Page 29
Story: Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter
CHAPTER 28
August 25 th
7:18 AM
I WAKE WITH the sun. I smoke half a pack of cigarettes on the trailer porch as I watch it rise over the nearby grove of trees, dandelion yellow. One hour until the liquor store opens. Every second is a bullet.
I am caught between preparing to die and fortifying my resolve to live. It seems foolish to bet on either outcome. He may shoot me on sight. He may do me the courtesy of a conversation before shooting me. He may mortally wound me. He may leave me with only a flesh wound. He may be sensible and listen to me. He may trick me into thinking I’ve persuaded him and shoot me in the back when I turn to leave. He may really kill me. The possibilities are horrifying in their endlessness. My father is a grenade with the pin already pulled. There’s no telling when he will explode and how much carnage will ensue when he does, and the uncertainty is what frightens me most. If I knew I was going to die, I could at least say a prayer for my soul.
And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment.
I picture my father sprinkling my remains in a landfill. What a sick twist of fate that if I die, my ashes will belong to him.
I dump the dregs of my coffee onto the lawn. I scratch Zenobia behind the ears. I slide the switchblade into my bra.
And then I drive to the liquor store.
Most of the vagrants on the street are still asleep, some in sleeping bags, some on cardboard slabs laid across the sidewalk. A small group plays blackjack on the curb, substituting bottle caps for chips. The dealer wolf-whistles at me when I pass.
I tell myself I am no longer seduced by bloodlust, no longer intoxicated by the thrill of revenge. I tell myself this is strictly business, a loose end demanding to be tied up. I’m not sure if I believe it, but I am leaving violence as the last resort, and surely that counts for something. It must mean I’ve changed, even a little, that I see a different means to my end.
The bell on the door chimes when I walk in. My father is not behind the counter, but he calls out from the back stockroom. “Be with you in a minute!” He grunts and groans over the bottles clanking together.
I snatch a shot-sized bottle of vodka from an endcap and down it in a single gulp. It burns on the way down and sours my stomach instantly, the liquor pooling in my gut like an oil spill. I fight to keep from retching as I put the bottle back where I found it, among a graveyard of empty friends. I’m the umpteenth person this week to do this. My final fuck you to my father isn’t even unique.
His footsteps are leaden. He stops in the doorframe, a beer bottle in his hand. We look at each other like a deer spotting the hunter who has it in the crosshairs. I don’t know who is the deer and who is the hunter.
“You must be deaf, butterfly. Clearly you didn’t hear what I said when you crawled onto my porch.”
I keep my voice even and calm. I can’t be weak, but I can’t be too strong either. “I came to talk.”
“You and I got nothing to say to each other.”
“You don’t, but I do.”
“That’s the problem with you: always looking to have the last word.” He gathers his greasy shirt above his holster to remind me of his Springfield. My cheekbone throbs at the sight of it. “If it’s so important, spit it out.”
“Grace should come to Missouri with me.”
I mistake his pause for contemplation, but it is mockery. His laughter rattles between the liquor bottles. “And what other wishes can this genie grant you?”
“I only want her.”
“It’s not a custody arrangement,” he says, setting down his beer. “She’s my daughter. End of discussion.”
“She’s my sister.”
“What happens if she goes back home with you? She sleeps on the couch in your shitty apartment while you’re drawing on people to pay the rent? Oh, what a dream life you’re offering her, Providence.”
“Aren’t you tired of raising your daughters?”
“I’ve been tired fifty-seven years, daughters or no daughters.”
“Don’t pretend like your children are the great joy of your life.” I soften my words with a chuckle forced from the bottom of my throat. It sickens me to show him even an imitation of joy. “You’re an old man now. You want to drink your beers, watch the Rockies lose, sometimes go play pool in Tyre. If Grace comes with me, you can have the life you always wanted. This whole thing’ll be done. That’s the best thing that could happen for any of us.”
“Family isn’t a rotten tooth. You don’t just yank it out when it starts to hurt.”
I train my eyes on his holster. “Normal families, sure, but when was this family ever normal?”
