Entropy (34 page)

It was a couple of days after that fire when I had seen you with her arm in arm fleeing from danger without any thought of my well-being. I initially kept what I saw to myself but became so reticent in my behavior, that you eventually asked me what was wrong. I finally broke down and I told you what I had seen. Once I had made my admission, the anger and pain that I had fought to suppress for so long poured out of me. I said such horrible things to you. Although I might have had cause, I never should have said those things. In my heart I knew them to be out of character, but it felt like you were trying to blame me for your actions.

When you moved closer towards me I began sobbing. Suddenly I began slapping you, pounding my clenched hands against the breadth of your chest. I kept asking you what was wrong with me. You didn't say anything for a couple of minutes. You just stood there and let me pound upon you. You then closed your eyes and said that I was unlovable. I begged you to take that back. Despite what you had done to me I said that I still wanted you. All I wanted was for you to love me. I desperately wanted to have another baby, and hoped that this could somehow rebuild upon the ruins of our daughter's death and bring us back together.

Instead, you grabbed my wrists and nestled closer to my neck so you could whisper to me. You said that you hated fucking me. You were never going to leave
her
and you said that she was already pregnant. It was going to be a girl. I tried to pull away from you, but you grabbed my forearms tighter and pinned them behind my back. You whispered that no man, no artist could ever make me beautiful again. You pressed your lips against the small area of flesh underneath my earlobe and said that it should have been me who was found dead hanging inside that barn, instead of my sister.

***

I should never have started this journey. I wondered if it was because I wanted to see you one last time that I was enduring this punishment. I finally recognized the hard truth as I watched the streams of sweat roll down the hijacker's forearm, connect with the barrel of the gun and drip steadily from his fingertips and onto the floor of the bus. I should have never allowed that note that you left to lure me. Everything was now directed at me, his anger, his seclusion, his despondency, your hubris, your brush, his gun. I felt suffocated.

The hijacker walked towards me. He leaned over and asked me to stand. I hadn't moved for so long that when I did, I stumbled and nearly collapsed. The hijacker grabbed my shoulder in an effort to support me. When he did, the gun pressed hard into the soft tissue underneath my arm. He then directed me to go towards the front of the bus and to stop at the door. The tip of the gun was pressed against the small of my back, brushing across the ridge of my vertebra.

The hijacker said that he should have let me go hours ago, and that I had been through enough already. I didn't understand what he meant. No one else but you had examined the wreckage left behind, like an investigator studies a plane crash. You searched underneath all of the structured frames and architectonics for reason, for cause, for probability. Yet there would be no findings, no reports, no conclusions that would ever allow me to discern our loss, our suffering. I had tried so hard to change, to be the woman and the lover I thought you wanted. Maybe we all see things in one another that just aren't there, including ourselves.

“I am sorry about your daughter.”

The words he said hit me hard and made me cold. Through them I could smell the turpentine you used to clean your brushes. I never had a chance to stretch and pull at his words, to mold them like warm clay into the shapes that I wanted them to take, because at that moment, the injured man at the rear of the bus had rushed forward and was reaching for the gun. How I wished it had been you, driven by that fractured sense of nobility that I thought existed in your gifted hands.

The gun discharged through the small of my back.

My body lunged towards the stairs and slammed violently against the door. I landed on my stomach, my face flush with the top step. Blood seeped from my abdomen. I wished that it was that brilliant vermilion shade you used in your paintings. All of the colors of your world suddenly became an amalgam. It was as if you tipped your palette allowing your carefully segregated colors to mix into a random and indiscernible array of blues and olives, alabaster and umber, colliding with the cold steel frame of the bus.

I was nothing more than a failed restoration, a now undesirable piece of unattainable art that was once priceless and original. I felt so cold. I finally understood what the hijacker was listening to. The earpiece he used was pulled from the recorder, and I heard a woman's voice. I wanted it to be your voice asking for my forgiveness, trailing through the deteriorating whispers of promises and hope that passed over my skin.

Your colors are gone and I am alone on a bleached canvas, frightened and neglected.

Robert Raker graduated with a degree in Journalism from the University of Pittsburgh. He currently resides in Philadelphia where he enjoys art, music, literature and live theater. He is currently working on his next novel.