The Dismantling (31 page)

Simon's lungs burned; black spots crept across his field of vision. DaSilva flailed again, and Simon's hold on the jacket loosened enough that the fabric slipped away from Peter's face. His mouth was pressed into a flat line, his nostrils flared; his eyes were wide-open, as though pinned back by invisible nails. He looked straight into Simon's own eyes. The look was one of confusion. This isn't what was supposed to happen, the look said. Or maybe DaSilva was beyond that. Maybe the look was meaningless, pure reflex. Finally Simon felt himself on the cusp of passing out, and he let go and pushed off, breaking the surface.

He stood in water up to his chin, hauling in lungfuls of cold, crisp air. DaSilva surfaced a moment later and floated, belly-up, a few feet away, wheezing and coughing up salt water. His face was red and his eyes squeezed shut. He seemed only half-conscious, unaware of where he was and what was happening to him. But he was still alive.

“Bring him in!”

Simon turned toward the beach: there was Maria, kneeling at the waterline. He couldn't imagine how she'd managed to move at all, the blinding, otherworldly pain such an effort must have demanded.

“Come on, hurry!”

Simon grabbed DaSilva's shoulders and dragged the heavy body toward shore. Peter didn't resist, his breathing wet and labored. They reached the sand. Simon collapsed onto his hands and knees next to DaSilva's prone body. He retched, hot bile and cold salt water mixing in his throat, as DaSilva began to moan and twitch.

Maria limped over to Simon and shook his arm. “Stand up. We're almost there.”

Simon forced himself to his feet. DaSilva had managed to roll onto his side and was coughing blood-spattered phlegm onto the sand.

“Where's the gun?” Maria said.

Simon shook his head. His limbs were trembling with cold and exhaustion. DaSilva slowly lifted his head off the sand and looked up at Simon and Maria. There was no question now that his mind had returned to his body, that he understood what he was seeing. “Don't,” he said. His lips were blue. “Don't.”

“Here.” Maria handed Simon the switchblade. The handle's mother-of-pearl design throbbed in time with his frantic pulse.

DaSilva tried to push himself up, gaining his hands and knees.

“Keep him down,” Maria said.

“What do you—”

Maria grabbed the knife from Simon, flicked open the blade and slammed it down into DaSilva's back. Peter collapsed to the sand again, the air whooshing out of his lungs. Maria nearly fell over, her face white with pain.

“Find the gun,” she said through gritted teeth. “Please.”

Simon waded back into the ocean. He found the pistol after a minute of searching, its silver barrel shining in the clear and shallow water a few feet from shore. He dangled it upside-down, shaking it a few times, letting the water drain out of the barrel. He turned back to Maria and DaSilva. She stood over the large man as he twitched and muttered. Peter tried to rise again, and again she slammed the switchblade down into his back. He grunted and then lay flat on the sand, his only movement the labored rising and falling of his chest, the stubborn insistency of his breath.

“Finish this,” Maria said.

Simon squatted down and pressed the barrel of the gun to DaSilva's right temple, shivering so much he had to steady his shooting wrist with his other hand. He stayed like that for one, two, three breaths, the gun pressed to Peter's temple, his left hand gripping his right wrist, his finger trembling against the pistol's trigger. He stared at his finger. He willed himself to pull, the action itself so insignificant, barely a muscle twitch.

Nothing happened. He let the muzzle drift away from DaSilva's head.

“Simon,” Maria said. “Do it.”

He nodded. He steadied the gun again, pressed it against DaSilva's forehead. But still he couldn't fire. This wasn't self-defense, not with DaSilva lying here half-dead on the sand, not beyond the most existential, abstracted sense of the term. This was pure, unadulterated murder. He couldn't do it.

Simon lowered the barrel of the gun.

“Simon,” Maria said.

“I'm sorry.” He looked up at her. She swayed slightly, her face pinched and ashen. “It's not in me,” he said. “I can't.”

She didn't try to convince him again. Instead, she simply put the switchblade into her pocket and held out her hand. He stood and gave her the gun.

DaSilva stirred again. His head lifted from the sand, and his eyes widened as he saw Maria point the pistol at his face. “No,” he rasped. “No, I can't—”

She pulled the trigger.

