The Cormorant (30 page)

Her legs and feet are still numb. Her skull feels like aquarium glass tapped on by an unruly child:
thoom thoom thoom, hello little fish
.

Jerry doesn’t say much. He mostly just stares at her, face a pair of masks fused together: not comedy and tragedy, but confusion and horror.

Miriam looks back at the shore. Sees the little island with the two reaching, beseeching hands disappearing slowly. The boat motor growls.

“I need to–” It feels like she’s trying to talk past a wad of bristly hay in her throat. She coughs, and Jerry quickly grabs for a small thermos behind him and hands it over. She opens it, takes a long swig – coffee. Cold. Doesn’t matter. It’s perfect. “I need to get to Key West. A friend is in…”
A body bag.
“Danger.”

“Sure, sure, but maybe you oughta get to a hospital first.”

“No time.” She levels her gaze at him. “How’d you find me?”

“You really wanna know?”

“I hate that question because, yes, I–” She breaks into a hard, raspy cough. “I really obviously want to know.”

“The bird led me here.”

The cormorant grunts.

Miriam says nothing but raises an eyebrow.

“I was getting ready to do some morning fishing. I drove the truck and the boat down to the bay. But then Corie here started… you know, freaking out. Flapping her wings, beating them against the side of the boat. Squawking. Then she flew away and landed on the hood of my truck and I kept trying to wrangle her away, but she kept flying back.”

“And you were OK with that.”

“No, I wasn’t. I wanted to get out in the water while the fish were still jumping. Then like that, she flew away. And not toward the water but toward the road. No way was I gonna keep up with her on foot so I got in the truck. She’d fly. I’d follow. I’d lose her – but the highway’s a straight shot so I kept driving and looking and then I’d see her sitting there on top of a Don’t Drink and Drive sign or on somebody’s mailbox. Then, soon as I got close again–” He claps his hands. “She’d take off again.”

“She led you here.”

“She led me here. You got it.”

Holy shit
.

She turns toward the bird. “You’re a good bird.”

Corie oinks at her. The bird’s beak opens and closes with a clack.

Jerry says, “I gotta tell you, the last thing I expected to see was you hanging from that tree.”

“Things didn’t work out.”

“With your perp?”

“Yeah. With my perp.”

“So now what happens?”

Now he hurts those people who fell in with me. Including you, Jerry. All because I fucked up. All because I took my shot and I missed it.

FIFTY

THE MONSTER WE MADE

Back at the Malibu she tells Jerry that she appreciates his help. She even leans forward and gives him a small, probably unpleasant hug. Her arms don’t quite touch his, don’t quite
complete
the embrace, but hugging is not a skill she has practiced very often in this life.

The hug hurts. Literally. Not in the way some people use that word now – literally as figuratively – but literally, actually, honest-to-all-the-gods-and-devils it hurts her body from top to bottom just to give a half-ass hug.

He tells her to go to the hospital.

He tells her to call the police.

She makes all the right noises – mm-hmm, yes, sure, it’ll be fine, right, right. And then she gets in the car and does none of those things.

From inside the glove box, she fetches her cell. She grabs Gabby’s number and starts to punch it in even as her tires are kicking up pebbles and the car lurches forward like a drunk off a barstool.

It doesn’t even get to one ring before someone answers.

“Miriam,” Ashley sings. “That’s such a pretty name.”

“You leave her alone.”

“File that one under
too late
.”

“Then stay right there. Because I’m coming for you.”

He laughs. “You came for me once already. How’d that work out for you? I admit, you got away much faster than I expected. But once I was done with your girlfriend here my friends gave me a message – I saw it written in her blood across the bathroom mirror. I saw the words drip together and tell me that you were on your way and that I was to expect a phone call. So I sat by the phone. I felt the familiar tickle, heard their little whisper – and sure enough, ringy-dingy. Here we are.”

“I’ll find a way to hurt you. To whittle you down like a stick.”

“You’re on the losing side, Mir. The side of the scrappy underdogs.”

“The scrappy underdogs always win.”

“Only in the movies. In the movies, the underdogs pull it out of the fire in the final game. In the movies, the killer’s victim makes it out alive – the final girl who kills the big bad boogeyman. But this isn’t the movies. This is life. And in life, the monsters prevail.”

She screams into the phone.

But he’s already ended the call.

“The girl is expendable,” says a voice. Miriam turns. Her bowels go to ice water. It’s Harriet. Harriet, the grim assassin. An evil little teapot, short and stout, here is her handle, here is Harriet cutting off all your fingers and toes because she wants to prove her dominance over you.

Miriam knows it’s not her. She tells herself that again and again.
It’s not her, it’s not her, it’s not her
. But still, she feels her innards loop like a noose at the sight of her. “You’re not real.”

“You should’ve died that day in the Pine Barrens. I gave you a gift. I gave you my gun. Think about it. If you had used it, we wouldn’t be here right now. Gabby would be alive. Your mother would not be next on the chopping block. You have less than two days now, you realize.”

“I chose life.”

“You chose complexity.”

“I
chose
. You’re always telling me there’s work to do. Well, I choose to do it. I chose that day to put a bullet in your ugly-ass haircut and my life is now my own no matter how you haunt me or mess with my head.”

Harriet smiles. “Good. Then maybe you’re ready for this. Maybe. Because you didn’t listen to me before. I said you weren’t ready but did you listen? The forces working against you realize the power you have. You’re the penny on the tracks – small, but still able to derail a train.”

