Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

He raises her chin with the gun, and she allows it to be raised, her eyes moving to follow him as he angles her face upward. He says, “I need you. I need you so badly. And this, this could be our world, kibble. Fuck the rest of it. That would be it. I would do you and then I’d do myself. Burn the fucking house down. Burn it all fucking down, and be done with it. Goddamn, I am so tired, kibble. I want to end it like this, kibble, you and me, a perfect ending. Have you down to your bones, once and for all. You know, right now, that there’s no going back. We’re too far into this thing, and I’ve gotten nowhere. I spent three months away from you and I knew, every day, I knew that I was doing the wrong thing. There’s no running away from this, and there’s no going on with it. So we end it together. Right here. Right now.”

He moves the gun from her chin to her forehead, he looks fixedly down into some point between her eyes, and she gazes back at him, trembling now, quivers that come in tight succession and then recede, and the grass stirs all around them like an ocean.

“You want to kill me,” she says, just to say it.

At this, he shudders. He steps away from her and he puts his hands to his temples, one of them holding the gun. Then he stoops in the grass as if he might throw up. “Fuck!” he says, shaking his head. “Fuck!” he says. “Fuck!”

He puts the gun under his own chin, looks up at the dark sky with the silver-lit undersides of clouds. Then, because he forgets that there is a round in the chamber, or because he wants the drama, he racks the slide noisily and Turtle hears the round jam. He makes an aggrieved noise, looks at the gun, inspecting it in the dark. “Fuck,” he says in disbelief, banging on the gun’s frame with the heel of his hand.

“You needed to clean it, that’s all.”

He shakes his head. “Don’t talk to me like that,” he says, “don’t you be a little bitch. Not right now. Not now .”

Turtle says nothing.

“Fuck,” Martin says. He looks in through the ejection port. Turtle can tell, just from the sound, that the gun has fed another round into the chamber without extracting the first. She knows that she can fix the jam, but she makes no move to help. Martin probes the round half lodged in the chamber, trying to rack the fixed slide, grimacing. “It’s fucking jammed,” he says, as if he can’t believe it. Turtle is embarrassed for him. Martin bangs the gun with the heel of his hand, trying to make something give. “Okay,” he says, looking around. “Fuck. Okay.” He looks up, nodding now, reappraising, biting his lower lip, breathing hard in frustration. “We go on like we always have.”

Turtle spits into the grass, and walks away through the field up toward the house sitting lonely and dark at the top of its black hill.

Turtle lies that night on her floor, belly-down, chin on her hands, looking into the flame of her oil lamp, spooning one foot against the other, thinking, he came back and everything left you. All the dreams about the girl you could be. Gone. You always thought it was him. But you wanted him back. You’re in this, too. You were a child once but not anymore and what could be excused in a child will not be and cannot be excused in you. You should’ve, she thinks, used a fucking condom. She doesn’t know exactly how it works, but things have changed. She thinks, maybe it was you all along. Maybe there is something in you. Something rotten. You asked for it, or you wanted it. Of course you did. You brought him into this when you were just a child and your mother understood and when she understood, she killed herself, and now he cannot get away. He looks into your eyes and he wants to die.

Turtle could smash to pieces. It is bad thinking, sloppy thinking. When you look at the thing like it is, she thinks, you see that Martin spent his life reaching out toward Grandpa, groping for some sign, and Grandpa just fucking hated him. Your father was raised in total, annihilating, self-hating destitution, and that is how he lives. But he loved you. Loved the hell out of you. How he found that in him, you might never know. All the strength in you, that came from him. The spark in you, whatever faith you have in yourself, everything in you that resists the rot, all of that came from him. He never had it for himself, but he found it for you. And you have to think he had some idea what he might be preparing you for and what he might have to give up. She is shaking. And you might, she thinks. You might be okay. And if that happens, she thinks, it’ll be because he gave you everything. That is the best of him.

In the morning, she comes down the creaking stairs and finds Cayenne still asleep in front of the fire, curled on her side, hunched a little, knees drawn up, heels pulled almost to her butt, her hands folded around one another and clutched to her chest. Turtle walks quietly into the kitchen. She doesn’t want to wake the girl, and so takes down her copper pot from its meat hook as silently as she can, and instead of running the tap, takes up the water glasses left on the counter and pours them down the side of the pot. She strikes the match on her thumbnail, lights the stove. She hitches herself up onto the counter, sits there cross-legged to wait. She is looking at the girl. She thinks, goddamn. The worst interpretation is that Martin picked the girl because it is about children. But Turtle doesn’t think so.

When the water begins to boil, Cayenne stirs and wakes, pushes herself against the wall. She sits hunched, holding her finger in her other hand. She watches Turtle silently. After a moment, she picks up her book, opens it, sits bent over it. Turtle hates her little cunt face.

Turtle says, “Whatcha reading?”

The girl looks up at her, blank, sullen.

“What are you reading?” Turtle says.

“ Twilight .”

“I see that.”

“Oh.” The girl stares.

“I mean, what’s it about?”

She riffles through the pages to her own, marked page, as if trying to remember. “Just . . .” she says.

Turtle ladles up tea from the pot into her cast-iron teacup.

“You know,” Cayenne says. “I didn’t need my mother. Not really. I was just so pissed off. I just said that because I was so pissed off.”

Turtle thinks, I was just so pissed off. The girl is copying someone, some man in her life, her mother’s boyfriend, somebody, who said that. I didn’t mean it. I was just so pissed off .

Turtle says, “Yeah.”

Martin comes out of his bedroom into the kitchen and stands at the counter beside her. He looks down into her copper pot of nettle leaves and then picks up a kettle and fills it with water. He begins looking around in the cabinets for coffee but there is no coffee and finally he goes to the grocery bags he has left on the floor and takes out a blue tub of Maxwell House and decants it into the French press. Turtle waits for someone to speak but no one does. His kettle boils and he pours it into the French press and waits, staring fixedly down into the thick, black, crackling crust of grounds at the top of the beaker. Cayenne turns the pages of her book. Turtle looks back at the girl and wants to say something but there doesn’t seem to be anything she can say.

Martin places both hands down on the counter and leans forward onto it. “I’ve been thinking about it,” he says, “and I think we’ve got to open her back up.”

“What?” Turtle says. Martin goes into living room and kneels down beside Cayenne, holds out his hands. She gives him her hurt one. He turns it over.

“I got a good look at it when I bandaged it, and the bone inside was crushed to shards and the meat around it was badly bruised and maybe even burned, and I don’t think the skin can close over the wound. I think we’ve got to cut that finger open and clip the bone down to the first knuckle and then sew it back closed so that the skin can heal across the tip.”