Alone, As Always - 3

By Jennifer Gardner

Friday PM, the day of...

"Whoa, Vic. What are you doing with that?"

He doesn't seem to take it too seriously, my holding this gun. So I point it at him, and fear falls into his eyes. He steps back slowly. "Put that down, baby. It could go off."

"That's what I'm counting on," I say in a voice I barely recognize as my own. I step towards him and he steps back, like we're dancing.

"What are you doing?"

My voice is calm. "I'm gonna kill you for what you did." I rub the trigger of the gun under my fingertip, lightly, as if to tease it.

"What'd I do?"

"Are you blind, Danny, or just stupid?" I start waving the gun now, like it's a wand and I'm a magician who's about to make her husband disappear.

"You mean your face? You think I did that?" Danny's really nervous now. I've backed him all the way onto the bed and he's nearly sitting on his briefcase. "Vicki," he says, almost stuttering. It's amazing how a loaded weapon makes him choke on his words. "Vicki, you fell in the bathroom two nights ago. Don't you remember? You hit your head on the sink."

"Don't lie to me, Danny."

"Baby, I got home from Minnesota and you were unconscious on the floor. The sink was all bloody. Don't you remember?"

The gun is shaking in my hand. "Stop it, Danny. I didn't fall. You did this, after you caught me on the phone with her."

"Who?"

"Stella."

"Who's Stella?"

"The woman who's gonna bury you," and again I didn't recognize my own voice.

"Vicki, you're talking out of your head, baby. I don't know anyone named Stella."

I scream at him. "She was on the phone, Danny! The other night in the kitchen. She's... I've been sleeping with her."

He laughs but stops when I inch the gun closer to his head. "Vicki, honey, are you trying to leave me for another woman?" I can hear the meanness in his tone. The way he says woman sets my blood boiling.

"No darling, I'm killing you for another woman."

He has nowhere to go. He can only swallow hard, trying to speak as he realizes I'm serious. I'm dead serious.

"Wait Vic. Listen to me. There is no other woman. There was no one on the phone the other night. You haven't been having an affair with anyone. You hit your head on the sink and now you don't know what you're saying. You need to see a doctor."

"You need to see an undertaker," is my witty comeback. But what he said troubles me. His words are circling my mind, buzzing against my brain in the most annoying way. I know they aren't true. In a desperate attempt to save his life, Danny's doing what anyone would. He's sitting there feeding me lies.

"Why would I lie to you, Vicki? Because you're holding a gun? Put the gun down and I'll tell you the exact same thing. I'm not lying to you."

"Bullshit, Danny. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit," I say because it's the only word in my head that makes sense. And each time I say it, my finger tickles the trigger like a lover.

He reaches out his hand. "Baby, don't you know that I love you?"

I pull the trigger and a bullet rips through his chest. I fire again. There is no sound. No bang from the gun, no scream from his mouth. I fire a third time and watch the light leave his eyes and his torso lightly bounce on the bed with the dry muffled thud of the bullet entering his body. I don't remember how many more times I fire. I remember the gun runs out of bullets.

Blood everywhere on the bed, some against the wall, a good amount of on me too. I've managed to splatter myself quite well, in fact. I'm a walking wardrobe of bloody murder.

In the bathroom, the full stream of cold water wakes my ears to the sounds of the outside world. No longer are my own thoughts so piercing. I run my hands and forearms under the water and wash my husband's blood from my skin. From out of the mirror, I study myself. My swelling has gone down and my eye seems to look closer to normal. I almost recognize myself.

"It's over," I say aloud to no one in particular.

Moments later, she's cleaning up at the sink, washing the arms that buried him in the garden, drying the fingers that moved his trash bag body into the freshly dug hole and covered it with fertilized soil.

"Fill out a missing person's report in three or four days," she tells me while splashing cold water on her face and wiping away smudges of dirt. "When they ask why you didn't report it sooner, tell them he's done this before. They'll think he's found another woman and probably won't even bother to investigate." She grabs the bloody towel from beside the sink as I stand behind her with my arms around her waist.

"You know what he told me... before I shot him? He said you weren't real."

She shuffles the towel from one hand to the other, furiously rubbing away the evidence from her body. "Did you believe him?"

"I didn't know what to believe. For all I know, I made him up."

"Now you're thinking. He never truly existed, except when you thought he did."

I look down at my arms and notice a patch of black dirt. "Stell, did I help you bury him?" I honestly can't remember.

"You said you couldn't." I rub at my dirty arm but the color won't come off. Seeing me doing this, she takes my arms in her hands and shows me it isn't dirt I'm trying to rub away, but bruises. Dark and patchy bruises extending up my forearms that I haven't noticed before. They're positioned where fingers once grabbed me. She doesn't have to say anything. I know I've been held like this before and not by her. I know the guilty fingers are now planted in my garden.

Overwhelmed with the confusion of reality, I kiss her, as if to confirm my own relevance to her. My body presses hers against the sink. I feel her dirty fingernails scratch against the back of my neck as she pulls my mouth further into hers. Without really knowing it, my hands work their way beneath her shirt and spider around her flesh like the insects inside Danny's mouth.

She eases me onto the floor beneath the sink and works her way down my body. Pushing aside my shirt still stained with Danny's blood, she rolls her hands up and down the length of my neck, licking a trail to my stomach, the ends of her dark hair tickling my skin.

My back arches. I moan. Almost instinctively my body lifts itself up and down off the bathroom floor and each time I feel her enter me deeper and deeper until her whole body is almost within me, as if we're one person in the same skin. The rush of orgasm flutters through me and she holds me there until it’s gone, until I fall back on the tile floor, exhausted and breathing heavily. My eyes close.

It's the light I notice first, the bright light on the bathroom ceiling. I'm lying on my back on the cold hard floor, the sink almost directly above me. On it I see a dark line, possibly dried blood that had dripped down the sink and out of sight. I reach up to touch it but I don't have to. I already know it's mine. Not fresh. But still mine.

Pulling myself off the coldness of the floor and into the brightness of the room, I glimpse my reflection in the mirror. It's me, all right. Nothing's changed. The sex doesn't show. The betrayal doesn't show. Not even the murder shows.

Murder? It feels like a dream, pulling that trigger.

The darkened bedroom is quiet, but not vacant. Even in its stillness I can vaguely make out the shape of the body in the bed. It's a body I know well, with shapes my own body has memorized. If I don't breathe, I can almost hear the faint airy whispers of her breath as it passes her immobile lips. Stella is very much asleep.

I stand near the bed and let my clothes drop to the floor. Then I slide under the covers, hugging the sheets around me and as my eyes close my mind starts to drift. Barely aware of the arm across my waist, caught in between the waking world and sleep I begin to dream. In the dream someone’s standing in the doorway mouthing words to me. At first I think it's Danny, saying, "We have to do it now," with furtive glances to the female arm across my stomach. I blink awake and he's gone. Stella stands there instead, half dressed and sexy. Somehow I know she's leaving. She leans down to me in bed and whispers in my ear. Then she kisses the side of my mouth as my eyes close again. When they open, she's gone. Like she was never there at all.

My fingers touch my mouth where I still feel her lips.

"Now you're free," were her whispered words, echoing inside my mind in the empty room.

I barely recognize my own voice when I say, "Now I'm alone."

As always.

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Alone, As Always - 3

By Jennifer Gardner

Friday PM, the day of...