He looked at her strangely, as though in a sudden flash of premonition he did. But he didn’t admit that he did. And he didn’t show any fear.
“I retraced her steps,” she told him. “Those steps she took away from you. Would you like to know where they carried her, toward what?”
“I’d like to know anything about her there is,” he said as insatiably as ever. “Anything about her is what I want to know, to hear, to be told. It brings her back again for a little while, in all her flame, all her glow, all her glory.”
“Her glory was shame and darkness, the glory that you gave her,” she spat out at him. “The hospital might have cured the shock symptoms, but she was a sick girl the day she walked out of there, sick in mind and sick in soul. She walked in shadows. She hid away, tried to hide away, from those shadows, in a cheap furnished room. I’ve been in it. I can see her there now, as she must have been. The shades pulled all the way down, all day long; hiding from life, trying to keep it out. Trembling on the bed at times, even though she wasn’t cold. Waking up at night from a fever-sleep and screaming out her horror and despair.
“She saw there was only one way to dispel those shadows, only one way to cleanse them out of her heart. Only one way to achieve purification. She had been brought up in a religion which forbade administration of the last rites or burial in consecrated ground to suicides. That way out was barred to her, then, or she surely would have taken it. But she was too frightened by what she’d been through to be able to face death without consolation, lie for all eternity an outcast, unhallowed and unprayed for. So she chose another crime, another sin, instead, perhaps as being the lesser of the two, who knows? The more redeemable. And that was the blotting out, the extirpation, of the source of the impurity that had engulfed her. That was the only way she could find peace.
“She left the room, gave up the room for the time being, and went back to her mother’s. To try to pull herself together a little, and also to make her preparations.”
She saw his brows twitch involuntarily.
“She bought a gun,” she said. “I have it. Its license is in her name.”
She saw his face go momentarily to the handbag, and then back to her face again.
He knows, she said to herself. He knows.
There was no fear. And neither was there any will to self-preservation, any crafty, calculating look of planning how best to evade or outwit it. She didn’t receive that impression. It was more like somebody waiting with as much patience as they could for something good, some benefit, to come to them.
“It’s, in many ways, far easier for a girl to obtain a permit for a gun than it is for a man. At least if she is known to the license department, has been a lifelong resident of the community, and is known to have a good reputation. She can plead molestation, real or fancied, fear of being followed or accosted on her way home late at night; fear of breaking and entry, if she occupies an apartment alone or, as in Starr’s case, with just an elderly woman; crackpot or obscene phone calls; any number of things like that.
“I don’t know if Starr did that. I do know she got her license and got the gun. She bought it quite openly at a sporting-goods store.
“When she was on the point of coming back here again, her mother, who’d guessed enough to feel uneasy about the whole thing, sneaked it out of her locked bag and hid it. She turned it over to me, when I retraced Starr’s path, step by step.”
This time he kept from looking at the handbag, but she could tell by his eyes he wanted to.
“Starr actually only discovered she was without the gun when she was once more back in the same furnished room she’d occupied the first time. I suppose she would have simply gone about the business of trying to get another one here in the city, which wouldn’t have been quite as easy a matter. But before she could do anything at all, she walked past the ground-floor windows of my house quite at random — and she didn’t need a gun anymore. I was the means of killing her.”
She saw him put a hand around his throat and hold it tightly, as though it hurt him there to breathe.
“I pledged myself to carry out whatever she wanted most out of life. The wreckage of life that was all there was left to her.
“Above all else, she wanted your death.”
At this, he slowly inclined his head in a sort of fatalistic acquiescence, as if to say: If she wanted it thus, thus let it be.
“And I’m pledged to carry that out for her. For I took her life away, and I must do the things, in her place, that I kept her from doing.”
She opened the handbag at long last and took out the gun. He winced a little, very briefly, as you do when you know pain is coming. Necessary, benevolent pain. Then he turned more fully toward her, as if to give her a better surface at which to shoot, and he took a deep breath. It almost sounded like relief.
He didn’t speak another word from then on, for all the rest of the time she was there in the room.
Although the way it lay, on its side, it was pointing straight at him, she didn’t raise it in her hand.
He started to lean a little toward her. Not in an attempt to close the gap between them, in order to snatch at it or try to deflect it. For he kept his arms where they’d been — they were now slightly to the rear of him — and he leaned forward with his upper body only. He was like a man slowly preparing for a dive, a dive down into death. He even tilted his face upward a little, as if trying to help her, trying to cooperate. And his eyes were pleading, begging, she couldn’t mistake what they were saying to her. Asking for this gift that she alone could give him. The gift of death. The gift of clean, fast death, and then no more horror, no more fear, no more anything but nothing.
The tip of his tongue even crept out for an instant over at the far corner of his mouth, and touched the edge of his lips, as if in barely restrained anticipation.
Then he dropped the lids over his eyes and he just waited, breathing a little fast but breathing hopefully. Not cringing. Waiting bated for the accolade of deliverance. “You are free.” God’s greatest gift to man: death.
“But I’m not going to do it,” she said, with no more inflection than they’d used at the dinner table earlier. “I can’t. I see that now. This isn’t my affair. Why should I interfere? Who gave me that right and who gave me that obligation? I have my own happiness, my own peace, to think of. I’ve caused one death, taken one life, already. Why should I add a second to it? Will that make it easier for my conscience to bear the first? No. Why should I liquidate my debt to Starr, only to find myself with a new one on my hands, to you? And after you, who next? On and on and on, like the links of an endless chain. And if she could look at you now as I’m looking at you, perhaps she wouldn’t want you dead after all. For the greater punishment for you by far is not to be dead. I think for you, life is death. And death would be — just escape. So Starr gets her fulfillment after all.
“My hand won’t be the one to meddle with your destiny.”
His eyes had flown open, stunned, reproachful, long ago.
She’d gotten to her feet, and as she did so, the gun slid off her lap and into the inside corner of the sofa. She made no move to reclaim it. If she saw it at all, it had lost all meaning for her; her faculties were too absorbed in the metaphysical problem that engaged them both, inanimate objects around her had no bearing or existence.
He didn’t seem to notice it either. It was into her face that he kept looking, with his haunted, pleading eyes, so strained they were like white scars slashed across his face. Nothing else existed. To the end they were fixed on her, begging without a word.
She opened the door, and from it looked back at him. “Goodbye,” she said quietly. “May God have mercy on your soul. Your poor, poor soul.”