It elicits in me a response that’s at once visceral and maternal. Birdie is not my child, but the desire to protect her like my own is stronger than anything I’ve ever felt. My brain races, calculating what I can do to stop what’s happening in front of me—this horror movie unfolding in real time.
“You want this child just like I wanted ours, Tom,” Vanessa says.
Her words catch me off guard. I vaguely remember that Vanessa lost a child. The instance of me going to Tom after finding out about her pregnancy is crystal clear. It was later in the year that I heard from another former student of his that she was no longer pregnant and that there wasn’t a baby to show for her troubles. I had felt sorry for her then. There was a part of me that knew it would harden her. She would change because of it. And I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to want a child and to lose it.
“This isn’t about that,” Tom hisses.
Vanessa laughs bitterly.
“That’s exactly what this is about, Tom,” she says. “Nothing you can do now can make up for what you did then.” Her voice turns to stone, the words working alchemy on it.
“This child,” Tom says slowly, carefully. “This child was given to me by God.”
She laughs again. The sound is mirthless, chilling. I feel my flesh prickle against the sound of her voice. It’s enough to make me think twice about moving forward again. Something is happening. Something between the two of them has coalesced and now I’m about to witness it boil over into something else entirely.
Vanessa steps forward. Her back to the windows, she moves through the moonlit room. She’s a shadow encroaching on Tom’s space. For a moment I imagine the pair of them like two animals, circling one another, sizing each other up. Birdie sits between them, her eyes shut and jaw clenched, trying to breathe steadily. She brings her hand away from her abdomen, examining the blood on her fingers. It’s flowing freely now.
“This child wasn’t given to you by anyone,” Vanessa says as she nears her husband.
He looks again at Birdie as though the girl will argue his point. As though she’ll say, Why, no. You’re wrong, Vanessa. This was my destiny all along. Birdie opens her eyes. The tears are gone, but something else has taken their place. A fight inside of her roars like a storm. She wants to live. I can see that.
Birdie looks at me. Our eyes meet for only a moment. She begs me in that moment, Do something. And I have no choice.
I lunge forward like I’m catching a football about to hit the ground. I throw my weight into Tom, knocking him over. The knife clatters to the ground and I hear Vanessa scramble for it. The fray is only beginning. I know this.
I wrap my arms around his waist and hold him. My hand grazes the revolver and suddenly I remember that it’s there. My stomach lurches like I’ve seen my own death. Tom claws at my face. He scratches me. I scream as his nail digs into my cheek, a burning sensation there long after his hand is gone.
I snap at him, bite his hand. I draw blood. He reaches for the revolver with the other hand and I fight him.
I grab and claw with everything I have, fighting like it’s for my life because I know that it is. He’s on top of me now, having rolled us over into a stack of paintings. They fall on him, images of abstract portraits an absurd backdrop for the man who wraps his hands around my throat.
I suddenly remember a self-defense seminar that I went to where the woman teaching it said, if someone puts their hands on your throat, fight like it’s life or death, because it is.
I reach for his hands. I scrape at them with my nails, the oxygen in my blood stream leaving me faster than rubbing alcohol evaporating into the air. He relaxes his grip for a split second, and I suck in the air, giving my lungs and brain enough to operate on for a few more seconds. I wedge a finger between his palm and my throat, and I look into his eyes.
It’s not so different, killing someone and making love. I think of all the times he was in just this position, thrusting himself inside me. My back arching and his name under my breath. I looked into his eyes so many times then and I realize suddenly that I never saw him as honestly as I’m seeing him in this moment. Stripped away are the inhibitions of polite society, of law, of reason. All I can see in his eyes is madness.
The man that I loved is gone, an illusion that he sold me. I bought it, turning over all of my self-worth in payment to him. The thought occurs to me that I could die here. That this could be it. And a calmness descends on me. The death anxiety that I’ve wrestled and fought with my entire adult life evaporates just like the oxygen from my blood stream. There is something welcoming in the idea of just letting go.
But then Birdie screams. Another howl like the first. An animal noise. The noise of someone who truly is at death’s door. Something awakens inside of me. The thought of her eyes—the fight in them—makes me struggle like a fish out of water. It makes me want to fight. I can’t die like this. Not here. Not because of him.
I’ve fought too hard for
