I have no idea where we are. In the woods, somewhere. He must have carried me here from the SUV. Or more likely dragged me, since the backs of my shoes have a buildup of mud and leaves on them. The surroundings remind me of where I was two years ago when I was the one holding the gun and not the one under the barrel of it. I am lying on my side, the wet dirt cold against my body. There are hundreds of trees and ferns and rocks, and there is a light rain. My cell phone is in a dozen pieces on the ground ahead of me.
The world comes into sharper focus and that’s a problem, because in the center of my view is my lawyer. He’s no longer wearing the suit. The gun looks like a nine millimeter. I figure it’s loaded to the max and this guy looks like he’s in the mood to prove it.
He notices me staring at the gun, then he turns it in his hand and looks at the side of it, as if he’s seeing it for the first time.
“It’s amazing what you can get for a few thousand dollars when you’re motivated enough,” he says, and I can tell from the look of him and where we are that he is, without a doubt, extremely motivated. “All you need is to be prepared to spend a few hours in the worst part of town. Guns, Tasers—there’s no limit when you’ve got the cash. And the desire.”
My hands are still bound behind me. I tuck my legs beneath me and manage to get onto my knees. The Taser pain is gone, but not the pain from the beating the guy gave me to knock me out. I have to blink heavily every few seconds just to keep things from going fuzzy, and it’s a struggle to stay balanced. The broken needle is still in my arm. Blood is running down my face. It’s getting dark. Must be around four o’clock. Maybe five. Or maybe it’s not getting dark at all, and it’s just my brain shutting down.
“What do you want?” I ask, though I already know.
“What do you think I want?”
I think about what he said in the car. About his daughter. “It was an accident. I’m sorry.”
“Ah huh. You think being sorry negates all of this?” he asks. “You think if she dies your sorries will help me sleep at night?”
I close my eyes while he talks to me. His words are very similar to the ones I said to Quentin James, only for him I didn’t use a What if because Emily was already dead. I wasn’t waiting on more information on which to base my decision. Nothing was going to change. One difference is I didn’t bind Quentin with plastic ties. I held him at gunpoint and made him walk. I made him carry a shovel because I wanted him to know how it felt to be a victim. I wanted him to know that the feeling he had, that he was about to die, was the same feeling I’d had every day since the accident and what I would feel every day for the rest of my life. Hell, for me it was worse. I already had died, and it was because of him. Father Julian used to come around to my house and we’d talk about that feeling, and I knew the only way to feel any better was to make the man who had done this pay. I couldn’t tell Julian that, but I suspect he knew. That day in the woods Quentin James prayed for a God who wouldn’t show up. I made James dig a grave, and all along he cried and told me it was an accident, he told me he wished he could change time, he told me it was Quentin James the drinker who had killed my daughter and not the man holding the shovel. The man holding the shovel was going to get better. He was going to seek help. He would go to jail and he would live with what he had done, and he would get better.
I’m a different person when it happens, he’d told me. I’m no longer me.
But I didn’t care; my wife was no longer what she had been, and my daughter was no longer alive, and therefore I was no longer me too. I watched as the sweat began to expand in circles from his armpits over his shirt, even though it was cold out. Dirt was sticking to his face, to his hands; he rolled up his sleeves and dirt began to stick there too. I told him it was too late, that it didn’t matter what he said now, that being sorry wasn’t going to change the past and wouldn’t prevent the future. He cried. He begged for his life. He tried to make me change my mind, but it didn’t matter. I was never going to let his justifications and sick excuses stop what was coming, and I’d made that decision before heading out there. I had to. I had to. It was the only way to go through with it, and the only way to save others from him.
Now my perspective is changing. Maybe the same damn thing that got me here is the same thing that happened to him. I never looked into his history. Never learned whether his family had died, never learned what drove him to drinking. There was way too much anger for that. He stood in the grave and he cried as I leveled the pistol at him. He told me he was sorry, and I told him that was enough, that I didn’t want to hear any more, that it was time to take responsibility. Through all his fear there must have been some hope I was going to let him go. I was hoping he would accept it, that he would shut up and make peace with his maker and just accept it. But he didn’t.
Quentin James was still begging for his life when I shot him in the head. It didn’t feel as good as I thought it would. I imagine it didn’t hurt as much as he feared. One moment he was staring down the barrel of my gun, the next moment he was slumped in the dirt.
I shuffled his body so it was nice and snug in the grave he’d dug, and then I buried him. I walked away without giving him a prayer or spitting on his grave. There was just a smooth transition between shoveling dirt and then turning away. A smooth transition between going from father to killer. I carried the shovel back to my car, drove away, and have never been back.
Unless I’m back here now. These could be the same woods.
“It was an accident,” I repeat.
My lawyer is nodding. “You had a daughter,” he says. “It’s all over the news now. How the hell can you, of all people, drive while completely tanked?”
It’s a good question. One with a complicated answer. One that involves me accidently killing a man who dug up my dead daughter. One that involves a priest who once tried to help me, and is now hiding the truth from me. I don’t tell him any of this. Instead I say, “There’s no shovel.”
“What?”
“There’s no shovel,” I repeat. “You should have made me bring a shovel.”
“What for?”
“What do you think?”
He nods. He’s figured it out. “You think I care whether I bury you or not? You think I care whether you’re ever found?”
“You should,” I tell him.
