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I don’t look back. I keep going. I tell myself it’s only guilt, that it’s my conscience speaking. Lily's and my house sits at the end of the street. The outside lights are on but beyond our home, it’s blackness. Lily is inside the house washing up for bed. We didn’t talk much tonight. Lily was quiet, shaken from her conversation with Nina. Our stress levels have reached new heights.
I make my way up the driveway, but I don’t go inside. I walk around to the side of the house, away from the porch lights, where I lie in wait in the shadows beside our home.
A cool breeze sweeps up out of nowhere, moving my hair. At the same time, a woman walks through a shaft of light coming from the streetlamp, and I would think that it was a neighbor taking a walk or walking a dog, except that as I look, Nina Hayes’s face comes slowly into focus. My heart races inside of me as I study her hair and her face, my eyes descending her body until I come to the bag in her hand, the same bag that I just left in a garbage can down the street, to get rid of the evidence of what Lily did to Jake. I didn’t want to leave it in our own garbage can in case someone found it.
My thoughts race. Nina was watching me. She was following me. She has the bag with Lily’s blood-soaked clothes. I watch in disbelief as Nina walks straight past the end of our driveway, as if to leave with the bag, and if not for the sound of a car door opening and then closing, I wouldn’t know she’d parked where the road dead-ends.
I can’t let her leave with that bag.
If I do, everything Lily and I have done up to this point is all for naught.
I don’t think. I react. It’s not conscious. One minute I’m standing on the side of the house, watching Nina, and the next I’m moving down the driveway for the street, feeling like I would do anything, absolutely anything, to get that bag back, to stop Nina from seeing what she’s about to see.
I come to her Tesla parked in the darkness. I stand less than three feet from the car. My muscles tighten. Everything feels suddenly more acute. My senses are heightened, honed. I have razor-sharp focus.
Nina’s fingers pick at the knot, removing things from the bag.
I’m too late. She’s already seen what’s inside.
I rap on the window, feeling something inside of me turn stone-cold. At this end of the street, the road narrows and slightly turns. The trees close in on you, making those safe, warm, cozy houselights feel very far away. There is a barricade at the end of the street and then, on the other side of it, nothing but trees. If you forge a path through the trees, you come to the river. The river isn’t incredibly deep. Maybe six or seven feet. It’s the type of river that’s slow and meandering. I hear it from here.
Nina turns at the sound of my knock.
There is this split second of calm before the storm.
In that second, I see myself reach out for the door handle. It’s something out-of-body and uncontrolled. A reflex. The door opens and Nina is suddenly aglow in the interior car lights, the open bag on her lap, a look of shock and horror on her face.
I see my hand reach inside the car. I feel myself take a fistful of Nina’s clothes in my hand—the collar or the lapels of her jacket, I don’t even know what—and pull, dragging her out of the car, while she pushes away with her hands, trying to resist, saying things like “Christian” and “What the fuck” and “What do you think you’re doing?”
All I can think about in this moment is undoing this thing that has just happened. Nina got the bag. She saw what was inside. She knows. I have to find a way to negate that because no one can know what was inside that bag.
Nina yelps. She fights against me, but I am either physically stronger than she is or my willpower is stronger. I overpower her. She comes sliding out of the leather car seat as if she weighs nothing. Her feet don’t reach the earth first and so she falls sideways out. I make no attempt to stop her from falling or to cushion her blow, so that when she lands, she lands hard on a hip, looking up at me as if hurt, as if offended, as if I might reach out and help her to her feet, though the expression on her face changes when she sees the expression on mine.
“Please,” she begs.
With a foot, I kick her over onto her back. Nina yells but then, as she lies supine on the street beside her car, I fall on top of her. I straddle her between my thighs as she thrashes beneath me, bucking at the hips, arching her back, pushing up on my chin with the heel of her hand, kicking her feet, thrusting backward. I press my hands to her mouth and to her nose, pushing hard, interlocking my hands, so that her eyes are wide and she struggles to breathe, held in place by my body weight. She grabs for my wrists, desperate and scared, her whole body trying to push up against the street. Nina squirms and I count the seconds that she’s deprived of oxygen in my head, wondering how long it takes for a person to succumb to oxygen deprivation, to die. I count to five, to ten. To twenty. To thirty.
Nina fights back and somehow in the process, she manages to knock my hands from her face. She arches her back and takes a gasping, sucking breath.
Without thinking, I move my hands to either side of her face, by her ears. I take hold of her face. My grip is tight, squeezing her like the jaws of a vice. Now that her mouth is freed, Nina is able to scream and when she does, it’s desperate, full-throated, loud. My only thought is to shut her up. To shut her the fuck up. To make her stop screaming before someone like Lily hears. To make herstop. Gravel digs into my knees and my shins as I pull up hard on her head, lifting her neck and torso from the street, bending her forward at the neck, gaining momentum and then propelling her back down to the street.
I pull up for a second time. Nina’s hands clutch me by the forearms. Her nails dig in because this time, she knows what’s to come. She knows what’s happening. She tries to resist but I overcome. I take her head and slam it back down against the street. The sound of her skull hitting concrete is low and dull, sickening. Her body jerks and strains, her desperate scream reduced to a whimper, which is in every way basic and primal, her body dying, the life slowly leaving it. Nina’s grip on my forearms loosens. Her hands fall away from me, splaying at her sides, and I could be done. I could haul her into the trees and leave her there to die, though if I do, there is still the chance that she could drag herself along the street for help.
I need to finish this. I need to be done.
I pull back up on Nina’s head. I’m able to pull higher this time because there is less resistance. Her body simply gives. Beneath me, Nina still moves, but she no longer bucks and kicks. Instead she wriggles, a slow sliding from side to side like a worm. She moans. Her head hangs heavy, like an infant that can’t hold its own head up. It lolls backward as Nina tries hard to gaze up at me disoriented, her eyes drooping, rolling backward, darkness oozing and pooling beneath her. I feel wetness—blood—in my fingers, which are in her hair.
I slam Nina’s head down against the street, and this time her whimper becomes a quiet, fading breath. I pick her head back up, cradling it in my hands this time, moving the hair from her eyes. She loses consciousness first. She’s peacefully still but I don’t think she’s dead yet. I watch in anticipation of her death, laying her head gently, tenderly down on the street, like putting a baby to sleep.
This, I think in that moment, suspended on my hands and knees above her, waiting for her to die, is what it feels like to snap.
If I was to sink Nina’s body in the river tonight, she’d probably be found by morning in the reeds along the shallow riverbank somewhere just a little further south.
But if I was to weigh her down, that might help slow things down and at least give Lily and me time for a head start out of town.
This is what I’m thinking to myself in that split second of stillness and silence as Nina turns at the sound of me knocking on her car window, and I find myself looking at her staggered and astonished face in the front seat of her car, as I shine my phone’s flashlight on it, turning her into something eerie and incandescent.
I’m thinking about how I could kill her. I’m imagining it. I’m imagining how I would kill her and what I would do with her body if I were to reach in through the window and snap her neck or drag her out of the car and smash her head against the concrete.
