There was one of my mother’s lessons I had never needed to revisit—until today. I’d manhandled Jim like a champ. I had put my hands on him with authority and no hesitation. I hadn’t faltered when I felt the warm and unfamiliar bulk of his body, a stranger’s body, sliding under his nylon jacket and twill trousers as I pulled and shoved him across the front seats. Even as I noted the slight, dewy catch of his bare skin where it crossed mine when I tied him, I didn’t flinch away.
This was her guidance. This is what she had told me to do.
Simon had been an athlete from toddlerhood. Not of the all-star or Olympic-hopeful breed, but he knew innately how his body worked. He trusted his balance enviably and frolicked in the automatic calculations of his height and long reach. Our mother encouraged his bounce and dash and tamed it with sports lessons and strict rules in the house.
But my dexterity was mostly between the ears, and she never let me feel less for it.
Some people live here. She playfully pinched Simon’s solid, little biceps. And some people live up here. Her hand coursed over the dome of my head. The luckiest ones have a good balance of both, but it’s always slanted at least a little bit one way or the other.
When I didn’t blossom under karate instruction, track and field, or tennis clinics, my mother found a way to stoke my strengths. My advantage was that I could talk myself into (or out of) almost any mind-set. My mother called it self-possession or pluck on the good days, and a vacation on Planet Dee in the times when it was less than admirable.
She, never in denial, used the world as it was, and our natures as they were, to train us. This was often at some odds to what we were learning elsewhere.
We’re all taught, from preschool on up, to keep our hands to ourselves. We’re flogged with the idea that it is not okay to touch other people. So the good guys mostly don’t.
Civilization is a conflicted dance of cooperative intimacy and guarded personal space. We’ll drive a bayonet into the enemy’s guts, or put our hands, side by side, on a car’s bumper to help push a stranded motorist out of a ditch, but still recoil from a fellow commuter’s heat or even the errant brush of his arm on a crowded train.
The villains of the world aren’t as confined by this inhibition. Someone else’s neck isn’t all that different from a doorknob for them. If it’s an obstacle, they grab it and pull.
My mother coaxed from my tenacity this very trait, the stubborn ability to get past anything obvious, including the ingrained reluctance to put my hands, if need be, on someone I didn’t know. She sent me swimming and steered me into lifeguarding at the YMCA. I took lessons until I was good enough to give lessons, and over the years I saved seven people from drowning.
I’d wrangled every age, gender, and body shape, nearly naked, in the water. The ease of the expertise never left me. In my time, I’d felt smooth, taut muscle under my hands, and aged flab, tired and almost weightless, as it sagged into my arms. I’d hauled grown men to safety and taught little kids to punch a panicked swimmer square in the face to subdue his thrashing.
On the day the topic of self-defense came up in our household, only a few weeks after my mother had returned from the Long Trip, the ambient air of the living room warmed and bristled.
Best-laid plans, Plucky—martial arts, role-playing exercises, defense drills. All those self-disciplines are good. They’re good for confidence and fitness. They’re good practice for feeling how your body moves in space. But the real world isn’t choreographed. And reality has teeth and spikes in all the wrong places. The universe doesn’t know what it can’t do.
You have to know, baby, that I want you to fight. If you’re ever in danger, fight like hell. But if you find that you can’t for some reason, or if it goes wrong—a little or a lot wrong—I would never blame you. You’re pre-forgiven for whatever doesn’t work. Disappointing things happen, but you could never be a disappointment.
Across from where we sat, I looked at the patched hole in our foyer wall. Her eyes followed mine. The plasterers had been good at their job. The casual observer wouldn’t have noticed the expertly feathered border of fresh drywall and paint, blending new over ruined old.
Besides, I’m not worried about you. She talked over my attention’s drift to the wall and its forever untold story. You know what to do, Dee. My lovely girl, you do it four times a week at the Y. You just pull them in close and save them from hurting you.
No one had ever before tried to hurt me. I almost felt sorry for Jim. I’d jumped him before he’d got the chance.
• • •
Forty minutes later, a few deep breaths are the only preparation I’m going to get. I know what I will do once Patrick arrives, which is not even close to the same thing as knowing what I should do. I certainly can’t call it a fully realized design certified for the best possible outcome.
