9 years she had hoped Heather’s absence would take away the hollow feeling rooted in her from that summer.She had planned and schemed to leave so many times, only to back out at the last second, and the chasm only grew.
Heather had to die. She’d known it forever.
Marlowe just hadn’t wanted to be the one to do it.
She cleared her throat and trailed her hands along the sweat-smooth oar, finding a weak spot less than a foot below the handle. “I’ve hated you from the moment they locked my cabin door. Maybe all the hookups were my own way of hating you. All the sex, all those years, all that sinning with me.”
The oar cracked against the side of the truck box and Marlowe hefted the small piece in her hand. She knew her words were thick and slurred, but to her they were clearer than anything she’d ever said. “You had a choice, Heather. You could have chosen to fix things. Or to leave me alone. You could have done better.”
Heather’s eyes flashed and a garbled moan wheezed from her lips.
Marlowe smoothed the sticky tangles of her hair back from her face and leaned in. “But you were always just like me. A degenerate little slut.” Marlowe found a vicious sense of peace when Heather’s cheeks paled at her own words used against her.
“At least I never hated myself for it,” Marlowe whispered.
Heather’s mouth trembled. She might have been praying. But Heather laboriously formed one, gasping word, grated from her raw throat like vomiting stones. “Please.”
Marlowe’s lips pulled back in a smile she knew looked more like Pike than anything human. “We should’ve both been locked away in that cabin,” she said softly.
Marlowe squared her aching shoulders. The jagged end of the oar hovered over Heather’s mouth. The night quieted.
Heather’s eyes shot wide as her teeth scraped against the wood sinking into her mouth, and scarlet bubbled from her lips.
Marlowe tasted blood spatters on her tongue.
Flesh separated around wood and crusted under Marlowe’s nails. She bore down and drove the stake down through rubbery ropes of cartilage. It slipped away from the inside of Heather’s knobby spine andthunkedwetly against the rusted truck bed.
Heather never made another sound.
Marlowe froze, hands clasped around the oar. She should feel something, staring at the spike through Heather’s face. Judgment she’d wrongfully placed with her own hands, when she’d always been told forgiveness wasfor humanity, judgment was for God. Only peace bloomed stubbornly in her cavernous chest.
Marlowe couldn’t accept grace and forgiveness, because there wasn’t a part of her feeling sorry for what she did. So she’d rot in her resentment along with Heather’s body, and if her anger sent her to the hell Heather believed in, Marlowe would gladly go.
She sank back on her heels and wiped a tired, damp arm across her forehead. Miss Marlowe, with the Oar, in the Truck. This time, she smiled.
Frogs croaked again, gentle in the quiet.
Another noise filtered into Marlowe’s cottoned ears.
Gravel dug into her bare knees as she crawled to the tailgate and let it free with abang, shattering the delicate silence.
Pike bared needle teeth at her.
Marlowe coughed and spat over the edge. “Get in line.”
Her body ached in ways she didn’t know it could and she was two teeth short and probably had a few broken bones, butit was over. Marlowe could breathe again, and she did. Deep, calming breaths. A smoke. That’s what she needed. In a minute, once she caught her breath.
Through the swelling and bruised ache of her eyes she caught a glimpse of the lake, once again peaceful. Good luck explaining what happened here tonight to anyone.She’d make up a story for the folks at work about getting jumped behind one of the sleazy bars she frequented.
Living life on the edge had advantages.
Marlowe dug out a crushed, soggy pack of cigarettes and fumbled for her lighter. Truck springs groaned and wheezed when knobby fingers grasped the edge and Pike began the slow, laborious haul into the box.
Marlowe’s stretched-thin muscles burned and her back felt like hot pokers had been shoved between her vertebrae. She might have broken ribs, if the throbbing pain in her side when she inhaled tobacco was any clue.
Forgiveness had been beaten into Marlowe until she was bruised from all the mercy. Her parents hadn’t known any better; but after they came to pick her up from Camp Atonement, they never stepped foot in another church until. Marlowe had known the damage was already done, and knew she was rotten from the inside out when forgiveness never truly took root in her.
As Marlowe tapped ash off her cigarette and watched it sizzle in the pools of blood, she didn’t feel rotten. She felt perfectly happy. At least she would be, after a couple of strong painkillers, chain-smoking a pack, maybe taking a nap.
