47. Mina

FORTY-SEVEN

mina

I’m sure I’m going to see Benjamin Barker’s sightless eyes in my nightmares for a long time to come. I’ve never felt bad about someone we’ve killed before, but Benjamin wasn’t a bad guy. And he wasn’t an immediate threat to our life. He just had a poor slip in judgment and paid the highest price for it. Would he have talked to the police? Maybe. Brian is right about the risk, but I can’t stop thinking about how it all went down, how scared he was, how he begged… and Brian’s complete lack of mercy.

And then there’s all the magic tools. I know Brian doesn’t believe in that stuff. And I’m not sure if I do. I glance down at my grandmother’s ring. I mean… I wear it all the time, so don’t I believe in that stuff just a little bit?

Surely I don’t wear it all the time just because I think it’s pretty.

The Lovers. The Devil. The Tower.

The cards were lovely and unusual. I don’t know a lot about Tarot, but I’m familiar with the traditional Rider-Waite deck that most people think of when they think of the tarot—at least I’m familiar with what it looks like and the names of the Major Arcana, the twenty-two themed cards most people think of first.

And while this deck was clearly based upon that one with the same card names, it had a very different look.

They were so beautiful. They looked hand-painted. Such a tragedy for art like that to go up in flames—which is why I grabbed them. They’re still gripped tightly in my hand, and I’m not sure if I got them all.

I don’t know why I took them. I definitely didn’t want a trophy from tonight, but I just couldn’t let them burn. It all happened so fast. I don’t think Brian knows I have them. I unzip my duffle bag and slip the cards inside, hoping I’m not missing any and desperately wanting to look at them. But it’s too dark inside the car anyway.

The few cards I saw in the shop all had pale nude figures that looked as though they were carved from marble on a stark glossy black background. Simple. Elegant. Hyper-realistic. Both the lovers and the devil had highly erotic imagery but with opposite intentions: one of love and one of bondage. The tower was a glass reflective building, suspended in space, exploding into shards, a tiny nude figure falling off the top, plummeting to his doom.

I make a mental note to look up these cards and their meanings when I get home. Though their meanings seem pretty self-explanatory. I’m not sure that I’ll mine any new depths with an Internet search.

And then the death card—a skull with a black and silver snake slithering through the eye holes. I wonder if Benjamin would have died tonight if that card hadn’t been on top—if I might have been able to talk Brian out of it. I feel like there is some awful fate coming for us, and I can’t shake it.

Did this fate get set in motion by Brian’s actions tonight… or was it already in the cards? I think it’s strange that all the cards that came up both for Brian and for Benjamin were Major Arcana. None of the suits, and that’s the majority of the deck. What does that mean? Maybe it means he doesn’t shuffle his deck well enough. That’s what Brian would say about it, anyway.

I watch the scenery out the window, trying to clear my head of all of this morbidness. Christmas Eve is supposed to be a time of excitement and wonder and anticipation, a time to wait for Santa to deliver your presents, a time to leave out milk and cookies and maybe sneak a few yourself.

But tonight has been more macabre, morbid, and scary in its own way than Halloween, and as we’ve just moved past the solstice and are rushing headlong into a new year, I can’t help but wonder what the future holds for us.

I’m surprised when Brian doesn’t drive us back to the house but instead to a very nice suburban neighborhood—a wealthier neighborhood with large but not too ostentatious houses. Each house has tasteful white Christmas lights on the outside and electric candles in all the windows. There was obviously a meeting to determine how everyone would decorate.

And while it’s a little boring and anal retentive for every house to be exactly the same, it’s also pretty impressive—both because they got every owner of every house to participate, but also because this level of sameness on this scale is very appealing to the eye.

It’s such a huge shift from the costume shop and the Krampus run.

“Brian? Where are we going?”

“Just one more thing I’ve got to do,” he says cryptically.

It can’t be another job. He would have told me. Besides, it’s well after two a.m. on Christmas Eve. Surely even killers take Christmas off.

