A Necessary End (33 page)

I listen to his breathing and let it work its magic. My thoughts are less frenzied, more focused. Then I tiptoe out. I close the door and lean against it, wanting to stay close to him.

To be clear: When I saw Patty—concave rather than convex—I didn't change my plan per se. I don't remember deciding to kill her. It wasn't premeditated. But things that were beyond the realm of possibility were no longer entirely impermissible.

I don't think Summer Jackson, former prosecutor, would get the distinction.

It was rage, pure and simple. Who plans rage?

I followed Patty outside. She was sorting through her mail and never saw me. See? Self-absorbed. I got in my car, keeping her in sight, and I began to drive slowly beside her. People were honking at me, and I slid down in my seat slightly, not wanting her to recognize me, not yet. I had a hoodie pulled up over my hair anyway, but still. I didn't want to take any chances.

She didn't get in a car, just kept walking. I was forced to tail her for ten blocks in a not-so-nice neighborhood with people swerving to get around me and occasionally yelling obscenities. Somehow, Patty just walked on. For a con woman, she was remarkably oblivious to
her surroundings. Her overconfidence was staggering. She obviously thought no one could touch her; nothing bad could happen. This was the woman who'd pretended to be unsinkable in the face of constant calamity. She'd snowed me completely.

I settle outside Michael's room, my back against the door, exhausted. It's always this way when I remember. Fortunately, I'm good at forgetting.

But the body's been found. That was never supposed to happen. Who the hell walks their dog in western Utah near abandoned mine shafts? There weren't supposed to be any remains by now. I suppose it could turn out that I shouldn't have followed the blueprint of Susan Powell's murdering husband, a psychopath who later killed his two children and himself. But her body never was recovered.

It's not my fault. Patty brought it on herself. If she'd had a shred of decency, of remorse, it would have ended differently for her. It might not have had to end at all.

I saw her go into a run-down apartment building, but by the time I found parking and ran in after her, the hallway was empty. It stank of cigarettes and something vaguely medicinal; the carpet was stained and looked like it was made of felt. Patty was destroying people's dreams in order to live like this? Somehow that seemed even more offensive. I read the mailboxes, not recognizing anyone. Now I know which name was hers: Joy Ellison. Then, I was forced into another stakeout.

I sat in my car outside her building for hours. There were few pedestrians, and no one looked at me with even the slightest curiosity. It was the kind of neighborhood where people avoid eye contact.

Finally, she walked outside with a bag of garbage. I leapt from my car and followed her back inside, holding the door open. She didn't look at me or say thanks. Another black mark against her. I hate when people don't thank you for an obvious courtesy. Are we not part of a civil society? Maybe if she'd said thanks, if she'd recognized me, it would have ended there.

Instead, I could see clearly which door she entered: apartment 3.

It was still daylight. I left and drove back to my motel, the one where I'd paid in cash, written in a false license plate number, and signed a false name. If the proprietor had asked for ID, I would have tried somewhere else; he didn't, so the Hi-Tone Motel it was.

Alone in my room, I recalled Gabe's
Catfish
trick: I searched ultrasounds under Google Images. I immediately recognized the third picture that came up. Of course I did, I'd stared at it for enough hours. It was Patty's baby, the one that was supposed to have been mine. She'd passed off someone else's fetus as her own, and she hadn't even been smart enough to cover her tracks. Maybe she figured she didn't need any camouflage, so long as she had the right victim.

I waited until after dark. I realize that might smack of premeditation, but really, I was giving myself a chance to formulate a new plan, or to back out.

That night, I drove back to her building. When I knocked on her door, my mind was racing (kind of like it is now). I had no weapons. I was in no way afraid of Patty, who was shorter and slighter than me and undoubtedly way less adrenalized. I had the element of surprise.

Only she didn't seem surprised to see me. She invited me in, and I had the distinct impression that I wasn't the first angry victim to show up at her door.

