Red-Blooded Heart Read online

  I am loading a shell into the chamber, and I sidestep.

  He goes sprawling, colliding with the hot tub. He shrieks.

  I cock the shotgun.

  “Wait!” he screeches. “Wait, hold on, what the hell? Stop!”

  I level the gun at him.

  “What do you want?” he says. “I have money. You want money? I can get you money. I can get you anything you want, just name it. Let’s talk, okay, let’s work this out.”

  I hesitate. I don’t like this, the way he’s begging. It’s bugging me.

  “I’ll stay away from Juniper. She’ll never see me again. You won’t either. I’ll go far away, and I’ll never say a damned word about this to anyone. I don’t want to die, man. Please.”

  My jaw twitches. “Shut up.”

  He’s starting to cry. “I can do better. I was drunk, and she pissed me off, but it’s not usually like that with us. I swear, I hit her less than any woman I’ve ever—”

  I pull the trigger, and the gun goes off, and there’s a spray of blood at his neck, and I run forward as quickly as I can and kick him hard in the chest, so that he lands on the ground and not on the deck, because I am so not interested in replacing boards on my deck again. I don’t want to clean up the blood.

  He lands on the ground next to the deck and he gazes up at me with accusing eyes.

  He doesn’t move.

  I fumble for another shell, but he’s still not moving.

  He’s dead.

  I look away. I set down the gun. I drag my hands over my face. “Fuck,” I whisper. And then I just keep whispering it, repeating it over and over. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

  I look back at him. He’s still staring at me.

  I go to him and close his stupid fucking eyes.

  I need a beer.

  * * *

  I probably shouldn’t be drinking.

  It’s late, and I have a lot of work to do, and alcohol is not going to make anything easier. It’ll only make it all harder. I should pour out the rest of the beer now.

  But I don’t. I finish it, sitting inside my house, where it’s warm. I am hiding from Graham’s body.

  I don’t feel guilty about what I did.

  I don’t.

  He deserved it. It’s not like Darius. This was a good thing I did. I saved Juniper from this asshole. I’m proud of myself. I’m not the least bit guilty.

  That’s not why I’m drinking this beer.

  I don’t want to think, anyway. My mind chatters at me a lot. It’s always got something to say, some stupid thing to turn over and look at in a different way, but right now, I wish it would be quiet, because I feel out of control of myself. I feel as though there is something in me that isn’t me, and that I let it out too much.

  And I don’t want to feel either.

  Eventually, the beer is finished, and then there’s nothing to do but work on the cleanup. This time, I don’t have to worry about a car. It’s easier. I load him up into the back of the truck and take him out into the woods.

  Not the same place I dumped Darius. That would be stupid. Elsewhere.

  I take Graham out into the woods, and I leave him, and I drive back home and clean the tarp and clean the bed of the truck, and I burn the blanket I had him wrapped in, and I take a look at the deck, but it’s too dark to tell if there’s any blood.

  It’s the wee hours of the morning by this point. Soon, the sun will be up. I decided I need to sleep before I tackle anything else, so I crawl into bed.

  I fall asleep right away and sleep a dreamless sleep.

  When I wake up the next morning, I feel stiff and sore and my head hurts, and that’s when I remember that he slammed my head around and he hit me in the face. Only then do I check myself out in the mirror.

  I look like hell.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  -deke-

  Due to the way my face looks, I can’t go and talk to Juniper, but I want to know how she’s doing, so I decide I’ll sneak in through the woods and go into the crawlspace.

  I’m not sure if anything bad happened to me, like if I had a concussion or not, and if it’ll be okay that I didn’t seek any medical treatment. I cleaned the wound on the back of my head well and did what I could to dress it.

  My face is swollen and black and blue from the places he hit me. I’m a royal mess. I can’t let her see me this way.

  As I’m walking through the woods, though, I see her.

  She doesn’t see me. She’s hacking her way through the underbrush, making a lot of noise, and yelling for Graham.

  Ah, well, I guess that’s to be expected. She must think that he’s out here in the woods somewhere, probably lost. How sweet that she’s looking for him. I roll my eyes. She should see that she’s better off now, shouldn’t she?

  But women are stupid about this sort of thing. I know that from experience.

  Juniper should come around, though, eventually. As long as she doesn’t connect me to it, anyway. Hopefully, she’ll decide he died out here from exposure.

  Hell, what if she brings some search party out here to comb the woods for him? What if they find something?

  How could I be so stupid as to not think of that?

  I follow her for a while, at a safe distance, far enough away that she can’t see me. I follow her and I watch her yell for him until she is hoarse.

  Eventually, she gives up and heads back for her house, and I follow her, glad that we’ll be getting out of the cold.

  I get into the crawlspace, once I’m sure she’s safe inside.

  She’s already shed her coat and hat. She is sitting in the kitchen, assembling herself some kind of snack, which seems to consist mostly of that freeze-dried food she has. She’s measuring out things from cans and then adding water, and then putting a saucepan on the stove. She stirs.

