Endings, Linda Richards [desktop ebook reader .txt] 📗

to see what he is trying to show me. And then I do. It is old and white, but the composition is clear: the perfect reflection of a small set of teeth.

“That was Renee,” he says.

“She bit you?”

“Like a dog,” he says.

“Wait. You’re saying she got away?” I feel this odd little surge of hope. A bird in my breast. It dies at his next words.

“I killed her like the bad dog she was.”

“You hit her—like you hit me.” I suddenly have a clear picture. A fist connecting in retaliation. A tiny jaw, shattering, like so much precious glass.

He grunts ascent. I close my eyes. Just for a second. But I can’t speak. And then I can.

“Why did no one ever find the body?”

“We were on the road. I popped her into a dumpster.” He says it casually, and it takes a minute or two for his meaning to become clear. And when it does, I can’t make the picture go away. He had thrown her away, like so much trash. And just like that, the trail had died.

I had seen Renee’s parents on television at some point through all of this. Their grief was oldest and so their expectations were not high. The stoop in their shoulders had come from an old and grinding weight, not like the newly grieved who have been hit by a recent storm and for whom walking fully upright and erect is beyond possibility. Oddly, though, I’d noted that there was a little hope alive in each parent, even after all this time. Nothing more than a spark, really. A dull flame, ready to be ignited at the smallest hint of warm wind. And to hear him declare, so casually, what had become of Renee, with all of the caring one might have given a broken toaster, something in that chilled my blood. All over again.

“But that was a long time ago,” he says.

“A long time,” I repeat. My voice is so quiet, I can barely hear the words myself. “So why do you do it?” I hadn’t known I was going to ask the question. And now here it is.

“Do you believe that no one has ever asked me that before?”

“Really?”

“No,” he says, deadpan. “But it should be true, don’t you think?”

I don’t have an answer for that. And we both stand there, silently for the moment. Almost companionably. There is the sound of a light wind in the trees. Occasional hits of the music of children’s laughter, wafting up from the beach. The sound is chilling in the circumstance.

The Bersa is trained at the base of his skull. I am ready to kill him at any moment. And yet. I don’t. At first, I’m not sure why. I grapple with it. And then I don’t grapple. We are different, him and I. I am not better. Because who can say they are better than anyone else? But also? We are not the same.

“It’s like a pressure,” he says out of the blue.

“What is?”

“You had asked why I do it. Before. You asked. And there is pressure. That’s why. The pressure builds. I relieve it.”

“Relieve it,” I repeat without expression.

“For a while, after, it’s okay again.”

I wonder but don’t ask what “okay” even looks like to him.

“And the garden?”

“Well, I didn’t ever want it to be just for nothing, you know? It felt like it could give their lives real meaning. More than they ever could have without it. Giving back to the earth in that way.” His voice has grown stronger with his explanation as he warms to the topic. He still doesn’t look at me, and I can tell he is attempting to articulate something he has maybe never tried to put words to before. I don’t point out the logic flaws. There seems to be no reason.

“And they were always kids,” I say, my voice only loud enough to travel.

“Not always,” he says, letting me know there is still another aspect here. “But mostly, yeah. And kids, well they’re easy, aren’t they? They’re small and pliable. Easy to get your hands on. And just so sweet.”

I feel my bile rising, but I hold it down. Steady the gun in my hands. Level it.

“You couldn’t not do it, could you?” I ask, and I realize I am thinking about him like he’s a vampire. One that must feed at intervals in order to ensure peak performance. I’m not asking because I am wondering about rehabilitation. That doesn’t even seem like a possibility.

“We are the same, you and I,” he says, surprising me with his words and by how closely they echo my own thoughts. “We are just the same.”

I just look at the back of his head, at the view beyond and, for a moment, I fall into this. We are the same, aren’t we? Then I mentally give myself a shake. We are not the same. To some people, the pieces might look similar, but the essentials? They’re not the same at all. A pressure, he’d told me. Nothing in me has ever been that. And then his garden, the highest usage of those young lives, he’d said.

I think about the wholeness I have felt at times when I’ve killed, but that was never the purpose of the exercise. Or was it? Now I am becoming confused. Even so, I know there has always been mercy in my hands. And the killings I have done were never of my choosing. Except when they were.

The world swims a bit, in front of my eyes.

We are alike, he said. We are the same.

But we are not the same. I know that now. I take aim, take a deep breath just as the stillness of the clearing is disrupted by the arrival of the team. Cameras are rolling and I hold my fire.

Atwater senses my hesitation and powers forward, stretching for the edge of the cliff.

“No!” I shout, raising the gun, cameras be damned. I don’t want him to escape, even in