Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“It’s a wonder you don’t have more friends.”

Turtle waits for more, but there is no more, and she crawls back down away from the landing, and gets up and walks quietly into her bedroom, chewing on her fingers. She lies and looks at the square of moonlight cast by the window onto the floor. She thinks, you don’t know what you heard, you don’t know, so don’t, and you don’t know what they meant, so don’t, Turtle, just don’t.

It is just barely dawn. Long wet stalks of red fescue are bent over her. Turtle lies looking through the scope. Close into the gun, she can smell its grease and the powder residue. Around her, the meadow is dew heavy, the mist purling down the hillside. As the day warms, long stalks weighted down with dew come suddenly untangled and spring up, their seed heads bouncing. There are yet no clouds in the sky except a single, distant lenticular toyed into strands by the breeze. Turtle dials in her distance and lies, cheek welded to the stock. The rifle target on its stand looks very far away. She thinks, no way would I ever take this shot. No reason to do it. At five hundred meters, you get up and walk away. I bet a lot of people think they can shoot out to five hundred meters and I bet there are very few that can. So just get up and walk away and take your chances. But, she thinks, I guess you can’t always. She dials the illumination down, the crosshairs going from laser-red lines to black. She pulls the trigger. The gun kicks the hot shell into the grass. The target pangs and swings wildly on its hanger, Turtle grinning on the luck of that, of having doped out the shot on the first try. She fires again and the target pangs and swings and she waits for it to drop and she fires again and the target swings back up, Turtle smiling, the .308 shells nested, smoking in the wet grass. From behind her, chuckling laughter. She twists around. Martin is coming up through the field, his jeans wetted to his shins, holding a beer to his chest. He comes and lies down beside her. “Fuck,” he says with slow pleasure, shaking his head, touching his dry lips speculatively and looking at the thing from every angle and ready to talk about it but not talking about it, a moment when the things he has wanted have come to pass, and here, in company with them, all the doubts, all the work to get here, all the expense, and she can see the darkening of the moment. “Fuck,” he says, looking away down the sweep of the hill, past the line of the sun to where the shining waves buckle and succeed onto the unseen shingle.

“How did she die?” Turtle asks.

He turns to her, his face bereft. “How did she die?” He shakes his head, inquiring mutely and wonderingly of her, of the moment, of the target down range, touching the pad of his thumb to his lips. “You don’t know? How can you not know? I feel like I’ve told you this a hundred times. A thousand times.”

“No,” she says.

“Fuck.” He stops, thinking about that. “Really?”

“I’ve never heard.”

“Fuck, there you go,” he says, gesturing to indicate the futility of the thing. He bends down a green stalk, begins tearing out the spikelets, the hulls cleaving wetly to his fingertips. Finally he says, “Well, she went abalone diving and she never came back.”

“Really?” Turtle says.

“Right out there. Buckhorn Cove.” He nods down to the bus stop, the ocean, the sea stacks black, verged with breakwater. “She went out alone, early that morning. It was a beautiful day. The surf wasn’t rough. Around noon, I went down to the beach and found her boat. I swam out to it. She was gone.”

“What happened to her?”

Martin probes his jaw.

“She just went down and never came back up?”

“That’s right.”

“Could it have been a shark?”

“Could have been anything.” He drinks from his beer, tipping it up with difficulty from where he lies. “I’m sorry, kibble. If it had to be one of us, it should’ve been me. I wish it had been me. She was everything I had. Well. Not everything.”

He rises and walks away. She puts her face in the grass. Then she struggles up and puts the spare magazine in her back pocket and follows him to the house. They climb up the porch steps together and he pitches his beer bottle out into the field. She goes to the fridge and takes out a Red Seal and tosses it underhand across the counter and he catches it and bangs it open on the counter’s edge. She stands with the fridge door open, cracking eggs into her mouth, finishes the carton, discards it. They wait in silence. He offers her the beer. She drinks from it, cuffs her mouth.

“Time to go down?”

“You don’t have to walk me.”

“I know, kibble. I know that.”

She nods. They walk down together. They wait at the gravel turnout.

“You don’t have to wait here, Daddy.”

“Look at that big goddamn bitch of an ocean, kibble.” The cormorants stand on white-painted rocks with their wings spread, facing the sun. Spume lofts through the blowhole on Buckhorn Island. “It is all meaningless,” he says, and she does not know why it would mean anything, or why you would look for meaning in it, and she does not understand why you would want it to be anything other than what it is, or why you would want it to be about you. It is just there, and that has always been enough for her. The bus comes gasping around the corner and pulls into the gravel drive and throws open its rubber-skirted doors and Martin salutes the bus driver with his beer and Margery looks straight ahead at the road. Turtle walks down the green vinyl seats and no one looks at her and she does not look at anyone.

She doesn’t wait for the bus to go on to the middle school. Instead, Turtle stands up with the high schoolers and files out when the bus makes its first stop in town. She heads down the hill and out onto the headlands. She does not know where she is going, only that she can’t go to school and nothing in her life is all right and that she needs to get away and get her head straight. What she wants, more than anything, is to be lost again on the muddy slopes above the Albion. A jogger coming the other way stops in front of Turtle and props one hand on her knees and takes her sunglasses off with the other, and then wipes sweat off her forehead with the back of her wrist. It’s Anna, trying to get her breath, dressed in pink running shorts and a blue tank top, black hair gathered into a ponytail.

She says, “Julia? What are you doing here?”

Turtle says, “Oh shit.”

“Julia?” Anna says again, in surprise.

“Oh fuck me,” Turtle says.

“Are you all right?”

“What are you doing here?” Turtle says.

“I’m jogging,” Anna says.

“But shouldn’t you be at school?”

“Shouldn’t you ?” Anna says. “I don’t have class until twelve thirty. But you should be in Joan Carlson’s math class right now. Am I right?”

“Yeah,” Turtle says.

“What’s wrong?” Anna says.

“Nothing—I’m fine,” Turtle says.

“Are you all right?” Anna says, coming closer, looking at her carefully.

“One fucking time, things could go well,” Turtle says.

“What?”

“Why would I go to school?” Turtle says. “Why would I even go?”

“What?” Anna says.

“Why would I go? Have I passed a single one of your little fucked-up, stupid, motherfucking tests? You take me aside and you go after me like, ‘Oh, Julia, why didn’t you pass your test?’ but isn’t it fucking obvious why I didn’t pass the test? What do you expect me to say? You’re asking me to lie to you. I don’t like to lie. I think there are good reasons not to lie, and I don’t like that it asks that, your class. I need to get away, and of course , here you are—‘Oh, why aren’t you at school, Julia?’ Fuck you, you sideways bitch. I suck at school because I am useless, Anna. That’s why. There’s your answer.” She raises her hands in helplessness and lets them drop. “I have tried and tried and tried and I fail and that’s all I will ever do.”