فصل ششم

sadie

I’m going to kill a man.

I’m going to steal the light from his eyes. I want to watch it go out. You aren’t supposed to answer violence with more violence but sometimes I think violence is the only answer. It’s no less than he did to Mattie, so it’s no less than he deserves.

I don’t expect it to bring her back. It won’t bring her back.

It’s not about finding peace. There will never be peace.

I’m not under any illusion about how little of me will be left after I do this one thing. But imagine having to live every day knowing the person who killed your sister is breathing the air she can’t, filling his lungs with it, tasting its sweetness. Imagine him knowing the feeling of the ground beneath his feet while her body is buried below it.

This is the furthest I’ve been from anything that I know.

I’m in the front seat, turning a switchblade over and over in my hand. There’s a dirty water smell in the air. I close my eyes and open them and I’m still in the front seat, still turning the knife, air still heavy with the pond scum scent of it all. I close my eyes and open them again and it’s like one of those running dreams where every impossible push forward is rewarded with the knowledge that you have to do it over and over again and there is no finish line and you don’t know how to make yourself stop.

“Mattie.”

The M of her name is an easy press. The double ts don’t overstay their welcome.

When she was five and I was eleven, Mattie would crawl into my bed, terrified of the dark, desperate for me to say something that would make her feel safe. My fractured reassurances were never enough; all I could offer was my presence and she took what she could get, pressing her head against my shoulder and falling asleep like that. By morning, all my covers were tangled around her tiny body and my pillow always somehow ended up under her head. When I was eleven and Mattie was five, she wanted to talk like me, would storm around shattering her words until Keith smacked her on the butt for it and said, Nobody talks like that who’s got a choice, and even though I hated him for it, I told Mattie he was right. When Mattie was five and I was eleven, I could no longer pretend each new sentence had a chance of coming out of me clean. I stopped talking for two weeks from the sheer grief of it until Mattie looked at me with her eyes impossibly wide and said, “Tell me what you want to say.” Keith is not my father, but he sometimes pretended he was, would let people make the mistake and silently dared me to correct them. He would buy me candy at the gas station whether or not I was begging for it, then make a production of putting it in my palms just because he wanted to hear me force out a thank you. He would sit me at the table at night and have me memorize prayers to the utter delight of May Beth and Mattie was right to be afraid of the dark then because at night, he would come into my room and make me say them.

When I was nineteen and Mattie was thirteen, Keith came back.

I turn the switchblade one more time in my sweaty palm, feeling the weight of its neat black handle and the unforgiving blade tucked inside.

It was his, a long time ago.

It’s mine now.

I’m going to carve my name into his soul.