"Sure."
She walks into the bathroom, closes the door. I turn off the television and move over to the window. Peeking through the curtains into the parking lot, I check on the car, see the dunes of Jockey’s Ridge State Park glowing more brilliantly than before.
Vi gasps in the bathroom.
I rush to the door.
"Everything okay?" I call out.
No answer, only sobs.
"I’m coming in, Vi. I’m coming in."
I open the door slowly, giving her a chance to cover up in case she’s naked.
She’s slumped over against the sink, jeans on, T-shirt and bra in a pile on the floor.
"Vi, what’s wrong?" She shakes her head. "Tell me."
She straightens up, faces me, forearms hiding her milk-swollen breasts, and taps her right shoulder, taps the purple-yellow bruise the shotgun made when it bucked against her nine hours ago.
I step into the bathroom, wrap my arms around her bare back.
"Why don’t you take a bath, huh? I’ll run some water."
"My clothes smell like that house."
"We’ll wash them in the bathtub later. Here, sit down."
As she takes a seat on the toilet, I kneel down, close the drain, and turn the hot water knob.
"How warm do you want it?"
"Very."
I crank the cold water knob, get the mix just right.
"Check on Max, will you?"
I crack the door. Corralled by pillows, the infant sleeps, a stuffed dolphin at his side.
"He’s fine. Call if you need anything."
"Stay with me, Andy."
"You sure?"
"Just close your eyes for a minute."
I turn my back, listening to her jeans unzip and slide down her thighs. She steps into the bathtub, eases down in the water.
"Okay, I’m in."
I take a seat on the toilet.
Vi sits close to the faucet, her legs drawn up into her chest, arms wrapped around her knees.
"This feels so good," she says. "I haven’t had a bath in…I don’t know how long."
She bats the running water into her chest.
Her legs glisten, unshaven for months.
"I’ll pour water on your back if you like."
"Be great."
I tear the wrapper off one of the plastic cups on the sink. Kneeling down on the floor beside the tub, I fill the cup and drizzle hot water over her back.
Her skin turns to gooseflesh.
I do this for awhile and then she lifts her hair off her back and says, "Would you pour some on my neck?"
Feels good to please her.
I ask why she hasn’t called her husband.
"Andy, I feel like I’ve just come home from war. You know what I mean?"
"Yeah."
I drop the cup in the water, run my fingers through her hair.
"And I’m not sure how to go back. All the drugs, the hypnosis, those terrible movies we watched—what if Rufus fucked me up?" She turns and looks at me. "How do you feel?"
"I feel nothing."
"You have somewhere to go?"
"Yeah. A long, long way from here."
"Tell me about it."
I smile at the picture my mind’s eye conjures of my cabin in the Yukon forest. I smell the tall firs. See the meadow at night. Think of lying in its cold, soft grass, beneath the quiet majesty of the northern lights. God, I’d love to see the aurora borealis again.
"It’s paradise," I say, pouring more water down her spine.
"You could go back, yeah?"
"Sure."
"Is it quiet there?"
"Very."
"Middle of nowhere, right?"
"Yes. And beautiful. So beautiful."
"No one bothers you."
"Not there they don’t. You live quietly, simply. It’s lonely, but a good kind of lonely."
"Part of me would like to go back with you."
"Just turn your back on everything?"
"It’s all bullshit anyway. What I did today—if I’m capable, anyone is. Except they don’t know it. They live under the illusion of decency, goodness."
"You, me, and Max, huh?"
"I could have a garden. Live off the land, you know. Never see anyone. You could write."
"Have to come up with a great pseudonym."
"Yeah, and you’d publish books again, Andy. Maybe even write about this."
"And one day, after twenty, thirty years, when everyone’s forgotten, we come back."
I sit down on the tile. Steam curls off the surface of the bathwater, the mirror fogged, walls sweating. Vi leans against the side of the tub and stares at me, not quite as pretty as when I first saw her that raw November afternoon in Howard’s Pub, her beauty now tinged with hardness.
"No," she says. "We never come back."
# # #
At some point during the night, Vi lifts Max from his place between us, and puts him to bed on his pallet on the floor. She climbs back under the covers and snuggles up beside me.
I’m awake. I don’t anticipate sleeping tonight.
"Will you hold me?" she asks.
I raise my arm and she rests her head on my shotgun-bruised shoulder. It’s cold in this room. Most of our clothes lie drying in the bathtub.
Vi drapes her leg over mine and whispers, "What are we going to do tomorrow?"
I cup her face in my hands.
Last two souls on the face of the Earth.
There are things I want to say to her—shards of comfort and warmth and nothing’s as bad as it seems and no you are not a bad person and yes we did the right thing today.
But they would be lies, and we are so far beyond that now.
# # #
I don’t sleep.
Before dawn, I slip out of the room and walk down to the beach. I sit in soft sand, watch the tide push in. The lights of a shrimp boat shine several miles out. No sound save the breakers.
A lean and tall older gentleman jogs past, northbound toward the five a.m. twinkling of Kill Devil Hills. As I watch him dwindling up the coast, it hits me—there are people who will live eighty-five years and never know a fraction of the horror I experienced yesterday.
Sure, they’ll mourn the passing of parents, a spouse, close friends.
They might suffer the depression of living a life of compromise.
Shit jobs. Marginalization. Termination. Resignation. Envy.
They’ll see wars on television—children pulled out from rubble in scorched, bullet-ridden rags, maimed and dead.
But they will not know gunning a young woman down on a tidal flat to save themselves. Won’t face the knowledge that they’re capable. How easily they’d do it. That the squalor of humanity, broadcast by grim robots on the evening news, abides also in them.
Their decency is a luxury, their violence sleeps for now, those whose monsters are car wrecks and cancer and the boredom of the suburbs, those who believe goodness is the prevailing station of our species. Their age of civilization and progress is a flicker in the dark eternity of violence.
Now light tinges the Outer Banks with a soft peach stain.
I watch a fisherman wade out into the warm surf.
Gulls are crying, Nags Head waking, that delicate hour of the morning gone as the Earth turns into the sun’s dominion, a cuticle of pink fire peeking over the edge of the sea.
# # #
I climb into bed and spoon Vi. She stirs. I stroke her yellow hair, still damp from last night’s bath, smelling faintly of that cheap motel conditioner.
"Oh, Max," she murmurs. "I want to…yeah."
She turns over. Smiling. At peace.
When her eyes open, they die.
"I was dreaming."
"It was a nice one."
"Yeah. You shaved. I like it."
She sits up, crawls to the end of the bed, and peers down at her son.
"Where’d you go this morning, Andy?"