The apartment smelled rancid. I wondered what could have been in her garbage that even hours later, the reek persisted. Her decorating was nonexistent. She had the bare minimum of thrift-store living room furniture. In the corner was a rickety desk with a computer on it. Facebook was up.

“Who are you posting as?” I asked. “Which of your alter egos?”

She laughed. She was going to play it as if nothing had gone wrong between us, as if we were old friends who'd fallen out of touch. “Alter egos,” she said. “That's funny. Like I'm Superman and Clark Kent.”

“More like Lex Luthor.”

Again with the laugh. She gestured toward the couch, which I feared might be infectious. “Have a seat. Can I get you anything to drink?”

I hadn't been prepared for hospitality. “No, thanks.” I walked around the living room. No pictures, nothing personal displayed.

“Are you sure you don't want to sit down? I know it's not the cleanest, but it's comfortable, I promise.” She sat herself, as if to say, Come on in, the water's fine. “I'd love an upgrade, but there's always something going wrong, always new expenses—”

“Where's your cat?”

Without missing a beat: “He died. That's part of why I was out of contact with you. Everything just went to hell. I'd had him for so many years, you know, and he's a member of the family, and there were all these burial expenses.”

“You defriended me.”

“Really?” Her brow furrowed. “That was a mistake.”

“You had my phone number. And my e-mail. If you wanted to stay in touch, you could have.”

“I didn't know what to say. I mean, obviously, I lost the baby.” She couldn't manage to look sorrowful.

“How does that work medically? When you lose a baby that far along? Was it stillborn?”

She shook her head, like it was too horrible to recount.

“You are the worst actress I've ever seen. Just stop it, okay?”

She stared at me a long minute, and then she started to smile. “Obviously, I wasn't
that
bad of an actress.”

“What is wrong with you? Are you just evil? How could you do that to people? I mean, I know I'm not the only one you conned.”

Her eyes were hard, and it couldn't have been the first time she was accused of evil.

“How do you live with yourself?”

“You really came all the way here to ask me that?” She smiled. “I didn't think you were that naïve, Adrienne. I thought you were one
of those people who get what it takes to survive. I thought we understood each other. I thought we were friends.”

“Fortunately, I don't understand you at all.”

“What about your brotherly love triangle?” She was smirking at me, like I was the one with a shameful past.

“Fuck you,” I said, my teenage self obviously alive and well.

“Well, fuck you, too,” she responded, still laughing. “You want to go get a drink?” She stood up.

“Do you think it's a joke, what you did to me? What you're probably still doing to all the other people who want kids?”

“Oh, right. You're here for all of them. This is an intervention. You're here to tell me I need to stop. What a Mother Teresa move.” Bitterness settled into the lines of her face. She looked ten years older than when I met her in San Francisco, back when I needed to believe in her. “You and all the rest of them—you like tossing me a few hundred here, a few hundred there. It lets you feel superior. ‘We might not be able to have a baby, but at least our lives aren't in the toilet, like Janice's.'”

“Like Patty's. You said your name was Patty.”

“Oh, my mistake.” She was still scoffing at me, and my anger was tidal and fast-rising.

My age, however, was waning. I'd regressed to elementary school: “Say you're sorry.”

“You came for an apology? Then we're done here? Well, okay. I'm sorry.”

I had no choice. I hit her. Just punched her right in her mocking little mouth.

I was shocked, staring down at my aching, already bruising knuckles, and so was she, as blood trickled from the corner of her mouth. Then she charged me. After all she'd done to me, she should have just taken her punishment like a woman. If she had, it might have ended there.

But no,
she
charged me. I wrestled with her a little bit and got
her on the ground. She was as shitty a fighter as she was an apologist. Once she was on her grimy floor, I started kicking. Boom, boom, boom, in her left temple, Tati all over again.

It might have ended there.

Except she didn't know to give up. She looked up at me and said, “Fuck you.” We were a couple of adolescents, and she wouldn't cry uncle, not after everything she'd done. She wouldn't give me any satisfaction at all.

I just kept kicking her, until her eyes closed. Then I kicked a few more times for good measure.

