Last to Die: A gripping psychological thriller not for the faint hearted (11 page)

‘
Y
ou have to come
, they’re expecting you.’ Mike stood in the door of the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist. His body looked lean and brown; his hair lay wet and flat against his head.

Jessie put the book she had been pretending to read down beside her on the bed. Their dog, Rudy, was asleep at her feet, his chin resting on her ankles.

‘You go. You’ll have just as good a time without me.’

‘Mom is doing this 
for
 you.’

‘I didn’t ask her to do anything for me.’

‘Jess.’

‘I don’t want to go. I don’t feel up to it.’

‘Up to what?’ Mike said, his voice rising slightly. ‘You don’t have to do nothing except sit there and—’

‘Mike—’

‘—eat some food, drink a beer or two and relax.’

‘I’m perfectly relaxed right here.’ Jessie picked up her book again, but now her hands were trembling.

‘You know what, Jessie? This is not how it’s going to be!’

Rudy opened his eyes and whined softly at the raised voices. Jessie lowered her book and stared at Mike in surprise.

‘
Excuse
 me?’

‘You think I don’t see what you’re doing? You’re holed up in this house avoiding people. You’ve been doing it for weeks. But I’ve had enough; this is not how it’s going to be. I won’t let you do this to yourself.’

‘I don’t see—’

‘We don’t have to stay there long. We can—’

‘I don’t fucking want to go, Mike. Okay?’

Mike looked surprised: Jessie almost never swore.

‘It’ll look funny if you don’t show, set them tongues wagging for sure.’

‘I don’t give a damn about their 
tongues
 neither.’

‘Yeah, well I do, and I don’t want to be stuck fending off questions for the evening.’

‘Oh, so it’s all about you then?’

Mike took two steps into the room. ‘It’s about 
us.
 It’s about us doing something together. Doing something normal for a change.’

‘What are you talking about? Normal? 
Normal?
 Are you kidding me?’

‘I’m not kidding about anything. I know you’re going through something rough, Jessie. Believe me, I get it. But let me tell you something, 
you’re not the only one
.’ Mike looked away for a moment. ‘We’ve got to try to get a handle on what happened. How are we supposed to get through this if you won’t talk to me? If you won’t talk to anyone?’

‘I did talk to Doctor Fraas.’

‘Once! Once! After that you refused to go back to him.’

‘He can’t help me.’

‘You didn’t give him a chance. You think you’re dealing with this, Jessie, but you’re not. You don’t sleep, you hardly eat, and you’re popping pills like there’s no tomorrow. I can hear you crying at night. You won’t talk to me, you … Look, I’m not asking you to do anything out of the ordinary here, except come with me tonight and eat some food.’

Though she tried to stop them, tears began to spill from Jessie’s eyes. Mike looked at her, anguished. ‘Please, Jessie.’

‘All right.’

‘Well all right.’ Mike tried his hand at a smile, but it didn’t quite work. ‘You should wear that green dress of yours, that looks nice.’

Jessie wiped her tears and rubbed the top of Rudy’s head. ‘Since when have you ever taken notice of my wardrobe?’

‘I’ve got eyes, don’t I?’

‘I guess you do.’

While Mike shaved, Jessie pulled out the dress and held it against her body. She looked at her refection in the mirrored door of the wardrobe, trailing a critical eye over what she saw. She looked sickly and wan. Her cheekbones were more prominent than ever, and while that might look fantastic on some Hollywood starlets, it did not please her in the slightest.

She took a quick shower while Mike fed Rudy and left some food out in a bowl for the cats at the back of the house. By the time he had done that and locked up, she was dressed and ready to go.

‘See?’ Mike snaked an arm over her shoulder and kissed her on the forehead before releasing her, ‘green suits you.’

‘Thank you.’ Jessie checked her refection in the hall mirror and dabbed some lip gloss on her lips.

You’re dolling yourself up while your friends lie rotting in the earth, while parents are crying over their injured babies, while children are learning how to be people again.

She shivered. What she was doing seemed ridiculous and offensive.

‘You can’t be cold?’ Mike said.

‘A little,’ she said, ‘I think I’ll take a wrap.’

‘I’ll go start the engine up.’ Mike kissed her lightly on the forehead again. ‘I’m glad you decided to come.’

‘Me too.’

