It had happened again. This time it was while we were cleaning out our closet when Ana came across the old cardboard box. I had a pile of old t-shirts that I was deciding which would stay and which would become rags when I heard her cry. I turned and saw her on the floor with the box between her legs. The flaps hung open to reveal its stale contents; a jewelry box, a wristwatch, some papers, some books, and other personal belongings. She held a yellowed newspaper clipping in one hand and an eccentric jade necklace in the other.
“I’m sorry,” she whimpered while tears gently rolled down her checks.
I stood silent for probably too long. I never knew what to say. Finally I knelt down in front of her “Honey, it’s okay I know it is hard.”
“Every time I think it will get easier; this time I won’t cry. But it still hurts so much.” Her silent cry turned to sobs “Why does he get to live? Why doesn’t he have to pay for what he did?”
“I don’t know,” I said solemnly and reached over and rubbed her shoulder. “Come on, let’s put this stuff away.”
She nodded slightly as she sniffled and together we put the things back in the box, last being the article that detailed her parent’s tragic end.
Every time this happened I would get a burning inside of me. My poor lovely wife forced to deal with such a horrible experience at such an early age. And the man responsible for her parent’s death lived his life as though nothing ever happened. It was fifteen years ago, my wife was nine, when he killed them. I guess back then they weren’t too sharp on handling drunk drivers. My would-be in-laws were coming back from a formal dinner party when that waste of flesh slammed into them. Of course the drunk goes unscathed while the victims are zipped up and towed away in bags.
~
I tell you it was a strange feeling, almost like a literal switch being flipped. My mind began to work out a plan. More and more the intricate details became clearer as the days went on. I found my work was not getting done as I focused more on my plan. My solution to the box of stuff. Then the day came.
Ana thought I was away on business and I told work there were personal issues that needed to be handled so I needed a week off. Both were only half-lies. I left Atlanta and drove nonstop to Chicago. I only had a week at best so I could not spare a single minute.
He was easy enough to find and I began to watch him. People are such creatures of habit and he was no different. In only three days his routine was detailed in the notepad I kept in the seat beside me. She was absolutely right; he lived his life as though nothing had ever happened. As if he was not responsible for the murder of her parents. He had a wife and child, but the bottle was still more important to him. Drinks after work seemed to be the norm so it was quite easy to snatch him up leaving the bar. I merely hid in the backseat and right before he turned the ignition I laid the tire iron across the back of his head.
I think it took him a minute to understand what was happening as he looked at me with a glazed look through the windshield. His slow blink turned to eyes wide open when he tried to reach for the back of his head and realized he couldn’t. He looked down at the silvery globs where his hands should be on the steering wheel. He jerked frantically against the duct tape, but I had used practically a whole role on his hands alone. Yelling was not an option for the same reason he couldn’t move his hands, feet, or body. I managed to buy plenty of the tape on sale as a handy man special.
After a few minutes of enjoying his struggle, I came around from the front of the car to his window. He jerked away when I reached for his face and sounded off with muted screams. I grabbed his hair with one gloved hand to hold his head still and ripped the strip of tape from his mouth. Instantly he began to yell for help.
“Go ahead, scream and yell all you want,” I told him as I balled the piece of tape up then flicked it at his face.
He looked at me and continued to scream for help. His head jerked side to side looking for help while he screamed. But there was no one around. I was quite proud of myself having found this spot in a strange place on so little sleep. There were no lights on this particular part of the tracks. And his Lincoln fit nicely across them.
I stood with my arms folded and my eyebrows raised and waited patiently until finally he stopped screaming.
“What the hell are you doing?” he yelled.
I slowly shook my head, “In your position, do you think it is best to yell at me?”
His head dropped and he took a deep breath. Without looking up he asked, “What is it you want?”
“I want you to die,” I said nonchalant.
His head jerked around “Why? What did I ever do to you?”
“You are the stone in the pond and I am one of your ripples.”
“What the hell is that suppose to mean?”
“About fifteen years ago you killed a man and a woman.”
At first he looked at me with his face scrunched up, like I was talking in some foreign language, but then his eyes opened. “That was an accident!”
