Nine blocks. Grocery store. Death.
It was not an equation anyone would ever have imagined. There was no actuarial table, no sophisticated algorithm that could project the heating oil fuel delivery truck that ran the red light and slammed into them. She had always hated that detail madly. It was nearly summertime. The weather was mild and warm. No one in New England was still using an oil burner. There was no need for the truck to be on the road.
They were properly belted. The air bags instantly deployed. The Volvo’s steel frame, designed to crumple protectively upon impact, had performed exactly as its engineers had designed.
Except none of it worked, because they were both dead.
Still hesitating in the doorway, Sarah said, “Look, Teddy, someone says they’re going to kill me. I promise I won’t get it and use it on myself. Even if I really want to, I promise, I won’t do that. Not yet, at least.”
It was almost as if she needed his permission to find the ammunition box and get the gun. Both of them had been raised in devoutly Catholic households and there was that profound prohibition against committing suicide. A sin, she thought. The most reasonable and logical sin she could imagine, but a sin, nevertheless.
She thought she was a complete coward in so many different ways that she could hardly count them. If she were brave, she could have decided to kill herself. Or, if she were brave, she would have decided to go on with her life and not let it disintegrate around her. If she were brave, she would have dedicated herself to something meaningful, like teaching special education in the inner city or going on missions to help AIDS babies in the Sudan, as a way of honoring her dead husband and dead child.
“But I’m not brave,” she said. It was sometimes hard for her to tell if she had been talking out loud or not. And sometimes she had entire conversations in her imagination that ended up with some sentence blurted out that made sense only to her. “Definitely not brave.”
But, she thought, I still need the gun.
It was, she guessed, some leftover frontier gene that lurked within her. Someone makes a threat, and like a cowboy in a Western, she would reach for her weapon.
She paused in the doorway for another moment. Her eyes scanned the room-and then she launched herself inside, moving rapidly. It was as if by looking around she would be inviting the memory attached to each item to punish her further. She went directly to the bookcase, pushed aside the novels that hid the dust-covered ammunition box, seized it, and then retreated as fast as she could, slamming the office door shut behind her.
“I’m sorry, Teddy, darling, but I just can’t stay in there.” She knew this was a half-thought, half-whisper.
Holding the olive-drab ammo box under her right arm, she lifted her left hand to the side of her face, blocking the sight of her dead daughter’s room. She did not think she could handle another conversation with a ghost that day, and she hurried down the hallway back to her kitchen.
She was still naked. But there was something about getting the weapon and the reverberating noise from the threatening letter that made her suddenly feel modest. She plucked her clothes from where she’d discarded them, and tugged them back on.
Then she took the letter and put it next to the ammo box on a coffee table in her living room. She dialed the combination and reached inside. A cold black Colt Python.357 Magnum rested on the bottom, next to a box of hollow-point bullets. She removed the weapon, fiddled with it for an instant, and finally cracked open the chamber. Seeing it was unloaded, she carefully steered six live rounds into the cylinder.
The gun seemed incredibly heavy in her hand, and she wondered how anyone had the strength to lift it, aim, and fire. She used both hands, and adopted a shooter’s stance as she had seen in television melodramas. Using two hands helped, but it was still difficult. A guy’s gun, she thought. Teddy would always want a real guy’s gun. Not some flimsy little girly shooter.
This thought made her smile.
She looked down at the words on the letter.
“You have been selected to die.”
Sarah put the gun down on top of the typed page
That might be true, she silently told whoever it was that was out there planning to kill her, but I’m more than half-dead already, and this is one Little Red Riding Hood that isn’t going down without a fight. So come on. Give it your best shot, and let’s see what happens.
Sarah was astonished at her response. It was the exact opposite of what she’d expected herself to think. Logic suggested that because she wanted to die, she should do nothing and just open her door to the Big Bad Wolf and let him kill her and put her out of her misery.
But instead, she spun the cylinder of the gun, which made a clicking sound before coming to a halt. Okay, let’s see what you’ve got. I may be alone, but I’m not, really. She had absolutely no desire to call her aging parents, who lived in the eastern portion of the state, or any of the people she once thought of as friends but whom she now ignored. She did not want to call the police or an attorney or a neighbor or anyone else. Whoever it was that had selected her, well, she was going to face him all by herself. This just might be crazy, she told herself, but it’s my choice. Whatever happens, it’s okay with me.
And oddly, she felt a sense of warmth, because for a fleeting instant, she thought her dead husband and her dead daughter just might possibly be proud of her.
Jordan seemed frozen on her bed, hunched into a fetal position. She wondered whether she should ever move again. Then, as seconds blended into minutes, and she heard some of the other girls in the dormitory returning-voices raised, doors slamming, a sudden burst of laughter, and a fake wail mocking whatever phony trouble someone had-Jordan began to stir. After a few more moments, she sat up and swung her feet to the floor. Then she picked up the letter and reread it.
For an instant, she wanted to laugh.
You think you’re the only Big Bad Wolf in my life?
It was almost like get in line. Everyone else-from her estranged and constantly arguing parents, to the faculty at her school, to her ex-friends who’d abandoned her-was in the process of killing her off. Now, added to that was some anonymous joker.
She suddenly felt rebellious, confrontational. She still figured that whoever wrote the letter was just taunting her. Prep school students could be incredibly inventive and incredibly cruel. Someone wanted her to react in some manner that would amuse him. Or her. She reminded herself to not rule out girls just because the letter writer promised violence. Some of her female classmates were capable of administering astonishing physical beatings.
Screw you, she thought. Whoever you are.
Jordan picked up the letter and began to go over it carefully, the way she once would do when she was absorbing a detailed question on a difficult test.
The words on the page seemed to leap at her. The letter didn’t seem juvenile. It had a more sophisticated tone than that of her classmates. But Jordan knew she needed to be careful before she reached any conclusion. Just because it didn’t read like it came from another teenager didn’t mean that one hadn’t written it. Like Jordan, many of her classmates had actually absorbed the language lessons taught by Hemingway and Faulkner, Proust and Tolstoy. Some were capable of very sophisticated prose.