Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

One of the girls on the floor sits up. It’s Rilke, from Anna’s long-ago classroom, from long-ago bus rides. Her hair has been worked into curls that hang around her oval face. She is wearing a pink strapless dress and tights, barefoot. She stares at Turtle, her mouth gradually opening into a lip-glossed O of surprise. Turtle leads Cayenne into the room. Brett looks up, stops.

Into the shocked silence, Turtle gasps out Jacob’s name. Even to her, it is an appalling sound.

Rilke says, “Oh god.”

Brett says, “Turtle—?”

“Oh god.”

Turtle gestures with the shotgun. All of them, they all need to leave. She doesn’t know how to go about that. She needs to find him. Everything else comes after finding Jacob. She is making that plan in her mind—find Jacob. Get everyone out of the house. Bunker down. Martin will come or he won’t. But, she thinks, he won’t. If he was going to come, he would’ve made that move already. He wouldn’t wait nearly four hours to pursue her. He would pursue her immediately. She thinks so anyway. And she can keep Jacob safe. She is sure of that. The two of them together, they can do this.

“Is she—?” one of the girls says.

“Turtle,” Brett says. “Turtle. You look like you were hung .”

She says, “Jacob—” Her voice cracks and fails.

“ What?”

“Christ, listen to her.”

“Oh my god.”

“Turtle, I can’t hear you,” Brett says. “You need Jacob? Is that what you said? What—what happened? What’s going on?”

Cayenne is hiding behind Turtle, holding on to Turtle’s hand and grasping at her flannel. Rilke has risen to a stand and is staring at Cayenne, slowly raising her hands to cover her mouth in shock. “Oh my god,” she says. Turtle ignores her. “Brett,” Rilke says, speaking through her cupped hands. When he doesn’t respond, she says it again. “ Brett .”

One of the girls says, “Somebody find a landline. Somebody call the cops.”

Cell phones, Turtle remembers, don’t work here.

“Where,” Turtle says with difficulty, “is Jacob?”

Jacob will know what to do. He’ll get everyone out of here. Then they’ll get through this together.

“Um—” Brett says, biting his lip and looking around as if he might be in the room. “I mean, he could be anywhere. But where? I mean—I don’t know?”

“Brett,” Rilke says softly, emphatically. Brett looks at her. “Brett, the girl,” she says. Turtle looks down at Cayenne. At first she doesn’t see anything. Then she sees it. There is blood on Cayenne’s legs. It has run down the insides of her knees and down her shins and it is dry and scabbed. It does not look like much.

“Oh my god,” Rilke says. She sinks to her knees. She does not seem to know what to do with her hands. She reaches out to touch Cayenne and then brings her hands back and cups them over her mouth as if to keep herself from crying out. Cayenne shies away. “Oh god, oh god,” Rilke says.

Turtle grabs Brett, jerks him forward. “I need Jacob.” Her voice is harsh and chapped.

Brett says, “Turtle—it looks like you’re bleeding into the whites of your eyes—are you all right?”

“Jacob,” she repeats. It’s all she can say.

Brett raises his arms, lets them drop. “I’m telling you, Turtle. I don’t know! He’s not in his room. He’s not here. All I know is that when Imogen decided to have this party, he said he wouldn’t come. He tried to get me to go hiking with him out to Inglenook Fen and I said, ‘Fuck that, I’ma party.’ I thought you’d dumped him. Hell— he thinks you’ve dumped him.”

Turtle stands. Jacob isn’t here. She has no idea what to do. With that impossibility, she can feel all of her momentum draining out of her. The world goes gray and flat with stress, her vision closing in from the sides as if the room were drawing back from her, and in this retraction, the scene, these people, this house, it grows stranger, darker, impenetrable and unnavigable. The floor wheels and she is afraid, for a moment, that she will go down.

“Turtle?” Brett says.

She gapes at them. Brett is talking to her, and Rilke is on her knees in front of Cayenne, patting Cayenne uncontrollably in a stymied impulse at more effective comforting. People are talking. It’s on her, Turtle realizes. To get all of these people out of here. To get them to safety in case Martin is coming. It is dawning on her what a colossal mistake she’s made, and she is, with a throttling and rising panic, trying to figure out what to do.

“Turtle?” Brett says again.

She just stands there.

“Turtle—what’s happening ?”

She walks to the bookshelf. Set beside a bookend is a clay jar full of pens and she upends it and taking out a Sharpie walks to the wall and writes:

Get everybody out of here

“What?” Brett says. He stands staring at the words. “What?”

She writes:

Run

A semicircle of strangers stares at her.

“Oh no,” Rilke says.

“Like, now ?” Brett says.

“This is bad,” Rilke says.

Turtle gestures them out with the shotgun.

“Wait,” Brett says. “Why? How? We took everybody’s keys—”

She gestures again with the shotgun and even as she does it, she recognizes the futility. The house is full of sleeping people. Cars are choked in the driveway. She changes her mind. “I need to go,” she says. “I need to get out of here.”

“Turtle—I can’t . . . I can’t understand you.”

She turns and drags Cayenne toward the door. If she hurries, she can set another ambush. Just before the bridge.

“Stop,” Rilke says.

Turtle looks at her.

“You can’t take her,” Rilke says.

Turtle puts her finger to her mouth. Everybody hesitates.

“Brett, she’s been—”

Turtle gestures with the shotgun. Rilke cuts off.

“Turtle, what the hell? Where are you going?” Brett says.

Turtle is dead silent. She can hear a truck out in the driveway. She hears it shut off, and she hears him kick the door open, hears the door slam. A numbness starts in her gut, a sucking, squelching, pins-and-needles awfulness as if those goopy coils were rags being wrung of blood. Rilke is talking, her words meaningless and warped, and Brett, too, and the others, all of them talking, and Turtle is thinking, he didn’t let me go. He hasn’t cut me loose. He waited for me to come back, like he did after he found out about Jacob. He gave me the opportunity to repent, because what he really wants is for me to come back on my own. But now he’s come here. She has seconds to do the right thing and if she does it wrong, people are going to die. Shit, she thinks. Shit.

Turtle shoves the girl toward Rilke. “Stay,” she says. Cayenne shakes her head. Turtle takes a knee, level with the girl. “I’ll come back.” Her voice is a chapped rasp. The girl shakes her head.

Promise , Turtle mouths.

“You promise?”

Turtle nods slowly, painfully.

To the others, she gestures up the stairs.

“Uh-uh,” Brett says. “No way. I’m not leaving you.”

“ Brett ,” Rilke says. “Someone tried to kill her and that person is here . That person is here right now.”

“I don’t care,” Brett says. “I’m not leaving her.”

“Brett—!” Rilke is holding on to Cayenne. “Brett, we need to go—”

Turtle leaves them talking and crosses the living room and goes into the hallway, closing the door quietly behind her. She can hear Martin’s footsteps coming up the deck. The hallway meets the entranceway at the T intersection and she gets down on her belly so as not to be backlit by the hallway’s display case, slithers across the carpet, noses the shotgun around the corner into the entranceway. The necking couple is still there, leaned up against the wall. The girl in the dinosaur onesie looks over at Turtle. She moves to brush a strand of hair from her face and then, recognizing the gun, freezes, opening her mouth. Turtle puts a finger to her lips. They stare at her. Turtle raises her eyebrows, looks to the door. They follow her gaze.