“Don’t talk about her like that!” I yelled. I remembered wondering years ago whether or not I had a breaking point. Apparently I did, and it had just been reached. I had nothing else to lose. If I was going to die anyway, I wasn’t going to put up with any more shit talk about Nicole. “That’s not what she is, and don’t you fucking talk about her like that again!”
Through my own labored breaths, I watched him watch me. He stood for a while and just stared, not moving and without changing his expression at all. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I spoke again.
“I love her,” I whispered. “Just like you loved Mom.”
“No one ever loved anyone like I loved her,” he said with a shake of his head. “Not possible.”
“I love Nicole,” I repeated.
His gazed dropped to the floor.
“She was all I ever had,” he said as he backed against the filing cabinet and slid to the ground. The gun was lying across his lap, still pointed toward me. “She was the only thing that made any fucking difference in my life. She left for school…and it hadn’t been that long…and then she went with him. But I was the one who loved her—not him! She came back with me…”
He scratched at his forehead and sighed heavily.
“She was everything,” he said again. “What do I have now, huh? Not you—you’d rather go find some idiot who doesn’t fucking know you. And now…now they say I’m not treating you right. What the fuck!”
“Who says that?”
He didn’t answer.
“No one tells me how to raise my son. And you are my son, dammit.”
He looked back at me and then laughed.
“If they came, you’d tell them to take you away, wouldn’t you?”
“Who?” I asked again.
“Doesn’t fucking matter,” he said and shook his head. “None of it does anymore.”
With his eyes still on me, he raised his gun hand higher.
“All gone,” he said. “Everything.”
His expression went blank as he looked at me. The tears on his cheeks were drying against his pale skin, and his chest rose slowly as he inhaled. He let the air out again without looking away from me. I couldn’t move. My heart seemed to stop beating, and my breath got caught in my throat, threatening to suffocate me. I couldn’t bring myself to do or say anything. I only stared as he turned the gun around, placed it against his temple, and fired.
I startled at the sound, and my throat started to burn. I couldn’t close my eyes, but I also could not comprehend what I was seeing. The ache in my throat got worse, and I realized I was screaming. I couldn’t stop.
“He that dies pays all debts.”
Curled in a ball, my body shook and shook and shook.
I couldn’t stop it. I had to bite down on my tongue to make myself stop screaming. I knew he was dead…There was no doubt. He wasn’t moving at all…and his head…
I swallowed hard, trying to keep myself from vomiting. I looked at my hands in front of my face, not allowing myself to peer around the room and see anything else. I had no idea how long it had been since he…since he did that. It could have been a few minutes or hours, as far as I could tell.
One thing was certain—I had to get out of there. What time was it? I glanced at the clock on the wall and saw it was only a quarter past noon. I wasn’t sure what time it was when Steven sent me to find the chart, but it was definitely after ten. Steven wouldn’t be back until tomorrow at the soonest, and no one else was scheduled to be here at all. The idea of Steven coming back before I could get ahold of anyone else was enough to get me to move.
I forced myself to straighten out as much as I could, which meant picking my legs up and pushing them off to the side. I could make them move a little, bend at the knee maybe an inch or so, but that was it. My hips worked okay, so I could move them from side to side. The rest I had to do with my hands.
Twisting and turning, I got myself in position to lift the wheelchair off the ground, but as soon as I looked at it, I knew there wasn’t any point. Where the wheel had been kicked, the frame was bent. There was no way it was going to spin even if I did manage to get it back up and pull myself into it.
“Fuck!” I grunted. It would have to be all me, then. It was a good thing my arms were basically back in shape, but where was I going to go?
There was no way I was going to make it out of the house and down the mile-long driveway to the highway. Even if I did, I’d probably be run over before anyone saw me. I looked out the window and watched the rain pour down. There was a flash of lightning and thunder in the distance.
Yeah, no way.