I’m waiting and rehearsing. The roar of blood in my ears is a soaring music, scoring the scene I’ve planned out for Patrick and me. The symphonic ringing in my eardrums vies for authority over the doom-drumming of my heartbeat. And Jim’s fussing is simply kneecapping the grandeur of the moment. I have already had to threaten him twice with the paintball gun to stop his squirming and mewling, but he’s started it up again anyway. Maybe he has to pee.
“What?” I hook a finger under the tight gag and pry it out, dragging it partway down his chin.
Jim smacks and purses his lips to get them working again. The corners of his mouth are raw and glossy where the skin has rubbed down, and the left side has chafed all the way to bleeding a little. Why would I even feel a twinge at that? But I do. Please tell me there is not an I’m sorry, Jim anywhere in my script. I will turn this gun on my own eyeball if I’m that beatable. I swear I will.
Jim clears his throat. “I just thought you might want to consider the fact that all your husband is going to find when he gets here is a chained-up gate. The last of the crew will have locked it up when they left.”
“What? Son of a bitch. Are you serious? We’re locked in? And Patrick is locked out?”
“Look. This could be a blessing in disguise. Are you sure you want to go through with this?”
“Pffft. Did you double-check with Patrick when I was the target?”
“Of course I did. Many times.”
“And that’s supposed to give me the warm fuzzies?”
“I’m not in the business of warm fuzzies, but I only sell what a very few people are absolutely sure they want to buy.”
“Great. They’ll probably put that on your tombstone. What the hell am I going to do now?” I scan the horizon as if it might offer up an answer.
“I have a key.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so?”
“I hadn’t gotten around to it. And speaking of, when are you going to untie me? I can’t stink-eye him to death, and not to point out the obvious, but the job isn’t going to get done with that.” Jim nods at the paintball pistol. “You’ll have to let me get my big-boy gun.”
“We’ll get to that.” I let the elastic in the socks snap the knot back into place over his teeth.
He patiently planks himself, bracing rigid between the floorboards and the headrest while I wrestle his work keys from his pants’ front pocket. My grand scenario doesn’t include Patrick’s driving up while I’m in mid-fiddle with the padlock on the gate. My heart pummels its pulse into my vision, banging out of rhythm in its suddenly too-tight slot under my sternum as I drive us back to the front gate. I shoot desperate looks down the dusty road. I need more time, whether he’s coming right this second or not. I can hardly breathe.
I shake out the tangle on the key ring to find the right one. It sinks home on the first try, and the shank pops free without a protest. The tiny victory lets me take in a steady inhale and send it out through a smile. I feel better. I’ll take every little sign that I should be here, in this place, right now, doing what I’m doing. I give a hard yank and the chain clatters through the wide mesh of the fence on the weight of the dangling padlock. I drag the gate wide and run for Jim’s car.
• • •
Not more than a minute later, a faint dust cloud rises above the crest of the hill just ahead of Patrick’s car sweeping into view around the ridge. I drive Jim’s car a short way into the compound and stop it on a slant, slightly uphill from the entrance. The last of the molten light pours over us, hopefully dazzling away the specific details of Jim’s front seat and how many passengers it holds, and what they look like.
I’ve figured out the difference between getting low and what would be getting too low. I can’t risk drawing Patrick’s notice. I need him feeling free to come close. I slouch down in the driver’s seat to the least suspicious end of the scale. I motion Jim down lower than me.
I set the paintball gun once more into his crotch. “Now, Jim, I’ve changed my mind.”
His eyes spark bright and worried.
“What I’m buying now is your silence. Same price. Not a peep from you. No matter what happens. Do you understand?”
He nods.
“This might not be a big-boy gun, but you can either be just a failure at killing me tomorrow or you can be a permanent failure at peeing standing up for the rest of your life. Not—a—sound. No matter what. Okay?”
