'Wake
Ed sputtered and shook his head. His eyes opened. He looked dully at Jack, then around him. He looked down and stiffened. Panic flashed in his eyes.
'Hey! What—?”
'You're dead, Ed. Ed is dead. It rhymes, Ed. That's 'cause it's meant to be.'
Jack was barely in control. He would look back in later years and know what he was doing was crazy. A car could have come down the road and along the overpass at any time, or someone in the northbound lanes could have looked up and spotted them through the heavy snow. But good sense had fled along with mercy, compassion, and forgiveness.
This man had to die.
Jack had decided that after talking to the State Police after his mother's funeral. It had been clear then that even if they learned the name of whoever had dropped the cinder block, without an eyewitness to the incident or a full confession freely given in the presence of the defendant's attorney, he'd walk.
Jack refused to accept that. The killer had to die—not just any way, but Jack's way. He had to know he was going to die. And why.
Jack's voice sounded flat in his ears, and as cold as the snow drifting out of the featureless night sky.
'You know whose lap your 'bomb' landed in last month, Ed? My mother's. You know what? She's dead. A lady who never hurt anyone in her whole life was riding along minding her own business and you killed her. Now she's dead and you're alive. What's wrong with that picture, Ed?'
He took bleak satisfaction from the growing horror in Ed's face.
'Hey, look! It wasn't me! Wasn't me, I swear!'
'Too late, Ed. You already told me it was.'
Ed let out a scream as he slid off the guardrail, but Jack held him by the back of his coat until his tied feet found purchase on the ledge.
'Please don't do this! I'm sorry! It was an accident! I didn't mean for anyone to get hurt! I'll do anything to make it up! Anything!'
'Anything? Good. Don't move.'
Together they stood over the right southbound lane, Jack inside the guardrail, Ed outside. Both watched the traffic roar out from beneath the overpass and flee down the turnpike. With his hand gripping the collar of Ed's peacoat to steady him, Jack glanced over his shoulder at the oncoming traffic.
With the continuing snowfall, the traffic had slowed and thinned. The left lane had built up an accumulation of slush and no one was using it, but plenty of cars and trucks remained in the middle and right lanes, most doing forty-five or fifty. Jack saw the headlights and clearance lights of a tractor-semitrailer approaching down the right lane. As it neared the overpass he gave a gentle shove.
Ed toppled forward slowly, gracefully, his bleat of terror rising briefly above the noise of the traffic echoing from below. Jack had measured the rope carefully. Ed fell feet first until the rope ran out of slack, then his body snapped downward. Ed's head and upper torso swung over the cab of the oncoming truck and smashed against the leading edge of the trailer with a solid
The truck kept going, its driver probably blaming the noise on a clump of wet snow that had shaken loose from the overpass. Another truck came rolling down the lane but Jack didn't wait for the second impact.
He walked to Ed's car and removed the cinder block from the trunk. He threw it into a field as he walked the mile farther down the road to his own car.
No connection to his mother's death, no connection to him.
Over.
Done.
He went home and put himself to bed, secure in the belief that starting tomorrow he could pick up his life again where he’d left off.
He was wrong.
He slept into the afternoon of the following day. When he awoke, the enormity of what he’d done descended with the weight of the earth itself. He’d killed. More than killed: he’d executed another man.
He was tempted to cop an insanity plea, say it hadn't been him up there on the overpass but a monster wearing his skin. Someone else had been in control.
It wouldn't wash. It hadn't been someone else. It had been him. Jack. No one else. And he hadn't been in a fog or a fugue or consumed by a red haze of rage. He remembered every detail, every word, every move with crystal clarity.
No guilt. No remorse. That was the truly frightening part: The realization that if he could go back and relive those moments he wouldn't change a thing.
He knew that afternoon as he sat hunched on the edge of the bed that his life would never be the same. The young man in the mirror today was not the same one he’d seen there yesterday. Everything looked subtly different. The angles and curves of his surroundings hadn't changed; faces and architecture and geography all stayed topographically the same. But someone had shifted the lighting. Shadows lurked where once there had been light.
Jack returned to Rutgers but college no longer seemed to make any sense. He could sit and laugh and drink with his friends, but he no longer felt a part of them. He was one step removed. He could still see and hear them, but could no longer touch them, as if a glass wall had risen between him and everyone he thought he knew.