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because you’re going to throw away your life,” I tell him. “I deserve what I get, but you don’t deserve to be punished.”
He takes a small step back. I’d rather he come forward. I’d rather he was pointing the gun at my head. Rather he did us both a favor and got this over with.
“What?” he asks.
I look from the barrel and into his eyes. “Just pull the trigger.”
“I’m going to.”
“Yeah, you’re saying it, but you’re still talking about it,” I say. “Look, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. But if you’re waiting for me to beg for my life, I’m not going to. You might want that, but it’ll only make it harder. It’ll haunt you. The fact is you’ll shoot me and you’ll discover it wasn’t satisfying. You’ll feel nothing. At least that’s how it was for me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Could be different for you,” I say. “Your daughter’s alive, right? Rather than being with her, you decided to come out here and be with me. You’ve got your priorities wrong. You could have brought me out here anytime.” There’s a wedding ring on his finger. “Your wife and daughter, they need you now.”
“Shut up,” he says. “Don’t tell me what my family needs.”
“What’s her name?”
“What?”
“Your daughter,” I say. “Her name. I don’t know anything about her.”
“You don’t deserve to know it.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I tell him. “But I feel if you’re going to kill me I think I ought to know her name.”
“Fuck you.”
“Just pull the trigger.”
“What’s your hurry?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, and it’s true. “I really don’t know.”
“You don’t think I’m going to do it, do you?”
“What do you want me to say?” I ask. “You want me to say something that will sway your decision? How about this? Your daughter could have died, but she didn’t. She’s fighting for her life and she’s still with you. Does that make a difference? Of course it does. You’d have to be stupid not to recognize it. Do I deserve to die for that? That’s up to you. Me, I’m at that stage where it doesn’t matter either way.”
He says nothing for a few seconds. None of the anger has disappeared from his features. In fact he looks even angrier. “How dare you.”
“What?”
“How dare you kneel there and act like a Goddamn martyr,” he says. “How dare you act like you’re the one who’s the victim, like you’re the one having a bad day. Don’t you get it? Don’t you get what you almost did?”
“Of course I do.”
“Yeah, you’re good at taking responsibility, right? But all you’re doing is trying to mess up my reasons for bringing you out here. Why don’t you just shut up, huh? Shut up and let me decide for myself what I’m going to do,” he says. “This is my life we’re talking about. My sixteen-year-old daughter you tried to kill. How dare you kneel there acting as if you don’t care whether you live or die. Show some respect and at least beg for your life, right? Make me feel something. Make me want to hate you even more, make me want to hate what I’m doing.”
“I’m sorry about your daughter,” I tell him. “I really am.”
“Emma,” he says. “Her name is Emma.”
“My daughter’s name is Emily,” I say, as if she’s still alive. At first I’m not sure why I say it, but then it comes to me. I want to live. I don’t want to die out here. I want the chance to make things right.
“Emma. Emily,” he says. He doesn’t expand on the thought, but he’s really thinking about it. Thinking hard. Maybe drawing some parallels between the two names.
“I still have a wife,” I add. “Her name is Bridget.”
“I know. And I’m sorry about what happened to your daughter,” he says, “but that makes what you did even worse. Don’t you get that? It doesn’t make me sympathize with you, it only makes me angrier.”
“And so it should.”
“There you go again,” he says. “You’re trying to diminish the moment.”
“Are you really a lawyer?”
“What?”
“You talk like one,” I tell him.
“I’m a divorce lawyer.”
“And when you came to the prison, you gave them your name, right?”
“I had to so I could bail you out. But they don’t know I’m the one who brought you out here.”
“You don’t think they’ll figure it out? You don’t think they’ll work out that the lawyer, who they’ll soon realize is the father of the girl I hurt, was the last person to have seen me? It’ll take them all of about thirty seconds to figure out. And you went into town and bought yourself some black-market weapons. That shows premeditation. That’s bad for you.”
He thinks about it for a few seconds. “Fuck,” he says.
“See, you’re being driven by emotion, not logic. You should have known that. It’s a pretty simple equation, and you looked right over it. Don’t do this. Don’t throw away your life.”
He takes a step forward. He keeps the gun pointing at my face. But the cold and the nerves are too much for him to control, and his hand is shaking badly. His breathing is ragged. He’s fighting with the same decision I had back when the roles were reversed, only it was a decision I didn’t fight with. I was comfortable holding a gun. I just aimed and fired.
“I’m going to do it,” he says.
“You’ve got no argument from me.”
“Shut up, damn it. Let me think.”
I stay on my knees and I force myself to keep looking at the gun, and it terrifies me. His face is taut with pain, his mouth forms a grimace as he runs through the scenarios in his mind. One, he walks away with blood on his hands; the other, he walks away feeling a little unsatisfied. I decide against giving him any more advice. He’s a big boy. He can make up his own mind. As I wait, the sounds of the forest fill in the silence. Birds, mostly. The breeze shifting branches around. A falling pinecone cracks against a fallen branch somewhere.
It takes him a minute. It’s painful to watch. Painful to stare at the gun as it rises and falls slightly as his arm shakes. The entire time I keep thinking he’s going to pull the trigger, or accidently pull it. In the end he takes a step back. Then another. But he keeps the gun pointing at me.
“If she dies,” he says, “we’re coming back out here.”
He backs away, turns, and then I am alone.