Page 48 of Antihero
He throws open the door, noticing a speck on the roof and stopping briefly to shine it away with spit on his thumb before climbing into the driver’s seat. I stay close, just in case, creeping just out of sight.
The door closes. I wait.
It doesn’t take long.
The car rocks and jerks with his struggles, and I don’t need to look to see him thrashing in the driver’s seat, the cord around his throat pinning him back against the headrest, Paige behind it, holding the garrotte until his movements stop.
***
“You seem different of late. Brighter.”
I laugh, raising an eyebrow. “Are you calling me dim?”
Charlotte actually smiles. A small one, but still. She suggested taking our session outside today, since the sun is shining. We sit on a disused wooden bench that points off the end of the promontory towards Tregam; the asylum looming behind us.
“Have you found a purpose? Something to live for.”
I shrug. I feel easy today, and her questions don’t press anxiety into my heart like they usually do. Perhaps they haven’t been for a while. “I don’t know. It might not last.”
The truth is, I haven’t been able to wrap my head around the reality of Paige’s condition. Her temporariness. My heart believes she’ll endure. My head won’t see her as a sick girl. She just feels so… vibrant. So alive. No matter what she tells me. What will I do if she doesn’t endure? Can I take another loss? Will I somehow be made responsible for that, too?
“The human mind can heal from many things,” Charlotte says, watching me, seeming to sense the depressing turn of my mind. She’s good. She could’ve made herself rich on the mainland, catering to rich types who would put the wealth of Feston to shame. But she doesn’t even serve Feston here. Just the asylum.
“It has to want to,” I point out.
“People find their reasons.” She takes a deep breath, the air fresh and crisp. “Let’s play a hypothetical.”
“Okay,” I say, only slightly wary. I came here to stop killing. Not to heal, not really. But now… maybe I should give healing a chance. Real healing, not distracting myself by chasing Paige all over the island. Much as that has been something I needed. She’s reminded me how to feel, how to want something for myself.
“Say you’re responsible for your sister’s death, as your guilt would have you believe. Would that be so bad?”
I choke out a laugh. “Would it bebad?”
“Yes. Perhaps it was simply her time. Perhaps she was in pain.”
Was Cass in pain? Of a kind. But the way Charlotte suggests it… like she was on a deathbed, and I merely pulled a plug. No. I pulled atrigger.
“It wasn’t like that.”
“No?”
Wasn’t it? Was she dying before I killed her? I remember her, so gaunt, eyes so huge and mad. I think of the crime scenes in her wake. Perhaps she was on a deathbed, after all.
“There was a time,” I find myself saying, “Before… a lot of things. That she was getting better. Finally, she was… I don’t know, finding her way. Then she went missing. Presumed dead.” When Cocooner, then Caleb, had taken her. He’d intended to kill her. But he’d seen something in her. Some kindred spirit. Spared her to be some sick paramour, instead. And boy, did she live up to it.
“I didn’t want to accept it. I put up missing posters, searched the city, got to know some scary types…” Scary types who would later be invaluable contacts as Needler. Types that knew who was killing whom. They didn’t know I was the same man by then, of course, but I knew how best to deal with them the second time around.
“I wouldn’t give up. I would’ve given anything to give her another chance. My own life. The lives of others.” I look down at my palms, thumb scraping over the burn, acquired when that first life went out in my hands. “And then she came back. She was alive.” My words fade, giving way on the last words, strengthening again as I admit, “And it would have been better if she'd died when I thought she did. She wasn't… something that should be alive.”
My eyes sting with unshed tears. A single one escapes, falling into my palm.
Charlotte lets the quiet extend. The wind sifts through the grass around our bench. She begins slowly. “The dead aren’t around to alter our opinion of them. You don’t need to block out what she was like in the end. But you, and only you, can choose which version of them you choose to keep. In your memory, or your heart.”
I look at the tear in my palm, fallen on the edge of the scar, obscuring the line between burn and unblemished skin.
Maybe that’s what this is. Not a wiping away of a burned past, but a way to mend it with the chances of a future.
***