“You had a roof over your head and food on the table. You had nothing to complain about.”
“Do you really believe that? Can you look me in the eye and tell me you honestly don’t think you did anything wrong?”
He can. “I never did nothing to you that my old man didn’t do to me or my sister, God rest her soul. It didn’t break us: it made us tough as nails. I wanted you girls to be tough. None of that crying over a scraped knee bullshit. No back talk, no sass. It never did me any harm, and you don’t look any worse for wear. I made you strong. That I won’t ever apologize for.”
“You made me scared.”
“Fear is a choice,” he says. “Look at Harmony. You think she was ever scared?”
“You were always too drunk to hear us cry.”
“You only think that because you were the weak one. I never saw you be strong, Providence, not once. Look at what you’ve done to your arms. It’s a weakness.”
“I keep myself alive. I’m a survivor.”
My father waves his hand like he’s batting away an insect. “Don’t get philosophical on me.”
“Please, I am begging you. Let me take Grace.”
“No.”
“One word?” I lift my hands. “That’s all I get?”
“The answer is no.”
“She’s going to go to college soon anyway.”
He shakes his head. “She’s not. She’ll go when I think she’s ready for it.”
“You can’t be happy unless you’re making someone else suffer, can you?”
“Providence, I am giving you one last chance to turn tail and get out of my store. You said your piece and I heard you out. It’s time for you to go.”
I step closer to him. “Give Grace a chance at a normal life. Give her one reason not to wish you dead. One thing to be grateful to you for.”
“Are you finished?”
“No.”
“Walk away.”
“I’m not finished. I won’t—”
Pain rips through my thigh, hot and fast and bloody. I hear a scream I barely recognize as my own, even recognize as human, a noise not unlike the one my mother made beneath the wheels of the car. I am on the ground before I realize he has shot me.
He shot me. My father shot me.
He walks toward me, gun still drawn. I stare down the barrel. The muzzle is agape in an eternal shriek. And the wound—it burns, God it burns, and I am paralyzed. I cannot even move enough to press my hands on the wound to stop the blood gushing from my leg. The pain radiates to the furthest reaches of my body. It screams up my spine, into my brain, the roots of my teeth, down to my toes, all the way to my fingertips.
“Run,” my father says. “Get up and run.”
No words form. My mouth is numb. It is all I can do to keep breathing. The world has gone blurry.
He stoops and grabs a fistful of my hair. Something cool nuzzles against my shoulder—not the gun, no, that’s in his other hand. It’s his wedding ring. And I suddenly think of my mother dressed in white, committing herself to this vile brute who calls himself a man.
He fires the gun at the ceiling from beside my ear. The ringing is so loud it doubles me over. “I told you to get up and run. Will you listen to me now? Get up! Get on your feet!”
I don’t have time to reach for the switchblade. I do the only thing I can think to save myself.
I rear up and bite his nose. I taste the blood and I feel the chunk of flesh I’ve taken with me. It rolls between my gums like a pinball as he falls backward, his hands clamped over his face. The gun planes across the floor.
“Fucking bitch!”
I claw my way on top of him and bear my full weight down upon his chest. Now is my chance. I am so desperate to breathe that I choke on the air. Before I can reach for the switchblade, he rams a fist into my solar plexus, and now I am wheezing, my vision turning green at the corners, so starved for oxygen that I would tear a hole in my own throat for a single gasp.
The gun skids to a stop in front of the pyramid of twelve-packs. He bear-crawls toward it.
I use the shelves to pull myself to my feet, but I collapse as soon as I straighten my wounded leg. The blood courses down my leg like honey from a forbidden hive, thick and sticky and somehow unbearably cold.
Get up, Providence. Get up.
One more time. I drag myself upright. He inches closer to the gun.
I reach for the switchblade as I drag myself down the aisleway, bottles of liquor shattering against the ground in my wake.
And I don’t think twice.
I throw myself down on him.
I plunge the knife through the back of his neck.
