Page 8

CHAPTER 7

August 12 th

12:32 AM

M IDNIGHT . I DRIVE through the reservation, careening down remote, lightless roads with no destination in mind. I acquired the habit on parole when I was tethered to my halfway house by an invisible fifty-mile leash. Aimlessly driving country roads became my preferred hobby. The streets of Kansas City offer a less bucolic diversion, but occasionally I still find myself navigating the rural stretches east of the city, hugging the banks of the Missouri River and dreaming about following the water all the way to St. Louis.

Missouri. Miserable place. It’s my punishment for near-matricide: living out the rest of my days in Missouri.

My mother’s body is probably on a road just like this, but there is no earthly trace of her to be found. She has disappeared. She has wandered into one of the world’s dark corners, fallen into one of its holes, and she disintegrates more with each passing day, not quite dead but not quite alive. A ghost who cannot be properly mourned. What sweet sorrow it must be to slip into the next life without even a sound.

It can’t end like this. What I did to my mother has defined my entire life to this point, and, perhaps as it should, it will define the rest of my life too. It shapes me into who I am, for better and mostly for worse, entwining me with my mother like conjoined twins who share organs and spines and brains. It’s a twisted form of codependency. Without my mother, I don’t know who I am. If I never ran her over, who would I be? Would that person be even vaguely recognizable to the woman I am now?

As my mother yawped beneath the car, her bones crushed, her tendons torn, not even the intended target of my wrath, I did not feel remorse. I could recognize the other emotions. Disgust. Shock. Horror. Even guilt. But guilt is not the same as remorse. Guilt touches you on the surface, but remorse echoes through your marrow. I always fall just short of it, eluding me like the end of a rainbow. I am always chasing it, desperate to prove I can feel the one emotion that would absolve me of my greatest fear. Remorse separates humans from animals. We are not the only species that kills for sport, but we are the only one that feels remorse when we do—and if I cannot feel remorse for what I have done, then am I even human at all?

An oncoming truck blinds me with its brights. Before my retinas can be further scorched, I peel off onto another side road, which runs out after half a mile. When I come to a stop, it takes me several moments to realize the vast, treeless expanse unfolding before me is not the prairie, but a lake.

The water is black and sedate like an oil spill. A single light on the opposite shore illuminates a boatless dock. I take the gun from my glove compartment before approaching the water. I’m less worried about a serial killer snatching me from the bushes than I am about becoming the midnight snack of perturbed wildlife. A murderer I can handle; a bear or a cougar would, frankly, make me shit myself. There’s a reason I explore the countryside in a car instead of on foot.

I leave my sandals on the craggy strip of sand separating the water from the grass and wade into the lake. The water kisses my knees. I wish I could swim or at least that I was brave enough to throw caution to the wind and plunge beneath the water. But I’m scared. Of drowning. Of the quiet. People muse about the silence underwater, like it’s something sacrosanct and beautiful, stealing precious moments away from the noise of the universe. I think the universe isn’t noisy enough. Even now, with the chirring crickets and sighing wind to remind me I am not alone, the quiet closes in on me like the jaws of an invisible beast.

I’m anxious. Short of breath. The gun is foreign and unwieldy in my hand. I have no more business handling it than a toddler who has broken into their parents’ gun box. I chuckle as I unlatch the safety.

I fire at the dock light and imagine it as my father’s face. It’s a series of sensory throttles: the muzzle flash, the gun recoiling into my shoulder, the acrid smell of gunpowder, the ear-splitting crack like the peals of a thousand church bells. My breaths are deafening in the ensuing silence. I wait for something to happen. I wait for police sirens to come screaming down the dirt road, or for an irascible creature to pounce at me from the shadows, or for something, anything other than this noiseless purgatory. It feels like I’ve detonated a nuclear bomb, only for there to be no mushroom cloud, no blinding pulse of light.

I raise the gun to fire it again, but my arm is trembling. My cheeks are wet, my breathing ragged.