I picked up the gun.
No, Rose didn’t want me. She hadn’t since the day she’d returned from Peru with her skin tan and her heart ripe with remorse. But in that moment, my love for her burned more fiercely than it ever had. I loved her for caring enough to push me away. For trying to teach me that abandonment didn’t have to be my destiny. For not giving me any easy outs and for insisting that some choices were the kind I had to navigate alone.
My hand shook, but I held her close. I cooed my love song in her ear, no longer a duet, but no less loving, and I told her about the beauty around us: the sunlight dancing on the water; the mountains kissed with snow; the tender spaces hollowed between the trees that were built to bear witness to secrets always to be kept and promises never broken. Rose gasped and struggled to breathe, her hands clawing at her throat, her back arched in constant pain.
I held her closer, and I told her about the gun. How I’d come to realize that like freedom, salvation could look different to different people, depending on where you were and what it was you needed. How I knew now that who we were was more often defined by what we’d done than what it was we one day hoped to achieve. And how I’d learned, more than anything, that survival so often meant letting go. I knew she understood that. We’d talked about it the night we’d lain half naked beneath the stars. It was the reason Rose had told Archie the things she did, offering him purpose even in the hell of his mind’s own winter. Hope soared over surrender, and reason triumphed over despair. Even in death.
That had been her gift, I whispered, pushing her soft hair back as I brought the gun to her head. Hope and reason. Now freedom would be mine. And for my beautiful, wilting Rose, who was stuck in her own agony, just like my mother before her, it was one I gave willingly.
Only this time, it was with my eyes wide open.
AFTER
49.
WHAT MORE CAN I tell you?
What else is there, really, to say?
50.
WELL, THERE IS more to say, of course.
Only I don’t know where to start. Or even how to begin. In reaching the end of her story, all that remains is now mine alone, and I never wanted that. Other people are born to be the protagonist, the main character, the brightest star in their galaxy.
But not me.
I could tell you, I suppose, about the snow falling outside my window as I write this, a near-poetic dusting of the dawn. It isn’t easy to see through the bars, but if I close my eyes, I can picture the way the flakes might gather on the ground, sticking together to become something greater than themselves.
Speaking of poetic, it’s not Chatterton, but William Bryant who haunts my conscience these days, his ode to impermanence capable of savaging my soul.
Loveliest of lovely things are they on earth that soonest pass away.
The rose that lives its little hour is prized beyond the sculptured flower.
Do you see? Do you see how those words might ruin me?
As well they should.
I could also tell you it’s been two months since the trip to Thompson Peak, which means it’s been two months that I’ve been housed here in Trinity County’s juvenile detention facility, waiting to stand trial for the murder of Rosemarie Augustine. I left my Humboldt home back in October and have yet to return, which I guess makes this place a purgatory of sorts.
No one from that trip has come to see me, in case you’re wondering about that. They also haven’t called. Or written. Or communicated with me in any way. None of this is a surprise, but it still hurts. From what I hear, though, they’re alive and healing, so I suppose that what I ought to feel is gratitude.
There are people who visit me, and they like to ask all sorts of questions. About Rose. About Archie. About Rose and Archie. About everything that happened, and why, when search and rescue finally showed up on that mountain, I was found alone in a tent, with my dead girlfriend in my arms and the gun I’d used to shoot her lying on the ground beside me.
My court-appointed lawyer doesn’t let me answer any of these questions. I understand why, but even when we’re alone, he never wants to hear what I have to say—unless it’s that I’ll take a plea deal, which I won’t because I’m not guilty of what I’m being accused of. So it turns out the only person around here I’m allowed to talk to with any degree of honesty is the county doctor they send me to who helps me with my migraines.
He also asks about my shoulder, that doctor. It worries him, I guess, that I still have so much pain. That’s what we talk about mostly. Pain. How bad it is and what I think I can live with. He wants to refer me to someone else in case surgery is necessary, but I don’t want to do that, to be cut open. I can live with the pain, I tell him. I’m pretty sure I can live with anything.
Hearing this always makes him frown. Pain isn’t meant to be punishment, he says. It’s a signal to tell you when something’s wrong. Well, I’ve heard this before and I know what he means, but I’m not sure I agree. My mother’s only spoken to me once since I’ve been here, and that was to tell me she’s through with me and my problems—forever. That she can’t handle what I’ve done, no matter with what love I might’ve done it.
Not this time.
Not ever again.
51.
THE SNOW’S CONTINUED to fall off and on over the past few days, and I think it might be getting to me. I started feeling bad after lunch today and ended up in the bathroom for a long time and then I ended up sort of wanting to die. That’s an awful thing to say, I know, but it’s an awful way to feel and it can overwhelm me at times, everything that’s happened. All that’s been lost. Doing the right thing doesn’t preclude regret, I’ve found. Or self-loathing. These are truths I have to learn to live with, and I suppose the good news is I managed to get myself out of there without doing anything stupid.
My little hour, such as it is, marches on.
But fate works in strange ways. After leaving the bathroom, I made my way down to the main common area. They’ve got a television in there, mounted high on the wall, and if I’m lucky, I can sometimes catch a glimpse of myself on the news and catch up with what’s happening back in Teyber. Lucky for me, there’s been a lot more coverage of my case lately, now that it’s been determined I’ll be tried as an adult. I sort of live to see the storm clouds on Tomás’s face. Not for the storm itself, but because I see Rose in him. She lives there, beneath his thorns, and she’s as beautiful as ever.