Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

Turtle walks with difficulty, her footsteps wringing water from the wet sand into shining halos. Ahead of her, the river is lined with sleeping geese. There look to be hundreds. Turtle blunders forward, leaning on the girl, lurch and step, lurch and step. The duct tape is squeezing in time to her heartbeat and, she realizes, the roll is still attached to her, hung on a long tail of tape. She runs several more passes around her stomach, tears the roll off and drops it to the sand. She is breathing in quick, hard pants and cannot seem to get enough air.

The bluffs are not high. The river runs beneath them for another twenty-five yards and then the bluffs fall back. Beyond the bluffs, the river’s shallow estuary is strewn with driftwood logs, sandbars, and stranded heaps of bull kelp, forty yards to the tide line, where three sea stacks stand in black outline, the breakers shattering white and rolling in across an expanse of beach that spans the horizon from north to south, each wave barreling a freight of water and sand that shakes the air. Above her, Jacob’s house, sitting on the corner of the bluffs, overlooks both the river and the beach. Turtle and Cayenne stagger forward, and the flock begins to take flight all around them. Turtle reaches the river’s edge and drags the girl forward into the cold water, slogging thigh-deep through a confusion of beating wings, and pitching into the current. Then Turtle lets go and swims hard across the sandy bottom. The river is only six or eight feet deep, but it carries her along with surprising force. She breaks the surface for air once, geese still taking flight all across the river, the house obscured from view, and she dives and swims again. She swims out past the bluffs, reaches a driftwood log that juts from the bank into the water, grabs ahold of it, and comes up behind it. She drags the girl out of the current and into the leaning, chiseled face of the riverbank behind the log.

Forty yards away, Martin comes out onto the deck and pans the weapon light across the beach, the light cutting slant through the river’s surface. Dappled reflections carousel across the cliff face. Turtle and Cayenne lie behind the log, chin-deep in water, sheltered against the sandy bank. He has a small height advantage—the deck is twenty, thirty feet up and overlooks the entire beach.

She has nothing in the shotgun but buckshot. He is right at the limit of her range. If she had a slug, she could reach out to him on those steps and end his life just like that. Her thoughts are coming to her slowly, the edges of her vision closing in, the world hollow and drained of sensation. She grabs the girl and points her downriver and Cayenne shakes her head. It’s another twenty or twenty-five yards to where the river meets the ocean. She wants the girl to follow the river to the sea and then strike south along the tide line. It’s her best chance. Turtle holds up three fingers —In three— looking at the girl meaningfully and the girl shaking her head and Turtle drawing her close and kissing her hair and then pushing her away and both of them breathing ragged and the sound of their breathing seeming magnified by the water and by the chiseled sandbank and Turtle turns and draws the Sig Sauer with water draining from the magazine and from the barrel, lays it across the log, finds the glowing tritium sights, picks out Martin with his light searching the beach, and she fires.

Martin must see her muzzle flash because the weapon light swings across the beach toward her and he begins firing back. Waterspouts jump into the air and flare black and nebulous against the weapon light’s sunlike apparition and wood chips geyser from the log and are raptured into the dark. Turtle aims right back into that annihilating glare. The shadows of her gunsights sundial across the gun’s slide and across her arm and the Sig Sauer eclipses the light and casts its slim shadow back onto Turtle’s right eye, the sights themselves haloed in shining white light, and she pulls the trigger. The light blinks out. Turtle continues firing, minutely attentive to the click of the trigger reset, her vision washed with afterimages. The Sig Sauer locks open and she drops it into the river, the gun hissing and then gone. She closes her eyes, consciousness slippery in her hands, and she thinks, you have to get up, Turtle. You have to get up.

Cayenne is gone. That, at least, had worked. The girl got away. Turtle crawls on elbows and knees through the water along the sandy bank, barely able to remember what she is doing, the river shallowing out around her as it broadens. Ahead of her, a mound of bull kelp lies islanded in the river course. Turtle slithers toward it, belly-down. There is a sandbar here, heaped with kelp and driftwood. She crawls up into kelp. Flies and sand fleas startle up from it around her. It smells of salt and of rot. She is taking fast, uncontrollable gasps, dragging the shotgun on its sling. She lies shaking with cold and with fear. Beside her, a crumpled jellyfish with purple skirts, limbs in ropy tangles, the hollows crawling with sand fleas swollen and magnified by the lenslike flesh. The water is brackish. The river current trades with the waves, changing direction back and forth. The surf rolls on toward her with a cacophonous grind palpable in the water and in the sandy bed below, palpable in her guts, which wallow in their ruptured and mucilaginous sack, each breaking wave sending a swash of water that rises around her and then drains. She lies scooping after oily thoughts like raking through seaweed for eels, thinking, I could close my eyes and this, all of this, would be over. Then she thinks, no, fuck that—you had your chance, you cunt, and you’re in it now.

Turtle eases up and looks through the kelp at him. Martin is limping down the beach beside the rivercourse and Turtle experiences a terrible surge of joy. She’d hit him, the fuck, at however many yards, and her with a 9mm and him with the AR-15, on higher ground and with the flashlight blinding her, and she’d hit him. She’d hit the flashlight, too, or else he’d be using it. Come to me, she thinks. Come to me in the dark, you fuck. Come to me and die. She eases into the water, which rises up around her eyes, and she pulls herself deeper into the heavy, oily tangle of kelp.

It takes him a long time to make his way down the beach and she lies unmoving, her heart clenching her whole body with its beat, panting, dizzy, and she thinks, just a little bit longer now, Turtle. Hold tight to the world and do not let go and do not fuck this up.

Martin is following the river’s edge. It must appear to him that there is no hiding on this vast, flat expanse of beach. He stops abreast of where she lies in her kelp heap. He, like her, is waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark. He watches the river for any movement, peering in the attitude of people who cannot see well in the dark. The gun is up against his shoulder. The shotgun is trapped underneath her. She doesn’t want to move to pull it free. She wants him to walk by. She will move if she needs to, but she doesn’t like her odds. She wants him to walk past. He keeps looking away toward the river’s mouth, where the three islands stand in the surf. Still, he doesn’t want to have the kelp heap at his back. Turtle closes her eyes. No, she thinks. He raises the gun and fires, searching the kelp heap with automatic fire, Turtle lying with eyes closed, teeth gritted, the wet smack of the bullets into the kelp, but nothing happens. He doesn’t hit her. He stops firing and studies the kelp heap. Then he makes his decision. He swings the gun toward the surf and walks by.

Turtle exhales hard, putting her knuckles to her mouth to keep from sobbing. Then she pulls herself slithering from under the kelp, the sandy shotgun dragging free, and she rises to her feet and limps after him through the shallowing rivercourse, thinking, not much farther, Turtle, all you have to do is keep your feet under you, you bitch. It is lurch and step through the shin-deep water, lurch and step, and it feels like god has taken her by the abdomen and is squeezing her, the beach drained of color, drained of smell and of sound, a black and white sheet, the white of the waves, the silhouettes of the islands, and Martin.