The knife hitches as it severs his vertebrae. He collapses beneath me, and I sense the moment the life leaves his body as he goes limp on the floor. And it is delicious. One more thrust, I tell myself, just to make sure, and this one is cleaner, slicing through with ease. I stab him until the tip of the switchblade clatters against the floor and bounces away from me, until his blood mingles with my own. It coats my hands and soaks my shirt. It is a lifetime of rage finally exorcized from my body. You’ll shoot me like a fucking dog, will you? I’ll eat you like a fucking dog, you sick, sick man. And me, I’m sick too. Sick for doing this, sick for delighting in it so brazenly, sick for pretending I was not driven by revenge or fury, the sadistic desire to end another person’s life. But that’s okay. I have the right to the last laugh. I get the last fucking word.
This is my pound of flesh.
Finally. Finally.
Harmony, Grace, I’ve avenged us. It’s over now. We’re free.
The pain roars through me again, stronger now than before. Everything goes white.
The world resurfaces in fragments as I fade in and out. A crowd. The same man who wolf-whistled at me uses his shirt as a tourniquet on my leg. An ambulance. I haven’t seen that much blood since my granddad showed me the old slaughterhouse in Gordon. A hospital. They jostle me around on the stretcher, and they aren’t running, which I find funny because I’m certain I am about to die. An operating room. The doctor smiles as me as I fight against an anesthetic sleep and beg him to save my moth tattoo. Count backward from ten, all right? You’re in good hands, miss .
And it turns out, he’s right. I wake up in a barren hospital room, mummified in blankets pulled up to my chin. The curtains are drawn, but the room is lit by the blinding hallway fluorescents and the artificial glow of the machines at my side. Oxygen tubes dangle from my nose and IVs sprout from the crook of my arm.
I peel the blanket back to look at my wrists. No handcuffs.
A nurse comes running when I hit the red button on my bedside. She checks my vitals, blinds me with a little flashlight that she asks me to follow with my eyes to make sure my brain is still intact. The surgery was a success. They removed the bullet, she tells me, and I’m very lucky it didn’t hit bone. She says more, but I still can’t hear out of my left ear and I’m too shell-shocked to tell her so. I am convinced this is a dream, a hallucination from the edges of a coma, and when I do wake up, it will be in a prison hospital, bound to the metal bedframe by my ankles and wrists, a khaki jumpsuit at the foot of my bed.
“The doctor … soon.…. . important … someone else … talk to … let him in?”
I nod at her piecemeal question. She leaves the room and not ten seconds later, Josiah comes in. He bears his cowboy hat in his hands like he has come to pay his respects at my funeral.
“… okay?” He pulls up a chair at my bedside and I hide my hands beneath the blankets.
My mouth is dry. The words won’t come. Josiah offers me a plastic cup of water and I drink from it in tiny sips, a dove at a birdbath. He is too polite to comment, but he gawks at my scarred arms.
“… lot of … to see you.”
I tap on my ear. “I can’t hear very well.”
He repositions his chair to the other side of the bed and leans toward me, keeping his words soft. “The nurse said the hearing loss is temporary,” he says. “Lots of folks came to see you. They’re all in the waiting room, whole pack of ’em. Grace, Zoe Markham, your friend from the reservation …”
“I don’t think I should ask what brought you here.”
“Not sure what you’re talking about.”
“I’m not really in the mood for being coy.”
He slices the air with a flattened palm, as if to say no worries, I got it. “Your father, you mean? Whole thing was self-defense. I saw it with my own two eyes.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“He shot you, Providence. The knife? If you didn’t do it to him, what was he going to do to you?”
My head is still underwater, thoughts hazy, but the memory of the knife in my father’s neck unfurls with perfect clarity. My shoulders ache from stabbing him so many times.
“You weren’t there.”
“Oh, I was. Karishma Jadhav called this morning, said you’d be at the liquor store. She was worried you’d get hurt. I got there in the nick of time to see it happen.”
“Why are you doing this?” I whisper. “Why are you lying for me?”
