Whether she was shooting fast or slow, every round pinged the steel triangle. Sometimes she fired with a slow rhythm, sometimes she fired as fast as she could pull the trigger.
Each time the gun emptied and she dropped the magazine, she slammed home a new one, racked the slide, and in a flash she was back on target. When that magazine was empty, the next one went in and was emptied in a heartbeat. From months of practice she could reload with a new magazine so fast that there was hardly any pause between one magazine and the next one feeding bullets into the chamber as she fired.
What mattered, what was important, was the connection she felt with that small area where the bullet had to go. The bullet went where she sent it, where she saw it going before she even pulled the trigger.
It all seemed to fall into place so unexpectedly, so profoundly, that she had to stop for a moment as tears rolled down her cheeks. It was almost like magic.
She felt that she had just mastered—not a skill, but her life in a new way. She had a new kind of vision. A new sense. All her senses keyed in to this singular purpose.
Angela knew it was somehow connected to what her grandmother had told her about her being different. She didn’t know how, but she knew there was a connection.
This is what her grandparents had seen in her. She now saw it in herself.
When she realized that she had used up all the ammunition for the day, she stood in the ringing silence for a long moment. She finally looked up at her grandfather. He was standing back, watching her with a strange, penetrating look.
He finally smiled and nodded. In that moment, in that look, they shared a silent understanding.
“This is the next step”—her grandfather snapped his fingers as fast as he could—“to fire this fast and hit that moving target every time.”
Angela had been immensely pleased with what she had just achieved. Now she was stunned at the impossible.
“Grandpa, I can’t think that fast.”
He smiled knowingly. “That’s the part you need to learn next—to do it without thinking. Thinking slows you down. Once you learn not to think, your subconscious will take over and do it. Like riding a bicycle without thinking of how to balance. Your subconscious can fire and hit the target as fast as I can snap my fingers.”
Angela nodded. “If you say I can do it, then I will.”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “How about some dinner.”
She pulled off her hearing protectors and looked around. It was nearly dark. She had been able to hit the target every time even as the light had faded and was almost gone.
The cabin smelled wonderful. Her grandmother was in the kitchen, and Angela saw that she was making Angela’s favorite meal: Italian bread torn up into chunks, soaked in scrambled eggs with basil, oregano, and some other spices, then fried up in olive oil in an iron skillet.
“How did she do?” her grandmother asked as she turned the bread and eggs with a spatula as they cooked.
“She’s got it.”
“Like you?” Gabriella asked without looking up as she stirred the sizzling dinner.
“Like me,” he said at last.
Angela didn’t know for sure what she had, but her grandmother lifted an eyebrow at the skillet.
Angela sat at the table spread with a white tablecloth with red strawberries on it, her head still spinning from what she had done. It didn’t seem real, and at the same time it felt more real than anything else in the world. It felt as if a whole new world had opened up for her.
As her grandmother leaned in and put a heaping pile of bread soaked in eggs on Angela’s plate, she looked up at Vito.
“In that case,” her grandmother said, “then maybe it’s time you showed her the basement?”
What? The basement?
The basement door was always locked. She had never, ever, been down in the basement. It wasn’t even talked about. She had absolutely no idea what was down there. She had always been curious about it, but now she felt an unexpected sense of apprehension about going down there.
Angela looked between her grandmother and grandfather as they shared a long look. In that moment, they looked like, to them, they were the only two people in the world.
Her grandfather nodded slightly. “I think you’re right.”
Angela was still looking between them. “What’s in the basement?”
FOURTEEN
Not long after that eventful day when a new doorway had opened to her, another closed.
Her grandparents were found by the side of the road, both shot in the back of the head with a .22-caliber bullet.
It was a sensational murder mystery on the local news for a few days and then it was gradually forgotten. Angela didn’t know if the police were looking hard for the killer, but it didn’t really matter because even if they were, they never found him and no one was charged with the murders. What mattered, though, was that her grandparents were dead and even if they found their killer that wouldn’t bring them back.
Angela was beyond devastated. She stayed in her room and cried for two days. She felt totally lost. She didn’t want to eat, or for that matter, to live any longer. She wished she had been there with her grandparents and that the killer had put a bullet in the back of her head first so she wouldn’t have to endure the agony of losing them.
Sally took it mostly in stride.
She spent the morning of the funeral smoking meth. She drove them to the funeral in her ratty old Pontiac GTO, a car that had been a fixture in the dilapidated trailer park since long before Angela had been born. Angela sat in the backseat crying. The sky cried, too, with a steady drizzle.
Standing beside the open graves, rain plastering her hair to her head, Angela felt numb. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. All she wanted to do was to hold them and be with them. She didn’t think she could go on without them.
In their will, they left money to pay for their funeral and burial. They left their home in town to Sally. But they left the cabin to Angela, along with an endowment she would receive when she turned twenty-one.
Sally was angry about the cabin and the endowment going to Angela. She ranted and raved that her parents hadn’t left everything to her. She was their only daughter, after all. She resented her parents for it. She hated them for it. She was consoled by the fact that the house in town was worth more than both the cabin and the endowment together.
It didn’t take her long to sell the house. It would have been better to move into the house and sell the trailer, but Sally didn’t see it that way. Selling the house got her more money.
Angela wished she could escape to the cabin, but it was way too far to walk there, and she wasn’t yet old enough to drive.
Once Sally had what she thought of as a fortune from selling the house in town, she started spending it on drugs. Angela knew that her grandparents would not have wanted their house to be turned into money for drugs. But she also knew that it was more important to them that the cabin go to Angela. In a way, Angela thought that giving the house to Sally, even though it would go for drugs, was a way to distract her from what they thought was more important—that Angela have the cabin.
On many a night, the trailer became party central. Friends, neighbors, and strangers smoked, got drunk, and were rowdy late into the early-morning hours. Some did lines of cocaine on a mirror on the coffee table in the living room. Most of them smoked, either cigarettes, meth, or pot. A few shot up heroin. Even when there wasn’t a party, there were frequently tweakers hanging around to share the meth her mother scored, or to supply it.
When Angela left her bedroom in the morning to go to school, there were often people asleep on the couch, in the chairs, or in their own vomit on the floor. She knew most of them, but it wasn’t uncommon for strangers to be there in the house when she left for school.