Chapter 43 #2
I was wondering if I should message Adam back, tell him to come over after all.
I did want to see him. But I knew I shouldn’t.
I grabbed a dry towel and straightened at the sink.
I was eeny-meeny-miny-moeing my decision, as I began to pat my wet face, when the bathroom’s quietness twisted.
There was a silence I’d made peace with, city-hum and heater thumping, the steady rhythm of my own breathing.
But now, it bent around something else. Instinct told me to turn.
Every hair on my arms rose. Still, I didn’t move, just kept my eyes fixed on the mirror as I lowered the towel.
That’s when I saw her. Stacy. She was in bedroom, reflected perfectly in the vanity mirror, an apparition in real time.
She wore a wool coat that looked too heavy for the weather and beneath it the glittery gown she’d had on tonight at the launch, her expression was unhinged.
But the gun, black and ugly and shaking ever so slightly in her hand, didn’t care about my powers of observation. It was pointed straight at my spine.
My entire body froze. I was rooted to the bathmat, towel pressed to my face. I couldn’t even gasp. My mind was a gnawing white-out of confusion and horror, the word “gun” firing like a warning beacon in all directions.
Stacy didn’t move. The gun didn’t move. In the glass her eyes looked puffy and wild, rimmed with mascara that streaked down to the corner of her mouth like a cartoon villain’s. She looked both exhausted and electrified.
I finally managed to speak, but my voice was thin, so thin I could barely hear it over the blood in my ears. “Stacy, what are you doing?”
She flinched at my words, causing the gun to waver. She yanked it up higher, as if preparing for recoil. I heard a hiccup, a wet snuffling sound, and realized she was crying.
For a rapid, almost hallucinatory second, I imagined lunging for her, knocking the gun out of her hand, pinning her to the bedroom floor. But my back was to her, and I’d have to turn around. There was no way she wouldn’t see me coming.
“I’m sorry,” I tried again, but Stacy cut me off, the motion of the gun enough to slap the words out of my mouth.
She shook her head, so violently the streaks of mascara on her cheeks wobbled with the motion.
“Stop. Don’t play dumb. I saw you talking to him tonight.
I thought you got the message.” Her voice was raw, slurred with panic and rage, the kind of voice that had already been screaming for hours and was now running on the purest fumes.
“You want to take my family and you don’t think there’s going to be consequences. ”
My brain was working overtime, the way it did in the moments before losing consciousness, when you know you’ve made a catastrophic mistake but can’t quite piece together what it was.
I felt my hands go cold and my knees bend, just slightly, as if my body was already preparing to crumple.
I shook my head as delicately as possible, trying not to set her off. “I don’t. I don’t want to.”
She glared, gun held up with both hands now, like she was steadying a camera to take a family portrait. “I know you dated him!” She spat the words with an upward jerk of the nose, the veins in her neck bulging blue and angry. “Don’t lie. I saw the messages on the app and I saw you tonight.”
“I didn’t know he was married. He said his name was Ronan. I swear I can show you,” I blurted, hoping my voice still sounded human and not like the desperate animal I’d become
I made a slow move toward the phone on the counter, lowering my arm, palms out. She took a step forward so fast I heard her heel scuff the hardwood. “Don’t move! I’m not stupid! I know you’ll call the cop back!”
Cop back? Detective Ramos. I’d dialed him by accident, and for the first time in my life, I wished I was the kind of person who called the police unnecessarily, a chronic alarm-puller. Why hadn’t I just asked him to come over? If I had, he’d be here by now, or at least on his way.
I could almost picture his face, the way he’d stand in the doorway and size up the threat, the way he’d talk her down with the too-calm voice that radio DJs used after midnight.
But I hadn’t. Because I was Billie Bliss, Professional Problem Solver, and if there was ever a time to regret that, it was now.
“Stacy, you don’t have to do this.” My arms were shaking so badly I had to lower them and hold onto the sink to keep from tipping over.
My entire body was trembling, actually, every muscle a live wire.
“I don’t want your husband.” I said it with as much steadiness as I could manage, which was basically zero, but I tried anyway.
She let out a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob, the barrel of the gun bobbing with the motion. “You moved in with Adam, isn’t he enough for you? Why can’t you leave my husband alone?” Her voice cracked. “Why can’t you all just leave my husband alone?””
Why wasn’t I better with people? Birdie or Bailey would be able to calm her down. I was just pissing her off.
I tried again, more quietly. “I am with Adam. We’re married. I don’t want your husband.”
She twisted the gun’s grip, like she was wringing the neck of a chicken. “So you’re a cheater, too?!” she shrieked, and thumbed off the safety, the click as loud as a gunshot to my ears.
Yep. Definitely saying the wrong things here.
She advanced two more steps, close enough that I could smell her lotion or shampoo, maybe perfume. It was floral mixed with vanilla and had undertones of musk. The gun was now inside the bathroom with me. It was a foot away from my head. “You’re all cheaters!”
I saw the look in her eyes, and in that moment, I knew she was going to pull the trigger. This wasn’t about me. The man had clearly been cheating on her with a buffet of women and that’s who she saw when she looked at me. I was just the unlucky one who’d been the last straw.
If I was going to die tonight, I figured fuck it, I might as well ask her what I wanted to know.
She clearly loved her son. Jeremiah was a good kid, and he talked highly about his mom.
He loved her but he was sad that she’d been sad lately.
