She puts the suitcase on the bed and unzips it. She throws aside the piles of socks and T-shirts, opens the zipper compartment, retrieves the Sig Sauer that she picked up at a gun show near the airport — no ID required, no background check, just cash and a big-ass smile. The guy who sold her the gun was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a robed Jesus holding a machine gun, defending the Statue of Liberty from a burka-clad figure wielding a machete. So much for subtlety. She wonders what her mild-mannered, laundry-washing, turn-the-other-cheek-preaching grandfather would think of this passionate new marriage between guns and Our Lord and Savior.
She slides twelve rounds into the magazine, loads the magazine into the Sig Sauer, flips the slide release, and places the weapon into the small of her back.
Time to go to work.
Let’s say you have made a life together. Let’s say this took half a lifetime to accomplish. Let’s say that, after several years of trial and error, you met the one. You quickly disentangled yourself from previous entanglements, because it was obvious: him. You forged a bond. You lived together first to test the waters, though it turned out they didn’t need testing; the water was fine. It was more than fine. You got married, had a child. Let’s say you were blessed with far more than you ever asked for — the good career, the nice house in a small town in California, the vacations to Canada and Oregon and Mexico and, occasionally, Europe. Let’s say the child was challenging, on account of her strong will, but she was happy and healthy, and you knew that stubborn nature would do her good, in the long run. You knew she would always stand up for herself. Also, even as a toddler, she had such a strong sense of justice, a kind of explosively righteous anger when she sensed someone — anyone — was being mistreated.
The husband was hardworking and funny and attentive, great in bed, and if you sometimes fought, you always came back together. There was no one you’d rather grow old with — really. Twenty years later, he was still the one.
Let’s say everything was going according to plan, and better. Let’s say you were happy. Genuinely happy. On a razor’s edge of happiness, holding your breath, thinking, How can this last?
Let’s say it didn’t.
It’s 11:01 p.m. when she pulls into Plantation Estates. She leaves the headlights off, rolls slowly through the azalea-covered entrance. She’s charted it all out on Google Maps. She has photos of the house from Zillow. Not just photos but an actual walk-through, a video. How many times did she mute the Muzak and watch that walk-through in slow motion? The entryway, the living room, the open-plan kitchen, up the stairs to the master bedroom, down the stairs to the basement fitness room.
She deactivated the Nest Cam online before she drove into the neighborhood. She did it from the parking lot of a motel on Government Street, connecting as a guest to the motel’s free Wi-Fi. The motel’s password was easy to figure out — Guest2018.
So was the senator’s. He’s a well-known Bama fan, and he graduated in 1988. Bama88.
It doesn’t matter how much you tell people about the fragility of their “smart homes,” they will continue to choose dumb passwords, passwords they can remember.
His wife isn’t home tonight. His two mostly grown sons are away. It’s so easy to map a person’s home these days, to map a person’s life. So many details are public. The wife is the CEO of a telecommunications firm, and she spends a lot of time giving speeches. This week she’s in Iowa. It’s good for his brand — such a visible, attractive, articulate wife. Well-spoken but soft-spoken, powerful without committing the cardinal sin of losing her feminine charm. A powerhouse in her own right. Why isn’t she the senator, instead of him? At press events and rallies and town halls, someone invariably asks, “When’s your wife gonna run?” and he invariably smiles and says, “The day she runs is the day I hang up my hat. One politician in the family is enough.”
She checked the sons’ Instagram and Facebook profiles before she left the hotel, just to be 100 percent certain. The youngest son just posted drunk pictures from a frat party at Vanderbilt, and the eldest is leading an all-night coding session at his start-up in Greensboro, North Carolina. By noon tomorrow, she knows, the wife and sons will be heading home, converging in a cloud of shock and grief, a thousand unanswered questions. She feels bad for the sons, not necessarily for the wife. The wife helped him get where he is. Half a million dollars and counting from the NRA, the organization that would most keenly approve of her back-channel, unlicensed, untraceable purchase of the Sig Sauer.
She knows from interviews that he exercises in his home gym, at night between ten thirty and eleven thirty, while watching TV. He is regimented in his exercise schedule. He claims to only need six hours of sleep per night, and he says doing the elliptical before bed helps him sleep like a baby. He’s not shy about his state-of-the-art sound system, or his affection for eighties TV. In an interview for a regional magazine last year, the wife said she had the whole thing soundproofed to save their marriage.
The sliding glass door on the back of the house is easy enough to open. He has never given up his pride at being a regular guy, living in a regular neighborhood, foregoing the security detail.
She finds him in the basement. It looks just like it did in the Zillow walk-through, only without the wallpaper. He is on the elliptical, facing a large wall-mounted television, his gray sweatshirt and blue running shorts streaked with sweat. The TV surround-sound is turned up loud, Hawaii Five-O — the original series.
If he were to turn around, he would see a woman who looks like a Girl Scout mom or mabe a new neighbor. She is not a scary person. She waits a moment. Perhaps he will turn around. She wants to tell him why she is doing this. She wants to tell him he is only the first one.
She wants to tell him she is starting at home. She wants to say, This is the only way to make you people listen.
Standing four feet behind him, she is not certain she would find the words. She is not certain she would be so articulate, or that she could even go through with it.
He doesn’t turn around.
Is it even worth going into the details? The phone call from her sister, saying, “I just saw the news and wanted to make sure you’re okay.”
She was in the middle of trying to find colored ink cartridges for the printer, because she needed to print some photos for her daughter. She was sitting on the floor of the hallway, going through the cabinets where she thought the extra ink cartridges would be, if they had any.
“What news?” she had asked, holding her breath, but of course she already knew what kind of news it would be, because it was always that kind of news, once every couple of weeks or so. You just hoped it didn’t happen in your town. You never thought it couldn’t — that kind of arrogant assurance, “it doesn’t happen here,” ended at an elementary school in Connecticut — but you hoped it wouldn’t. You hoped your town would be spared.
“Are Brian and Dottie at home?” her sister had asked carefully.
She could hardly get out the word “no” — wasn’t sure if she said it, or if she just thought it so loudly that her sister heard.
“Where?” she asked.
One beat, two, an eternity. “Burlingame Avenue,” her sister said.
“I have to go.”