“Samantha.” Gamma’s tone was cold, more like a warning. “Please ensure the faucet valve is closed and quickly make your way into the kitchen.”
Samantha looked back at the mirror, as if her reflection could explain to her what was going on. This was not how her mother spoke to them. Not even when she was explaining the difference between a Marcel handle and the spring-loaded lever on her curling iron.
Without thinking, Samantha reached into the sink and wrapped her hand around the small hammer. She held it behind her back as she walked up the long hall toward the kitchen.
All of the lights were on. The sky had grown dark outside. She pictured her running shoes alongside Charlotte’s on the kitchen stoop, the plastic baton left somewhere in the yard. The kitchen table laid with paper plates. Plastic forks and knives.
There was a cough, deep, maybe a man’s. Maybe Gamma’s, because she coughed that way lately, like the smoke from the fire had somehow made its way into her lungs.
Another cough.
The hair on the back of Samantha’s neck prickled to attention.
The back door was at the opposite end of the hall, a halo of dim light encircling the frosted glass. Samantha glanced behind her as she continued up the hall. She could see the doorknob. She pictured herself turning it even as she walked farther away. Every step she took, she asked herself if she was being foolish, or if she should be concerned, or if this was a joke because her mother used to love to play jokes on them, like sticking plastic googly eyes on the milk jug in the fridge or writing “help me, I’m trapped inside a toilet paper factory!” on the inside of the toilet paper roll.
There was only one phone in the house, the rotary dial in the kitchen.
Her father’s pistol was in the kitchen drawer.
The bullets were somewhere in a cardboard box.
Charlotte would laugh at her if she saw the hammer. Samantha tucked it down the back of her running shorts. The metal was cold against the small of her back, the wet handle like a curling tongue. She lifted her shirt to cover the hammer as she walked into the kitchen.
Samantha felt her body go rigid.
This wasn’t a joke.
Two men stood in the kitchen. They smelled of sweat and beer and nicotine. They wore black gloves. Black ski masks covered their faces.
Samantha opened her mouth. The air had thickened like cotton, closing her throat.
One was taller than the other. The short one was heavier. Bulkier. Dressed in jeans and a black button-up shirt. The tall one wore a faded white concert T-shirt, jeans and blue hightop sneakers with the red laces untied. The short one felt more dangerous but it was hard to tell because the only thing Samantha could see behind the masks was their mouths and eyes.
Not that she was looking at their eyes.
Hightop had a revolver.
Black Shirt had a shotgun that was pointed directly at Gamma’s head.
Her hands were raised in the air. She told Samantha, “It’s okay.”
“No it ain’t.” Black Shirt’s voice had the gravelly shake of a rattlesnake’s tail. “Who else is in the house?”
Gamma shook her head. “Nobody.”
“Don’t lie to me, bitch.”
There was a tapping noise. Charlotte was seated at the table, trembling so hard that the chair legs thumped against the floor like a woodpecker tapping a tree.
Samantha looked back down the hall, to the door, the dim halo of light.
“Here.” The man in the blue hightops motioned for Samantha to sit beside Charlotte. She moved slowly, carefully bending her knees, keeping her hands above the table. The wooden handle of the hammer thunked against the seat of the chair.
“What’s that?” Black Shirt’s eyes jerked in her direction.
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte whispered. Urine puddled onto the floor. She kept her head down, rocking back and forth. “I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry.”
Samantha took her sister’s hand.
“Tell us what you want,” Gamma said. “We’ll give it to you and then you can leave.”
“What if I want that?” Black Shirt’s beady eyes were trained on Charlotte.
“Please,” Gamma said. “I will do whatever you want. Anything.”
“Anything?” Black Shirt said it in a way that they all understood what was being offered.
“No,” Hightop said. His voice was younger-sounding, nervous or maybe afraid. “We didn’t come for that.” His Adam’s apple jogged beneath the ski mask as he tried to clear his throat. “Where’s your husband?”
Something flashed in Gamma’s eyes. Anger. “He’s at work.”
“Then why’s his car outside?”
Gamma said, “We only have one car because—”
“The sheriff …” Samantha swallowed the last word, realizing too late that she shouldn’t have said it.
Black Shirt was looking at her again. “What’s that, girl?”
Samantha put down her head. Charlotte squeezed her hand. The sheriff, she had started to say. The sheriff’s man would be here soon. Rusty had said they were sending a car, but Rusty said a lot of things that turned out to be wrong.
Gamma said, “She’s just scared. Why don’t we go into the other room? We can talk this out, figure out what you boys want.”
Samantha felt something hard bang against her skull. She tasted the metal fillings in her teeth. Her ears were ringing. The shotgun. He was pressing the barrel to the top of her head. “You said something about the sheriff, girl. I heard you.”
“She didn’t,” Gamma said. “She meant to—”
“Shut up.”
“She just—”
“I said shut the fuck up!”
Samantha looked up as the shotgun swiveled toward Gamma.
Gamma reached out, but slowly, as if she was pushing her hands through sand. They were all suddenly trapped in stop-motion, their movements jerky, their bodies turned to clay. Samantha watched as one by one, her mother’s fingers wrapped around the sawed-off shotgun. Neatly trimmed fingernails. A thick callous on her thumb from holding a pencil.
There was an almost imperceptible click.
A second hand on a watch.
A door latching closed.
A firing pin tapping against the primer in a shotgun shell.
Maybe Samantha heard the click or maybe she intuited the sound because she was staring at Black Shirt’s finger when he pulled back the trigger.
An explosion of red misted the air.
Blood jetted onto the ceiling. Gushed onto the floor. Hot, ropey red tendrils splashed across the top of Charlotte’s head and splattered onto the side of Samantha’s neck and face.
Gamma fell to the floor.
Charlotte screamed.
Samantha felt her own mouth open, but the sound was trapped inside of her chest. She was frozen now. Charlotte’s screams turned into a distant echo. Everything drained of color. They were suspended in black and white, like the bachelor farmer’s picture. Black blood had aerosoled onto the grille of the white air conditioner. Tiny flecks of black mottled the glass in the window. Outside, the night sky was a charcoal gray with a lone pinlight of a tiny, distant star.
Samantha reached up with her fingers to touch her neck. Grit. Bone. More blood because everything was stained with blood. She felt a pulse in her throat. Was it her own heart or pieces of her mother’s heart beating underneath her trembling fingers?