You could live a short life or a long one. You could nip a purposeless life in the bud or let it spin itself out for seventy or eighty or a hundred years. Either way you died, and once you were dead it was as if you had never lived.
You were gone and that was the end of it.
Then why hurry it?
Or: then why delay it?
Play the radio, she told herself. Turn on some lights.
Instead, once more she brought the gun to her temple. Once more her thumb drew back the hammer. Once more her finger tightened on the trigger.
Did she decide to squeeze the trigger? Are these things decided? Her finger tightened on the trigger as it had done before, only this time it went on tightening, and she squeezed the trigger.
The hammer descended on an empty chamber.
Relief flooded through her, relief that expanded to fill her own body. She had been spared, she had been saved, and her life of a sudden felt infinitely precious. Even as she trembled at the narrowness of her escape, at the same time she thrilled to the excitement of being alive. A moment ago life had held no excitement, and now, suddenly, the mere fact that she was alive was exciting in and of itself.
She had survived. She had played out her hand, risking everything, and she had won.
She sprang to her feet. Tomorrow the old gun would go where it belonged — in the trash, down the sewer, wherever it could do no harm. She would not need it again. She had kept it, she knew now, for this very purpose — to stand on the very brink of death and be given her life back. She had taken a horrible chance, but it was a risk she need never run again.
She danced across the room, switched on the lamp, filled the room with its cheering glow. She turned on the little radio, let the room fill up with music. She moved gaily to the music, her feet as light now as her heart had been heavy mere moments ago.
And, dancing, she realized with a start that she was still holding the gun.
She stopped, stared at the thing in her hand. Very nearly the instrument of her destruction, it had instead been the means of her deliverance, and her feelings for the object were impossible to sort out. One thing, though, was quite certain. She didn’t want to carry it around with her now.
She found the velvet bag, tucked the gun into it, drew the drawstrings tight. And then, dancing again, caught up in the music and in her own joy in life, she slapped the gun down on a table. Perhaps she meant merely to set it down. Perhaps the rhythm of the music and the joy of her own life urge made her slam the gun down so dramatically.
The gun discharged upon impact.
The noise of the shot was enormous in the little room. She caught her breath at it, and her heart clutched in her chest. Even as the sound of the gunshot was dying out around her, she moved quickly and without thought to switch off the radio, so that the silence which followed the shot could be complete.
Where had the bullet gone?
She moved, frantically, to touch her hands to her own body, as if she could have been shot without realizing it. What irony, to fail in an attempt at suicide, then to shoot oneself by accident just minutes later. But the bullet had not struck her.
Yet there had been a bullet. The room reeked of cordite, and the velvet bag showed a black-edged hole where the bullet had torn its way out.
She looked for a bullet hole in the walls, for damage to anything within the room. She saw nothing.
Then, as if magnetically, her eyes were drawn to the open window.
She was gazing at the window when she heard someone moaning outside.
A woman, alone, sprawled on the pavement. A woman, young, moaning, sobbing, her head cradled now in Madeline’s lap.
A woman, shot in the chest on the sidewalk across the street from Madeline’s rooming house. Shot in the chest, bleeding, the blood streaming from the wound. Eyes trying to focus, a mouth trying to form words.
Around them, a crowd was forming. People cried out questions, supplied answers.
Who was she?
Why, she lived here in the neighborhood.
Who shot her?
Why, there had been a shot fired from a passing car. Some lunatic, some thrill killer, driving through a quiet neighborhood, rolling down his window and firing at random.
My God, here? In this neighborhood?
Hell, it could happen anywhere. All it takes is one madman with a gun and a grudge. That’s all it takes and it can happen anywhere, and to anyone. You get some madman shooting from a window, some lunatic killing little kids, some maniac stabbing hitchhikers. Or someone like this, firing at random from a moving auto.
The voices were background music to Madeline. She barely heard them because they didn’t know anything. There had been no shot from a passing car, although death had been as random, as capricious, in selecting this young woman.
Her gun, her father’s gun. The gun had spared Madeline’s life and taken this life instead. It was true — you couldn’t return your weapon unblooded to its sheath. The gun you showed onstage had to be fired before the curtain fell.
Now the curtain had fallen, and a comedy had turned to a tragedy.
There was a siren, a police car on its way. But she barely heard it. She was looking down into the woman’s eyes, and as she sought to see into them she saw the very life go out of them. The girl shuddered once in her arms and was still.
The lamp was on, and the radio. Both stayed on all night as she sat in her room, waiting for them to come for her. It was only a matter of time, she thought, before the police came to her room and knocked on her door. When that happened, she would admit them and tell them what had happened. How she had tried to kill herself. How she had been spared, and how a woman across the street had been chosen by some unseen hand to die in her place.
How, more prosaically, she had acted thoughtlessly with a gun, and how a bullet had found its way through an open ground-floor window and into living flesh.
And then what would happen to her?
She didn’t know. What she had done had not been murder in the technical sense of the word. It had, to be sure, been an accident. But this did not mean the law would not find her at fault. It had been a criminal accident, and there would certainly be some penalty she would have to pay for it. And that was fitting enough. She had deprived another woman of her life. Whatever penalty the law exacted would be no more than fair.
And so she waited for them to come. She had slipped away from the scene outside moments after the woman’s life had slipped away. Gently she’d laid the woman’s head on the pavement. The crowd had opened up for her as she stepped through it, closing again around the woman’s body without taking note of Madeline. But someone surely had noticed her, and someone would say something to a policeman, and they would come to her door, if only to seek her testimony as a witness. Perhaps she had been there when the woman was shot. Perhaps she had seen the killer, or noted the license number of the car. Certainly she ought to be questioned, so that they might determine what she did or did not know.
The radio played on. Outside, the police cars came and went, the crowd dispersed. The gun, still wrapped in its velvet bag, remained on the table where she had flung it. From where she sat, she could see the ugly hole marked with powder burns where the bullet had exited.
If she had known the police were not to come, perhaps she might have turned the gun again on herself. But she fully expected their visit and was willing to leave the matter of her retribution up to them. Even when the sky lightened with dawn, she waited for them to appear.
But they did not appear.