“Me? I’m nobody.”
“You’re somebody.”
“Just a guy.”
Her eyes widened slightly. “You’re him.”
“Nobody special.”
Another silence. If she really didn’t care how this ended, then it could end only in a way that would haunt me.
She said, “You can’t kill a girl, can you?”
“I’ve killed a few.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true. I wish it weren’t.”
“But not an unarmed girl.”
I didn’t confirm her suspicion.
She smiled. “See how it is?”
“How is it?”
“I know what free is,” she said. “You’re not free. If you were free, I’d be dead now.”
I understood her logic. It was the logic of the asylum.
“So I can just walk out of here,” she said.
“No. I can’t allow that.”
“Why not? You have to have a good reason. Your way of thinking requires good reasons.”
“You’re a murderer.”
“So are you,” she said.
“No. I kill. You murder.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I kill murderers.”
“Is this a riddle or something?”
“It’s just the truth.”
“I don’t get it,” she said.
With sorrow, I said, “No.”
After a silence, she said, “Now what?”
I indicated a door framed by bookshelves. “Maybe that’s a closet. Open it and show me.”
She did as I asked, and it was a walk-in closet.
“You’ll step in there,” I told her. “I’ll tip a chair under the knob to brace it, so you can’t get out. Then I’ll call the police.”
“What if I won’t?”
I thrust the rifle toward her. “Then I’ll have to hurt you.”
“Been established, hasn’t it? You won’t kill an unarmed girl.”
“No. But I’ll shoot to wound.”
She studied me, trying to calculate a way out.
“Get in the closet.”
She didn’t move.
“Get in the closet.”
When still she didn’t move, I squeezed off a three-shot burst past her left hip, into the shelves of books.
“Four inches,” I said. “That was the only difference between you walking normally or being crippled for the rest of your life.”
Again her words were too edgy for her apathetic tone. “How many girls have you murdered, choirboy?”
“Killed,” I corrected.
“How many? Are you ashamed to say how many?”
“Three.”
“All justified, huh?”
“All in self-defense.”
“That makes you feel righteous.”
“No.”
“Sleep like a baby, do you?”
“Not in a long time.”
“You’re him, all right.”
“Like you, I’m nobody,” I said. “We’re two nobodies. But we’re different.”
“You’re gonna find out we’re somebodies,” she said. “Some of us are geniuses.”
“Geniuses create. They don’t blow things up.”
“Create, huh? Wait’ll you see what some of us created.”
“So tell me.”
She hesitated, and I thought she almost began to share some secret that thrilled her. But then she held her tongue and stepped backward into the closet.
I crossed the room and started to close the door on her, and she blocked it with one foot. “Please don’t. I’m claustrophobic, and I’m afraid of the dark.”
“You are the dark,” I said.
My mistake was getting too close to her. She was as lithe as an eel, as fast as a striking snake. She came in under the gun, and I’ve no idea from where she drew the knife.
She wanted to gut me, and I grabbed for her wrist, and although the blade didn’t slice open my stomach, the point of it pierced my left palm. Before my eyes, the point exited the back of my hand — an inch or more of it gleaming and slick with blood. Before she could twist the knife and disable me with pain, I reared back to get the gun on her again and poked her with the muzzle and squeezed off a three-shot burst and at once another.
She fell back into the closet, landed on her rump, and knocked the back of her head against a shelf. She looked down at her torn stomach, tried to raise a hand to the wounds, but found perhaps that she was paralyzed below the neck.
She raised her head and met my eyes. The hatred and anger with which she’d first regarded me now returned and revealed the ugly face behind the mask of beauty. “Murderer.”
I did not dispute the charge.
“See you in Hell, murderer.”
“Maybe. But you’re deceivers. All of you, deceivers. You’ve been deceiving me all night. One distraction after another. Sowing doubt. Hoping to sow despair. No more. I’m not listening anymore.”
Her eyelids fluttered, almost closed, then opened wide. “Hey, dog. That’s you. Just a dog. Know what?”
“What?”
Her voice grew thicker. “You a dog.”
She was on her way out.
“You a dog?” she asked.
I didn’t answer.
She found the strength to put a sneer in her voice. “Oh, yeah, you a dog.”
“I didn’t want this,” I told her.
“Hey, dog, you got papers?”
A glaze dulled her eyes. She was only half here.
“You got papers?” she asked again. “You … just a dog.”
And she was gone.
I put the rifle on the desk. The knife, a stiletto, hung from my left hand, stuck there. Not horrible pain. But bad enough. I gripped the yellow handle and with some care extracted the blade. On the way out, it felt as though it scraped a bone, and it must have touched a nerve, because I shivered head to foot and broke out in a sweat as cold as ice water.
Forty-five
After waking from the dream of the amaranth. The afternoon of the day that I would leave for Pico Mundo. The seaside cottage. Young Tim seeking seashells and playing in the surf. Annamaria and I on the sand side of the picket fence between yard and beach.
Then, as always, regardless of the place, the weather, she wore white athletic shoes, khaki pants, and a baggy sweater that could not conceal her pregnancy. Sometimes the sweater was pink, at other times yellow or blue or pale green, but it was always the same style. I had the strangest notion that Annamaria could have walked through a dusty marketplace crowded with women a thousand years before our time, two thousand, and have appeared to belong there, in spite of the shoes with rubber soles in an era before rubber, in spite of being clothed in fabrics unproducible then, in spite of the garments being in hues and having a consistency of color that no dye maker of that time could have achieved.
Watching Tim searching the shore for shells, she said, “Blossom Rosedale sold her house and wrapped up her affairs in Magic Beach. She’ll be joining us here tonight for dinner.”
“I wonder now,” I said, “if she should have done that.”
“She wants to be part of something that matters, odd one. And she believes that what you have been doing matters very much.”
“But she was a part of Magic Beach. An important part. Everyone knew her, knew the art she created, and the quilts that won national awards.”
“Being known by everyone is not the same as being loved.”
“But she was loved. She had so many friends in Magic Beach.”
Annamaria put a hand on my shoulder. She was petite, and her hands were delicate. Therefore, on those rare occasions when she placed a hand on my shoulder or took one of my hands in hers to impress upon me the importance of what she had to say, I was always surprised by the weight of her touch, by the strength of her grip.