How ill kill you, p.17
How I'll Kill You, page 17
I should be telling him I love him. We should be in his bed by now. That’s what I’m thinking when a nurse comes and puts an arm around his back and leads him away.
“Can you climb up onto the bed?” my nurse asks me. But I wobble so much that she holds me by the shoulders and tells me, never mind; we can do this part right where I am. She just needs to take a little blood and then someone will come and take me for my X-ray.
She draws a full vial, dabs at my forehead with gauze and peroxide, and gives me a smile.
All I can think is that my sisters are going to be so angry about what I’ve done to the car. We pay cash for everything, and the damage will be at least three months of rent, and what was I thinking? Couldn’t I have just crashed the damn bike into a ditch instead? Or discussed this little plan with them first at least?
And that’s saying nothing about the medical bills, which will also have to be paid in cash because Jade Johnson doesn’t have insurance and we don’t want them running our fake license.
This will all be worth it, I tell myself. The way Edison looked over his shoulder at me as the nurse forced him down the hall. The way he held me and carried me through the rain. He loves me. If he didn’t know it before, he knows it now. When we get out of here, he’ll take me back to his bed. He’ll prop pillows behind my head and watch over me as I sleep, fretting, thinking how broken he would be without me. In the morning, I’ll open my eyes and there he’ll be beside me. I’ll tell him that I’m sorry for scaring him and promise not to do it again. And somewhere in the brilliant sunlight that can only come after such a stormy night, we’ll confess our love.
It seems an hour passes before a different nurse comes into my room. “All right, then,” she says, staring at the chart propped against her forearm. “How far along are you?”
I don’t understand the question. The nurse looks up, and when she sees the bewildered look on my face, she softens. “Your baby, honey,” she says. “How long have you been pregnant?”
17
It’s one o’clock in the morning when we’re finally out of the emergency room. Edison arranged for the car to be towed to the mechanic. They’ll get us a quote for the repairs in the morning, he tells me when I ask him. And then he kisses my forehead, beside the browning gauze, and says it’s not important. He’ll take care of it. He’ll take care of everything. But I beg him to bring me to the mechanic so that we can find my purse. I can’t have them running my license and realizing it’s a fake, but I tell Edison I’ll need my keys.
The building is closed, but there’s my Honda with its mangled hood resting in a row of other damaged cars. Edison finds my purse in the back seat. My phone is ringing when he brings it to me. I hear the musical chime, muffled by all my things, the tube of matcha ChapStick, my wallet with my fake ID, and a travel pack of tampons because I was expecting my period sometime this week.
I’m too numb to wonder who could be calling me so late. My sisters would never use this number, besides which, they expect me to be spending the night with Edison and won’t be concerned that I haven’t been in touch. The little details that usually bring me comfort are evading me right now. The ringing stops. The door opens and Edison sits behind the wheel.
He doesn’t know that his baby is inside me. He’ll never know. That detail floats away with all the rest—the car crash, the ache in my head, my wild love for him. All of it is a blur.
“Are you sure I can’t take you back to my place?” Edison cups my cheek. When I left my apartment this evening, sleeping beside him was everything I wanted. But now the thought of being near him frightens me. We could run away. I open my mouth and those words are on the edge of my tongue. I know how to make us disappear. We could go someplace we’ve never been and rent a house with window boxes and an ornate door knocker. He could rest his head on my stomach and feel the movement inside.
Stop dreaming, you idiot. In my mind, the baby falls out from between my legs, slimy and screaming, and I don’t know what to do with it. I’m afraid, even in my own imagination, to pick it up, to clear away the blood and see if its face looks anything like mine, to know if I’m capable of loving it.
“Jade?” There’s a worry line on Edison’s forehead that I’ve never seen before.
“I want to sleep in my own bed,” I say, and it pains me to tell him such a lie. But I can’t be emotional right now. This is too important, and I need time to think.
As Edison drives back to my apartment, I watch his face in the flicker of the passing streetlamps. He looks about ten years older than he did yesterday. His eyes are bleary, his fingers clutching the wheel. But his grip softens when I reach out and put my hand over his.
“I’m sorry I scared you,” I say.
“Jade, I—” His voice chokes off. He gives himself a few seconds. “This could have been so much worse, and I couldn’t take it if—”
He can’t finish, too afraid that saying it out loud will manifest it.
This moment will live inside of me forever. Those beautiful words will warm me for the rest of my life.
“All I could think about was you,” I tell him in a soft voice. “When the car stopped spinning and I realized I was alone out there, I knew that I just had to call you and you’d come.”
He brings my hand to his lips and kisses my palm, hard. This was his greatest fear. He imagines it every time I leave him, and only breathes a sigh of relief once I text him that I’ve gotten home safely.
“I love you so much, Jade,” he says, too caught up in the moment to maintain his defenses. If he caught me by surprise in that church, I’ve repaid him here. We are full of surprises, my love and I.
This can’t last forever, Sissy, I have to remind myself. We are lucky to have found each other. We’ll burn for a short while, but the fire is hot and bright and wild. It’s a short love, but a rare love. Once in a lifetime.