Jessie walked to the bathroom and closed the door. She barely made it to the toilet before she vomited. She retched until her stomach was empty. When she was sure nothing else could possibly come up, she washed her face and hands, reapplied her lip gloss and went to join her husband.

Fay lived on the opposite side of Rockville to them; the ‘gentrified’ side, as it was laughingly known amongst those that could not afford to live there. Mike’s father, George, had built the house some time in the early seventies, based on a memory of an elaborate house he had once stayed at in Europe. Unfortunately, George hadn’t been much of an architect and, as a result, the single-storey house was an odd expanse of strangely shaped rooms built in an almost hexagonal shape around a central courtyard.

The house was gaily lit up when they arrived. Mike drove up the long-fenced drive and parked to the rear of the property.

‘I see Waldo is here.’ Mike nodded to an out-of-state Lexus. Waldo was Walter Hynes, Mike’s sister Karen’s boyfriend.

‘Don’t call him that. He hates being called Waldo.’

‘I don’t think much of that guy.’

‘You mean he’s not local.’

‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’

‘You know I’m not local either,’ she reminded him.

‘That’s different.’

‘How?’

Mike shrugged. ‘It just is.’

They got out of the truck. As they climbed the steps to the patio, Fay flung open the doors. ‘There you are! I was starting to think you weren’t coming.’

‘Hey, Mom, good to see you.’

‘Come in, come in. Oh for heaven’s sake, Mike, I’m glad you’re here, could you please go help your brother get that grill going some time this evening. I don’t know what is wrong with it.’

‘I’m sure Ace has it under control.’

‘Mike,’ Fay said, tilting her head.

‘I’ll go take a look.’ Mike stepped past his mother and into the main house. Fay gave Jessie an expansive hug.

‘I’m 
so
 glad you’re here. The girls are inside. My, isn’t green just darling on you. Come on through, I sure hope you’re hungry.’

Jessie allowed herself to be shepherded through the house. She spotted Walter by the fireplace in the living room, standing stiff and formal with a bottle of beer in his hand. He tipped the bottle to Jessie and she raised a hand in return. Jeb Orville, the husband of Penny, Mike’s other sister, was sprawled on Fay’s white sofa, pink-faced from sun, wearing a cream polo shirt and cargo pants. Jeb’s father, Vernon Orville, was one of the richest men in Rockville, owing to the timber trade. Jeb worked in the business as little as possible while drawing a considerable salary. He was not a person Jessie had a lot of time for.

Jessie offered to help Fay in the kitchen but was refused, so she made small talk with Penny and Karen. After a while, she excused herself and drifted outside to where Fay had set up a long table under a green awning in the courtyard. Mike and Ace stood over the, now lit, barbeque. Ace turned drumsticks over the coals, a cigarette dangling from his lips, a beer in his other hand. He was deeply tanned and wearing clean jeans and a clean shirt. Jessie drew alongside them. Ace had a zoned-out look that Jessie guessed was from a certain level of self-medication. Well, if that’s what it took to get through these family reunions, who was she to judge?

‘Hey, Ace.’

He turned to her and smiled shyly. ‘How you doin’, Jess?’

‘Fine, thank you. You?’

‘I have been a whole lot worse.’ His eyes drifted down to her empty hands. ‘Mike, your wife could probably do with a drink.’

‘Jess?’

‘I’d love a glass of white wine.’

Mike went inside to fetch her drink while Jessie took a seat at the table, enjoying the warm air and the rich scent of the honeysuckle growing all around the courtyard walls. Ace cooked the rest of the chicken, and then placed several potatoes wrapped in foil over the coals. He hummed under his breath while he worked. The ash on his cigarettes grew perilously long between tips. Neither of them spoke, but the silence between them was natural and comfortable. Jessie always felt at ease around Ace and he around her. She knew he had his demons and thought they were none of her concern. She had long before decided it was not her place to judge people on how they lived their lives. Ace was his own man. That didn’t suit 
some
 folk in the Conway clan, but 
that
 wasn’t her concern either.

The evening drew on and for the most part it was perfect: nothing but easy company and light conversation. For the first time in a long time some of the tension ebbed from Jessie’s body. That was until Jeb, brimming with scotch and entitlement, felt the need to pontificate on the subject of violence. Penny attempted to draw him away from the topic, but Jeb, standing under the awning gnawing sticky chicken wings, talked over his wife.

