Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

Ahead of her, he approaches a narrow corridor between two islands, cavelike and winding. He thinks she is there, holed up ahead of him. Turtle’s vision is tunneling down to a single determined thought. He stands at the margin of the tide, knee-deep in water, facing the ocean. The moon is ahead of him and backlights him. It is touching the horizon’s edge. She lifts the shotgun, shedding water from the magazine tube, and does not know if it will fire.

“Daddy,” she says softly from behind him, and he swings around and the night dials apart with the helicoptering strobe of the muzzle flash. Turtle pulls the trigger. Her own muzzle flash makes a three-quarter corona of light broken by the silhouette of the shotgun and a great lance of fire reaches out to him and she sees his shape and then darkness. She never sees him fall. The sound of the shotgun rolls across the beach, everything extinguished, gone, the afterimages white and green and red, each retaining the impression of color, but each of them as dark as black. She pitches onto hands and knees and crawls toward him, puts her hand on his leg. His jeans are soaked and crusted with sand and she takes hold of his shoulder and drags him toward her.

His hand, enormous, calloused, covered in sand, clenches at her and his strength is just like she remembers it. She hauls him into her lap and sits stooped over him, hot and alive in the cold water, his labored breathing twinned with a suckering squelch. Turtle puts a hand on his face and holds his jaw. His mouth opens spasmodically, and she thinks he will talk, he will say something now, but he just gasps, sucking air through a pit in his chest, and she covers it with her hand and feels the wound draw flush against her palm, and he drags in a breath. She thinks that he will speak, but he does not speak. She says, “I love you.”

His legs kick in the sand, some reflexive twitching motion, and when the wave breaks over them, his body lifts in her arms, the water dragging at their clothes, sucking the sand out from under her, leaving them half buried in the wet dregs. His jaw moves and then he says over and over again, “I— I— I—” but he cannot get past this first word and she can see the enormous tendons of his neck, the grain of the flesh, dark freckles, stubble, snaking veins thick as her fingerprints, the apple of his throat like a hard knot, the two cords that stand out like cables on either side of the hollow, and whatever else he would say is swallowed in the roar of the tide and he wraps his hands around her wrists to fight her and she drives the blade down through the leathery skin. The coarse white strings of tendons flash once and a spume of blood is thrown up and across her face and his back tightens and he arches up, his hips rising off the sand, his trachea gaping black beneath the blade, and then another wave breaks over them and she can feel the hot underwater jets of blood. The blade lodges against some hard knot of bone and she drags the knife forward and back and it breaks through his neck and down into her own thigh and she is sitting now in a hot pool of blood in the slack moment before the wave retreats, the moon shining through the gap between the islands, holding Martin still underwater, his fingers opening and closing convulsively as he struggles. The hot, arterial pumping stirs the surface. She tries to draw the knife from his neck and cannot. She hauls on it, gritting her teeth, and still cannot pull it free. Then the wave retreats and she can see his blood running in great black ropes across the wet sand. She bends over him and he is irretrievably gone. It is his same body in her arms and she takes hold of his flannel shirt, and it is his flannel shirt, his sodden jeans, his boots sticking up out of the sand, but he is gone from her. Cayenne comes toward her from the dark alley between the islands and drapes her arms around Turtle’s neck and puts her cheek against Turtle’s shoulder and Turtle lets her but will not and cannot take her hands off him. Cayenne pulls at Turtle’s shirt and Turtle looks up, out at the beach. The waves fold onto the sand and the moon touches the water’s surface, and she thinks, the hell, isn’t that something.

Turtle sits on the edge of a raised garden bed, the forest quiet around her, the redwoods eighteen to thirty-six inches through the centers, second growth from the burls of huge, duff-filled stumps, the biggest of which were long ago burned to ash-scaled cauldrons fifteen feet across. Indian pipe, sword fern, and madrone grow at the edge of the clearing. Above it sits Anna’s cottage, big south-facing windows, homemade stained glass in the kitchen and a dream catcher in the second-story bedroom, roof covered in solar panels, the building and land inherited from Anna’s grandmother. The forest has been crowding in closer and darker since the house was built. Sitting on the deck’s balustrade, Anna’s cat, Zaki, looks down at Turtle and lids and opens her pale blue eyes approvingly.

Turtle digs her gloved hand into the soil of the raised bed, rich and black from a recent rain. She doesn’t have to dig far before she finds the roots. She gets down on all fours. The bed is on six-inch concrete risers. A crooked finger of feeder roots has climbed out of the earth, following the trail of the dripping water, crossed the open gap between the earth and the bed, and snuck in through one of the drainage holes.

Turtle began gardening eight months ago, hampered in every movement by pain and by her ileostomy bag. One of the bullets took her low in the back, passed between two intercostal arteries, perforated her jejunum, and exited out her lower left side, another scraped her left cheekbone, and the third glanced off her seventh rib on the right side, just below the scapula. The rib punctured the pleural sac around her lungs, and as that pleural space filled with air, her right lung began to collapse. “Just a small pneumothorax,” Dr. Russell had said, thumb and forefinger minutely apart to indicate its size. “Just a small one.” Dr. Russell was a thin man, with pale skin blotched with blemishes, balding, quiet and careful. He’d lean in while he talked, pinching thumb and forefinger together as if capturing the texture of her voice, and he’d ask again, “Why’d you think to tape up like that, Turtle?” and Turtle would shake her head, because she didn’t know, and he’d smile and lean back. He was excited by her case and by her injuries, which Turtle liked. He loved this part of his job, she could tell. The contents of her small intestine had spilled into her abdominal cavity and after the first stabilizing operation, there had been two major surgical procedures to clean out infection. If her duct-tape bandage hadn’t held, Turtle might not have survived at all. Seawater, Dr. Russell liked to say, is nasty stuff. Her survival amazed him.

The surgeons brought a loop of gut up to the skin on her right side, above her groin, which made a puckering red asshole in her hip, and for six months, she shit out of that, or really, dibbled through it. A flexible adhesive patch with a gasket was placed over the stoma, and the ostomy pouches snapped onto it. Turtle would wake up in the middle of the night clawing at the flange where the pouch met the baseplate, and one night she’d almost succeeded in pulling it off, woke up just in time and staggered out to the bathroom and stood at the sink, imagining herself yarding out a foot of pink intestine through a keyhole in her side, stood clutching the bathroom counter, panting with pain, looking in the mirror and shaking her head, and she’d thought, Martin tried to tell you, he tried to tell you that one day you would need to be more than just a scared little bitch with good aim, that one day you would need to be absolute in your conviction, that you would need to fight like a fucking angel, fallen to fucking earth, with your heart absolute, and you never got there. You were full of hesitation and prevarication right down to the end. She stood at the sink thinking, you were never enough and you never will be enough. That day she’d waited for Anna to come home, and when Anna opened her car door, Turtle said, “I want to make a garden,” and Anna had stood, holding her bankers box of tests to grade, slack with exhaustion, leaning back against the Saturn, and then she’d put the box back inside and Turtle had gotten in the passenger door and closed it with the bungee cord.