“Really?” My heart fills up with more heat and light than the sun.
He nods, brings his hand back to the steering wheel with my fingers still in his. “Yeah.” His voice is tight. “I love everything about you. I love the way you grab the headboard with both hands when I go down on you, and the taste of coffee in your mouth when you kiss me in the morning. I love your fucking smile. It drives me wild, Jade. That day in the church, you smiled while you sang to me and it set me on fire.”
He knew. He knew that I’d come for him. We were always on this course and we’d waited all our lives to finally crash like two asteroids in an empty galaxy.
I don’t say anything for a long time, and he glances at me. When he sees the tired smile on my face, relief floods through his features. No, his confession hasn’t scared me away.
“I love you too,” I say.
The rain drums all around us, composing a song.
Now that the adrenaline has died down, my muscles have started to ache. My neck hurts, and my head is starting to throb. But I will relive this night a thousand times after Edison is gone. I’ll remember how beautiful he was, how gentle his calloused hands, the protective watchfulness of his eyes. I’ll remember his child curled up inside me.
“There can never be another you,” I tell him. He smiles, taking this as a sweet declaration made in my delirious state. But the words are the truth, and I needed to say them.
By the time Edison pulls into my parking space, I can barely keep my eyes open. He sweeps me into his arms and carries me up the stairs, using the blanket to protect me from the rain. He sets me down only once I’ve fished the keys out of my purse, but I stop him with a hand to his chest when he tries to follow me inside.
“Lisa is sleeping,” I say. “I don’t want to wake her up.”
“You need someone to look after you,” he says. “Your head—”
“The nurses said nothing was broken,” I remind him. “I just need to take a couple of aspirin and get some sleep.” I kiss him before he can argue. “Good night.”
The ghost of my original plan is still in play. No, we won’t sleep beside each other, but he’ll spend the night thinking of me, loving me.
I’ll go to him just as soon as I figure this out. I’ll have my sisters to contend with first, and then the car, and the matter of paying for all of it.
And then the other thing. The one I can’t put words to just yet. There’s a blurred image of a baby’s face that won’t come into focus in my mind, and I try to push it away but something else within me clings to it.
Once Edison has left, I move through the house silently. My sisters will be fast asleep by now, and if they knew I let Edison come all the way up to the front door, they’d be furious. What if we were down here, Sissy? What if he saw us?
My phone starts ringing again, and this time I fumble for it immediately and put it on mute so that the noise won’t wake my sisters.
Twenty-seven missed calls, all of them from Dara.
A new terror takes hold of me, and I drop my purse on the couch and I go to her. He’s done it, I’m thinking as I take the three strides to her front door. He’s finally hurt her so badly that she wants to run away. She has no one else to call. Her parents are in Florida, and her little brother is in Dubai for a year as a college exchange student. She would never confide in the nosy biddies in our complex, or the judgmental lady across the parking lot who keeps telling her that her music is too loud. Although it may come to her great detriment, all she has is me.
I knock quietly. Two brief raps with the knuckle of my index finger. There’s the glow of a light through the curtains, which are too thick for me to make out any silhouettes inside.
The door opens an inch, and Dara peers out at me. There’s blood smeared all over her face and her left eye is swollen, bruised deep purple against her skin.
“What did he do to you?” I growl.
Tears all over her cheeks. “Jade?” she whispers, her voice broken. “I—I need your help.”
“Let me in,” I say, but when I try to open the door, she holds it in place with her foot.
“I’m in trouble,” she says. “I—”
I know she wants me to see whatever’s happened in that apartment. She didn’t call me nearly thirty times just to show me the outside of her front door. I’ve never seen her like this, shaking and small, and I force myself to tamp down my rage so that I can reason with her. “Dara, whatever it is, I can help you. But you have to let me.”
“No.” Fresh tears well up in her eyes. “No, no, no.” She sobs, and I suspect those words aren’t meant for me. When she wipes her hands across her face, I take the opportunity to push the door open. This time, she doesn’t stop me. She tumbles out of the way, her back pressed against the wall.
The coffee table is upended, candle wax caked in splatters on the linoleum. The television is broken, spider cracks on the screen. Dara’s yellow flip-flop is wedged between the couch cushions, and I can see that she must have been running from him, crawling over the couch to put a barrier between herself and his monstrous wrath.
I close the door and lock it. She is cradling her left wrist, which is swollen like her eye. “Dara.” I stand in front of her and brush my thumb across her cracked, bleeding lip. “Where is he?”
Her eyes give her away. She looks over my shoulder to the kitchenette. There’s a bare leg sticking out from around the island with the bar counter. Pale and thin and unmoving.
I walk slowly, Dara whimpering in agony behind me. When I step into the kitchen I see what she’s crying about. Tim is slumped against the cabinet below the kitchen sink, trembling, blood pooled around the hilt of the steak knife wedged into his chest.
He looks at me with bloodshot eyes, blood dribbling down from the side of his mouth.
“Help,” he whispers, sound barely leaving his lips. “Help me.”
Dara is chewing on her knuckle, pacing. She grasps her hair in her fist and then flails, as though the violence of this night is a cobweb she can shake herself free of.