Simon turned his head away, but nothing happened. Maria lifted the pistol, shook it. A few drops of water spattered onto the sand. She bent over and pushed the barrel back against DaSilva's temple. He tried to move away, sobbing now, but he was too weak, and without hesitation she depressed the trigger a second time. This time the gun fired, jerking sharply in her hand. DaSilva's head lifted off the sand and then dropped back down. His temple was caved in, splinters of bone protruding from the edges of the hole. Maria bent down and placed the pistol into DaSilva's right hand, curling the fingers around the grip, bending the pointer inside the trigger guard. A wave surged gently across the pebbles, washing over the hand that held the gun. Simon noticed a flash of white in the water: the transfer form, soaked through and already falling apart. Another surge of water carried the paper onto shore; the wave receded and sucked it back under. Simon retrieved the stray wad of cash and stuffed it back into the duffel. He picked up the bag, and then they turned their back on Peter's body and limped across the beach to the foot of the path, Maria's arm slung over Simon's shoulder, her wounded foot dragging behind her.

T
HEY
made it to a Best Western in Jamaica that evening, a concrete box near the Grand Central Parkway. It was as far as he'd allow them to travel before tending to her foot. She'd refused to let him bring her to a hospital. “I need to disappear,” she'd said, “not be processed in a fucking ER again.” Upstairs in their room, he helped her onto the bed and propped her foot on a pillow. His jaw ached, tapping out a Morse code of dull pain. He held her ankle gently. “I'm going to take off the sneaker, okay?”

She nodded, staring at the foot. Her face was grayish white, her pursed lips nearly colorless. A hole had been blown through the top of the black Chuck Taylor and dried blood stiffened the sneaker's fabric. Simon loosened the laces as delicately as he could, then lifted the tongue. The blood had soaked the sock, a sticky, rusty red. He gripped the sole between his hands and looked up at her. “Ready?”

“Just do it already.”

He pulled the sneaker off in one quick motion. She hissed, her fingers digging into the bedspread. Her body went limp, and he looked up and saw her eyes roll back into her head. She came to gradually, surfacing in increments. Her eyes refocused on his face and then slid, reluctantly, down to her foot. The hole was neater than he'd expected, punched right through the webbing between her first and second toes. He looked inside the sneaker. The bullet was still there, embedded in the sole. He brought the lamp over from the bedside table and leaned in closer to her foot.

“It's only nicked the bone,” he said. “You're lucky.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I feel really fucking blessed right now.”

“We're alive, aren't we?”

“There's that.”

He walked to a drugstore on Hillside Avenue and bought a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, tweezers, bandages and gauze, a tub of ibuprofen. He found a replacement charger for his cell phone and threw that into his basket too. While he waited on the checkout line, he closed his eyes and saw DaSilva lying on the sand in his sodden black jacket, a hole in his head. The image presented with the dispassion of a fact, like one of Maria's collected photographs: DaSilva's skin blue white, the dried blood crusted around the lip of the wound reddish black and flaking. Beneath this image and at the same time contained within it, a palimpsest, were the half-dismantled girl in anatomy lab and Amelia in the morgue. The dead were piling up in Simon's mind.
It could have been you
, he told himself.
Remember that, it could have been you.
But although he recognized this as the truth, he couldn't simply reject his guilt, toss it aside like a smoked cigarette. He was partially responsible for a man's murder; he'd failed to save his own sister. That the man had tried to drown him and that he'd risked his own life in the attempt to save Amelia's did not change these facts. He thought of Lenny Pellegrini too, the suicide Simon had done nothing to prevent; he'd ignored Lenny's pain because it was inconvenient. He recognized that guilt would always be a part of him. He needed to learn not to fight it, nor let it overwhelm him, but to coexist with it, to make space for it, like a difficult, burdensome family member within the house of his self.

Back in the Best Western, he found Maria on the bed, hunched over DaSilva's duffel, a few stray wads of cash scattered across the comforter. She looked up when he walked into the room and gave him a seasick smile. “Does this make you feel any better?”

