September 3, 1995
“I want a divorce,” she said. The two of them had stopped laughing when they realized she was there. The girl had pulled the bedding up to her chin and was staring with wide, frightened eyes, but she hadn’t screamed. Janice had to give her that. She hadn’t screamed, and she didn’t seem very surprised. Just wary. “I can’t believe I’ve wasted so much of my life with you.”
Matt got out of the bed and held his hands up. He was completely naked, his body smooth and gleaming in the low light, his cock swaying gently between his thighs as he came closer. He looked ridiculous, she thought. She should shoot him right now, in that stupid dangling thing he was so proud of. That would teach him a lesson.
“Janice, it doesn’t have to be like this,” he said softly, coming closer. Hands still up. The love line that cut across his palm was especially long, ran almost from one side of his hand to the other. “Put down the gun and we can talk. This isn’t what you think.”
She’d been holding the gun down at her side, the barrel pointing at the floor, and brought it up now, looked at it in astonishment. She’d practically forgotten that she’d grabbed it as she’d come in, and she couldn’t believe it was still in her hand. She held it out toward Matt, meaning to give it to him, to let him take it out of her hands because she hadn’t wanted the damn thing in the first place. But he must’ve thought she was going to shoot, that she meant to kill him, because he sprang forward and grabbed her, trapping her hand on the gun’s grip, forcing her fingers tighter around it and pointing it away from himself. She tried to pull away, to get free, to let him have the damn gun so she could leave, but couldn’t. Afterward, she wondered how often bad things happened because of these sorts of miscommunications. Afterward, she never knew how long they struggled over the gun, her trying to give it and Matt trying to take it away, both misunderstanding the other, but it ended when the gun fired. Janice felt the heat of the bullet streak past her face and the silver-white flash of light and gasped, stumbling back, and Matt did the same.
The gun clattered to the floor between their feet.
They looked down at themselves, then at each other, checking to see if either of them had been shot. They were both fine, but the woman in the bed was not. She’d been thrown back on the pillows, her arms flung out and her eyes open, a single drip of blood running down the center of her face. The bullet had gone cleanly through her left eye, a once-in-a-million shot, and the force of it had knocked one of her front teeth out. The bedsheet had fallen down so her breasts were bared, her areolas large and pinkish-brown. Janice went to the bed and pulled the sheet up to her neck, covering her up. A silly thing to do for a dead woman, but she did it without thinking.
“We killed her,” Matt said.
“It was an accident.”
“No one will believe that.”
“But it was an accident. We didn’t mean to do it.”
Years later, they’d blame each other for the girl’s death. They’d say it was on purpose, that one of them was more guilty than the other even though they’d both been holding the gun when it fired. This girl came up every time they argued for years, because once you have some bit of information to hold over another person’s head you have to use it whenever possible. But now, standing beside the bed they’d shared for less than a year, they were in it together.
For better or worse.
“What are we going to do?” Matt asked.
“What are we going to do?” Janice echoed.
Life was spinning like a dime again—which way would it turn? They might’ve gone a different route, they could’ve called the cops and reported it, explained what had happened, and everyone might’ve understood and things would’ve turned out much differently, but they didn’t.
That would’ve been too easy.
This is what they did in the panicked moments after the bullet had entered the girl’s brain: they decided to burn the body, to burn the whole house down. They came up with the story about being attacked, and practiced it. They’d make it look like it was Janice who’d been attacked and killed. It was a good story, they said. A believable story.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, you see, and create desperate people.
But who came up with the idea for all this? Who was the brains behind the whole thing?
Does it matter?
Of course it matters, and the answer is that they both did. Two voices became one. All together now, with feeling, as Loren would say.
“Matt?” Janice said. They were in the bedroom, Matt pouring the last of the gasoline out of the canister and over the girl’s body, his back to her. It was the only thing she could trust him to do. She’d told him to knock the girl’s teeth out to make identification more difficult but he’d refused. Because he’d known her, Matt had said. He’d cared for the girl.
