door above him was splintered.
Alexandra
Richard yelled like crazy person for his wife and his little girl to run. Maybe because he didn’t deserve to die—none of them deserved to die, this wasn’t his fault, this wasn’t their fault—I pushed him hard as I could back inside the house and slammed the door. I shouldn’t have come. Big selfish decision on my part.
I saw his wife and daughter turning to go, racing around the side of the house, and I could see on the poor girl’s face such confusion and such terror. I had heard her call me a sex slave through the front door. I guess because I was watching them, I never saw the gun—I took my eyes off the Escalade for just long enough. So I only heard the shot.
It’s so strange what you remember and what you don’t.
The girl from the party? The sex slave?
…
Kirill wore a shoulder holster. Pavel used the kind that straps onto a belt loop. Think American cowboy or police guy. It meant that he kept his shirt untucked sometimes when he wasn’t wearing his black blazer so you couldn’t see the gun, but he liked that look. Thought he looked cool. Different tastes, that’s all. But it meant the two guys drew guns in different ways, even though they were both right-handed, because Pavel kept his gun on his right side and Kirill kept his on his left. Kirill liked to cross-draw. His right arm had to cross his chest to pull Makarov from beside his left ribs. From almost under his armpit.
The night of the party I had been in the doorway between the living room and the hall when Sonja jumped on Pavel’s back with the knife. I was stunned. Totally stunned. I knew she was avenging Crystal, but nothing else. Not yet. She hadn’t told me anything. And there was Kirill, coming back from bathroom on the first floor of the nice house. He looked up from his zipper when he heard the big commotion in the living room. There was the thump from the little table that got turned over when one of the men at the party jumped away from Sonja with her knife and Pavel, there were the yelps from some of the men who were screaming things like What the fuck? and No!, and there was the sound of Pavel gagging as he swung his arms around, trying to get Sonja off him, before he finally fell over the back of the couch. All this chaos and noise? Happened almost at once. Within seconds. Kirill couldn’t see what it was, but his first thought was to reach for his gun before going in. Which was when I threw myself at him. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do. He was big guy. They were all big guys. It was just reflex. I landed on him right when he was pulling his gun from his shoulder holster. I landed on him right when he must have been using his thumb to flick off the safety.
And when I landed on him, by mistake he squeezed the trigger.