SHE RUSHED down from the house clutching a towel, pressed it to his shoulder to staunch the flow of blood, told him the ambulance had been called, would be there soon. His color was bad but his eyes were clear, awake. He wanted her to remain beside him. She saw that the shotgun lay just beyond his reach. She said to stay still, then picked up the shotgun and walked into the woods, ignored his shouts to stay.
The blood on the snow was pronounced and arterial. It wrote itself out in flecks and long arcs. She paused and touched her fingers to it, wiped its strange oils on the inside of her wrist where her pulse jumped. She had no doubt of where he had fled. And, of course, she would have to meet him there to finish things. They owed one another that.
The ruins of the old place surprised her. There was a difference in how the collapsed shape appeared in the snow. The angled roof had nodded closer to the ground under the unaccustomed weight. The blood led her on.
“You better put that shotgun down, Little Bit,” he called from within.
She settled the weapon flat on the ground, held her hands before her.
“Come on, then,” he said, his voice thinned by labored breath.
She advanced, aware of the sudden cold and silence of what surrounded them.
She went up the front stairs and stepped carefully across the spaced boards of the front hall. The house ached and complained at her passage.
“You’re headed in the right direction. Come on in.”
His voice was its own spirit in the house. The invitation could have belonged to the walls as much as they did to this man she’d once called her husband.
“Where are you?” she stopped and asked. In the long silence that followed she thought perhaps she would be spared this confrontation, but he called her name and she went on toward the back bedroom.
He was braced in the back corner, his legs splayed and the blood coming brightly out of his chest like a fatal decoration. He coughed, waved her in with his hand that still held the pistol. She moved across and sat a few feet away. He coughed again so that he doubled up in pain and had to wait for several seconds before he could speak.
“I’d worried the chemicals would still be bad in here, but it’s just me dying.”
“There’s an ambulance coming. You just need to let me help you.”
He laughed, though it caused pain.
“I imagine I’ve had about all the help from you I can stand.”
She tried to move closer still, but he raised the pistol to warn her away.
“I don’t mean to be moved by you so you better get comfortable where you’re at. You don’t have the first idea why I came here, do you? You think this was about me trying to get you back? I’m going to tell you something, Rain. There was never any meaning in it. I wanted to shape you, I wanted to make you believe in something that was impossible . . .”
A fit of coughing overwhelmed him. He leaned to the side and spat, held his hands to the side of his head as if he could contain the substance of what he thought by simple physical pressure.
“I’ve always wondered something,” he continued, looked her in the eye. “I’ve wondered how successful I was, how much you believed. Do you still call yourself by the name I gave you? Can you give yourself to someone else as easily and completely as that? Can there be better proof of what I can control?”
She said nothing.
“I’ll admit, I didn’t expect it to go like this. I didn’t mean for it to cost as much as it has. But that couldn’t be helped. You’ll find out about that, but I don’t have time to tell you what got us here. That’s something you’ll get to carry. If you can carry it. It’s hard to know what you can endure.”
“I’ve had to carry plenty,” she said, though her voice was as quiet as she could make it.
“That’s fine. You think you have, but you still have more to carry. You’ll understand that. I do have one thing I’d like to ask of you. Something I’ve wanted to hear so that I can remember what it sounded like. Can you remember who I was? Can you tell me that? Just one time I’d like to hear you say my name. That name you used to call me when you said you loved me.”
When she said nothing he put the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.