I don’t have to ask what it is. Our brains are so eerily similar that I can dive right into his silent musings with no further clarification.
“Plane crash,” I offer.
“Too many innocent bystanders. A well-placed bomb?”
“Same issue. Poison, maybe. Something engineered to attack his DNA specifically.”
“Is that even a thing?”
I shrug. “Probably.”
“Can’t exactly Google it though, can we?”
“We’re already risking a lot just talking about it.”
Beck sighs, turning sleepy onyx eyes on me. “Two bullets to the back of the head.”
“Execution style. I like it.”
“We could do it together,” he says.
There isn’t a single thing in this world I’m not willing to do with Lance Beckham including assassinating a President, but there’s a whole other person to consider in this scenario and every other one we play out where we’re responsible for ending Aubrey’s life.
“We’d go to prison for the rest of our lives. She’d be alone.”
“Yeah,” Beck agrees. “But at least she’d be free.”
3
BECK
No one ever talks about how peaceful cemeteries are.
The quiet calm that finds you when you’re sitting among the headstones of people you hope were loved well and are missed terribly. I can’t speak for anyone else here, but I know for certain that both things are true for the two souls who were laid to rest in the spots in front of me.
I wasn’t planning on visiting Diana and Cameron’s graves today, but after receiving a call from my realtor confirming the sale of what was supposed to be our forever home, there was only one place I really wanted to be. Cal let me leave the circle of his arms without much protest, knowing I needed the space to process this final loss of my old life.
Blades of freshly mowed grass brush against my legs as I kneel before my wife, replacing the bouquet I brought last week with a fresh one. This is the first time in a while I’ve been able to visit before the flowers wither and die, and I find myself smiling at that as I reach over and put the old arrangement next to the set of blocks I got Cameron.
He would have been inching up into the teenage years if he’d lived to see today, but I can only ever picture him as a baby.Small and fragile and in need of protection I wish every day I would have been able to provide.
A sharp lancing pain rips through me, forcing my eyes shut for a second.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, letting the useless words find a home in the timid warmth of the early May afternoon. As I open my eyes, I imagine them floating up to the leaves of the cherry blossom trees looming above, acquainting themselves with every other apology and grief-riddled sentence that’s escaped my lips and been captured by the branches.
The image brings me no peace.
Few things do these days.
Instead of dwelling, I settle myself into the spot between Diana and Cameron and give the trees more things to hold. I spend an hour unburdening myself only to stand and find I’m carrying the same heaviness I was when I sat down. It came in the days after we rescued Selene from Jacob Marsh when the air of relief that she was safe dissipated and the weight of what I’d done to make that a reality set in.
First, it was the what-ifs.
What if I hadn’t stumbled out onto that landing? What if I had thrown Charlie to the side instead of over the railing? What if it had been Cal? Would he have been able to talk her down? What if she didn’t have to die?
What if, what if, what if.
Then came the nightmares I refused to talk about with Cal because I didn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t always Charlie’s broken body on that factory floor. Sometimes it was Selene’s. Sometimes it was his. Sometimes it was Diana’s, and she’d have Cameron in her arms. And no matter who the victim was, the perpetrator was always me. Me, doing damage, inflicting pain, ruining everything.
