Page 1 of Soft Erasure

PROLOGUE

Before

“Breathe in. One. Two. Three.”

I learned to count my breaths the night Jeff drowned.

Thirteen months later, I learned someone had watched me count long before that night. In a room I didn’t remember. That is the thing about conditioning: it does not feel like conditioning. It feels like yourself.

The voice came from behind me, calm. I didn’t turn. I didn’t need to. My family owns this lake. By morning, the lake will own Jeff.

His voice again. “Four. Five.”

The count came down the gravel. I had heard it before. My shoulders dropped on five.

Jeff was still on the dock with me, still in his socks. I had told him four days ago. Six months I had kept the pregnancy from him, which was also how long it takes a man like Jeff to notice a woman has stopped drinking.

He said it in the flat voice he used for people who worked for him, not for a wife. “You knew what you were doing, Sherry. Own it.” He said it enough times in four days that I’d started to believe I really had been careless.

Still pacing. Still telling me the clinic opened at eight, the one whose window closed at seven months. Jeff had researched it. Four hours from where we were standing, and we had agreed.

We had not agreed. He had agreed and I had stayed quiet, which with Jeff was the same thing.

The gun was casual in his hand. Held, not aimed. I had said no to the drive. No to the appointment. No to the name he had for what was inside me, which was not a name I used. He had taken it out of the back of his jeans when I’d said no the third time. He had not pointed it at me. He had pointed it at the dock between us. Then at the boathouse. Then at his own thigh.

Jeff used a gun like he used his voice, to make the world smaller and put himself at the center of it.

The dock had three boards that gave under weight and one that didn’t. I had mapped them barefoot as a child, back when the lake was only a place the family kept so men could feel rich for a weekend. I knew which board complained and which one only pretended to. Jeff didn’t know the dock. He had married into a family that owned it and never once asked which board was safe to stand on.

He didn’t know my family had plans for him.

“Six.”

The man on the gravel didn’t say seven.

He stopped at six and waited. My body knew the seventh count before my mouth did. My body counted it for me.

Seven.

Jeff turned, mid-sentence. The matchbook was in my pocket already. I had been holding it through Jeff’s voice for an hour. Green foil, a phone number in pencil on the inside. The Greenroom in letters from a place I had not been, or didn’t remember being, which is not the same thing.

The matchbook’s foil was the same green as the seam on the man’s ring. I wouldn’t understand what that meant for twelve more months. That night, I only knew the color.

“Who the f—”

My hand went out on seven.

Not the push. I want to tell you it was the push. The wet board had been wet since I was nine. Eighteen years it had waited for a body. I had never asked why that board stayed wet when the others dried by noon. Some questions a child learns not to put to a lake. I know now what the answer would have been.

The wet board did not get the body. The wet board got the cartridge.

My hand went out on seven and closed over his. For one breath the gun belonged to both of us, his fingers and mine around the same warm metal. Then I felt his grip give before mine did. What was in his hand was in mine for less time than it took the count to finish. I didn’t aim it. The count aimed it. The count had been waiting for the lake since before I knew what counting was. I felt the mechanism inside me engage. The seven was the key. I didn’t know yet what door it opened. I knew my hand was the lock.

The sound was not as loud as the movies say. It was the size of a single hard cough across a quiet lake.

Jeff went sideways before he fell. He was down before he understood he was going. The dock shifted once under the weight of him leaving it. The water received him with a sound smaller than I expected. Black water, a sliver of moon. He came up once with his mouth open, looking at me, not at the man on the gravel.

Looking at me, he tried to say something. It never became a word before he went under.