“Oh my god,” Marcy/Macy/Michaela says. “Billie. Billie, what happened? You’re bleeding.”
What’s good for the goose, she thinks and using all her strength, she swings the tire iron up and around, cracking it down onto Marcy/Macy/Michaela’s wrists. The girl howls in agony. The gun skitters across the concrete, ends up somewhere under a car. She can’t see where the hell it’s gone.
Marcy/Macy/Michaela clutches her wrist against her chest and sobs, as much in outrage as pain. “You broke my arm.”
“Shut up,” Billie says. “Shut the fuck up.” She’s got enough strength to go looking for the gun, or get in the car. Not both. “I have your gun,” she bluffs. “I’ll shoot you. Shut the fuck up. Get on the floor. Hands behind your head. Now!”
“You broke my arm. Why did you break my arm?”
“Fucking now, bitch. Get down. Hands behind your head.” A rush of dizziness. Blood loss. She needs to get to a hospital. She needs to get out of here.
Marcy/Macy/Michaela is crying harder as she gets down onto the ground. She says something unintelligible through the sobs. Billie doesn’t want any more fucking noise.
“Shut up, or I’ll shoot you, bitch.” But that’s not her jam. Dodgy deals, smooth operations, getting rare goods to the people willing to pay for them, sure, what’s the harm? She’s not a murderer, though, even if right now she’d like to make an exception for her fucking cunt of a sister who ruined everything. Everything.
“Behind your head!” she yells.
“I’m doing it!” the woman whimpers, lacing her hands on top of her head. Or trying to. One arm is definitely broken. She was asking for it.
Billie sinks into the driver seat. Keys in the ignition. Motor running. Steering wheel on the wrong side of the damn car. Fuck. Fucking Americans. Why the fuck do these people drive on the wrong side of the car, wrong side of the road? Fucking imperial. Imperialists. Ha.
The gears stick, high-pitched grating. Clutch. Put the clutch in. Remember? Get it into reverse. The car jumps backward so abruptly, she slams on the brakes. Her head jolts. Nausea and that feeling of everything closing in around her. Tunnel vision. Or her options narrowing. First gear. More grating.
“Keep your fucking head down,” she yells out the window at Marcy/Macy/Michaela, who is craning her neck. “Or I’ll shoot you.”
And then the gears catch and she’s driving away, she’s doing it, making her getaway. The car scrapes the wall, but Billie doesn’t care, because she’s free.
4.
Cole: The first end of the world
THREE YEARS AGO
The global obsession. Where were you when it happened? Where were you when you were first exposed? But how do you draw a line in the sand between Before and After? The problem with sand is that it shifts. It gets muddy.
Disneyland. Summer vacation 2020. They did a big family get-together every few years across the hemispheres with her math professor sister-in-law, Tayla, and her software engineer husband, Eric, so Miles could get to know his American cousins: rangy, goofy Jay, the oldest, whom Miles followed around like a puppy, and ten-year-old twins, Zola and Sofia, who graciously tolerated Miles and let him beat them at video games. Billie was supposed to come, but she bailed at the last minute, or hadn’t ever intended to follow through. That’s so Billie. She’d only met the extended family a handful of times. Their wedding. Christmas in Joburg two years after that.
The memories are crystallized around moments when she could have turned back. Like standing in the interminable immigration queue at Hartsfield-Jackson. Flying alone because Devon had gone ahead the week before, Cole had forgotten how long and arduous the flights were from Johannesburg to Atlanta, how suspicious the immigration agents were.
“I see you’re on a spousal visa. Where is your husband?” the man in the uniform said back then, peering down at them, travel-fragged and jetlagged, eight-year-old Miles dying of embarrassment, shirtless and wrapped in an airline blanket poncho because he’d got motion sick and puked on his clothes and the spare set of clothes she’d brought just in case.
“At a conference in Washington D.C. He’s a biomedical engineer.” Hoping to impress him.
“And you?”
“Commercial artist. Window displays, editorial work for magazines. Not fine art.” She liked to joke that some people have imposter syndrome, but she had im-poster syndrome. She got a lot of “can you get paid for that?” at dinner parties, and she’d quip back, over-saccharine, “Why do you think I married an engineer? Someone has to support my silly little hobby,” and roll her eyes at Devon, because some jobs she pulled in earned her twice his monthly salary. But it wasn’t exactly reliable, or practical, or life-changing, not like making artificial esophagus tubes to help babies to breathe.
“Yeah, but it’s not art,” Dev would counter, and that was one of the infinite multitude of reasons she loved him. Along with the saving-the-world stuff.
They met at a science talk on gravitational waves at the Wits University Planetarium back in August 2005, tail end of Johannesburg winter, the nights breathlessly cold and crisp. She was the one who made the playful yarn constructions of the universe decorating the foyer; he was the gawkily handsome PhD student (bioinformatics: sequencing the RNA of malaria, in South Africa on a grant from a big foundation), hanging out awkwardly with a beer. It wasn’t a meet-cute so much as her feeling sorry for the guy on his own, but he was disarmingly funny in a dry way. It took weeks before they got their act together enough to go out for a drink at her favorite dive bar in Parkhurst, where they got so lost in their conversation that the unthinkable happened and they got kicked out of the Jolly Roger at closing time.
They moved in together, too soon, barely six months later, because her lease was up and he had a tiny house in Melville. And it was all temporary anyway, because he was going back to the States after he finished his PhD, and maybe she could visit him? Which she did, and they tried their best, but she wasn’t allowed to work, and she looked into studying, but she couldn’t sit on his couch all day so they broke up and she went back home, twenty-two hours all the way back to South Africa, and it was hell. And sixteen long and terrible months later, he found a way to come back—a job with a medical appliance company that paid in rands, unfortunately, but which sponsored all his permits.
She wasn’t going to get into all that with the immigration guy.
“Mmph,” the officer glanced up from their South African passports, green mambas, her best friend Keletso called them, because they’d bite you with visa fees for all the countries you’re not allowed to sommer just go to. “And you’re returning to South Africa after your vacation?”
“Yes, that’s where we live,” proud of the hard fact of it. Away from everyday Nazis and school shootings so regular they were practically part of the academic calendar along with prom and football season, away from the slow gutting of democracy, trigger-happy cops, and the terror of raising a black son in America. But how can you live there, people would ask her (and Devon, her American husband, especially), meaning Johannesburg. Isn’t it dangerous? And she wanted to reply, how can you live here?