‘Stop moving,’ Reuben said.
‘I’m not moving.’ Will moved up.
Reuben’s throat flexed as he swallowed. ‘She kept it from me. The pills. She stole that video. I know she’s the one who stole it. Ruined my life. My son’s.’ He swallowed again. ‘My son.’
Will was close enough now. He could only grab one thing: the gun or Anthony.
Anthony or Will.
All it came down to was which direction the gun was pointing.
‘It’s okay.’ Reuben was looking at Will now, a flatness to his eyes. His mouth gaped open. His lips were blue. He was having trouble getting air. He blinked, slow. He blinked again, even slower. He blinked a third time and Will lunged forward, his arm swinging through the air, backhanding Anthony out of the way.
Reuben’s head exploded.
Hot blood splattered Will’s face and neck. Bone was inside his mouth, up his nose. His eyes were on fire. He fell back, dropped the rifle. He clawed at his face. Strings of muscle and tissue caught in his fingers. He sneezed. Blood sprayed onto the floor. He could barely see it. He was standing, walking backward like he could get away from the carnage, but the carnage was all over him.
‘Will!’ Amanda yanked him forward by his arm. He stumbled, tripping over his own feet. She kept pulling him, then dragging him across the atrium, down a corridor, where he bounced off the wall. He was completely blind. Carpet was under his feet. He tried to open his eyes, but he couldn’t. Splinters were ripping apart his eyeballs—shards of Reuben Figaroa’s bone and teeth and cartilage.
‘Lean over.’ Amanda pushed him down.
Cold water streamed into his mouth, his face. Chunks of gray matter slid down his skin. He saw light. He blinked. He saw white porcelain, a tall faucet. They were in the bathroom. He was leaning over the sink. Will reached for the soap dispenser. It ripped off the wall. The bag burst. He took handfuls of soap and scrubbed his face and neck. He ripped off his shirt. He scrubbed his chest until the skin was raw.
‘Stop,’ Amanda said. ‘You’re going to hurt yourself.’ She grabbed his hands. She made him stop before he peeled the skin off his body. ‘You’re okay,’ she told him. ‘Take a breath.’
Will didn’t want to take a breath. He was sick of people telling him to take a breath. He stuck his head under a different faucet in a clean sink. He rinsed out his mouth. The water was pink when he spat it into the bowl. He rubbed his face, scratching the skin, making sure there were no more pieces of Reuben Figaroa in his eyes and hair.
‘Drink some more water.’
He picked something out of his ear. Red grit, part of a molar.
Will threw the tooth against the wall. He leaned his hands on the basin. His breath was like fire in his lungs. His skin burned. Phantom drops of blood slid down his face and neck.
‘It’s all right,’ Amanda said.
‘I know it’s all right.’ He closed his eyes. It wasn’t all right. Blood was everywhere. In the sinks. Pooling onto the floor. The bathroom was freezing. He was shaking from the cold.
‘Anthony?’ He clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering.
‘He’s safe. Faith has him.’
‘Jesus,’ Will mumbled. He tried to regulate his breathing, to get back some sense of control over his body. He squeezed his eyes shut. ‘I wasn’t sure Faith had a line.’
‘She did. I did. All of us did. But he beat us to it.’ Amanda started pulling paper towels from the dispenser. ‘Reuben Figaroa killed himself.’
Will’s head jerked up in surprise.
‘The second Anthony was gone, Reuben put the gun under his chin and pulled the trigger.’
Will stared at her in disbelief.
She nodded. ‘He killed himself.’
Will tried to play it back in his head, but all he remembered was the fleeting concern as he shoved Anthony out of the way that the kid would fall and hurt himself.
Amanda said, ‘You did everything right, Will. Reuben Figaroa made a choice.’
‘I could’ve saved him.’ Will wiped his face with a paper towel. The rough paper was like a cat’s tongue. He looked down expecting to see blood but finding only the dark stain of water.
Was Faith wiping Anthony’s face in another bathroom?
When the gun had gone off, the boy had been standing as close to Reuben as Will had been. For how many years would Reuben’s son feel the slick fibers of his father’s brain dripping down the side of his face? How many nights would he wake up screaming, scared that he was suffocating on the gray matter and bone that he’d sniffed up into his nose?
‘Will,’ Amanda said. ‘How could you have saved him?’
Will shook his head. He had made the wrong choice. He’d felt it in his gut even as the lie had come out of his mouth. ‘Reuben would’ve put down the gun if I’d told him the truth about Jo. That she was alive. That he had something to live for.’ He wadded up the paper towel into a ball. ‘You heard what he said about not leaving Anthony alone, that Jo wouldn’t want that. No way he would’ve pulled the trigger if he’d thought there was still a chance that his family was intact.’
‘Or he would’ve shot you instead. Or been shot by any one of us, because he stabbed a woman to death two floors above us. He shot another woman in the head. He beat his wife for nearly a decade. He threatened to murder his own son. Where are you getting this notion that there was some romantic bond between Reuben Figaroa and his wife that you could magically invoke and make everything better?’
Will chucked the paper towel into the trash.
‘If you love someone, you don’t go out of your way to hurt them. You don’t torture them. You don’t terrify them or make them live in constant fear. That’s not how love works. It’s not how normal people work.’
Will didn’t need Amanda to point out that there wasn’t much daylight between Angie and Reuben. ‘Thanks, but I think I’m going to pass on today’s parable.’
Amanda didn’t respond. She was looking at his bare chest. The round, perfect Os that the cigarettes had seared into his flesh. The black tattooing left by the electrical burns. The Frankenstein stitches around the skin graft from when a wound refused to close.
Before Sara, he would’ve scrambled to cover himself. Now, he was just intensely uncomfortable.
Amanda unzipped her jacket. ‘I used to come watch you on visitation days.’
Visitation days. She meant at the children’s home. Will had always looked forward to the visits, until he started dreading them. All the kids were bathed and trotted out for prospective parents. And then the kids like Will were trotted back in.
‘I couldn’t adopt you. I was a single woman. A career gal. Obviously I was unfit to take care of anything more than a pet rock.’ She wrapped her jacket around his shoulders. Her hands stayed there. She looked at him in the mirror. ‘I stopped visiting because I couldn’t stand the longing. Not my own, which was hard enough, but your longing broke my heart. You wanted so badly for someone to pick you.’
Will stared down at his hands. There was blood crusted into his cuticles.
‘I picked you. Faith picked you. Sara picked you. Let that be enough. Let yourself accept that you’re worth it.’