“I didn’t want to,” she says. “I swear I didn’t want to.”
“Yes, you did,” I say. Nobody stabs someone in the chest unless they mean it. “If you lie to yourself, this will be a lot harder than it needs to be.”
She presses her palms to her eyes. “God.”
“Hey.” My voice is gentle, the way I would speak to my child if I could ever hold it in my arms. I take her elbows with careful hands, but she still flinches. She looks at me. “You have a choice to make.”
Even in her grief, Dara is too strong to succumb to hysteria. She’s in her right mind. He’s come for her a hundred times before, and she’s subsisted on the promises and apology gifts. He buys her designer purses and shows her real estate listings for homes they’ll be able to afford one day. But somewhere in there, he started to push her too far. She started to think about where the weapons were, how she would do it if she really had to.
Tim might be a goner no matter what. The blood in his mouth means that he’s bleeding internally, and if he could have been saved, it would have been sometime in the last hour while Dara was calling me instead. But if Dara regrets this later, and she didn’t try, I know that it will only haunt her. She’ll make a saint of him and forget what he did to make her stab him. “We can call an ambulance and tell the police it was self-defense,” I say. “They’ll take photos of you. They’ll see what he did to you and we’ll get you a good lawyer. You might go away. It might be really, really bad. But maybe the hospital can save him if we act now.”
She takes a shuddering breath and looks at him.
“Or we can make all of this go away, you and me together,” I tell her. “But it has to be your decision. Do you understand?”
“I want to call the ambulance,” she whispers.
“You’re sure?”
She nods, swallows hard. I grab her phone from where it’s sitting on the counter smeared with blood. I place it in her trembling hands. “Say it just happened,” I instruct her. “Act like you called them right away.”
She unlocks her phone, and Tim gurgles and spits. After hanging on for nearly an hour, he’s finally starting to lose consciousness. “Move—” he rasps. “Move faster, you fucking—psycho.”
Dara studies him anew, this man she vowed to honor and love. This man who puts on a suit and tie in the morning and kisses her at the door. This man who breaks her over and over, until she can’t believe there’s anyone out there who would love her like she deserves.
She locks her phone and sets it back on the counter.
18
It takes thirty more minutes for Tim to die. By the time his chest stops heaving, Dara is completely drained. Her skin is ashen and her leg is shaking, knee bobbing furiously up and down.
I sit on the adjacent barstool facing her, and I wait for her to understand that Tim isn’t going to draw another breath. The realization comes when she squeezes her eyes shut and bows her head.
“What the fuck?” she whispers.
I don’t tell her what I’m thinking, which is that she made the right choice. When she answered that door, coated in blood, my heart about stopped. I don’t tell her that I’ve never had a friend who could scare me like this except for Colin, who flatlined once between rehab stints. I don’t tell her that she couldn’t have done a more beautiful thing to free herself if I’d given her written instructions.
“What the fuck,” she says again. “I just killed my husband—I—”
“Dara.” At the firmness of my voice, she snaps out of it and looks at me. Her brow furrows; she’s just noticing my own bruises and the bandage on my forehead. Now that the adrenaline has worn down and the world hasn’t ended, little details are starting to make sense to her again. “Take your clothes off and leave them on the kitchen floor. Then get in the shower and scrub every last inch. Don’t touch the railing or the doorknobs. Don’t even get a towel until you’ve cleaned off all the blood.”
If my instructions are strange to her, she doesn’t let on. “What’s going to happen to him?”
“I’ll take care of him,” I say. For the first time, skepticism mars her features. And then incredulity that I can be so calm.
But she does as I say. I look away as she slides out of the pink tank top and shorts she was wearing—pajamas she had put on expecting to go to sleep before Tim balled his fists for the last time. She leaves them in a pile on the floor. We wear almost the same size and her clothes can pass easily for mine. I’ll wash the blood out with dish soap first. Then I’ll clean them with my own laundry. I’ll fold them and put them in a trash bag with some other clothes and dump them in a donation bin. They’ll be on their way overseas just as soon as the next pickup arrives.
Water runs through the pipes as Dara showers upstairs. A wave of dizziness and fatigue overtakes me when I kneel beside the ill-fated Tim. The dull ache in my head has become a persistent throb. My muscles are begging for rest. But I must move quickly. Rigor mortis can begin as soon as an hour after death, and once his body goes stiff, it will become a lot harder to manipulate.
Dara and Tim order weekly meal kits that are left in a temperature-controlled box by their door. Filet mignon, seared ahi tuna, braised organic vegetables. And because they’re such avid chefs, they have a full supply of cutlery, including a hefty butcher knife stuck to a magnetic strip above the stove. I’m grateful Dara didn’t use this one to kill him. It would have done the job, but it also would have left a considerable mess. As it is, she stabbed him once and it’s a clean wound. Right through the chest with a serrated knife from the block. I’m amazed that he lasted as long as he did.
Her bloody handprints are all over his bare chest. She knelt down to help him, cupped his cheek. She had tried to stop the bleeding, and she’d gripped the hilt of the knife with her bloody fingers, but then thought better of pulling it out.