She tilted the open bag toward him. Inside were a few more banded wads of cash, but the rest of the duffel was filled with stacks of plain white printer paper. “He was going to fuck us too,” she said.

“It's not the same thing.” Simon reached inside the bag and lifted up the reams of paper. There was nothing underneath. He knew he shouldn't be so surprised that DaSilva would try something like this. But all it proved was that he was going to shortchange them on the money, nothing beyond that.

“What isn't?” Maria asked.

“Really? You're going to make me say it?”

She just looked at him, waiting, defiant.

“Ripping somebody off and killing them, Maria. Not the same thing.”

“I had to do it.”

“You're not going to convince me, so just stop trying.”

“He was going to kill you,” she said. “Probably both of us. If not today, then eventually.”

“You lied to me.”

“Only after you said you weren't going to do it the way I wanted to. The way we
needed
to.” She picked up a handful of bills and waved it at Simon. “It's about $2,000, the cash he laid on top. He probably got the idea from a TV show or something, the trick's so obvious. Anyway, you should take it. It's all yours.”

“I don't want it.”

She stared at him. “Come on, Simon.”

He shook his head. The money was contaminated: blood money, pure and simple.

“Here,” he said. “Let me see your foot.”

He cleaned out Maria's wound and wrapped the foot before taking scissors to her sneaker and cutting out the tongue. He pried the bullet out of the sole with the pair of tweezers. She held out her hand and he dropped the bullet into her palm.

“I'm going to keep this,” she said. “String it on a necklace.”

She asked him what she should do to keep the wound from getting infected.

“Wash it out with hydrogen peroxide twice a day,” Simon said. “That'll hurt like hell, but you have to do it. Cover the hole with gauze. Take ibuprofen for the inflammation. You still have your painkillers?” She nodded. “Use them when you have to. Keep taking your antibiotics too.” He paused. “What are you going to do, Maria? Where are you going to go?”

“Don't you think it's better if you don't know that?”

“You shouldn't have to do this alone.
I
don't want to do this alone.”

“You don't want to hang around me for too long. Didn't I prove that already?” She closed her eyes. There was a long pause filled only by her jagged breathing. She grimaced as she shifted her wounded foot. “I'm glad you didn't pull the trigger, Simon.”

“I thought you were disappointed in me.”

“For a moment, yeah, maybe I was. But I was wrong. I'd crossed that line already. I'd become that person. You didn't have to.” She opened her eyes. “I've felt what it's like to be powerless, and I am never going to let that happen to me again. I'll do anything to fight that feeling. And I'll tell you something else. Killing DaSilva was easier than killing Thomas, and DaSilva hadn't even done anything to me yet. You understand?”

“Are you saying I should be afraid of you?”

“What I'm saying is that you can recover from this. You can get a job or go back to school, keep your head down and hope they never tie you to DaSilva's mess. You can try to build a regular life—you still have that choice. I've already chosen a different way to live.”

“You can have a regular life too.” It was pointless to argue with her, he knew that, but he couldn't fight the compulsion to do it anyway. “Move somewhere remote and private. Start fresh.”

She smiled gently, as though he were a child who needed to be cushioned from hard truths. “I don't think it's going to work out quite like that.”

Simon sat down on the bed. “I've wanted to ask you something.”

“So ask.”

“Did it help?”

“What?”

“Killing Thomas. Did it make you feel better?”

“It made me stop feeling worse. It made me feel like . . . an imbalance had been corrected.”

“I'm sorry you've suffered so much.” Simon lay back against the pillows next to her. “I don't know what else I can say.”

“So am I.” She turned toward him. “Now I'm going to ask you something.” She reached over the edge of the bed, to his bag, and came up holding Amelia's lockbox. “I know it's private. But you asked me to bring this. It was the only thing you wanted from your apartment, so it made me wonder what's inside. What you care about that much.”

Simon looked at the box. He didn't say anything.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'll put it back. I guess it's none of my business.”

“No. I'll show you.” He spun the lock and opened the lid. “It's a few of my sister's things.”

The hemp bracelet, grayed and ragged, lay next to the red diary, both resting on top of the Venus flytrap drawing. The objects appeared small and sad, drained of their magic as he looked at them now in the presence of another person.