  Her face looks bad—worse than mine. She’s bruised and scabbed and her nose is twice its normal size. I am frightened that it is broken. Why hasn’t she gone to the hospital for this? She needs help.

  But I can’t confront her and tell her this.

  Maybe I can call her.

  But she’ll probably hang up on me. She hates me.

  She sets down the spoon on her stove. “You need to face it, Juniper,” she says aloud to herself. “Graham’s gone. He’s probably dead out there. Even if he’s not, even if he shows back up, no way are you going to convince him to stick around and help.”

  She turns away from the stove and goes over to the other side of the kitchen. She slams her hands down on the counter. “Everything is ruined. How am I supposed to do this without him?”

  Do what?

  What the hell is she talking about?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Juniper stops talking to herself after that. She paces. She stirs. She eats. She takes a shower. Then she goes to bed, and I know she’s got to be exhausted after all that trekking through the woods that she did.

  I watch her sleep for a while, but then I’m starting to nod off too. I did my fair share of trekking too. So, I go home.

  When I get there, I look at everything that I’ve looked at before again. Her social media. Graham’s social media. I try to figure out what the heck it is that she could be talking about. How could Graham help with anything at all? He’s not the helping type.

  What’s ruined?

  Why doesn’t she seem the least bit worried about him, and instead just worried about whatever it is that’s been ruined?

  This is driving me insane.

  The next day, I go back to the house, but her car isn’t there, and she’s not there either. Where did she go?

  I hope she hasn’t gone back to the city, but maybe it would be better if she did. This woman is not exactly good for me. She makes me crazy and she brings out the worst in me.

  I have a key to her place, because I built it, so I let myself in, and then I start going through her stuff. She hasn’t left behind her phone, but she did leave her laptop.

  Which is pass
word protected.

  I’m smart, but I’m not much of a computer hacker. I let that be.

  Eventually, I end up in the loft, and I find this box of letters, all of which are written to her sister, Elsie.

  “Dear Elsie,” it says at the top of each sheet of paper, and then she has written a long, long letter in round, careful printing. There are at least a hundred of these letters. There is no way that I can read them all, not unless she really has gone back to the city.

  I can’t chance that. I can’t stay here, reading all these letters when I don’t know when she’ll be back and when I can’t even be sure they have anything interesting to say.

  I skim through them, and they seem to be more of a diary than anything. Updates on how much money Juniper has saved, how she has scouted out a company to provide her with cabinets for her off-grid house. Detailed explanations on gardening and raising chickens.

  These don’t seem like letters to a sister.

  They’re probably nothing.

  I page back and read the first one.

  * * *

  Dear Elsie,

  I know you asked me to let it go, and I want to. I really want to. I see the sense in what you are saying, and I understand Mom’s point of view on the whole thing, and I even discussed it with my therapist, and she said that I need to honor your wishes, because this is all really about you and not about me.

  And, like I said, that’s what I want to do.

  I even spent a whole week trying to talk myself out of it. Whenever I would think about doing anything about it, I would tell myself to stop thinking that, and I would shut down any thoughts of any kind. And it was working, too. I was thinking about it all less and less. Probably, if I would have kept that up, I would have stopped thinking about it entirely.

  So, why didn’t I?

  Well, the other day at dinner, you came down and you were so upset, and I wanted to know what it was, and it was this TV show you’d watched. Something in the show had triggered you, and you could hardly eat, and you told me later that you sometimes wished you could go back to being on drugs, because they numbed you out, and the meds that the doctors give you just aren’t the same.

  The doctors say you have to face it all and move through it, and that’s the only way that you’ll get past the triggers. But you don’t want to have to do that.

  Look, Elsie, I know what you said. No matter what I do in the here and now, it can’t change the past. I can’t change what happened to you. I can’t make it right. I know that.

  I think I have to do it anyway, though.

  I’m not going to give you this letter. At least not for a long time. Maybe, after it’s all over, if it’s ever over, I will. Maybe then I’ll let you know what I did, and maybe it will help you.

  You said that it wouldn’t. You said that I wanted this because of myself. That it was all about trying to ease my own guilty conscience. And you also said that I didn’t need to do that, because you forgave me.

  The thing is, I don’t forgive myself.

  I think that’s why I have to do this. I have to make amends for my part in what happened to you. I can’t simply forgive myself for it. I don’t deserve that. But if I do this, if I go through with it, then maybe I can.

  I know it’s extreme. It’s even more extreme than what I told you about before, but I won’t get into all of it now. It’s probably better not to leave my plan lying out in black and white, written out for the world to see. Someone could find this letter, after all, and what if they found it before I managed to put my plan in motion?

  The plan is complicated, sis. It’s got a lot of steps, and I don’t have it all figured out yet.

  But the important thing is that I found him. I know where he is. So, now all I have to do is figure out how to get there myself. And I have to do it in such a way that it doesn’t call attention to myself. I have to find a way to cover my tracks.

  I think that being bold is the way to go, Else. I could be sneaky and try to go out there and do it on the sly, but I think it’s better to do in the broad light of day. That way, it looks less suspicious.