I don’t bother to read his face for compliance. I ready my phone in my hand and snug the gun deeper into the crook of Jim’s legs. Patrick pulls up close to Jim’s car. I hit the Call button and immediately mute the speaker when a woman answers. “Please just listen,” I say into the silenced phone, praying for an ally on the other end of the line. “Don’t hang up. I only have one chance. Please stay with me. This isn’t a joke.” I check the icon. The call is still live, the timer rolling off the seconds since I’ve added her to my team. With the speaker off, I can’t hear her reply. But Patrick won’t be able to hear her either, if he ever gets out of the car. I have to make him talk, and it has to be over here. Please let him be loud enough.
I wait in Jim’s car. Patrick waits in his. The palms of my hands are tingling, and restless needles dance over the back of my neck.
Patrick finally gets out of the car, squinting into the sun. I let him come on.
“Here he comes,” I say to Jim, and also to our other silent partner, still waiting, the timer marking the seconds on the phone. One step. Two steps. Three. Then I loosen the reins off my twitching foot. The tires of Jim’s borrowed sedan churn up a fog of orange dust as I wheel the car around to block the open path behind Pat’s parking job. I clamp my hand down over my purse to keep it and my phone from launching into the footwell. I stop behind Patrick’s car, blocking the easy path back to the gate. I buzz down the window.
• • •
He gapes at the roar and dust of the gambit, Jim’s blue sedan now freshly spun around behind him, but Patrick’s expression fades to loose, blank confusion at seeing me behind the wheel instead of its usual driver.
“Jim’s over here.” I tick my head to the right.
“What the hell? How did . . .”
We stare at each other and the weight of the day rams the foundations of my detachment. I see Patrick, the boy at the front of the class, now thinned and changed under almost fifteen years of too much I haven’t known. Until it was too late, I hadn’t known on purpose, and it’s left me stranded here in this impossible moment, trembling between a long-ago transformed man who wants me dead, and an indifferent man who would have done it without cringing for a cut of my mother’s money.
My voice whispers over my suddenly dry tongue. “Why?”
I follow Patrick’s gaze as it drifts beyond me. Jim’s eyes flash bright warnings at Patrick, while Patrick scans the pathetic state of his hired murderer. “Why is he all green?”
“Pat . . .”
He flinches, and his attention scalds back onto me. His mouth works for some time, his jaw grinding side to side before he speaks. “You don’t know anything, Dee.”
“Well he certainly does,” I shout. “A hit man? Really? What movie do you live in? Who does that?”
Jim’s bound legs twitch in the footwell, his eyes bulging from his red face.
“The money’s all legit. There’s paperwork. I’m careful. There’s nothing to be able to prove it was for that.” Patrick’s words are more confident than his knees and he braces himself against the open window frame between us. His composure wavers and he struggles to keep his anger and amazement at just under a scream into my face. “I’m not stupid, you know!”
“Is that what it was all about, Pat? Is that why you were so worried that I might have my own lawyer. Someone who knew we were a wreck? All that smiling, the kissing, the fucking trip to Europe? What was that? So that when I was dead, they wouldn’t automatically look to you, except to say, ‘Poor Patrick, you loved her so much. Anyone could see . . .’ ”
He laughed at me. It actually straightened him up from using the car as a crutch. “I knew trying to be happy would feel like a trick to you, Dee. It’s just not your thing, is it? So I just didn’t bother at home.”
“You could have just divorced me!” I yell back.
“And what? Started over again? With no money, no credit, staring down middle age with nothing to show for it? Or were you just going to give me everything—since you’re not using it!” He scrubs his hands over his red face and forces down a breath. “When I wanted to go off with someone who could actually make a real life, would you have given it to me? There’s not enough there for my half to pay for an entire reboot. My whole life was wasted on you. You don’t even care what I do. Right or wrong, I’m nothing. I’m a prop. An inanimate, goddamned fixture in your Still Life with Attached Garage. Half of all of the savings we’ve got isn’t worth it, if I’d even get half. I was at least as kind to your mother as you ever were. And I put up with your shit on top of it all. I earned that money, Dee.”
“My mother earned that money.”
He sneers and spits his accusations into my face. The words are almost hot in the air. “What difference would it make? Huh, Dee? What are you fighting for? You don’t even live a real life. You just bide your time trying to be part of the goddamned wallpaper when you’re not pouting on a barstool next to your loser brother. Your mother must have been so proud of you two. Small-time cop and small-time—what? Nothing. You shun anything that remotely hints at living. Deep down you know those pills weren’t even about me. You knew not to trust your own body with any more life.”
