As she’s thinking this, Tori shakes her head as if she wants to deny the claim, and Rebecca notices a little wetness around her eyes, like she’s been crying. Although it could be the cold. “Are you okay?” she asks suddenly.
Tori blinks, then smiles. “Sure,” she says. “Let’s find that kid.”
Together they walk through the playground like some kind of police duo, fashionable Mounties in their red coats, looking at the kids and trying to figure out, in the blur of skipping and falling down and crying again, which one they’re looking for.
“Hey, hey, kids,” Tori calls out. “Which of you kittens has lost a mitten?”
The kittens ignore her. “It’s like I don’t exist,” she says to Rebecca. “Kids don’t recognize that I’m alive. Good thing I don’t have one, I’d never get it to do a thing I say.”
“It’s probably different once you actually have one,” Rebecca says. “A mothering instinct kicks in, and then you’re good at scolding and nagging.”
“And giving advice and instilling guilt.”
“Exactly,” Rebecca says. “It all happens automatically. At least I think so, anyway. I wouldn’t know for sure.”
Tori doesn’t answer. The two women stand for a moment encircled by their thoughts, each examining her own future and its branching flowchart of possibilities. Tori thinks about a life with Tommy and/or kids, and how they might be able to make it, to be happy, but then again might not; also about life with Frank, and/or kids, and how this life once seemed not only necessary but inevitable, until it dissolved. And it’s so strange that this can happen, and something so counted-on can just wither once exposed to the air; but it never withered for Frank, who insisted on meeting her here today, for one last time. She loves Frank. She misses him constantly. But Tommy — they’ve been together since they were nineteen and he’s going through rehab, changing everything for their life together. “It’s not something you walk away from,” she told Frank, and she could almost hear him thinking, Neither am I.
Rebecca is thinking about how something drained out of her in the doctor’s office, some part of herself that believed in change and possibility, in all the and/or flowchart branches of a long and storied life. She thinks about how she hated Gabriel then, and blamed him, and wrote that letter to his long-suffering wife. But the truth was that in spite of it all she did love him; she didn’t idealize him or anything, she simply loved him, and that love was pure and true and strong even though its circumstances were sordid and trivial and absurd.
· · ·
The bus stops at the other end of the park. Coming out of the rec center, snapping her gum (which seems to lose its tensile strength in the cold, and she wonders, briefly, why), the day-care attendant notices a man in a gray wool coat get off and start across the park in the direction of her charges. The only reason she notices him is to think that her boyfriend is better-looking and taller and more muscular, and she can’t wait until she sees him tonight. She’s got a one-track mind, that attendant.
A child runs up to Rebecca and doesn’t say anything, just stands in front of her, a strand of blond hair leaking out from underneath a fleece cap. Crouching down, Rebecca can see it’s a girl, who removes her hand from the pocket of her snowsuit and shows it to her, shyly, like an injury of which she is ashamed. Their eyes meet.
“It’s okay,” Rebecca says mechanically, and the child nods. “Come here.”
She fits the mitten over her small, white hand and tugs it up over her wrist, the girl so close that Rebecca can smell the sour yet wholesome scent of her skin. The two of them look at each other, the child still holding up her mittened hand as if Rebecca isn’t finished yet. What’s left to do? A kiss on the forehead, a “You’re dismissed”? What’s the protocol? Then she realizes she put the mitten on wrong, that the girl’s thumb isn’t fitting into its slot. So she has to pull the mitten off and start over again, the child staring all the while. Rebecca’s starting to wonder if something’s wrong with the kid, with the whole lot of them, and that’s why they’ve been abandoned in the park to play by themselves.
Tori, meanwhile, is standing next to her, standing there in her red coat, her long blond hair snaking down her back. From the back, of course, she looks just like Rebecca. Only one thought exists in her mind: Frank.
The man coming toward them, the gun warm in his hand, could be Gabriel or Frank or even Tommy, escaped from rehab. But not all of them; only one. As it turns out, it’s Gabriel. It’s the sad-eyed ones you have to watch out for — another piece of advice that could usefully have been given to Rebecca, but which she would probably have ignored.
You can see where this is going, right? With the red coats and the blond hair? There are no surprises for you here.
From a distance of ten yards Gabriel sees only Tori’s back, and he is so blinded by his belief that it’s Rebecca — the woman who wrote a letter to his long-suffering wife — that he doesn’t notice the other form crouched down next to her. If he did, he might think it is a bundled coat or a child on a sled; his focus is that intense, the world outside it merely peripheral.
The day-care attendant puts away her cell phone, wonders who all these adults are, then sees him pull out a gun and fire. A woman in a red coat falls to the ground, lightly, almost casually, as if in jest.
The attendant starts to run. Children are screaming, some of them running away. Rebecca drops the mitten and stands up and turns around. She thinks of cars: backfires, accidents. She doesn’t take a gunshot into account. Then, seeing Gabriel, she thinks he has come for her, to make a life with her, that he has finally left his wife. All this crosses her mind with certainty in the second before she notices the gun. Once she does, she sees the woman on the ground beside her, crouches again, and turns her over, feeling for a pulse. There is none. The woman still looks alive — that is, exactly like she did only moments earlier — but she is dead.
“Oh,” Rebecca says. “Oh. Oh.” The little girl runs away.
You knew that the gun was going to go off, and that it was going to kill a woman in a red coat. It was only a question of which woman, and when. And of course why. This isn’t some kind of mystery. It’s not even a story about the murder, really, or police and jail and a trial. It’s about the moment after the murder, when Rebecca looks Gabriel in the eye and he looks back. The bitter, burnt smell of gun smoke is in the air between them. Here’s the thing: in that instant, Gabriel knows that he’s killed the wrong woman, that his Rebecca — the love of his life, notwithstanding the long-suffering wife, whom he couldn’t bear to have hurt — is still alive, and he’s so grateful and happy that he smiles. And Rebecca, who with one part of her brain knows he must have come to kill her, with another part of it registers this happiness and smiles back, out of instinct, acknowledgment, and love.
And meanwhile Tori is gone and, somewhere in the world, Tommy and Frank do not know it yet.
Soon, of course, there will be police, jail, a trial. There will be repercussions, grief, and pain of enormous proportions, with consequences radiating out from each of the three people in this park, toward friends and families and coworkers and neighbors and childhood acquaintances they haven’t spoken to in years but in whose minds they nonetheless appear and flit around, moth-like, unexplained, from time to time.