Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

In the morning there is something grim and sad and self-hating in his face and he opens the fridge and takes his beer and bangs it open and he walks out and down the porch steps and she looks at his retreating back, and she thinks, I will take what comes.

He is out there, staring at Buckhorn Cove, for a long time. Turtle waits that night, dissembling the Sig Sauer and reassembling it, the shotgun laid beside her with a fifty-five-round bandolier of shells, picking up Marcus Aurelius and opening the page and reading by the light of the oil lamp and then tossing the book away and picking up the gun, taking the slide from the frame and sitting with the two paired in her hands and staring at them.

Then she hears Martin’s bedroom door open, hears Martin cross the long hallway to the living room where the stairs to her room begin. Turtle’s whole body prickles. She listens. He walks into the living room and stands at the foot of her stairs and she waits, thinking, come on up, you bastard. You might hurt me but you can never break me, so come on up the stairs, motherfucker, and let’s see what you have. Turtle’s scalp prickles. It feels like the skin is tightening. The fear grows on her. She hears him whisper to Cayenne, and the rustling noise as he picks her up, still in her blankets, and then his heavy, uneven footsteps going down the hallway as he carries the girl back to his room.

Turtle thinks, thank god it’s her and not me. Then she stands up and grabs her hair. She walks to her door and puts the heel of her fist against it. This is not your fault, she thinks. This is not on you. You owe that girl nothing. You can’t do anything about this. She walks back to the window, sits down, chewing on her knuckles. Though Jacob would have no doubt that you could stop this, and that’s how little he knows about you and that’s how little he knows about life. She picks up the Sig Sauer and holsters it and picks up the shotgun and shoulders the bandolier and then she opens the door and she thinks, motherfucker, what are you doing, Turtle, what are you doing.

She walks down the hall, her boots soft and worn. She stops, listening for any sound, and she can hear nothing over her own breathing and over her heart, and she thinks, Christ, girl, breathe steady. She descends into the living room. Turtle stands holding the shotgun. Down the hall, the new bed creaks, and creaks again. Turtle passes the bathroom on the left, and then the foyer on the right with its twenty-two bear skulls, and then the pantry on the left, and she comes to Martin’s lightless door at the end of the hallway, the cut-glass knob.

She is acutely aware of her own smell in the dark. Her knees are loose; she puts her forehead against the wood panel. On the other side, a painful gasp, the hitching of breath. A protracted silence, and then another gasp of breath, half-stifled. Turtle stands there and she thinks, you can turn around now because you have no plan and there is nothing you can do and there is nowhere you can take that girl. You can’t take her away and you can’t keep her safe and it is blindness to think otherwise. Think about who he is. How much bigger he is than you. How much stronger and smarter, how much more experienced. She thinks, you will die. You will fail and you will die, and for what. The moment you take that girl out of this house, he will drive up the coast and go to Jacob’s house and kill Jacob. That is what you are hazarding, Jacob’s life, and your own. And he won’t do that girl all that much harm. He will do to her what he did to you night after night for years, and you’re still here.

Then she thinks, but if I go back up the stairs, there will be a whole tract of myself I will have to keep half lit by remembering, and I will never come to peace with it, but if I go in there now and I do just the best that I can, that is a story I can tell myself, however it ends. More than anything, more than life itself, she wants Jacob Learner back, she wants her dignity back. She thinks, okay, you cunt, put your brain in your lunch box and go to work. She thinks, if you’re going to do this, you have to do it exactly right.

She tries the door. Then she trips the slide release and draws the pump back to expose the yawning maw of the chamber and she drops in the breaching round and slides the pump forward and feels the breech bolt crunch closed. She shoulders the gun and blows the lock. Her hearing, sensitized by the silence, is instantly gone. She kicks the door open, racking the shotgun as she steps through. Martin lurches up from the covers and lunges toward the side table, sweeping aside bottles and magazines, reaching for the Colt, and Turtle shoots it off the table, the shotgun throwing a lance of flame, a beer bottle tossing its glass neck, spuming, the ejected shotshell hanging in the air beside her, revolving as it arches into the dark. Martin sweeps the covers off himself and steps out of bed and takes a single step toward her, huge and naked, his thighs immense and shining in the dark, his chest deep and black with hair, and Turtle brings the shotgun up.

“Wait—” she says.

Then he is on her. He backhands her across the face. She strikes her head on the doorjamb and lands sprawled in the hallway. He looms out of the darkness, huge, kneeling over her, and takes her neck in both hands and forces her to the floor. She makes a choking, throttled noise and then all sound is cut off. She seizes him by the wrist and cannot break his grasp any more than if she were fixed in place by a railroad spike.

“Shoot at me ?” he says. “Shoot at me ? I made you. You are mine .”

They do not lash or even move, but strain against each other there in the hallway. His face is a murderous rictus. Turtle’s mind fills with a silent agony. She can feel his fingers sinking wells into her neck, the flesh strained almost to shearing. Her face is thickening into a crust like a mask. She is aware of this beneath the howling, mind-bending air hunger, and aware, too, of the roof of her mouth itching , and her eyes itching as blood vessels bleed into her skin.

Turtle clutches at his fingers. They are lapped into folds of her flesh. It is like trying to pry roots from stony ground. She claws up gouts of her own skin. His palm gaps up and she chisels her thumb beneath it, her thumbnail cutting a deep, bloody groove in her throat. Desperately, she works her thumb along his palm toward the smallest finger of his left hand. Her mouth strains for air. Her face is swollen, engorged with blood, her vision narrowing, going gray-black and losing all depth, inky black vessels unfurling across the left-hand side.

He heaves her up and slams her back down against the floor, Turtle desperately intent, prying at the smallest finger of his left hand, tearing at it, her thumb hooked beneath it. Slowly, torturously, she begins to lever his littlest finger away from the others. She fights for leverage. “Shoot at me, bitch?” he says. “I made you.” He lifts her up and slams her back into the floor, trying to knock her unconscious, trying to shake her grasp. Her vision swims with sparks. She gets her entire fist around his finger, drags it back, and tears his hand away. He lurches to a stand before she can break any of the small bones of his hand.

Even released, Turtle sprawls. She cannot get up. She cannot breathe. She does not know why. Even with him no longer there, she cannot take a breath. There is no gurgle, no sound of air. It makes no sense. She rolls onto her stomach and scrabbles across the floor. I’m going to die, she thinks. I am going to die right fucking here. In this hallway. She wants to cry out for help, but she cannot. Something has been crushed in her neck. She wallows, fights for air, and then Martin walks up behind her and kicks her in the groin.