Chapter fifty-seven:

 

 

I am a pussy, I think as I cry in my hands. I am a God-damned pussy, and Benny would be ashamed of me.

Carrie says nothing while I let out my grief. I cry until I’m not even sure why I’m crying anymore. Is it the loss of my mother or the death of my father? Is it the memory of so much blood as Carrie’s knife tore through her father’s flesh, or the emptiness in her eyes when she walked away? Is that she let me rot in a cell? That she took my life and blamed me for it all? Or is it the loss of a love I never had?

“My dad is dead,” I say.

She says nothing. Because she knows; she was there, and she saw it all. How did I forget all of that? How did I make that memory go away? God, how I wish I could do that again.

He never came to see me in prison because I killed him. My mom moved away because she wanted to start afresh, away from the dead perverted husband and the murdering son. I hope she got her fresh start, I think.

“You never loved me?” I say through my pain.

“No, Ethan.”

“Not even a little bit?”

“No. Not even a little bit.” And the way she says it makes me know that she’s telling the truth.

“But you let me touch you!” I say through clenched teeth.

“I let a lot of people touch me,” she retorts with a laugh.

“We made love!”

She shakes her head. “No, you made love. I was fucked.”

Her words are cold and dead. Lifeless, just like she is.

“How could you be so cruel?” I shake my head and then I grab my hair and pull on it as if I could pull her answers out of my own skull. I don’t really expect an answer from her. How can you answer such a question? She took my life. Her father’s. And then she made me take my father’s too. She destroyed everyone and everything that night. Even if she just wanted to escape. To be free.

It could have been so perfect, I think

“I was made that way,” she says, and she stands, her foot touching the cold, hard floor as she looks around us. “I could have been anything,” she says. “I could have done so many amazing things with my life, but he took it all away from me. He ruined me.”

“I tried to give it back to you,” I say, heartbroken words tumbling from me.

She smiles, and it’s the first true expression I’ve seen on her face since I found her again. “I know you did, but you can’t give back what you didn’t take away. He stole my innocence and my future. You didn’t. So you can’t give it back.”

“You ruined my life,” I say, and I feel like I’m drowning as reality and memories collide. “You ruined everyone’s lives, Carrie!”

“And everyone ruined mine,” she replies coldly.

And there is no love in her voice.

For me or for anyone.

I don’t know what to say to that. She’s right—this was all him. He did rob her of everything, but she got away, she could have started again. But she didn’t. She just became the very thing she’d escaped from. I don’t say that though, because what’s the point? There isn’t a point to any of this anymore.

Not to me, or her. Or an us that never really was.

I still love her though. That won’t go away, but I know it’s one-sided. I know that, yet my heart still reaches for her. It yearns for her love.

“Where are we, Ethan?” she asks, her voice sounding frightened.

The sun is beginning to rise and the soft orange glow of the morning burn is shining in through the hole in the roof. She sees the hooks and the metal tables and the rollers and the signs on the walls. And the odor that she could smell finally makes sense to her.

She looks at me with wide eyes and horror on her face.

“Are you going to kill me now?” she says, and the horror is gone and a calmness envelops her pretty features. She’s a little girl once again, and I am a little boy. We are playing in the mud, and she is chopping off worms’ heads. And she is telling me how they will grow a new head and everything will be okay, even if it hurts for a little while.

Am I going to kill her? I wonder. Is that why I brought her here? To kill her? Because if I can’t have her, nobody can? Is that how strong my love for her is? Is that how deep it runs?

“I should,” I say. “You ruined my life. You turned me into a murderer, but I never murdered you, or your dad. I never did those things.”

She nods like she knows, like she understands, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t know shit. So I tell her that.

“Don’t you nod at me like you get it, like you have any idea what it’s been like. You don’t know shit, Carrie Brown.”

She looks away with shame.

And I am angry now. Furious, even. Because how dare she nod and presume to know what she put me through. Seeing my mom’s heart break over and over. Being beaten and abused in prison. But worst of all, the feeling of that blade cutting through my dad’s chest, through bone and skin and muscle and then heart. That feeling hasn’t gone away. It did for a while. I blotted it out. But it’s there now. I can feel it running up my arm. The sharp tug as I pulled the blade back out, and bone and muscle cling to the blade in the hopes of resurrecting life out of his body.

It wasn’t her fault. But it wasn’t mine either. Yet I suffered for her all the same. She made me suffer for her. But then, when I think of her life now, of how little she has achieved and how grown-up Carrie is just the same as little-girl Carrie, I wonder if she suffered just like me too.

“Well?” she says. “Are you?”

I stand up and I go toward her, and even though I’m full of rage and hate for her, my hands still want to run through her soft hair. They still yearn to stroke her smooth skin. To feel her thighs wrapped around me while I move in her and on her, feeling her hot breath against my neck. To hear her say she loves me. To finally hear the words that I’ve been chasing for so long. So long that it feels like forever.

She watches me come toward her, and she doesn’t cry though I know she’s afraid. And when I am in arm’s reach, I stop and we stare at one another for a long time. The silence permeates around us. The echo of our entwined breathes bounces off the cold metal walls of the slaughterhouse, and the gun in my hand that burns my palm.

“If you’re going to do it, then just do it,” she says, and though her words are full of defiance I can hear the sadness in her tone. The grief at a life unfulfilled.

Really, it would be the humane thing to do for her. To put her out of this misery.

I feel the trigger under my finger; just one little squeeze and it would all be over. For both of us. This torture that we put ourselves through would be over. No more pain. No more anything.

Just one little squeeze.

“Ethan?” She whispers my name just as a car backfires outside, the abruptness of the bang so loud in my head that I startle.

Carrie startles too.

Her eyes grow even wider with both shock and fear, but she’s brave and she holds my gaze steady and she waits like a good girl. Because she is, deep down, a good girl. Things just got all messed up, and I get that. It happens to me a lot. But hey, maybe that’s just life, right?

I’m not used to holding a gun. The metal is warm against my palm, the gun heavy. My arm is aching from holding it, shaking under the strain.

She sobs. Her lips are quivering, and I frown as the car backfires again.

But, ‘It’s okay, Carrie,’ I soothe. ‘Everything is going to be okay now. Because I’m going to set you free—I’m going to set us both free.’