She got to her feet and ran to the edge of the hill and she saw him down at the bottom on his knees. She jumped into the brush and the high grass and the weeds and the bottles and old burger wrappers and came down the hill with the gun held high by her right ear.
Ned was on his feet now, staggering toward the first brick building. By the time she reached the bottom of the hill he was holding a hand to his belly and lurching as he walked and he made it to an old office chair with rusted legs and a rusted metal frame. Someone had slashed a horizontal line across the seat and the foam that spilled out was brown. Ned sat in it and watched her come.
Her phone vibrated. She put it to her ear.
“You okay?” Brian asked.
“Yeah.”
She looked back up the hill at him standing on the back porch, the baby to his shoulder, the shotgun in his other hand.
“You need me?”
“No,” she said. “I got this.”
“They shot her in the head.” Brian’s voice was thick. “In the room with the baby.”
“Okay,” she said. “It’ll be okay, Brian. I’ll be right back.”
“Hurry,” he said.
“Why’d you have to kill her?” she asked Ned when she reached him.
He pressed a hand to the exit wound. One of her bullets—she had no idea which one—had entered his body somewhere in the back and come out by his right hip.
“Performance bonus,” he said.
What came out of her mouth sounded like a laugh. “What did you say?”
He nodded. “Our hourly rate is for shit. We’re incentive-based.” His head lolled as he looked around at the husk of the mill. “My old man worked in a place like this up in Lowell.”
“Cotter-McCann could turn this into an apartment complex or a mall,” she said. “A casino, for Christ’s sake. Make their seventy million back in a year.”
He gave that a weary raise of the eyebrows. “Land is probably poisoned.”
“What do they care?” She was hoping if she kept talking he would just fucking bleed out in front of her. “By the time people start getting sick they’ll have pulled their money back out and be long gone.”
He gave that some thought and half nodded, half shrugged.
“She didn’t know anything. She barely spoke English.”
“Police have translators,” he said. “And she spoke English just fine in her last few minutes. Believe it.” He was turning gray, but the hand he pressed to the wound still looked firm and strong. He gave her puppy-dog eyes full of apology. “I don’t make the rules, Rachel. I don’t control anything. I just do a job to put food on my family’s table and I sit up some nights just like every other parent hoping my kids’ lives will be better than mine was. That they’ll have more options than I did.”
She followed his gaze around the mill. “You think they will?”
“No.” He shook his head. He looked down at the blood soaking into his lap and his voice cracked. “I think those days are over.”
“Funny,” Rachel said. “I’m starting to wonder if they ever existed at all.”
Ned heard something in her voice that made him look up. The last thing he said was “Hold on.”
She aimed at his chest from three feet away, but her arm was shaking so badly when she pulled the trigger that the bullet entered his neck. He went rigid against the back of the chair for a moment and panted like a parched dog and blinked at the sky. His lips moved but no sound came out; the blood pooled in the hollow of his throat and dripped into the crevices between the chair frame and the cushions.
He stopped blinking. His lips stopped moving.
Rachel walked back up the hill.
Brian stood with Annabelle to his shoulder. Her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted. She was sleeping.
“You want to have kids?” she asked him.
“What?”
“Simple question.”
“Yes,” Brian said to her, “I want to have kids.”
“Beyond this one?” she said. “Because I think she’s ours now, Brian.”
“Ours?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t have a passport.”
“No, you don’t. But you have our kid. Do you want another?”
“If I live?”
“If you live,” she conceded.
“Yes,” he said.
“Do you want to have kids with me?” Rachel asked.
“Well, who else?” Brian said.
“Say the words.”
“I want to have kids with you,” Brian said. “No one else.”
“Why no one else?”
“Because I don’t love anyone else, Rachel. Never have.”
“Oh.”
“I want a few actually.” Brian nodded. “Kids.”
“A few?”
“A few.”
“You going to birth them?”
“Already playing the violin for herself,” he said to the child on his shoulder. “Get a load of her.”
She looked at the house. “I’m going to say good-bye to Haya.”
“You don’t have to go in there.”
“Yes, I do. I have to pay my respects.”
“They blew her head off, Rachel.”
She winced. Haya had pursued a desire to be anyone but what the world had fated her to be with such fierce resolve that Rachel, having only met the “real” Haya a few hours before, didn’t want see her with half her face turned to pulp, lying in a gout of black blood. But if she didn’t look, then Haya was just another of the disappeared in Rachel’s rearview. Soon it would grow too easy to pretend she’d never been real.
If it’s ever within your power to do so, she considered saying aloud to Brian (but didn’t), you have to bear witness to your dead. You simply have to. You have to step into the energy field of whatever remains of their spirit, their soul, their essence and let it pass through your body. And in the passing, maybe a wisp of it adheres to you, grafts itself to your cells. And in this communion, the dead continue to live. Or strive to.
Instead, what she said to Brian was “Just because it’s unpleasant doesn’t mean I get to avoid it.”
He didn’t like it but all he said was “And then we gotta go.”
“How?”
He gestured toward the river. “I got a boat down there.”
“A boat?”
“Big boat. Get us to Halifax. You two will be out of the country in two days.”
“What’ll you do?”
“Hide in plain sight.” He placed his palm to the crown of the baby’s head and kissed the top of her ear. “You might have noticed I’ve got a knack for it.”
She nodded. “Maybe too much of one.”
He gave that a sad tilt of his head and said nothing.
“If we don’t make good time on the water?” she asked. “Or if one of us gets injured, breaks an ankle or something?”
“There’s a backup plan for that.”
“How many backup plans do you have?”
He thought about it. “Quite a few.”
“What about me?”
“Hmm?”
“You got a backup plan for me?”
He stood across from her with the baby asleep on his shoulder and he let the shotgun fall to the ground and he touched a strand of her hair with his thumb and index finger. “There’s no backup plan for you.”
Eventually she looked at the house behind him. “I’m gonna go pay my respects.”