How much did you care for her? Janice had asked. Did anyone know about the two of you? If someone realizes she’s gone missing, are they going to come looking for you?
I don’t know. I don’t think so.
He’d refused to help knock out the girl’s teeth, so she’d done it herself. If you want something done right, she thought, don’t ask your husband to do it.
Then she’d taken a pair of pliers from a kitchen drawer and pulled one of her own teeth to leave with the girl’s body, for identification purposes. She’d sat on the side of the bathtub as she did it, not sure that she could go through with it, but then she remembered the breathless pain of seeing her husband with another woman earlier that night, and her heart hardened. She lost consciousness as she pulled that molar, but when she came to it was done.
“Matt, look at me.”
There was one more thing to do, and she knew he wouldn’t like it.
He didn’t even have time to register surprise before she pulled the trigger. She’d been aiming for his arm, high up, hoping to graze the meat of his bicep, but she’d never shot a gun before and was lucky the bullet didn’t end up in his heart. It ended up going into his shoulder, and years later the puckered scar tissue left behind would look a little like a starfish.
“You shot me,” he screamed, falling to the floor and writhing in pain. She thought he was being a little dramatic—surely a hole that small couldn’t hurt much—and tried to explain that he couldn’t walk away without a wound, not if the cops were going to believe their story. He had to be hurt, and it had to be believable. “You didn’t have to shoot me.”
“Yes, I did,” she said. She’d shot him so their story would seem believable, but she still had to admit that a part of her had taken pleasure in shooting him, at seeing Matt weak and squirming, weeping in agony. Much later, she’d wish she’d pointed the gun a little higher and put a bullet between his eyes, instead. It would’ve saved her so much misery in the long run.
She kneeled over her crying husband and fed him his story, gave his ear a hard tug to make sure he was listening—guy broke in, I tried to run, he shot me—and then stood up, tucking the gun into the waistband of her jeans. Rubbed her hands together and looked around for anything she should take before they lit a match and let the place flame up—and saw Jesse O’Neil’s face in the window. He must’ve come to check on her—he’d done it before, when she and Matt had gotten into one of their screaming fights—and had come around the backside of the house when no one answered his knocks on the front door, stood in the flower beds and peered through the bedroom window. The drapes were pulled, but they were gauzy and light as air, and sheer enough that she could clearly see the shock on Jesse’s face. And the window was wide open. If she’d been able to hear Matt and his little girlfriend laughing, she had no doubt Jesse had heard every word they’d said.
So it wasn’t really a question of what Jesse knew—she had to assume he’d seen and heard it all, or at least enough to get them into big trouble.
So the real question was this: How was she going to fix it?
“I have to go,” she said, picking up the dead girl’s purse and giving it a brisk shake. There were car keys jangling around inside. “For chrissake, Matt. You’re fine. Quit being a fucking baby and finish this. I’m going to my mother’s house.”
She nudged him, not gently, with her foot and ran outside. Her mouth was bleeding, badly, and she turned her head to spit so she wouldn’t drown in it.
Jesse was still out there, stumbling away from the house with a numb look on his face. It was simple enough to convince him to get in the girl’s car and to drive away with her. He wasn’t scared. Jesse loved her, and he didn’t think he had anything to be worried about. Even though she had a gun, even though he’d watched her shoot her husband. That pissed her off a little. Don’t worry about that woman, she’s harmless—she won’t shoot you in the back of the head so the police will think you’re a killer.
But she did shoot Jesse—although she screwed that whole thing up royally, didn’t she?—because Jesse was only a guy she knew from work and Matt—although he was a scumball who’d probably picked up crabs from a hooker and passed them on to her—was her husband. And they’d taken vows, and those vows meant something. Till death do us part, for better or worse. As long as we both shall live.
So there really wasn’t a choice at all.