The twelve gauge was a piss-poor companion.
Jess had set the shotgun down on the table in the living room after Mason Burke left, and sat down on the couch next to it and stared at it most of the night.
She didn’t sleep. If she slept, she’d dream of Afia, and if she dreamed of Afia one more time, she might well blow her head off with that shotgun the moment she woke from the nightmare. So Jess didn’t sleep. She didn’t blow her head off either.
She’d bought the shotgun from Chase Ogilvy with that eventuality in mind; she could admit that, now that she wasn’t going to do it. Sure, she would use the weapon to defend herself in the interim, but once she’d scared Kirby Harwood and his buddies away, once she’d found herself left alone in Ty’s house again?
That shotgun was meant for one purpose, and that purpose was to rid her head of the nightmares, of Afia and the valley, forever. Jess figured she could live with the side effects.
But she didn’t blow her head off, alone as she was with her thoughts. And the reason she didn’t do it was that every time she looked across the living room at that shotgun on that table, her eyes would skim past the gun and scan the room a split second, and she’d catch a glimpse of Lucy’s worn leather lead hanging on a hook by the door.
She hadn’t been able to throw the lead out, not yet. Same for Lucy’s water bowl in the kitchen, and the bag of pepperoni treats stashed in the fridge. The dog was as good as dead, but to trash her stuff would make it final, and Jess wasn’t ready to take that step yet.
Except now she couldn’t look at the shotgun without seeing that lead, and she couldn’t look at the lead without hearing what Mason Burke had told her, how Lucy was still alive and he planned to rescue her. And if the dog was still alive, and Burke planned to save her, then damn it, the notion of Jess blowing her head off kind of made it seem like she was abandoning the damn creature, giving up too easy.
Jess didn’t give Mason Burke a snowball’s prayer of rescuing Lucy from Harwood and his buddies, but the dog was still alive, and that meant she still had a chance, however infinitesimal. Jess wasn’t sure she had the energy for a fight, but damn it, the last thing she needed was to pile more guilt on her head, feel like she’d let someone else down.
She stared at the shotgun on the coffee table some more. She didn’t know what to do.
She’d always known, more or less, what to do. Her whole life Jess Winslow had had plans, a path spread out before her, and growing up had been as simple as putting one foot in front of the other.
Marrying Ty, that had been simple. He’d asked her out shortly after Kirby Harwood did, sophomore year, and he was ambitious and funny and cute and didn’t bully the freshmen, and she’d said yes and they’d gone into Clallam Bay to the movies, and afterward Ty had kissed her, and then they were going together, and that was pretty well how it happened. She felt safe with Ty, liked his dimples and the way he looked at her, and the way he talked about making something of himself, a real man, a highliner like his daddy used to be, resurrecting the family name and Deception Cove at the same time, doing something important. She liked that.
And even after they’d graduated, and Ty’s big ideas didn’t pan out the way that he’d planned, he always had other ideas, more schemes, and anyway, Jess was enlisting and there was no sense in waiting—kids in Deception Cove married their high school sweethearts, that’s just how it went—so they married before she set off to South Carolina, and then overseas, and by the time she came back from that first tour of duty, she’d been gone so long and seen so much that she wasn’t even sure she could recognize herself, much less the man she came home to.
He was up to no good then—he must have been, those big schemes gone sour—but Jess was so stuck in her own head that she didn’t catch on. And anyway, there was still some of that magic left sometimes, like she’d come out of her fog now and then, and there was Ty, like the old days; they’d watch a funny movie together, or he’d drive her out to the cape and they’d walk in the woods, the stillness of the rain forest a salve on the wounds she carried inside her. Ty still knew her better than anyone else in the world, still loved her, and she supposed she’d still loved him, too, and still did.
But she’d reenlisted anyway, and gone back over, and he’d gone and gotten himself drowned.
The corps, too; she’d always known she’d be a leatherneck. Her dad had fought in Iraq with the First Marines, Operation Desert Storm, and growing up, Jess had wanted nothing more than to emulate her father, impress him. So she’d enlisted after graduation, joined a female engagement team, and found out pretty quickly that she was just as good a marine as she’d ever hoped she would be.
It wasn’t just the fighting, though she was plenty good at that part too. Working with Afia was less about shooting M4s and more about talking to people, listening, mediating. Gathering information and assessing its value, helping your team leaders make tactical decisions. And Jess, who’d never been much of a student, realized she was good at the engagement stuff. Working with Afia, she’d been better than good.
But Afia was gone, and Jess was too fucked up in the head to fight anymore, a medical discharge and some combat ribbons and a never-ending barrage of nightmares her only souvenirs of a four-year engagement she’d hoped might become a career.
Her dad was dead, Ty was dead, Lucy was gone; for the first time in years, maybe even a decade, Jess Winslow had no idea where she was going, what she was supposed to do. No path to guide her but her memories of the valley, and the blessed relief offered by the shotgun that lay before her.
And she might have done it too. She might have eaten that barrel, put an end to the guilt and the horrible thoughts, the hopelessness and aimlessness and apathy. She might have welcomed the silence, the sudden end.
But damn it, every time she looked at the gun, Jess saw Lucy’s lead on its hook in the background. And every time she saw that lead, she saw Lucy, languishing somewhere, terrified and alone. She saw Mason Burke and the look in his eyes, and she knew there was still a path she could follow, if she could only find the starting point.
She’d given up on Afia. She wouldn’t give up on Lucy. Jess supposed that meant she’d have to find Mason Burke.