“That’s a myth. The penny just gets squashed.”

“I prefer my narrative. Though maybe that’s what will happen to you. Maybe you’ll get squashed. Maybe this is all just a trap and I’m not really here to help you. Maybe I’m here to hurt you. Maybe everything I tell you to do has just led you to deeper, wider circles of misery. You’re Dante in Hell. You’re Sisyphus pushing that boulder up and up and up until it falls back again and again
and again
. Or maybe you’re Prometheus. You stole something precious from the gods, and now they punish you. I’m the eagle pecking out your liver for all of eternity.”

“Just shut up. I’m tired of hearing you speak.”

“It’s like I told you. Nature is brutal and grotesque. If you see yourself as a part of nature – as you must, dear Miriam – then you too must be brutal and grotesque if you are to persevere. Once I told you to be docile. Now is not the time to be docile.”

“I said
shut up
and
go away
.”

“Not without leaving you one last gift.”

Then Miriam turns–

Harriet has a gun pointed at her head.

The gun barrel is a dark eye, unblinking.

Trigger pull.

Bang.

The vision hits Miriam like a bullet to the head.

HOW GABBY DIES

Fast forward: she and the other woman are bolting down Duval Street past the drunks and pirates and cruise-ship tourists and the blonde pulls Miriam into an alcove between an art gallery and a Cuban food joint and Miriam starts cursing about those thin-dicked shit-birds, those assholes who think they can saunter into a bar and jam their nickel-sized cocks into whatever coin-slot they want just by using a few half-ass weak-fuck pick-up lines–

The other woman says, “You have a dirty mouth. I want to taste it.”

Then it’s her mouth on Miriam’s–

It’s five years later and it’s night in Key West and the air feels like the breath from a panting dog and she tosses and turns but her skin crawls and her heart is a jumpy mouse. It’s another panic attack where she feels oh so small in a world so big, like she’s nothing at all, just a bug under a boot, like all eyes are watching, like all eyes are judging–

And she gets up and goes to the bathroom and turns on the light and the scars that criss-cross her face like the clumsy lacing of a crooked boot are puffy and pink and long-healed but still horrible, X’s and dashes of ruined skin. Across the nose. The brow. The cheeks. Lines cut into her cheeks. Her face is monstrous. Like when a child breaks a vase, then sloppily glues it back together again.

The panic seizes her. She’s ugly. Mauled. Nobody will love her. Nobody
could
love her. Her breathing goes shallow. She feels woozy. Sick with self-hatred, like it’s an infection whose tendrils grow long and dig deep.

This is it. She can’t do this. Can’t handle it. The horror and dread and disgust are a meteoric fist punching her into the dirt–

She flings open the medicine cabinet.

Oxycodone. Old prescription.

She grabs that.

And Ambien. Her sleeping pills.

That, too.

And Ativan. For the anxiety.

She puts a bunch into her mouth. Not even sure how much. Not too many. She’s sure of that. The wrong amount is the right amount.

She scoops water into her mouth from the faucet.

The pills go down, and she goes back to bed.

Soon she stops crying. And shaking. And sweating.

And breathing.

FIFTY-ONE

STILL ALIVE

Gabby is still alive.

The vision says she dies in five years.

Which means today, she’s still alive.

But I bet I know who’s gonna carve up her face like that
.

Miriam slams her foot down on the pedal. She knows that it means a cop could stop her. Let them. Anybody tries to stop her, she’ll cut a path through them all.

FIFTY-TWO

PRETTY PRETTY CICATRIX

The door is ajar.

Blood on the inside doorknob. A handprint.

Miriam hurries inside.

She goes room to room – a small house, not a long journey – open kitchen, living room, bedroom. She smells a mix of perfume, piss, blood, and it’s in the bathroom that she finds Gabby.

No no oh no I’m so sorry–

Gabby, curled up in the well of the old clawfoot bathtub there. Lying in her own sticky blood. Her face vented, sliced, each cut like a fish’s gill, and as she sits up and cradles her head against Miriam’s thigh, the dry blood crackles and some of her cuts open anew–

Fresh red soaks Miriam’s jeans.

Miriam fumbles with her cell phone. She calls 911.

She strokes Gabby’s hair. Kisses the back of her head. Tries to soothe her with shushes and coos but then worries that it sounds like she’s trying to quiet Gabby’s whimpers and cries and so instead she just tells her how sorry she is, how this is all her fault, how she’s going to get the guy who did this.

Gabby speaks, then – with stiff lips where the words slip out broken and half-uttered but clear enough to hear. “Not all about you.”

If only you knew
.

Gabby looks at Miriam. “He got you too.”

Miriam nods.
And I’m going to kill him for it. Somehow.

“Don’t have…” A pause. “Health. Insurance.” And that brings on a new wave of tears. Out of all of this, that’s what makes Gabby cry the hardest: that she doesn’t have health insurance. Miriam thinks,
Welcome to America
, and finds that all the more heartbreaking.

THE ARROW THROUGH THE HEART OF THE APPLE

They take Gabby into the ambulance. Gabby cries, wants Miriam to come with her – but here, too, are the cops, and they want to talk to Miriam about what happened. And she thinks,
I don’t have time for this
, because two days left is rapidly about to become
one
day left as time bleeds out as if from a throat-slit pig. So she does the only sensible thing.