Did I ever think, I'm going to kill her? Or, I might be killing her right now?

No. I just wanted to close her I-won-you-have-no-baby eyes. I didn't even know it was possible for me to kill someone like that. I thought that at most, she was unconscious. She was out cold but she'd wake up—Tati all over again.

Once again, I wasn't about to involve any adults. Because in the police's eyes, she'd committed no crime. At a minimum, I'd just committed assault.

But I wish a jury could have seen her, the remorseless bitch. They would never convict me. They'd know I was the victim.

While I was punting her head, my rage was so complete that I lost contact with the sensory world. No seeing, hearing, smelling, nothing. I was pure energy, I was one with the universe. I coasted on my adrenaline over to her computer and there I found further vindication: She'd been in the middle of writing to someone, talking about her fourteen-year-old cat that needed surgery, posting an eighteen-week ultrasound. My ultrasound.

When she woke up, I planned to tell her that I'd gathered evidence of all her crimes and that she better stop or I would come back. I'd expose her, or I'd do worse. She'd just felt what I was capable of. She was not going to mess with any more adoptive parents, not on my watch.

But minutes passed, and the fury began to drain out of me, like fury will, and I started to feel afraid. Patty hadn't stirred, hadn't made a sound. I had to force myself to go back and squat beside her. What freaked me out the most was that there was not a spot of blood on her—no, just purple flesh, dented purple flesh on the side of her head. It hadn't caved in, not like in the movies, it had just yielded a little, just enough.

I realized that I should probably touch her, touch that vampire, that sack of human waste. I should confirm if she was breathing. If not, I should put my mouth to her nasty little mouth, breathe the life back into her, my life, as if she hadn't stolen enough. No, I'd pound her chest instead. That was more up my alley. Then she'd sit up, startled, with a dramatic intake of oxygen, like in a Quentin Tarantino movie.

My senses were coming back, one by one. First up was smell. It wasn't the rancid smell from earlier, no, it was something animal, like what a skunk releases when he's trying to save himself. Strong and musky and vile, and I didn't know if it was coming from me or from Patty. Was it Patty's last attempt to save herself? But it didn't work, no, it didn't, and I knew because I made myself hold my hand in front of her crummy little mouth to check for breath and then I made myself touch her rotten forehead, not where it was dented on the side but where you'd check for fever, where the first wrinkles had started to form, the last wrinkles she'd ever have, and Patty was not quite cold but she wasn't warm either, she was no longer human temperature, not
living
human temperature. She was transforming from person to meat.

I saw that there was blood now on Patty's forehead, and I jumped. Patty was bleeding after death, like stigmata or some religious shit. Then I understood: It was my blood. I had dug into my own palms with my nails while I was kicking in Patty's head. I'd dug in deep enough that I was still bleeding, even though time had passed—how much fucking time had passed?—and something needed to happen
now. I needed to get out. There was a dead body beside me, and I had made it that way.

I knew what I had to do, but I couldn't do it. I sank fully to the floor in paralysis, that dirty fucking floor, with bits of old food and dust balls and—was that cat hair? Yes, it was. White fluffy bundles of cat hair, from who knows when.

So Patty really used to have a cat. Or she still had one right then, crouched somewhere in the apartment, wondering if his mother was dead. Because Patty was that cat's mother. I had killed somebody's mother.

Patty would have been a terrible mother. Incapable of love, incapable of feeling. If there was a cat there, I'd done him a favor. He was probably lurking nearby, waiting, with yellow eyes, waiting until I left so he could eat his lousy mother's face off. He'd been biding his time for years, praying for an opportunity like this one, that bloodless bitch dead on the floor.

I had to clean up my blood.

But I couldn't move. I kept thinking of that cat and his yellow eyes. He was waiting until I opened a closet or the bathroom door, and then it was my face he'd eat. He'd avenge his mother. Because crappy as she'd been, she'd been his.

This was crazy. I couldn't be killed by a friggin' cat.