Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

She rears up silently and then collapses. “Fucking bitch ,” he says. “Fucking—fucking—– fucking bitch . You are mine. Mine. Mine,” he rasps raggedly. He does not seem to understand why she is on the floor. He pauses, perplexed. She still cannot breathe. Her air hunger has an all-consuming urgency. He kicks her again. In agony she rends at the floorboards. Her diaphragm convulses violently. She props herself up and can feel the air in her mouth—a cold mouthful of air, cold against her teeth. She takes hold of the half-open pantry door. She thinks, get up, Turtle. You have to get up. You have to get up.

He says, “You bitch. You whore .”

She staggers to her knees, takes a great bloody suck of air, grabs at the knob of the pantry door to steady herself. She thinks, all right, you cunt. Let’s see what you have. She sucks air again. Cold and painful and good. All right, she thinks. No more fucking around.

Martin picks up the shotgun and walks toward her, saying, “Mine, you are mine.” He walks right up to her and he brings the gun up into her face. He is too close to her. He never could do anything right. Turtle looks up into the shotgun’s great black bore like looking into a pupil, thinking, he was never careful of you, he never believed in you. Everything falls away, each gesture, each thing collapsing into itself, stripped of doubt and hesitation. She reaches out and latches the shotgun’s barrel just behind the front sight. Then she pulls the gun down toward herself like it is a railing and she is helping herself up the stairs, angling the barrel away from herself. There is no effort or sense of effort. Her intentions simply unfold into action.

The gun goes off. It throws a white-hot lance of sound and fire past her hip into the wall. Martin has not let go of the stock and he comes forward with it, stumbling, off balance, his mouth gaping and appalled. It is happening too fast for him and he can do nothing. She drags him down to where she wants him. Then she sets her feet and drives her elbow up into his jaw.

There is no pain, but she feels the blow all the way down to her heels. Martin reels back. He hits the wall and goes down.

Turtle exchanges her grip on the gun and racks it. The shell ejects and clatters across the boards, smoking. She stands where she is. With each breath, the world around her draws color, draws depth. She does not walk toward him. There is a backsplash of blood on the wall. She tries to speak but produces only a painful rasp. Something has been damaged in her throat. Her vocal cords, something. Martin lies facedown.

Kill him, she thinks. He will never let you go. He levers himself up and casts around. A bit of tooth is on the floor and his eyes fasten on it. Blood is falling from his mouth in drippy strings. His pupils are blown to hoops. His legs work uselessly. Turtle thinks, just pull the trigger. She could do it if she needed to, but it is the need she doubts. He pushes himself up, sits back against the wall, his legs stuck out straight before him, staring. His hands lie uselessly at his side. His chest heaves. He seems stunned.

She opens her mouth to ask him something and produces a chapped and bloody sound. He looks up from the floor and she tries to weigh his look, but it is blank, almost expressionless. She wraps and rewraps her hands around the shotgun’s ring-tailed pump. His shoulders cabled with tendons, knotted with great fistfuls of muscle. His body knobbed and trenched with shadows. Muscles stand out in sashes across his ribs, which heave open and closed with his labored breathing. In this stooped posture, his powerful stomach is lapped into folds. He has drawn his legs up and his bare feet rest flat on the boards, snaked with veins, a fan of bones standing out from them, the arch high, his gigantic, stubby toes clutching at the boards. He does not look away from her.

She staggers past him along the wall to where Cayenne is huddled in the bed, grasping at the rucked sheets. Turtle holds out her left hand with its crooked fingers and the girl stares into the dark. Turtle can barely stand. She points the shotgun at the girl, swings the barrel to indicate that she should move, and Cayenne screams, bringing her hands to her face, then cutting off abruptly. Turtle climbs up onto the bed and takes the girl by the hair and hauls her back through the hallway, trying to keep her from looking at Martin, pulling her into the foyer. The bear skulls shine yellow in the dark, the chandelier looms from out of the cobwebbed rafters, the great brass goosenecks catching the light. Turtle pans the shotgun one handed, hauling the girl with the other hand.

He clears his throat, hacks. “Don’t go,” he says. His voice is thick and slurred.

Turtle levels the shotgun at him and Cayenne cleaves to her, burying her face in Turtle’s stomach, wrapping her hands around Turtle’s back and gripping the wifebeater and the flannel with her small fingers. He spreads his hands, holds them out in mute appeal. Turtle opens the huge oak foyer door and shoves Cayenne out into the driveway. She walks to Grandpa’s truck and opens the passenger-side door and the girl climbs in, clumsy and naked, holding her arms around herself. She turns back and gives Turtle a single frightened look, her hair in tangles. Turtle slams the door, turns back around. She can see Martin through the open door of the foyer. She tries to see it in him, what he will do. If he knows, himself, he makes no sign. He seems to be staring at the floor or at his own, open hands. Just don’t follow me, she thinks. Don’t follow me, you son of a bitch.

She walks around the front of the truck and gets in. She could shoot the wheels out on his truck, but if he’s going to come after her, she wants him to do it now and she wants him in a vehicle she’ll recognize. The keys are in the ignition. She wrenches the headlights on and throws the truck into gear and roars down the driveway. Cayenne crawls across the vinyl seat and puts her cheek in Turtle’s lap, her eyes sealed shut, jerking and spasming, and Turtle puts a hand on the girl’s hair, on the side of her cheek. The truck fishtails out onto the black and familiar highway, and at the sight of this clean expanse of tarmac, the yellow dividing line, the mailboxes, the hummocks of torch lily, she gasps with relief. She reaches up with one hand and touches the divots torn in her neck by her own fingernails. She moves the rearview mirror. In it, her face is mottled with black capillary bleeds from the strangulation. When she opens her mouth, it is purple-black inside, her teeth rimmed pink.

Turtle tries to say something and cannot; her mouth opens and closes with a clicking sound. Cayenne reaches out with one hand, grabs ahold of the thigh of Turtle’s jeans, slowly closing her hand into a fist, and Turtle looks down at the girl. Cayenne draws her thighs together, one hand wrapped around her own stomach. With the dome light off, the cab is near lightless, but Turtle catches silver-lit adumbrations of the girl in the headlights of passing cars. Turtle can see the half silhouette of a silver cheek, the crescent of an eye socket, her gaping half-mouth, planes of her face catching the light and her black hair soaking it up.

A mile or two miles out, Turtle stops the truck just past a blind turn. They are on the winding, dark, cliffside highway south of Mendocino. Cayenne sits up wordlessly. Turtle reverses and backtracks through the curve. She watches her rearview mirror carefully. She cannot turn her neck enough to look over her shoulder. The embankment on the right is in the dark. On the left, her headlights light the guardrail, the cliff. They spear out above the ocean. Turtle changes gears and takes the turn again, slowly, watching the embankment, watching the guardrail, watching the road ahead as it comes into view. The headlights catch the guardrail but not the forested slope on the right. She drives a hundred yards farther and pulls off on the left side of the road and sits in the cab, listening to the ticking of the engine.