‘See, kids these days, they get too much handed to ’em,’ he said, sucking dark brown sauce from his thumb. ‘That’s why they go nuts.’

‘For God’s sake, Jeb,’ Penny said, with a mortified glance in Jessie’s direction. ‘Nobody needs to hear this.’

‘That’s the other problem,’ Jeb wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘We pretend like this shit don’t happen. Well it’s happening. Kids got no sense of … ethics. Why would they? Everything comes too easy to them.’

Mike took a sip of his beer. ‘Unlike, say, how you struggled to find employment?’

It went quiet for a long moment. Inside, Jessie heard Fay clattering around with the dessert plates.

‘My daddy built that mill from the ground up,’ Jeb said petulantly. ‘I know I was raised well; that’s not the point I was making.’

Ace lit a cigarette and folded his arms across this chest, his expression neutral. ‘What was your point?’

‘Ace—’Penny hissed.

‘My point is we’re breeding a generation of fags and layabouts. Like them kids that shot up the school. Kids like them Columbine freaks in the trench coats and all the weird music and stuff. Back in my day, if you saw a kid wearing makeup you saw someone touched in the head. Now we’re all supposed to act like we don’t see ’em and pretend we’re okay with stuff we used to be proud to stand against.’

‘Jeb, honey, could you see if there’s some more coleslaw in the fridge?’ Karen said.

‘There’s some right there,’ Jeb pointed to a tub beside a stack of stripped ribs. ‘Now I know these days folk like to say it’s all, what ya call it … social conditioning or some shit – excuse me – some bullcrap like that, but it’s no such thing. We didn’t have no shootings in our day, did we Walter?’

‘I’m sure people got shot plenty in our day.’ Walter opened a bottle of beer and threw Karen a look. Karen shrugged, helpless.

‘Yeah I know, but not like now. We didn’t have kids going in and shooting up a place or bombing the heck out of schools. We didn’t have that sort of—’

‘Jeb, I’m not sure we need to talk about this right now,’ Penny said.

Fay returned carrying ice cream. ‘I hope everyone kept room for some dessert?’

‘Well, see that right there is part of it,’ Jeb said, ignoring his mother-in-law. ‘If we don’t talk about these things … if we don’t face up to the peril this generation is suffering from, and I mean peril, a peril of the soul … see if we don’t face up to these things … they get swept under the carpet.’

Fay frowned and glanced at her daughters, then to Jessie, who had grown still and pale. ‘Give it a rest, Jeb, would you?’ Mike said.

‘Now hold on here. That’s what happens. We duck and dive and bob and weave, but we know what’s out there and we need to face these fears, we need to face them head on, we need—’

‘I faced it head on,’ Jessie said.

Jeb looked at her as if seeing her for the first time.

‘I faced it head on, Jeb, and you know what I learned from it?’

Jeb stared at her.

‘Absolutely nothing, that’s what I learned. Nothing.’

Jessie stood and pushed her chair back from the table. Her face was alabaster pale, her eyes glittering and overbright. ‘Good night, Fay, it’s been a lovely evening and thank you for having me.’

‘Jessie, please don’t go.’

Jessie grabbed her wrap and walked through the house. She walked straight out the door without stopping.

Mike joined her after a few minutes, his face flushed with temper. He climbed into the cab and slammed the door. ‘There’s no cure for stupid, Jessie. You know Jeb, a few drinks down him and that man is stupid to the core.’

‘Can we go home?’

Mike drove them home. When they pulled into the yard, Rudy got to his feet and stood in the headlights, yipping a delighted greeting.

‘You okay?’ Mike asked.

Jessie stared out the windscreen at her home, at her dog standing in the beams of light. She realised then what it was that had been bothering her. She had spoken in anger, but, she realised with shock, it had been the truth. Everything she had said back at Fay’s was true. Everything she had once believed had been swept away on a wave of screams and blood and pain. No insights into the universe had been revealed to her; she had learned nothing. She 
knew
 nothing. She felt nothing. She might as well be dead. She might as well have died in a hail of bullets on the cafeteria floor.

Maybe that was the truth of it. Maybe there was nothing to be learned.

Absolutely nothing.

‘Jessie?’

‘I can’t do this any more.’

‘Do what?’

‘Any of it.’

Mike took her hand in his. ‘Don’t talk like that.’

She pulled her hand away. ‘I’m sorry.’