How did someone who was a good mom get here? Was it the same as Adam’s mom?
Was this why my dad left? Or did he just not love us and was lazy?
I took a breath, which mostly tasted like my own fear and the sharp tang of cleaning alcohol, and asked: “Did you always want to be a mom?” I didn’t know why I said it, but the words tumbled out, raw and unfiltered.
Stacy jerked her head, confusion flickering for a moment. “What? Why are you asking me that? What?”
Tears started to fill my eyes, but I wasn’t crying for me.
Maybe for how absolutely doomed we both were, because in that moment, I did feel sorry for her.
“I was, um, I never wanted kids, because I had to raise my sisters and it sort of fucked me up, but my dad left, and Adam’s mom left, so I was just wondering did you always know you wanted to be a mom? ”
Her chin started to wobble, and her lip began to quiver. For a second, her face softened. Like she’d been hit in the stomach, and all the air went out. “Yes,” she whispered. It wasn’t an answer, just a confession.
“Why?” I asked, following the thread even though it made zero sense.
“Why what?”
“Why did you want kids?” My voice was thin as tissue. I didn’t even know if I was buying time, or if some perverse part of me thought I could save her from herself.
Her mouth flapped open, then closed. The gun was still pointed at me, but her grip was so weak I thought I might be able to turn and knock it out of her hand, if I wasn’t rooted to the floor by some weird need to see this through.
“What are you doing?” Stacy’s voice went sharp, a whip crack in the air. “This isn’t about Jerem—” She caught herself, the syllable splintering in her mouth. “Don’t try to psychoanalyze me, you bitch,” she snapped. “I’m not the crazy one here. I’m not.”
She blinked hard, and for a moment, she looked less like a villain and more like a woman who’d been awake for three days, living on Red Bull and revenge fantasies. Her knees buckled a little, just enough that I thought she might collapse, but she caught herself on the doorframe.
I watched the gun, the way it trembled in her hand, the way her finger hovered near the trigger but never quite settled. If she pulled it now, it would probably hit the window above my head, or ricochet off the glass shower doors and take out one of my fake plants.
She stumbled backwards. Her shoulders slumping. I had a feeling she didn’t want to shoot anyone she just wanted someone to listen.
So, I listened.
“I did everything right,” Stacy said, the words bursting out of her in a single exhale.
“I did everything you’re supposed to do.
I went to church, I volunteered, I made dinners, the lunches and the school projects and the fucking Halloween costumes.
” Her voice was rising now, climbing a staircase of pain.
“And you know what I got? I got a husband who screws every desperate, pathetic woman he meets at work and on those fucking apps. I got a son who thinks I’m the bad guy because I’m sad and yell too much and his dad’s a superhero because he’s always gone and only shows up for the fun stuff.
I got nothing.” She dropped to the edge of the bed and slammed the side of the gun against her thigh, a dull, meaty thunk, but she raised it again.
“You can leave him? You don’t have to stay.”
She laughed, but it was the sound of shattering glass. “Leave him?! And do what? I quit my job to have Jeremiah and then I had post-partum and Tanner said he’d take care of us. He promised me I’d never have to work. He promised me I’d be safe.”
The gun wavered. The story snapped into focus for me. She was stuck. She was alone. She was angry and she was drowning. She wasn’t well. She needed help.
Something in me broke, just a little. “Okay, but you still have Jeremiah.”
Her head snapped up, eyes wild. “You don’t get it!” she screamed. “He worships his dad. He thinks he’s a superhero. He misses him and he thinks he doesn’t come home because I’m mean.”
For the first time, I saw pure, cold fear in her eyes, and it had nothing to do with me. It was the fear of being alone, of being the villain in your own kid’s story.
She pressed the gun against her own chest, almost like she was hugging herself with it. “You’re just like the rest of them. You think I’m crazy. You all think I’m crazy.”
It was only then, with her attention turned inwards, that I remembered my phone on the edge of the sink.
I moved my shaking hand toward it in slow motion, as if afraid even the thought of movement would snap her back to reality and reset the whole nightmare.
But before I could actually touch it, there was a sudden, unmistakable voice from my room, “Drop the gun.” The words were low, clipped, and male, with a professional calm that made it all the more terrifying.
Detective Ramos.
In that split second, I realized he hadn’t listened to me and had come anyway and must be standing in my room, which I couldn’t see because I was in the bathroom.
I didn’t dare look away from Stacy, not even to check if he was alone or if backup had come with him.
I kept my eyes on the mirror, tracking her every move, and willed the universe to let this be over.
Stacy jerked at the sound, her entire body tensing like a rabbit about to break for the underbrush. The gun came up again, wilder this time, pointed not at me but at the doorway of my bedroom.
Two loud gun shots rang out in quick succession—one flat, metallic clap, louder than anything I’d ever heard, and then a second, impossibly louder, that rang in my skull like my brain was a gong.
I dropped to the bathroom floor, knees and elbows smacking hard against the tile, and curled in on myself the way you do when you see a car crash about to happen and you’re powerless to stop it.
The world shrank to the twin concussions echoing in my ear canals.
I lay there, paralyzed, waiting for the third shot, or the fourth, or the inevitable pain that would tell me I’d been hit, too.
But instead, there was just the sharp, chemical tang of gunpowder, a patter of footsteps, and then the sound of a grown man’s voice very close to my head, but all I heard were those pops over and over again.