MARY MAY HELD THE GUN STILL. SHE HAD ONE HAND ON HER brother’s shoulder but she was looking around at John, feeling exposed. “You say you’re not killers,” Mary May said. “But my father went up the mountain and he never came back down. He died up there trying to get Drew and now I’m trying to do the same. That’s what Daddy wanted and that’s what I made my mind up to do.”
“How?” John asked. “You’ve put your brother in front of you like he’s your hostage. You’ve tied his hands like he’s a prisoner. Why would you do that to your kin? Ask yourself that? Ask yourself why none among you, Will or Jerome, would allow this man to go free.”
She looked around the group now, they were waiting on her, but none seemed to have raised their guns or weapons and she turned again and brought her eyes to John. “He’s one of you. The Father or someone got in his head. He’s not the same man he was. He’s not the brother I knew when we were kids.”
“No,” John said. “He’s better than that. His mind is open. His eyes are open. He has been changed. You are right in that.”
“You talk as if it’s a good thing that he turned his back on family.”
John laughed. He looked around at the faces that looked back at all of them, the witnesses to whatever meeting this had become. “You still don’t get it, do you? It was never about Eden’s Gate. It was never a church issue. All The Father does is listen. He supports. That’s something your own father never did. Your own father, and even your own community, turned their backs on Drew a long time before. The Father came to this place and saw what it could be. We had nothing to do with what passed between your own father and his children. That was not a church issue. That was a family one.”
“But you killed him.”
“We welcomed Gary. We knew about his wife, your mother. Our hearts went out to him. But we,” John stopped now and raised his arms to encompass all of them. “We did not kill him. The Father did not kill him. I did not kill him. What your father wanted from Drew was not something we had any say in. Only Drew could answer to your father and his answer was no.”
She felt her hand loosen from her brother’s shoulder. She had known in some way. But it was beyond knowing, it was like an accident seen in the clear bright sunshine of day, but its action was so horrendous that in memory that same moment was as dark as night. Unseen, unwanted, and pushed away.
Drew turned all the way around now, his eyes seemed to her as cold as she had ever seen them. Hardened like two pieces of glass there within the sockets of his skull, unfeeling.
“Daddy made you proud,” Drew said. “He gave you everything like it was your birthright and not mine to share. When we were kids, when we were teens, when we became adults together, he gave to you before he even thought to give to me. He gave you the bar, him and Mamma. And though there was a place there for me it was never mine to have.”
She shook her head. She could not believe what she was hearing, or that their recollections of their life together could be so different in time and place. “No,” she said. “I was just older.”
“Older. Smarter. Funnier. Stronger. Nothing I did could ever measure up. All I tried to do in high school, all I did afterwards. It never was enough.”
“No,” she said. “That’s not true.”
“The truth,” Drew said, “is that they never listened to me. They never tried to understand me. They never wanted me. Do you know what that’s like? To live in a household and a family that doesn’t want you?” He laughed now, the laugh carrying on into the silence. “Of course you don’t.”
“They loved you,” she said. It was the only thing she could think to say. It was the truth and he needed to hear it. She could barely look at him. The hate she saw, the way he had grown taller almost as if talking about the death of their father had given him new life, while taking it from her, causing her to shrink ever farther now within herself. “Daddy loved you,” Mary May said again, wanting him desperately to hear it.
“No. John is right. Daddy never listened to me. He never understood me. But The Father did. Eden’s Gate did. They gave me a new life when they marked me, and baptized me, and then gave me the birth I always should have had, into the family I should have had.” He turned now and looked at all the members of Eden’s Gate who encircled them, and then he brought his eyes back to her. “I was given a new life and when Daddy came to get me I wanted nothing of the old life and I told him that. But it was like nothing had changed. It was the same between us. He did not listen. He insisted that his way was the true way and that I was in the wrong. He put his hands on me, but I was not the little boy he thought me to be. I had grown. My mind had grown. And whatever power he once had over me was gone.”
“But it was a car accident,” she said in a weak voice, not knowing what to say, not wanting to hear what he was telling her.
Drew looked at her like she was nothing. He looked at her like she was stupid. “You know that’s not true,” Drew said. “You’ve said that yourself. You just can’t see it. You just can’t picture how it was between us.” Drew raised his two hands, banded together by zip ties at the wrist. His palms open and his fingers outstretched but tightening. “Picture him coming to me and trying to tear me out of the life I’d made. Picture his hands on me, trying to drag me away. And then picture the fact that I was finally stronger, faster, and quicker than he had ever been. Picture that and then you’ll understand it was not an accident. That he forced my hand and he paid for all the wrong he’d done to me.” He leaned in now, coming closer. “It was nothing to kill him. It was like sticking a knife into something already dead.”
She fired from the waist and the bullet entered beneath her brother’s chin and exited just behind his hairline. She watched his body go loose then fall all at once to the side. She felt like she was not there anymore. The night did not exist. The people. The pressure that had built within her with every one of his words. It all went out of her. It all ceased to exist for that one second as she watched him fall away.
Mary May was sobbing now, she had dropped the gun and she found herself upon the ground, trying to drag his body up to hers. The feel of his weight, the knowledge of what she’d done, of what she had allowed herself to do. She tried to tell herself that he had done this. But she knew he hadn’t. She knew it was her that had pulled the trigger, that it was her and no one else.
She looked around now, they were all staring at her and as she raised her eyes to them they seemed to shrink back from her, to recede in some way. Soon, Mary May heard the shuffling of their movements. She held her brother in her arms. She tried to support his head, to hold him up. But she could do little for him now, she had shot him, hadn’t she? But it did not feel like that. It did not feel as if it was her. It was slowly changing now. The anger she had felt, the rage, the sheer compulsion of her action that seemed to have come from her like lightning from a storm, natural as anything she had ever felt.
“Your father made you proud,” John said. John stood in the same place he had stood before, but his people were filing past now, moving one at a time away from him and down the slope again. “I gave you the sin of envy, but I see now that you were neither the pride your father gave you nor the envy I saw in you. Now I see that I should have given you wrath. Someday when the time is right for you to accept that, I will be waiting for you.”
She looked at him. He was a blur within the lineaments of her vision, tears now streaming down her face. “You didn’t come for Will,” she said. “You came to tell me about Drew. You came to see what I would do. It was not me that pulled the trigger. It was you.” She was fighting back tears now. Her vision was almost gone in the aftermath of it all.