He backs the rear of the car inside the darkened garage, the light on the automatic door disabled, and pulls Sunbeam’s tarp-covered form out of the trunk before pulling the car out and closing the garage door behind him again. As quiet settles, he has a moment’s thought of the little girl back at the house and remembers one time, in the beginning when he was just a boy. He’d caught a neighborhood cat and was using a wire loop to take it to death’s door and back, over and over again. The cat’s screams had brought some older kids to the copse of trees where he’d been experimenting. One of them had been a bossy type of girl. It wasn’t the first time he’d done some experimenting: the first cat he’d killed was with a large firecracker shoved up its rectum. Then there were the birds he’d caught, after that chick, baiting them with grain and dropping a box over them, and then injecting them with bleach and sitting back to watch them shake and die.
I was just playing with it, he’d said, removing the wire loop from the cat’s neck, hiding it, and then letting the cat go. But that bossy girl had just stood and stared at him. Just like that girl back at the house had.
Word about the incident got out, thanks to her, and he was called in to the middle school guidance counselor’s office.
The counselor, a wrinkled woman with large rings on her nubby fingers, smelled of coffee and kept saying things like: Don’t you feel bad for the cat? What about the cat’s feelings?
Well, she didn’t get it, that guidance counselor, not at all. Where would he have even started to explain with someone like her? Especially at his young age, when he was so far from true understanding himself. So he’d said yes, he certainly did feel bad, and he would never do anything like that again. And he’d been allowed to walk out of the guidance counselor’s office and to get on with the rest of his life. That bossy girl had stayed away from him, and she’d switched schools not long after the incident and he hadn’t thought of her for a long time—until earlier that night when he’d been ready to leave Sunbeam’s but had to finish up. He’d opened that bathroom door and had come faceto-face with the niece … He never did like bossy little girls …
Sunbeam is still alive, but only in the technical sense and certainly not in any functional one. Her breathing is shallow, her pulse weak and thready. The part of her brain that controls her involuntary motor functions has been damaged from lack of oxygen. Once he saw a report on television about college-aged binge drinkers who anesthetized themselves into comas with alcohol, and their symptoms were similar to hers.
He walks around her naked body, roped spread-eagle on the floor, and gets ready. She is beyond terror, beyond conscious comprehension, but soon on a deep, cellular level she’ll experience full awareness. It would have been nice to talk to her for longer, to watch her fight her situation with more vigor and fire. Even though those are superficial pleasures, and her condition doesn’t really matter to him so long as she is alive for this part.
He moves to his workbench and selects some tools, but then pauses. Suddenly he is back at the jumping-off point, at the beginning of his army service, home on family medical leave to tend to Mother, who was suffering, after a series of mini-strokes, and it was time for it to come to a close. Even that shining hair she’d been so proud of had become lank as straw. If she could have talked, she would’ve asked him to end it. He was sure. But investigators could take an impression of the inside of the lips, and the depressions of her teeth on the soft flesh there would reveal she had been smothered with a pillow, and that just wouldn’t do. It was hardly that complicated or difficult though. He merely pinched her nose shut and covered her mouth and waited. She barely thrashed. The end was a mere spasm, as she looked up at him, her eyes wide with shock, fear, and understanding of what she’d birthed and created.
Later, he’d sat naked and cross-legged, like a giant pale baby, in front of the mirror in her room, Mother’s corpse reflected behind him, and he’d wept and laughed until he grew hard and then he’d masturbated feverishly. When he’d returned to post after the burial, and no questions were asked, it was with a sense of utter lightness and freedom.
But this memory puts a different idea in his mind. He crosses over to Sunbeam, kneels down, and puts his mouth over hers, pinching her nose, and he breathes for her. He smiles at the irony, at how differently he had handled Mother, and because at some point he will be doing the opposite and taking Sunbeam’s breath from her, but not yet …
Because it works, like splashing water in the face of someone who has fainted. He sees her blink and look around at where she is. She’s not completely lucid, but Sunbeam is back.