He parks the car and reaches into the back seat to retrieve a brightly wrapped package I hadn’t noticed.

“Brian?”

“It’s nothing. Stay in the car.”

I watch him break into the house. Nothing smashes or breaks. He’s got a key. Why does he have a key to this house? How does he have a key to this house? I’m worried an alarm will go off, but nothing happens. This is the kind of neighborhood where every house has a home security system.

As if to put a fine point on this observation, I notice a small sign in the front yard with a spotlight on it announcing the company that protects the house. And yet… no alarm starts blaring.

Maybe it’s a silent alarm and the police will come to cart Brian off for... leaving someone a Christmas present? Maybe it’s a bomb. I’m honestly baffled.

Five minutes later he’s back in the car.

“That house has a security system,” I say.

“I know. I have the code,” he says as he backs out onto the main road.

“Are you going to tell me what all that was about?”

“Nope.”

I turn back to the house in time to see a small boy looking out the window into the night. He’s looking up at the sky like he thinks he’ll find Santa Claus up there, and that’s when I realize who it is.

“Brian! You’re keeping tabs on the kid?”

He shrugs like it’s nothing. I know I’m not going to get more out of him tonight on this topic, and maybe not ever. I lean back in my seat, stealing quick glances at him when I think he’s not paying attention. Parts of Brian are changing. It isn’t just with me.

Despite his impulsive darkness and the death he dealt to others tonight—the death we both dealt—something is changing.

But it’s an additive process. I don’t think he’ll ever wake up one morning and decide to do something normal and boring with the rest of his life. He’s never going to attend a City Council meeting to discuss the value of preserving the old historic trees on Main Street or volunteer to read to toddlers at the library—unless it’s necessary for recon. He’ll always be a killer. But he’s becoming something a little bit more. And yet… I worry that the fate that may hang over us will snatch this new Brian away from me before he can take full form.

He turns the heat up until it feels like springtime in the car. I didn’t even have to say I was cold. It’s these small considerate gestures that get me the most, that make me think he is so much more than what he appears to be.

Finally he sighs and says, “Do you remember back in September when you woke up to the murder wall, and I admitted I’d killed someone without you?”

“Yeah?” I say it so cautiously, so quietly as though he’s a deer I don’t want to spook. I know if I push him he won’t talk about this. I can tell it makes him feel vulnerable to admit whatever this is—even to me.

“It was Aidan’s aunt. She was hurting him.”

I don’t know what to say to this that won’t just re-trigger his own childhood traumas, so I just say, “Is he safe now?”

“Yeah, I think so. He thinks he’s got an angel watching over him.”

“Well, you kind of are.” I’m still so shocked at the level of interest Brian has taken in this kid, going so far as to leave him a gift from Santa. It’s surreal.

“No, you,” Brian says. “He thinks you’re his guardian angel. He told me when I was playing Santa.”

I did see the kid, which was why I slipped away to another part of the store for fear he might recognize me. I wasn’t worried for Brian with the fake white beard covering up so much of his face.

It takes everything in me not to make the kind of noise you make at the discovery of a cute puppy. But I keep it together. We’re silent the rest of the way home. I don’t know which fact is causing the puppy reaction in me. That Aidan thought I was an angel? That he told Brian? That Brian patiently listened to him tell his secrets? A combination of all of it?

When we get home we shower together, but we don’t go run on the treadmill. It’s far too late at night for that and everyone will be up bright and early for Christmas. Phyllis goes all out with the food for the holidays. And I wonder if Benjamin Barker has family who are about to have Christmas ruined for them for the rest of their lives.

I lie in bed in the darkness, the tarot cards and Benjamin’s warning playing over and over in technicolor in my head. I want to brush it off as Brian does, but I guess I do believe in fate. And I feel that surely, given who we are and what we do—what we’ve done —that mine and Brian’s can’t be good.