“Do you have a picture of her in there?”

“I don't need to be reminded of what she looked like,” he said, hearing echoes of his father in his words.

Maria reached toward the box. “Can I?” He nodded, and she lifted the three objects out and placed them on top of the comforter, smoothing out the drafting paper. “She drew this?”

“Yeah. She wanted to get it tattooed on her back.”

Maria laughed, then covered her mouth. “I'm sorry.”

“I know, I know.” Simon found himself smiling. “She was fifteen, remember.”

Maria looked back down at the paper. “It's a good drawing. I just wouldn't want it on my body my whole life.” She brought it closer to the light. “What's the flytrap?”

“What do you mean?”

“She's the fairy, the Tinker Bell, right? So what's the flytrap? Or
who's
the flytrap?”

“I don't think it's a symbol. She probably just liked the way it looked.”

“You weren't a teenage girl,” Maria said. “Believe me, it meant something.” She plucked the band that held the diary shut. “Is this her diary?”

“Yes.”

She moved as though to open it.

“Don't do that,” Simon said. “Please.”

She stopped. “No, sorry, of course. It's private.”

“I just think that if I haven't read it, neither should anybody else.”

“You haven't read it?”

“I'm afraid of what it might say about me.” He'd never articulated his reasons for not reading the diary before, but as soon as he spoke the words, he knew they were true.

“I'd never have the discipline. I'd be too curious.” Maria put the diary back into the box and lifted the hemp bracelet. “What's the story behind this?”

He suddenly didn't want Maria looking at these objects anymore, didn't want her touching them. He felt foolish, ignorant, secreting these things around like fetishes. “It was just her bracelet, that's all.”

Maria read his irritation and returned the bracelet to the box. He reached over, closed the lid, and spun the lock.

He lay back on the pillows and stared up at the ceiling. “We shouldn't have done that,” he said softly. “DaSilva. How could we have done that?”

“He was never going to let us go.”

“We don't know if that's true.”

“Yes,” Maria said firmly. “He deserved it.”

“Nobody deserves that.”

“Better him than us, Simon.”

How could he argue with that? And yet Simon's own potential death seemed to him an abstract concept next to the blunt facts of DaSilva's blown-out temple, his sightless eyes, all that heavy, dead-white flesh anchored, forever inanimate, to the wet sand. The equivalency didn't seem equal, or fair.

 • • • 

M
ARIA
Campos exited his life at 7:13 the next morning. He looked at the clock the moment the door closed behind her, as though fixing the exact minute in his mind would mean something. She wouldn't let him take her downstairs; she didn't want them to be seen leaving the hotel together. This was the first move in the game of her disappearance, and she would make it alone. He sat on the bed and waited until all traces of her presence had dissipated, until he could feel nothing remaining of her in the room.

As she was leaving, she'd turned to him in the doorway and said, “What we did to DaSilva, it only exists in our minds. Do you understand?” He'd shaken his head that he didn't. “Only we know exactly what happened,” she said. “Everybody else will just be guessing. The truth lives and dies inside our heads. Okay?” He nodded. She was telling him to keep his mouth shut, and, of course, he would. “I'm sorry,” he said, “for everything you've had to do.” She leaned in. “You'll survive this,” she whispered. She smiled at him, the gray tooth flickering, dark eyes shining, and then she'd turned and walked to the elevator and didn't look back.

He got up from the bed, took the elevator to the lobby, paid their bill in cash, and went down into the garage under the hotel. Katherine's RAV4 was still parked where he'd left it the night before, a filthy snow- and salt-spattered incrimination. He started up the car one last time and pulled out onto Jamaica Avenue. He drove slowly, on local streets, to the nearest A train station, a mile or two away. Thick black clouds had rolled in again overnight and it was bitterly cold. Traffic was sparse, and he made it to Liberty and Lefferts in under ten minutes. He parked the car around the corner from the station, on a quiet residential block. A few figures hurried down the street, hunched inside puffy jackets, and nobody paid him any attention as he hauled his duffel bag out of the backseat, left the car, and walked to the subway station.