  It will really all hinge on whether or not people can believe it’s a coincidence, I suppose. I worry about that. I feel like it’s a weakness in my plan.

  But enough about that. I’ll write more as I get this all firmed up in my head.

  In the meantime, I want you to know that I love you. You are my sweet girl, and I would do anything for you. Anything at all within my power. I wish that I hadn’t hurt you in the first place. God, if you only knew how many times I have looked back and wished I’d made another decision. Any decision.

  I would die for you.

  There’s only one thing I can’t do for you, and that’s give this up. I know you asked me to, and so I’m apologizing again, for not being able to let it go. I’m sorry, Elsie.

  Maybe you wish you’d gotten a different sister, but you got me.

  That’s all.

  Love,

  Juniper

  * * *

  I don’t read every letter, but I skim them. The rest are less interesting, though. They’re all about how she saved up money to build this house and get out here. I don’t get it.

  Near as I can tell, living off the grid is the plan that she had, the one that’s her “extreme” plan.

  There’s something to do with finding a man.

  Who’s the man?

  Is Graham the man? Is he part of this plan somehow? Maybe something happened to her sister? Maybe Graham did it? Or maybe she did it. She apologizes a lot in the letter, so she obviously did something wrong. What I don’t get is how it has anything to do with living out here.

  And I’m not sure how I feel about learning that she’s hiding something or that she has a secret plan or that she’s done bad things to her sister.

  It’s not that I think that she’s perfect or anything. In that class I took in college, the one where we read Twilight, we talked about the double standards for morality for women and men. In books, male romantic heroes can be pretty dark. Edward Cullen is a vampire who’s killed people. He’s also controlling of Bella for the reason of protecting her. And he spends most of his time trying not to bite her and drink her blood and kill her too. But he’s considered a great guy and super romantic.

  Women, on the other hand, are not allowed to do anything wrong at all or else they cross into evil territory. Women can be bad or they can be good. They can be virgins or whores. They can be nothing in between.

  I mean, I don’t think this. I doubt anyone really thinks it, but it’s the soundtrack to our lives. It plays out in everything that we see—in movies and books and songs and memes and everywhere we look.

  Men are bad.

  Women are good.

  Men can’t help being bad. It’s in their nature. That’s why men cheat and why they lose their tempers and why they date rape. They are not to be trusted. There’s no script out there for being a good guy. Even if you manage to be one, it’s not because you’re naturally good, it’s because you managed to fight off all your violent, sexual male tendencies and kept yourself in check and did all of it while being humble and worshiping the goddesses of womanhood.

  And women are just good through and through. They only do violent things if they’re provoked. If a woman is a killer, it’s probably because there was some abusive guy behind the scenes, pulling her strings and making her do these things. Because women are sweet and small and nurturing. And if women ruled the world, there would be no more war, and everyone would hold hands and braid each other’s hair and sing, “Kum ba yah.”

  I mean, I think everyone knows that isn’t true, not really.

  I know that women aren’t perfect, and I don’t put them on pedestals and then feel the need to destroy them when they let me down.

  Oddly, I have a stray thought about my mother, and she is sobbing and beating her fists ineffectually against my chest and screaming at me. I push that thought away.

  Juniper ha
s flaws.

  Okay.

  I’m fine with it. I’m not going to put her in the evil woman box. I’m not going to demand she needs punishment.

  Really, I’m not.

  I mean, I thought she was cheating on Graham with me or me with Graham or whatever—I thought she was a floozy, and I didn’t turn my back on her then, did I? No, I stuck around and I continued to care about her, and that’s how I discovered that there was more to the story, and that she was a victim. And then I saved her.

  Maybe this will turn out the same way.

  I have to figure out what happened to her sister.

  But it’s not easy. I manage to find her sister’s social media accounts, and it’s not hard to figure out that her sister has been in and out of drug rehab for the past few years of her life. Also, her sister’s quite a bit younger than Juniper. Ten years younger, so her sister is still a teenager. She graduated high school just last year.

  But the drug stuff, I’d already guessed from the letter, because Juniper hinted at it.

  Triggers, Juniper wrote.

  People who get triggered have been through something traumatic, typically. Some kind of abuse or violence or attack or something.

  Well, I have to admit, it’s a word that maybe gets overused these days. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything quite that horrible. Maybe it’s just some trigger for a relatively benign psychological issue that caused Elsie to turn to drugs.

  I don’t know what that could be.

  Maybe their parents’ divorce, which happened a few years back, according to Elsie’s timeline. She made only a zillion posts about it.

  I’m a little appalled at how far back her social media footprint goes. Who lets a ten-year-old have this many profiles? And she doesn’t censor anything she says either.

  At the very least, she could set her profile to private. Someone should talk to her about this. But maybe whatever trauma she experienced in the divorce also makes Elsie a flamboyant performance artist who craves attention. Maybe when she doesn’t get enough attention, she turns to drugs. And maybe Juniper feels responsible for the divorce, so she’s created this house off the grid to bring her sister to so that Elsie can dry out from drugs and social media and get in touch with nature.