Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“Daddy.”

“You think I’m running out the clock.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

She waits for more. She thinks, I will not talk before he talks.

She says, “What if they send someone to the house?”

“Well.”

“Well what?”

“No one cares, kibble. You think someone’s out there, keeping tabs on you?” He runs his tongue across his lips, slowly, as if looking for a split. “We’ll get your enrollment figured out. Something.”

No, she thinks. They care.

“What were you doing with Cayenne?” she says.

She turns. He is staring out over the hillside toward Buckhorn Bay.

“Well?”

“What the hell, kibble?”

“Before you got here. Why did you have her with you?”

“That’s a hell of a thing to ask.”

“Well?”

“Christ. Jesus Christ.”

She waits.

“Jesus fucking Christ, kibble.”

“What, then?”

“Fuck, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? That’s all? You don’t know?”

“I just picked her up. That’s all. Just found her and took her along.”

“How?”

“How what?”

“How did you pick her up?”

He gestures mutely, as if to suggest that he’d come by her the way you usually find ten-year-old girls. She wants to wait him out. There is a way it feels to ask him things. To need things from him. A specific way that feels.

“How did you find her, Martin?”

“Christ.”

“How?”

She waits. She can’t believe he’s going to leave it at this. For a while, she’s determined not to ask.

“How?” she says.

“Christ. If it means all that fucking much to you.”

He pitches his beer bottle out into the dark.

“Yeah,” she says. “It does.”

“It was nothing. I was at a gas station and went around back to take a leak and some guy’s got Cayenne by her arm and he’s talking to her. He’s holding her by the arm and talking. Nobody else there. You should’ve heard him. Two a.m. and the things he is saying. Kinds of things remind you of your old buddy, Grandpa. I thought, well, this is just not going to fucking fly.”

He gestures. That’s the end of the story.

“You just—?”

“We tooled down all these old, overgrown back roads in Washington and into Idaho. She’d ask about things. How do cars work? How are coins made? Who invented money? Who would win in a fight, so-and-so or so-and-so? We’d pull over, lift up rocks by the side of the road, find skinks and things, toads. Go fishing, and fry up the fish for dinner. Just go a few miles each day, and camp. And that’s when it hit me. I’d done the wrong thing, abandoning you. What I couldn’t figure was why I’d done it. I was about out of my head.”

“What’s gonna happen to us?” she says.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“Hell. We’re gonna be all right, kibble.”

“You think so?”

“Hell.”

“That’s all you’ve got. ‘Hell’? That’s all?”

He is silent for a long time.

She thinks, we have never been all right and we aren’t ever going to be all right. She thinks, I don’t even know what all right would look like. I don’t know what that would mean. At his best, we are more than all right. At his best he rises above all of it and he is more than any of them. But there is something in him. A flaw that poisons all the rest. What is going to happen to us.

She stops going down to him. Each night, she wakes with the breeze coming in through the window, her mind hot and alive, water slithering down the window’s black pane. Downstairs there is a room where everything ends. She lets the earth turn slowly around her and she thinks, you are doing this for a reason, and if you can’t see what comes next, you take each moment as it comes. In the mornings she sits cross-legged over her tea with the fresh leaves beside her on the counter. They are like huge, toothy, green spear blades fuzzed with silica needles. She ladles tea into her cast-iron teacup and Martin comes up the gravel road from his morning walk down to the beach. He comes in through the sliding glass door with the wet flowers of rattlesnake grass stuck to his jeans and he holds up a padded postal service envelope. “Package,” he says, “for Turtle Alveston . No return address. What do you think, kibble?” He tears away the strip and extracts a book and a letter. “Marcus Aurelius,” he says, “ Meditations .” He thumbs through it. “Hell of a book. Hell of a fucking book. You should read that instead of Lysistrata or whatever the fuck you’ve picked up.” He laughs bitterly, licking his lips, touching them with his thumb, and begins sorting through the letter. He folds it and tears it into strips and discards it into the fire. Turtle ladles tea from her teapot. Martin walks away down the hall and slams the door.

Cayenne says, “Turtle?”

“Yeah?”

“I didn’t know you were reading something, Turtle.”

“He’s an asshole.”

“Oh.”

Turtle drinks her tea.

“Are you, though?”

“No.”

She strips and cleans the Sig Sauer by the light of the oil lamp. She taps the magazine in and racks the slide and puts the gun to her temple just to remind herself that she is never so trapped that she cannot escape. She thinks, you have lost your guts, lost your courage, you are disgraced, but you are still here.

It has been a week since she’s been down to his room. When she comes down the stairs in the morning, Martin is making pancakes in a chipped Bauer bowl, hipshot against the counter with the bowl under his arm, tipping his beer into the batter, gesturing with the spatula. She looks slowly away from the window to Martin, who is smirking, who has asked her a question. She blows across her teacup and watches the steam diffuse and reform. She picks up the shotgun from the counter and jumps to the floor and walks away. She sits on the toilet, her pants about her ankles, holding an unwrapped, urine-soaked pregnancy test, turning it between thumb and forefinger, watching the negative result fade slowly into the little plastic window. Speculative about what it means. Turning it slowly.

That evening, she has the gun stripped and laid out when she hears Martin come out of his room. Turtle pauses and seems to hang above her guts and the world to rise around her, to lift, and she listens to him climb the burl treads of the staircase. She assembles the gun, barrel into the slide, spring onto the recoil rod, recoil rod tensioned against the barrel, slide locked back on the frame, slide release engaged, magazine into the well, then she drops the slide to chamber a round, letting him hear. He pauses outside the door. She waits on him. The knob turns. He walks in and seems confounded to find her there, cross-legged before the oil lamp, bottles of powder solvent, degreaser, and the oil arrayed around her.

“Clean in here,” he says.

She says nothing.

“Okay, kibble,” he says. “Okay.”

She closes the door after him and sits down with her back to it, hating him. He will punish me for this, she thinks. He means to teach me a lesson about this, about what I’m doing, and I’m sure I’ll learn it.

Turtle boils her tea and sits on the counter and watches Cayenne stir from her sleeping bag. She has finished her vampire books and is reading Deliverance .

“How is that?” Turtle says.

Cayenne wrinkles her nose. “It’s weird .”

“How so?”

“Just”—screwing up her whole face—“ weird .”

That night Turtle sits sharpening her knife, listening to the hush of the polishing stone, regretting it all. She thinks: come up. I want you to come up. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and I’m sorry, and if you come up it’ll all be okay. It’ll be just like it was before. She knows what she should do. She should go down into his room. She can’t do it to herself, though.