Chapter Text
You said Get in the van, Elizabeth.
But I didn’t want to. So I said that. I said I don’t want to.
You stole a glance at Mick that communicated something, and then you both were grabbing me by either elbow, tearing me from the flanks of my family. I didn’t resist, not really, though I stumbled, bruised my shin against the bumper. They screamed; I remember them crying my name even after the van’s back doors shut on them. As the engine rumbled to a start you could hear their wails, a few sharp slaps of their palms against the windows before the van peeled off.
I didn’t beg. Did you think I would? Thrown in the back of a van in an alley in the middle of the night, I knew what was coming. You should’ve done this a long, long time ago.
Why didn’t you? Why did you wait so long?
I didn’t want to look at you, but I could feel your gaze upon me. The van rocked along the road. My back ached, my shin ached. Distantly, I remembered I hadn’t eaten dinner yet, and my traitorous stomach growled. I felt weak and wounded and I didn’t look at you.
All I could think of was the chasm of knowledge we possessed of each other. Deep but empty. How little I knew you, how little you knew me, how we had hidden so much of ourselves from each other. The impossibility of it gave me a very particular nostalgic pain.
Eventually, finally, the van started to slow. A cold drop of terror moved through me, solitary and precise.
The van stalled, parked, the engine cut. Bile rose to the back of my throat, all of my muscles clenched hard. I couldn’t stop shaking, my teeth making an embarrassing clattering noise in the hollow bowels of the van.
Finally, the doors opened. Mick’s solid black silhouette against the glow of the van’s lights.
What’s going to happen to them? I let out, feigning away from your hands as you went to grab for me.
Your eyes were hard, unreadable. You have always been a mystery to me but right then you were gone, very very far away. I wanted to scream at you, to throw you back against the wall of the van and throttle you. I wanted to reverse time, to rewrite everything, to untell every lie. To meet you as someone else, somewhere else, innocuous, to misunderstand each other over a glass of bourbon anywhere other than your bar. To be honest strangers again.
The doors were open, but I just kept staring into your eyes. Was there anything left? Or had I exhausted my entire rope?
The fecund scent is what made it real. Raw earth, broken, soil overturned. That worm-smell, how the earth can make even decay sweet.
You’d dug my grave. Or at least, paid someone else do it. All the same, right?
Maybe I was over-confident. Maybe I was challenging you. To call it off. It could’ve been a scare-tactic. I have to be honest, I didn’t think you’d ever go this far. Did I read all of this wrong? Was I that naïve? Or had you played me that good?
Still, there it was. The grave. Shallow. Dug over the recent casket of someone else, some other name on a temporary marker. They hadn’t even been here that long, no tombstone yet. It was a good cover. For you. At least for a little while.
Something hit me from behind, and I dropped to my knees before the pit.
Would I fit? It didn’t look like a big enough grave, but maybe that was because it wasn’t very deep.
My eyes were wet, although I don’t think I was crying. Not exactly. I was just trying to make out the name on the marker.
You were erasing me completely, putting me underground, under some other name.
Is that what you wanted? For me to never exist?
I thought maybe there would be a moment of—
Something. Anything.
But no, it was just the dead-of-night silence and my heaving breaths and then the white-hot noise of the shot. I felt it penetrate the back of my skull, move through me and out my mouth. I tasted the blood.
You watched me flop forward. The soil got in my eyes, my nose. I tasted the dirt. I twitched. And then went still, so still. You stared at me for a long time in the misty illumination of the van’s headlights. It was August, but my grave was cold. Then, at last, you turned back to the van, where you overtook the driver’s seat, and waited as Mick dragged me further into the grave, and then buried me.
You should’ve done it.
Alone.
You’d told me that you’d do it yourself.
He’s good at his job. He’s loyal.
But you already know that.
Was it cathartic? Was it a relief? I am asking because I don’t know what your face looked like when you… when you did it. Did it feel good? Did it feel like the right thing to do? Does it still feel like the right thing?
I see you sleepless in bed at night, wide-eyed. I see you over-drinking, making yourself sick. I see you taking it out on people who don’t deserve it—on Rhea, on Marcus. I see you thinking of me, always. The walls of your skull plastered with my image, the cavities in your ears echoing my laugh unprompted at all hours.
Do you regret it?
When they found me, my face had melted away, my flesh sloughing from my bones. When they found me they didn’t know who I was. They looked at my teeth to figure it out.
Do you remember my teeth? You’ve never touched any of my other bones.
When they came for you, you didn’t even fight. You just went, to be chewed up by some other monster.
When you come back to me, when you’re just dirt and ash again with me, I know we will ask each other: Was it worth it?