I stepped toward the car and kicked the driver door. “Accident? You chose to drink and drive! How is that an accident?” He just stared at me with his mouth hanging open. “You killed my wife’s parents. You stole her childhood. It is something she has to live with, something she has to deal with everyday. It is something that I have to deal with because it hurts her so.”
“I’m… I’m sorry.”
“No you’re not,” I chuckled. “If you were sorry you wouldn’t still be drinking and driving. If you were sorry you might have come to her and apologized for what you did, begged for forgiveness.” I could feel a vibration under my foot as I stood on the steel rail. I looked at my watch. “No, you’re not sorry, but you’re about to be,” I said as I turned and looked down the track.
We were both silent long enough to hear the rumbling and clanking of the train.
“Please don’t do this! I’ll do anything! I have a wife and son!” he yelled and tears started rolling down his face.
“Oh, you cry now when it’s you who is looking death face on. Did you cry for them? Did you cry for the little girl whose life you changed forever?”
I slowly backed away from the car and watched him begin to thrash against the tape. I looked down the tracks and saw it closing in. The massive serpent of metal wasn’t moving terribly fast, but it rumbled ahead quick enough. When I looked back I was shocked to see that he actually got a hand free. My heart pounded and I kept snapping my attention from the train to the car. Then he got his other hand free. The train was closer. Now his torso. The damn train wasn’t moving fast enough. I inched toward the car not sure what to do. I looked back for him, but he wasn’t there. Franticly I looked around for him and stepped toward the car. There I saw his back jostling as he worked to get his feet free. I was only a couple steps away from the car. Every part of my body throbbed as my heart jolted in my chest. Everything was happening in slow motion, especially the train.
His head popped up and he gave me a look of disdain; he had gotten his feet free. My eyes shot open and my jaw dropped. As he turned for the door the blast from the horn sounded causing me to jerk and snap my attention to the foreboding beast. The brake screeched as the train, deceptively quick, was upon us. Something that big doesn’t seem to move that fast, but it did. Over the horn and the breaks I could hear the horrific sound of him screaming. He had managed to get the door open, but that was all when the train collided with the car and him between the two. Being so close to the impact I stumbled backwards and fell. I stared as the train pushed the wreckage down the tracks creating a wake of sparks, then the car ignited. Once the train and the squeal of the brakes came to a halt I shuddered and began to run.
~
When I returned home I couldn’t sleep. Any moment I didn’t preoccupy my mind the images and the sound of his scream would fill my head. Every time the phone rang, every unexpected knock on the door I would start to sweat. I waited for word to come to Ana from her friends or distant relatives about his demise, but no one seemed to care. Truth was she really didn’t have anybody. I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to tell her, partly because I couldn’t stand to carry this burden by myself any longer, but mostly because I did it for her. I wanted her to know how much I loved her. It was at dinner weeks later that I finally broke down.
“Baby, you’re not eating your dinner. Do you still feel bad?” she asked as she twirled the spaghetti onto her fork.
She looked so sweet and innocent. Her shoulder length curls draped the sides of her soft face. Her round green eyes were set perfectly in her porcelain skin. I couldn’t help but crack a smile as I looked at her.
She sheepishly smiled back “What?”
“I don’t tell you enough how beautiful you are.”
She smiled big then looked down at her plate and shook her head “You are being silly.”
“Really, you are my world. You mean so much to me and I would do anything to make you happy.” I took a deep breath “I would even kill for you.”
She looked at me sideways “That’s a strange thing to say. Most people would say die for you.”
“Oh, and I would die for you, but that would be easier comparatively. There is something I have to tell you.”
“You are starting to scare me.”
“You know the man that killed your parents?”
“Stop, I don’t want to talk about this.”
“No listen. I didn’t go away on business.”
“Don’t tell me this! I don’t want to hear this.”
“I found him and I killed him.”
A loud clank rang out as she slammed her fork into her plate. “Stop it! Why would you say something like that? I don’t think this is funny!”
“Baby, listen, I know how much he hurt you. I couldn’t bear to see you get so upset every time you looked into that box of stuff. You were right, he deserved to die.”