“Just doing what we both know is right,” he says. “Besides, there was a man outside the store who saw it too. He and I agree we saw the same thing. The one who stopped the bleeding, remember?” Josiah’s knees crack when he stands. He inhales through gritted teeth.
“People might ask questions.”
“I think it’s an open secret no one in Annesville was going to shed a tear when Tom Byrd met the reaper.”
My father is in hell. I sent him there. The thought brings the faintest smile to my lips.
“I’d offer a penny for your thoughts, but you never were too hard to read.”
“My mother was the inscrutable one.”
At that, Josiah smiles. “The preacher promised me he’d work on a headstone for Elissa. It’ll take a few weeks, but he’s going to put it under the chokecherry tree, facing west so she can watch the sunsets.”
“Her ashes are mine now, aren’t they?”
“The house and everything in it are yours. I know everyone else in his family is gone, and frankly, your father didn’t seem like the type to have a will.”
My father starts slurring in my mind, but his voice is already fading.
“Tell the preacher I want her ashes buried,” I say to Josiah. “She can be the first Byrd woman buried at the church.”
The first and, God willing, the last.
I am warm from morphine. My body cries out for sleep. Connor tries to see me, but I turn him away. I drift off during Sara’s visit, and when I wake, it is Grace in the room with me.
She sleeps on a cot beneath the window, curled up like a wounded fawn. She has eaten the pudding a nurse brought for me earlier in the night. The empty pouch lies on the floor beside her shoes and her backpack. It is scuffed and discolored, bulging with books and binders. Her life should have been so much simpler. We’ve robbed her of childhood. We’ve forced her to grow up long before she should have. For all the times she reminded me she was no longer a child, she didn’t understand how much less painful her world would be if she was. She should be studying for midterms and buying a dress for prom. Instead, she sleeps beside me in a hospital room, motherless, fatherless, lulled to sleep by the rhythmic tones of the machines to which I am attached.
She stirs beneath the blanket. Her elbows and knees pop.
“Grace.”
Every question is about me. Are you angry with me? Can you forgive me? Have I committed the unpardonable sin? Am I evil? Did the world make me this way or is this who I have been all along? Is this my nature, the way a snake must always bite?
My father deserved to die, but my sister did not deserve to become an orphan. I don’t know how to reconcile that both can be true. I don’t know how to reconcile how I can feel so righteous and so depraved all at once. When I thought of killing my father, I thought of him as just that. Mine. I forget he is ours, mine and Grace’s and Harmony’s, and even if we all prayed for him to die, I am the one who ended his life.
I am a killer.
I am nauseous at the word, but that’s a good thing. Taking a human life is meant to weigh on your soul. This pang of remorse is what separates me from a sociopath.
I will tell myself this for the rest of my life, but I will only believe it some of the time.
Grace cloaks herself in a blanket like E.T. She brings her vape to her lips, but stops short of smoking. I want to crack open our skulls and compare our brains side by side to see if the same defect that made me capable of unspeakable violence afflicts her too. I picture it as a malignant growth spreading across the tissue, turning it from gray to black, and if I find it within her, I will take a melon baller and scoop it out.
“Thank you for staying.” I reach toward her. She hesitates but takes my hand.
“You would have stayed for me.”
“Is …” I swallow hard. It’s difficult to speak. “Do you have somewhere to stay?”
“Mitesh said I could stay with him and Karishma for a little while.”
“That’s kind of him.”
She sneaks a tiny pull from her vape and exhales into the blanket. She slips it into her bra like I did with the switchblade. “It’s just the two of us now. We’re all that’s left.” She climbs into my bed. We lie forehead to forehead.
“I know about Harmony.”
We search each other’s eyes for absolution we cannot grant. My sin is unforgivable, and her sin is not mine to forgive. If we fall short of forgiveness, we must pay each other the kindness of silence, now and forever. Grace curls into me, once again the tiny baby I cradled in the linen closet, bringing the crucifix necklace to rest on her bottom lip. Maybe it is not Jesus lashed to the cross. Maybe it is the penitent thief after all.
She begins to tremble. I draw her closer.
“It’s okay, Grace. You can grieve if you need to.”