I hesitate as he motions to the phone in my hand. I pause, but then unlock the screen and enter his information.
“Try it now so I can capture yours.”
I send him a text and hear his phone ping inside the truck.
“There!” he says.
He moves closer, this time squeezing my shoulder. There is an energy about him that feels electric, like a starstruck fan meeting a movie star. He’s nervous and excited all at once.
I take a step back and cross my arms at my chest. I should leave. I have no weapon. We’re miles from town. I don’t know what to make of this. Of him. I wonder if any of us came out of that store unscathed and how our behavior has changed. He needed to meet me here on a secluded road. I sleep on the sofa, wander the house at night in a trance. I talk myself into believing there’s nothing wrong.
He needed to see me. But I need something from him too.
“Please—I have to ask you a question.” My heart beats faster, and I begin to think the energy is coming from me and not him.
“Anything,” he replies.
My head is light as I stumble on the words. I think about Rowan and Mitch and Dr. Landyn telling me again and again that it doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. I remain unpersuaded, and now I might, finally, know if I was justified in killing that young man.
“Did you see it?” I ask him. “Did you see him fall?”
Both of his hands reach for my face, and he holds it firmly at the jawline. “Oh no! Is this what’s been bothering you? Why you haven’t returned to work? Why you can’t sleep?”
Fuck.How does he know that?
“Are you asking me if you really saved my life?” He stares into my eyes, his hands suddenly stronger as they press all the way to the back of my neck.
“Yes,” I say. “That’s what I’m asking. No one else was hit. But you... I thought you were in a direct line of fire and at close range...”
He releases my face and pulls my entire body into his. My forehead presses against his chest. I feel his hips beneath my rib cage. His arms are like metal bars behind my back, locking me to him.
“Of course you saved me,” he says. “He had already fired, but the shot went right past me. Then you came out of nowhere. I saw you shoot and watched him go down. I hadn’t reached the dressing room.”
I swim in a sea of emotion, held captive by the body of this man but set free as well. A weight lifts from my heart as my legs buckle and I begin to cry, sob, in the arms of this stranger.
“Shhh,” Wade whispers, stroking my hair. “There, there. It’s all right. You’re all right now.”
I smell the soap, stronger now, and feel the warmth of his body. Intimacies coming from a total stranger. The alarm bells grow louder, but they are quickly muted by the relief that has rushed in.
He tells me then, in a soft, quiet voice, every detail of what happened. He describes the pieces I know, matching them second by second. “When he knew you were behind him, he turned and I saw him aim his gun at you, so I moved, hoping to draw his attention, and I did, didn’t I? My eyes never left him. He saw me and turned back, and that’s when you fired. I saw it. I saw the shot, but I kept moving into the dressing room to help the pregnant woman.”
I begin to calm as the torment eases, and Wade Austin releases me. I take a deep breath, and he tells me he’s sorry for not coming forward sooner. “I just assumed you knew. There were so many people there.”
I explain how the others had found hiding places and how the cameras didn’t cover the area where all of this happened. As we stand beside his truck, leaning against its side, I tell him I’ve been tormented.
I tell him the things I haven’t told anyone because no one else has understood. I’ve had to be their hero. I’ve had to be rational and stable to return to work. I’ve had to be a mother and wife. Here, I don’t have to be anything but what I am. What I’ve become.
“This is why I wanted to see you,” he says. “I needed to know what that moment did to you because it changed me too. And no one wants to talk about it. I’ve tried to reach out to other people who were there, finding them through chat rooms and news reports. They all just want to put it behind them.”
Wade looks into the woods across the road and grows reflective. “Every night I see it. I see that creature with dead eyes walking toward me like he had not a care in the world. I see the pregnant woman pushing past me, running for the dressing room. All those people climbing into the racks and hiding like cowards. I’ve been over it in my head, asking myself why I stood there, why I didn’t run or try to hide. I like to believe it was an act of bravery. That something inside me was willing to draw the fire. That I was sacrificing myself so the others could live. It was instinct. Pure and simple. Just like it was for you. Knowing when to shoot. Knowing it was the last chance. I saved their lives by offering my own, but then you saved mine.”
I picture the scene, the parts I can remember. His hands in the air. The desperate hope that washed over his face when he saw me. And then he tried to escape. He moved toward the dressing room. But he remembers this part differently. He believes he was trying to draw Clay Lucas’s attention away from me. I say nothing. I don’t challenge his recollection. The way he’s reconstructed his actions. I don’t judge him for creating a story he can live with.
I remind myself that every memory from that day is subject to scrutiny—especially my own.
“That day,” he says, and now I see the red streaks on his skin and the tears welling in his eyes. “That day changed me the way it changed you. And all these feelings, they don’t just stop, do they? But there’s no place to put them.”
We talk for a long time. Close to an hour. It passes by in an instant. I tell him about the crime that goes on under the bridge where Clay Lucas had taken refuge. How it’s likely that’s where he got his hands on the gun. How he was having delusions about the devil. I tell him how pervasive the problem is—drugs and guns—how the dealers come from New York. How one of them was even murdered in the town north of ours, a state reserve with hunting shelters, one that had a Kill Room—that’s what they call it now.
