40. Funerals & Finalities
Funerals I can’t even say I hoped to have a long, full life before that day.
Just that I’m… grateful, I suppose, or at least as grateful as I can manage that Jackson rotted his liver with pills, that I got to come home before the end.
I meet her on the porch, pulling her inside as she rapidly fires off rambling information that only drives a deeper wedge of hatred for Martin Altman.
“Gideon, we need to go, to run or something. We have to leave, he… Altman showed me the girls. He knew Gideon. He knows about your mom too. Oh god, what are we going to do? We need to get rid of the tapes. He-he—"
“Shhhh, puppet, it’s alright.”
She nestles closer, and I can’t help but smile as she clings to me.
Adorable even with her refusals, her panicked planning as she rationalizes and lies herself through it all.
I don’t tell her there’s no point in running, that we’re being watched and we wouldn’t make it far.
I don’t tell her I’ve been waiting… ready for this day for some years now.
That by leaving Piedmont, taking my strings from the puppets, metaphorically and physically, I knew what I was doing.
That I was ending this. And when I left the last girl just a street over from my apartment, I was giving the detective the last push he needed.
I tighten my grip, pushing her head back so I can look at her pretty, teary eyes. “I have something for you.”
Her words cut off, blinking her thick lashes and setting another round of tears free from them. “Gideon, we need to—"
“Stay right here. That’s it. Stay here in our home, Audrey. We have a client, remember?”
Something tormenting shutters behind her eyes as she retreats into herself, the way she has ever since the night of the wedding.
Audrey has been smaller, helpless. I run my hands through her hair before letting go, only long enough to pluck something from my pocket.
When I offer it to her, it’s genuine excitement in her eyes, a little of the life they’d been missing the past few days. “Oh, Gideon.”
She stares at my mother’s ring like it’s the prettiest thing she’s ever seen before her head snaps back up to me. “Wait, this is your mom's. Does this mean—"
“I want you to marry me, Audrey Fisher.”
She sucks her chapped lips between her teeth. “Everything is so scary and awful right now.”
“Hey, do you trust me?”
“Of course,” she breathes.
“Then you have nothing to worry about, do you?”
Her smile makes a thick lump form in my throat as she slips my mom’s ring on, the one I’d pulled from her corpse after carrying her into the house from the woods, knowing one day, when the time was right, I’d give it to Audrey.
“I love you, Gideon Bell.”
My lips meet hers as the sound of another car passes in front of the house, a cruiser again. I don’t let it distract me as I lift her into my arms and carry her upstairs.
The next morning is nothing less than the calm before a storm.
There’s something tense, painful, in the air.
Like someone is poised over you, a knife to your throat but also somehow entirely out of sight.
A threat you can’t see, but know it’s there all the same.
Audrey pins a few extra photos the family dropped off yesterday afternoon to the memorial board, wisely choosing to remove a few from after Mr. Oliver had gotten ill.
My smart girl had already distracted from them on the collage board displayed by the artfully candled memorial table on the side of the viewing room, but I can tell she’s pleased to be able to take them off.
It took quite a bit more time than I had thought to reconstruct the older man, the disease wasting away at him until he more resembled a rail-thin wraith of what he once was.
Audrey’s eyes pop up from the board, following me, the scent of flowers heavy on her from her morning-long war with arranging and rearranging the layout around the casket.
It’s closed for now, to give the gentleman inside respect until his family arrives to display, gawk, and sob over the empty meat wagon he’s left behind.
The dutiful pastor Lemmings is already nestled in the gathering room down the hall, nursing a coffee that was prepared for the family as he reads over his notes.
Through the years, different pastors have come and gone, different denominations, different availability.
Lemmings has always been one of the most familiar, without fail always showing up an hour before the family to ensure he’s at their disposal for counseling during the private viewing.
My father admired it and him for it when I was a child.
In an industry and world where everyone always does only what was required, I can now understand why.
Although his presence makes it somewhat difficult to see if my sweet little puppet would open up for me in one of the pews.
It has long since stopped being jarring, the way Audrey affects me.
That with the simple wrap of her arms around my middle, her head nestled into my chest, the world around us…
whatever is wrong inside me can quiet. I’ve scarcely wondered about things like damnation or forgiveness.
Never felt the pull to confess any sins, not to anyone but her, anyway.
To wonder if that lake of fire was waiting for me, if legions of angry, tormented women were waiting on the sidelines to drag me down deep within its lapping waves of lava.
If my mother was among them. If I’d regret it in the moment, as the flesh on my bones bubbled and the smell of sulfur squeezed at my lungs.
If there is a heaven, or a hell, which I highly doubt the validity of, I can’t seem to care.
The only forgiveness I need is given freely simply by the woman in my arms. The only person who's ever truly mattered. There is certainly no god, not any benevolent one worth following, anyway. Any god that would allow someone like her to love something like me is a being perhaps more cruel than even the worst of his creations. My lips dance over her head in a soft kiss, lingering… reverent. Wondering if her listless, blank-eyed smile is the cause of this… heavy aching feeling in my chest. Wondering, again, since I forced her to watch my tapes, if I’d done the only thing I had ever strived to prevent.
If I’d hurt my best friend in some irreparable way that can’t be fixed with a doll’s dress.