“You can’t kill me because I was a disappointment.”
“It’ll never stick. I was careful.”
“It’s over, Pat.”
“Not yet, it’s not.”
• • •
Patrick bolts off around the front of the car, hurling abuse at Jim. “You stupid shit. How did she get you . . .” His voice goes muffled through the distance and the glass of windshield as he hurtles past the front bumper. I can barely scramble out of the driver’s side before Patrick has already ripped open the passenger door and taken up handfuls of Jim’s jacket to haul him out.
I know I won’t stand the odds of me against Patrick’s full fury plus Jim untied.
Jim had righted himself higher in the seat. His mutely jerking head draws Patrick’s eyes again, signposting as best he can to the center console, where my cell phone sits, propped in the folds of my handbag. I stop my fingers just short of Patrick’s collar. I don’t pull him back, don’t try to prevent him from leaning in past Jim and snatching up the phone. He stabs at the home button. The screen lights up and 911 stares back at him, at us, from the display, just atop the speakerphone icon and the counter showing that the call has been running for more than three minutes.
Patrick spins to face me and our eyes meet. I watch his fall out of focus as he plays back what he’s just said, searching for any hope that he’s left himself an out when he’s inevitably faced with explaining away this recorded conversation. He drops the phone into the footwell of the car.
“No,” he says. Just no.
He reaches for me, his voice full of tears and rage. “No, no, no.” Over and over. He flails for my face, lunging with open hands, pawing, scratching at my neck, slapping my eyes. He’s gasping and grabbing, choking, twisting, blind with pitch and yaw. He is a drowning man.
I know this one.
My eyes are streaming and I taste blood from where his loose fist has crushed my lip against my front teeth. I sweep my left arm in a wide circle and drag Patrick’s thrashing arms down, away from my face. I step in close and reverse the arc of my swing, slamming my forearm against Patrick’s jaw and ear. His struggling stops instantly in the shock of the strike.
I wrap my other arm around him and draw him in close. I feel his heart banging against his chest. In a single second I meet the forward edge of disaster, the wave of sorrow that is surely coming. The people who loved him will have to find a new way to see him now—the criminal, the cheat, the face on the news, someone they didn’t know and would have sworn didn’t exist.
Except I am the only one who knows that neither of us has ever existed. Not the us we’ve shown to the world, or to each other.
I hear the rumble of an approaching car engine.
Patrick rears back to drive his head down into mine. I don’t give him the chance. I widen my stance and twist around, driving his off-balance weight over my right thigh. He clamps down and drags me over with him.
The engine roars louder, then there’s a bang behind us, but I can’t look away from Patrick’s teeth snapping at my face, snarling like a dog. A screech of metal-on-metal sings out in the haze. Out of the far corner of my eye, I see Jim’s car jolt out of its position next to our sprawl and realize it’s been hit. Two points for me for multitasking.
Patrick lands hard and I knock the air out of him, crashing down on his chest. I roll away and he grabs for purchase, any handhold to reel me back. Grit stings my palm as I slap the ground and I scrabble for any inches I can get with my left arm. Patrick’s fury holds my right arm useless. I thrash away from his pull, but it’s not working. He’s dragging me to him. I heave in mouthfuls of air and dust, which melts into metallic panic down my throat. I try to scream it out, but the bitter-tasting, strangled bawl I manage doesn’t match the effort. My throat clicks shut, the fear of Patrick’s gripping progress up my arm is winning an edge, drawing me in from the only advantage I’ve had.
I quit fighting, on the outside at least. I fall completely limp to sell defeat. A tidal wave of silvery terror rolls through me while Patrick takes the slack bait. He grunts his effort to haul me in, but he has to loosen his grip to get a better one. He doesn’t have the best hold. He’s got half a hand’s worth of sleeve and I’m deadweight to drag now. I have to get the timing right. There won’t be another free second.
His hand opens. I launch myself through the dirt.
My wrist, then pants leg, then knee, then ankle, slip out of his grip. I kick him in the face and struggle away, an ungainly roll of elbows and toes. I look up to see the new car coming on. Patrick scrambles after me.