“Hello? Phillip?”
Olga and Carl Winnick stood in the shadowy living room with their backs to me, their postures strained and stiff and angry. Phillip stood beyond them in front of the closed drapes. I couldn’t see him very well in the murky light, but he seemed to be in dark pajamas almost the same shade as the bruises on his face.
Olga whirled and shrieked, “Get out of my house!”
I didn’t try any pretense. I said, “I’ve come to get Phillip.”
Olga came at me like an avenging Fury, actually running with her arm held out stiff and her fist closed like a battering ram. The woman was nuts if she thought she could scare me with that fist.
I grabbed her wrist and twisted it, then got her other wrist and locked it behind her back. The woman was wiry, and stronger than I’d expected, but I knew I could have her on the floor in a second. She seemed to know that, too, because she didn’t kick at me, just twisted her stiff neck and panted like a tethered dragon, sending out hot air and the odor of liquor.
Carl Winnick ran past us toward the kitchen. Without his executive suit jacket, his barrel chest and short legs made him look almost pathetically misshapen.
Olga said, “This is all your fault! You and people like you, filling his head with filthy ideas!”
I called to Phillip over her head. “Phillip, you’re a good, decent, talented young man, and you don’t have to stay here. Come with me.”
He shook his head. “It won’t…make any difference.”
“It will! Of course it will. You’re hurt now, but you’ll heal and everything will be okay. You don’t have to live a lie anymore.”
“Just…live with my parents hating me.”
“They don’t really hate you. They just don’t know you. They’ll change, you’ll see.”
Carl ran from the kitchen and jammed his red face close to mine. “I’ve called the police, girl, so you’d best leave before they come and arrest you.”
I stared at him, and something clicked into place in my brain.
Phillip took a couple of steps forward and said, “Leave her alone, Dad.”
That’s when I saw the gun. The barrel was dark, like his pajamas, and he carried it with the muzzle pointed down by his thigh. In his large hand, the stock was almost invisible. But I could see the telltale red pinprick that showed the safety was off. I should have known. In addition to teaching his son to open doors for ladies, Carl Winnick had taught his son how to handle a semiautomatic.
I said, “Phillip, what are you doing with a gun?”
Too calmly, he said, “I’m going to kill myself with it.”
Most of the time when people threaten to kill themselves, you can hear in their voice a silent plea to talk them out of it. To bargain with them. To promise them that things will change, that their lives will get easier, that some injustice to them will be righted, that somebody will listen to them and actually hear what they’re saying. Phillip wasn’t doing any of those things. He was stating a cool intention, one that he’d already worked out in his head, one for which he could see no alternative.
Carl said, “Didn’t you learn anything when you got beaten up?”
“I learned how ashamed I make you. I learned I’ll never be the son you want.”
Slowly, Phillip’s arm raised so the gun’s barrel was at the side of his head. I heard a silent whimpering inside my own head, and a sick metallic taste coated my mouth. I had to stop him somehow, but every idea carried the possibility of making him pull the trigger.
Even Carl seemed to understand that something had to be said that would change Phillip’s mind.
“I’m not an unforgiving man, son, you know that. You can make me proud of you again!”
Phillip’s voice took on a new irony. “Sure, all I have to do is kill myself.”
“Do you have any idea what that would do to me and your mother? Do you want to heap more shame on us?”
I lost hope then. Just completely lost the last thread of thin hope I’d been clinging to.
So did Phillip. Wearily, he said, “There’s more than one way to kill myself. With a bullet, or living the way you want me to live. Either way, I’ll be dead.”
I had loosened my hold on Olga, and she suddenly twisted free.
“Phillip, we’re going to send you to a hospital! They’ll cure you! When you’re yourself again, you can still go to Juilliard!”
Phillip barked a hoarse laugh that jerked his head backward, and the gun sounded with a roaring blast. He crumpled to the floor with blood spilling around his head in a bright pool. Olga screamed and covered her face with both hands. Carl gripped the door frame and stared goggle-eyed and frozen. I tried to push past them, my cell phone in hand, already dialing 911.
I didn’t realize I was sobbing until Deputy Jesse Morgan gently shoved me aside.
“Somebody already called,” he said.
He had his own phone out, calling for an ambulance, then he rushed to Phillip and blocked my view.
The thin wail of an ambulance’s siren was already cutting through the mid-morning heat, and I knew that several more cars from the Sheriff’s Department would soon arrive. I walked back to Marilee’s house and closed the door.
I didn’t want to see them take Phillip’s body out in a bag. I was afraid I might kill Carl Winnick if I did.
Back in Marilee’s guest room, I crawled into bed. With the wooden blinds closed, the room was dark as a cave, and the stucco walls were thick enough to muffle sounds from outside. If I covered my head with a pillow, I couldn’t hear any noise at all from the Winnicks’ house.
I knew how to do this. I knew how to numb myself from horror. I knew how to withdraw into myself so the sharp edges of reality wouldn’t scrape me and jab me and cut me. I had thought I could face life, but I couldn’t. I didn’t even want to.
Ghost slithered under the covers and pushed himself into the crook of my body, sending his body heat into my stomach. Instinctively, I cupped my hands around him and felt his heart beating. His rough tongue lapped at my wrist, and he began to purr. Dumb animal to dumb animal, he was sending me love in the only way he knew how, and gradually it crept into my cold veins and to my anguished heart.
I finally had to admit to myself that it wasn’t the world I was retreating from, but my own rage. I truly and sincerely might take my.38 in hand and go over and fill Carl Winnick with bullets. I truly and sincerely might go over and pistol-whip Olga Winnick to death. I had it in me to do that, and I knew it and was terrified by it. I also knew there’s nothing so paralyzing as unexpressed fury.
My cell phone rang in my pocket and sent Ghost scrambling out of bed. I checked the ID and groaned. It was Guidry.
Without any preambles, he said, “Dixie, the Winnick boy is alive. He’s on his way to St. Pete’s trauma center. I don’t know how badly he’s hurt, but he’s alive.”
I sat up and wiped at the tears on my face with the edge of the sheet. “Carl Winnick was the man who took the pipe away from Tanisha. He either clubbed Phillip himself or he hired Bull Banks to do it for him.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just know. He used the same words to me that he used to Tanisha, called us both ‘girl.’ I know it was him.”
“Deputy Morgan says you were at the door when Phillip shot himself. The Winnicks say they don’t know why he did it. Do you?”
“Sure. He told them why. They didn’t want the son they had, and he couldn’t live with that. His mother’s response was that they were going to send him to a hospital to ‘cure’ him.”
“Jesus. Poor kid.”
“You’ll go after Carl Winnick, right? Because if you don’t, I will.”
“No you won’t.”
The phone went dead, and I slammed it against the covers.
“Son of a bitch! Egotistical bastard! Shithead!”
Yelling is always good when you feel totally helpless.
But Phillip wasn’t dead. Maybe a miracle would happen and he would be okay.