[PREVIEW: CI S1E8, ”COLLATERAL DAMAGE”]
[0: KINGS NEVER DIE]
TODAY IS THE DAY.
Danielle Ashbury is moving out. The car is piled high with her things, everything she wanted to keep, everything she needs to start over, everything her little girl needs to be happy. She doesn’t care about the house, the furniture, the fine decorations and paintings. It’s just a house. Houses can be bought.
Happiness can’t, and lost happiness can’t be somehow magically recovered like the sand once the hourglass has fully tipped over.
It’s been a long time since she was happy. A long time since they were D&D, Danielle and David, smiling in their wedding photos and wreathed in roses. She remembers that day, and how the roses had smelled faintly rotten, and a bee had slipped down the back of her wedding dress and stung her until she broke out in hives and spent her honeymoon night sobbing in a puddle of calamine lotion.
Maybe she should have taken that as a sign.
It wasn’t all bad. This failure of a marriage has given her Melanie, and Melanie is everything—little girl all bundled up in the back seat already, clutching her teddy bear and looking out the window and humming. She’s always humming, little songbird who loves to watch America’s Got Talent and The Masked Singer and any other show where she can hop and dance in front of the TV and sing along.
To her, this is just another trip, like the time they drove to Disney and ended up hot and sweaty on the side of the road with a flat tire, but Melanie still singing so happily in the back seat.
She doesn’t know yet that when Daddy comes home today, he will no longer have a wife and child.
If asked, Danielle can’t even quite explain why. It’s not that the spark is gone, the magic. That’s what couple’s counseling is for. It’s that she doesn’t feel married at all, when David comes home later and later every night, living at the office—or possibly living in another woman’s bed. She’s wondered if he was cheating, wondered if she was imagining the occasional whiff of something floral and cloying on him, but she’s decided she doesn’t want to know. It won’t do her any good.
It won’t help.
It won’t make her love him again, and it won’t make him see her when she’s been invisible for many long years.
No way to live, she thinks as she hefts another box into the trunk of her Kia and slams the lid down. No flower can survive, deprived of sunlight.
She isn’t a delicate flower…
But she needs light.
She checks the contents of the car one last time, and peeks in through the window at Melanie, wiggling her fingers and smiling.
“Just one more minute, honey,” Danielle says, and straightens to retrieve the manila envelope off the dash. It’s thick, heavy with the weight of what it means.
Divorce.
Legal, final, more than just a separation, a trial. She doesn’t want to drag things out anymore.
Rip the Band-Aid off.
Leave the papers where he can find them, with his house keys…
And go.
Her sister is waiting for her, in Chapel Hill.
And so is a new life.
She bustles up the walk, tugging at her keyring, using her fingernail to pry the separate rings loose so she can slip the keys off. House, garage, storage shed, the spare to his car. She’s so preoccupied with the keys that she doesn’t notice the door, which she had closed, swings open lightly at her touch. She does not notice anything, until she lifts her head to navigate the foyer, steps into the living room…
And sees David sitting there, his stern and upright figure settled on the couch, his head propped against his knuckles as he takes in the minor disarray left of the room when she has taken what she wants or what she needs, very little among the ornate and expensive decorations.
David has brown eyes, the brown she fell in love with, the memory of shared sodas and sweet chocolate kissed from each other’s lips. But they are almost black now, a strange and inhuman regard she doesn’t recognize as he regards her calmly. He does not move. Does not stand up.
He only looks at her across the expanse of the room, and curls his other hand tighter around the silver shine of the gun in his lap.
Her world narrows to that. It’s a Smith & Wesson, detailed and articulated and exaggerated in all its stylizations, and her first ludicrous, panicked thought as her brain short-circuits and explodes to frightened pieces of nothing is that she isn’t going to die lie this, shot by a gun that looks like it belongs in a cartoon.
She wants to run. She cannot move, and she realizes the crinkling sound she hears is her fingers gripping the envelope, the soft thuds the keys falling from her grip to bounce to the carpet.
“Danielle?” David asks with deceptive mildness. “What’s going on here?”
She can’t speak. Her lips won’t work, too numb, too heavy, and a cold and paralytic fear is working its way through her entire system. A lump in the pit of her stomach, as if she’s swallowed a pound of ice. Icy feelers in her veins, detaching her from the impulses that guide movement, flight, speech.
But as if she has spoken, as if she has answered him, he flicks that searching, eerie gaze to the envelope in her hands. “Divorce? You intend to divorce me.”
He stands, then. He has always been a lanky man, and she liked that back in the day, liked how it made him dapper and elegant. But he seems to take up more space now, brooding, hulking, his weight doubled by the weight of the gun, his presence filling the room from wall to wall.
“You can’t divorce me, Danielle.” The eerie calm of his voice belongs to someone else. Someone less terrifying, less awful; someone who would never do as David does now, lifting the gun and pointing it at her, finger on the trigger. “And you aren’t taking my daughter away.”
A twitch against the trigger, and suddenly she can move. Suddenly her legs are spring-loaded, and she launches herself to the side as the sound that snaps over the house bursts like too many fireworks lit all at once, and her ears ring as she throws herself to the ground. The edge of the coffee table explodes in a shower of wood pulp. Then the wall, the stucco puffing a white cloud as a black bottomless eye appears in it, and another and another and another, chasing her in patterns but she’s running, dodging, leaping, she’s going to get away.
It’s not the pain that hits her, first.
It’s the force.
She’s never thought about the force of a bullet hitting a body, especially on one side. On the left side, where her heart is, and it’s that force that sends her spinning around and around and around like a merry-go-round as the force of that little bit of metal and gunpowder slams into her at two thousand, five hundred feet per second. She is dizzy, dizzy, and her chest feels both cavernously open and perilously warm, soaking and soaking and soaking in liquid heat.
The pain only really hits when she crumples to the floor, and gravity shakes her every nerve loose from its mornings.
She can’t move again. She had a few quick seconds and then she becomes stone, and the barrel of that gun is the snake on the head of the Medusa, immobilizing her because she stared into its black, black eye.
Polished, black leather shoes draw closer. That eye looks down at her, round and black and the only clear thing when everything else is a blur, terrible and strange.
The world doesn’t look the same anymore.
Her world hasn’t looked the same since David, and she only wishes she could rewind to when the colors and shapes of things made sense, and she didn’t know the feeling of the slow death of love, or the sensation of a body bleeding out.
It’s quieter than it should be, she thinks.
Almost anticlimactic.
Then she thinks nothing at all, and the last thing she hears is the faint, ominous click of the trigger beginning to move, and this time…this time, she smells the perfume on him, and it is rich and mingled with the scent of her own blood. She catches one more sound, then, and it is her own slow and wheezing sigh as the last of her breath steals away.
Then all is silent, save for Melanie’s screams, calling “Mama, Mama!” into the void.