Suzanne turned back into her house to check on Bobby, who was shouting with his wrecked voice.
“Go on, now!” he screamed. There were several shots. “Git!”
“Where are they?” Suzanne asked him.
“Down by the canal,” Bobby said. “I can’t get a clean shot. I think they’re trying for the boat.”
“Damn. Okay, you stay here. Greenburg, hold that door and open it for Bart!”
She went back out the front door and cut around the side of the house. The crushed coral crunched beneath her feet and the palms and flowers were lush and inviting. There was no time for remorse or thought beyond what had to be done. She had to protect her child.
At the canal, one man was stepping onto the Mistress while another crouched down to remove the lines from the cleats; the one on the dock had his back to her, and Suzanne shot him from forty feet away as she skirted the pool. The buckshot somersaulted him into the water.
The other man slipped and fell, perhaps surprised by the sight of Suzanne pointing the shotgun at him, or startled by the sight of his accomplice having a hole blown through his back. He cried out and vanished from sight, down on the deck of the boat. Suzanne came forward slowly, knees bent, another shell in the chamber.
“Come on,” she heard the man say. “Don’t shoot! I’m unarmed. We was just trying to get off the island!”
He stood up then, both hands in the air. Suzanne saw he was young, maybe under twenty, and his eyes were rolling and white and terrified.
I should shoot him. He might come back. They came to my house, trying to hurt me and my child. She hesitated, the gun leveled at the man’s chest.
“Please,” he begged. “I wasn’t going to hurt anyone.”
“In the water,” Suzanne said. “If I see you again, I’ll shoot you. I don’t care if it’s on Duval Street five years from now. I swear, I’ll put a hole in you.”
He sat back on the side of the boat and let himself fall over backwards, one hand pinching his nose. Suzanne watched him swim toward the opposite side of the canal and she turned back toward her house. The gunfire had ceased.
She walked the perimeter of her property, past orchids and sago palms, and palmettos along the edge of her land swished against her bare legs. Lizards scampered out of her way, and a snowy egret took flight from the walkway.
Bodies and blood stained the white coral driveway. So much blood. There were pools of it seeping into the ground and splashes of crimson against the rocks and on her car. Two old pickup trucks loaded full of loot smoked in the middle of the road pockmarked by bullet holes, windows shot out. She saw an arm draped over one of the doors, hanging lifeless. Thick blood dripped down onto the vehicle’s door.
Sweet Jesus. What did we do? What did I do?
A shot that seemed louder somehow than all the other shots that came before it rang out and echoed from the other houses and the street; Suzanne jumped. One last parting shot from the looters.
Bart came around the mailbox holding the assault rifle in his right hand. His left arm was bloody, his short-sleeved shirt soaked, and his face was tight and grim.
“I’m okay,” he said. “You?”
“Yeah, but you don’t look okay.”
“Through and through. Just a graze. Have you checked on everyone?”
“No.”
“All right, then.”
There was a clenching feeling in her, a choking, constricting sensation. She pushed the door open, dreading what she would find inside. Someone was screaming. She could take a lot, but losing Taylor wasn’t one of those things.
Suzanne had never envisioned herself being a mother. She’d been driven and a little reckless and selfish, and she’d privately scoffed at the women she’d known who went from being smart, successful, and fun, to dowdy and dumb in less than a year. She’d resolved never to join that particular settling tribe of minivans and bake sales and PTA queen bees and passive-aggressive judo she heard about and saw from former members of her own tribe, the let’s do something with our lives women she’d largely surrounded herself with.
She met Taylor, and her world changed.
It wasn’t the sonogram that did it and it wasn’t the initial shock of the test. Feeling the child growing inside her, she still felt reckless and even resentful sometimes. She loved Henry, and she knew he wanted to have a child, but sometimes late at night, she would scream at the loss of her youth and freedom and the idea that something had been taken from her.
The nurse put baby Taylor on Suzanne’s chest. Swaddled and crying and with a little pink cap on her head, and hands so small they could hardly wrap around Suzanne’s little finger, the child suckled at her breast, and everything Suzanne thought was so important before mattered less. The baby was purpose, future, and everything good and right. Taylor was perfect, unblemished by the world, and Suzanne felt an outpouring of love that was electric and true. She cried, something she never did, from the joy and promise of the moment, for what it meant for the rest of her life. Her child mattered more than anything else in the world.
Suzanne believed she’d lived her life with Taylor’s best interest in mind; she’d sacrificed gladly for her baby girl, and hadn’t become cow-eyed and torpid. The idea that a woman must give up sensuality, intelligence, freedom, and grace because she has a child seemed absurd, in retrospect. There was no dichotomy between motherhood and living a full life unless it was by choice.
Doing something with her life, though, meant raising a child, that little baby with the hand wrapped around her finger. That was doing something, the most important thing, at the end of the day. She’d thought about that when she signed the divorce papers with the heavy Montblanc pen in her attorney’s office after weighing the pros and cons and deciding Taylor would be better off in the long run.
Bart paused for a moment at the door, his face a mask of pain and rage and an almost pleading look, a fear of the unknown, perhaps, which Suzanne understood. She wanted to open the door but she also didn’t. Pain waited on the other side. Once she opened it, she would never be able to close that door again. There are nightmares and things which wake you up screaming and thrashing and sweaty, and then there is seeing that worst fear face-to-face and being powerless against dripping, hungry fangs, when everything that mattered before has fled and there is that one thing left.
Suzanne flung the door open and stepped inside.
Mary was screaming, lying sideways on the couch, her hands pressed to her belly in the way of a pregnant woman. Mary’s hands were covered with blood. She howled and yelped and her legs kicked and shook.
Suzanne sat the shotgun against the wall and ran for the med kit while Bart went to his wife.
“Bobby, go out back and keep an eye out. Greenburg, you go out front. Take the shotgun.”
Suzanne handed Bart the kit, and he tore into it, removing gauze, gloves, antibiotics, and painkillers. He gave Mary an injection, and within seconds she relaxed enough that she stopped screaming. Her eyes rolled back in her head.
Bart cut away Mary’s white nightgown, which was now crimson and soaked.
“Water,” Bart said.
Suzanne came back with a pitcher of clean water, and Bart poured it over Mary’s bloody belly.
More blood oozed to the surface from a hole in her abdomen.
“There’s no exit wound, so the bullet is still inside her,” Bart said. Go see if you can find a doctor at the hospital. Take Greenburg with you, and the AR.” He was packing the wound.
Suzanne grabbed her keys and jogged out to her car. She and Greenburg drove into town. She feared when she returned Mary would already be gone.