“Shut up!” she screamed and jumped from her seat. The chair fell back and crashed onto the floor and she ran out of the room.
She was face down on the bed sobbing when I found her in our room.
“I did it for you. I love you!” I plead.
“Go away!” came a muffled yell from behind one of the pillows.
I placed his driver license on the bed and pulled the door shut as I left. While I was cleaning the dishes I heard her scream. It was much like his right before the train hit.
~
The silence in the house was probably the hardest thing to take. Ana refused to even look at me. Whenever I was home she found refuge in another part of the house. I wondered when she would leave and where would she go. She led a sheltered life and was very shy. Despite her beauty she had never been in a relationship before ours. The grandmother that raised her had passed away a little over a year ago and the family she did have were so distant, either physically or emotionally, she was basically alone. And though I hoped she would realize there was no where for her to go, even more so I hoped that she would realize all I had done was out of love. Even when I threw that box of stuff in the trash.
It all came down to that damn box of aged reminders. Every time she looked in that box it tore her apart. Every time she was hurt by it, it hurt me. That damn box of stuff was the reason I had done what I had done. That night was the first time in six months she spoke to me. It was also the last.
“David, where is my box?” she screamed from the closet.
When I stepped into the doorway she was tearing the clothes off the racks. “Baby,” I paused as she slowly turned to look at me. “I had to get rid of it.”
She dropped to her knees and shrieked, “No!”
“Ana, don’t you see, it was that box of stuff that was tearing us apart” I said and knelt down in the pile of clothes beside her.
She held her face in her hands and wept.
I tried to stroke her hair, but she smacked my hand away “I can’t live here anymore,” she sobbed as she ran out of the closet.
Tears began to tickle my cheeks as I hoped that day would never come, but by the end of the night she was gone. I cried so hard I felt sick and threw-up in the shower. I just sat on the floor and let the water beat on me.
~
I’d been alone in the house for almost two years and why it took me so long to find her book behind the nightstand I’ll never know. She must have knocked it off when she left so hastily that night. But I did and in it what I found shocked me even more. Tucked almost halfway through the paperback romance were his driver’s license and a folded piece of paper. The book tucked under my arm dropped to the floor. The unfolded piece of paper revealed an Internet search of the name Richard Bateman, the man who had killed her parents and subsequently I had killed. Or so I thought.
I ran down the stairs and into the study. My fingers couldn’t type fast enough, but I found the archived article. As I read it I discovered that Mr. Bateman had managed to dive out of the way of the train at the very last second. When he was found at the site of the burning wreckage he was unconscious. He remained at the hospital in a coma for almost a month before he came out of it. Apparently he had no memory of the events that night or how and why he was parked on the tracks.
I couldn’t believe what I just read. I held the paper up with a shaky hand and my eyes darted around it. The article was written one month and one week after I had returned from Chicago. At the upper right of the paper was the print date; one week after the article was written. One day after I told Ana I had killed him.
She had known he was alive. She had known the whole time, yet she never said a word. Why? Why would she not tell me? All I ever did was love her. The only reason I did what I thought I did was for her. Yet, she couldn’t forgive me.
I folded the piece of paper up and slipped the license in one of the folds. The stairs creaked under my feet as I made my way back to the bedroom. I picked up the little novel and rubbed my thumb across the embossed cover and couldn’t help but smile as I looked at it. Every time Ana would start reading a new one she would make it a point to claim herself to be the voluptuous female character and me as the rugged male. I sighed as those happy days were long gone now.
Once in the closet I parted the hanging clothes to reveal a wooden chest. I turned through the dial on the lock and gave it tug. The lid opened with a squeak and I tucked the book into a little gap amongst the various items. I looked over to the right side of the chest and saw the smooth white orb. I lifted it up and looked deep into the sockets. In my head I could still see her green eyes set in her soft skin.
“Why didn’t you tell me? You knew all along he lived. It didn’t have to be like this, but you had to know I would never let you go.”
When I said I would kill for Ana I guess in the end that included her. I caressed her smooth skull and placed it ever so gently in its place. I closed and locked the lid, then put away my own box of stuff.
