Two in the Head by Eric Beetner

Author:Eric Beetner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Down & Out Books

A REGULAR FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

Everything I know about dressing a wound I learned from field stripping a deer. When Daddy first showed me how to skin and gut a buck I nearly threw up. Each time after it got easier and the clinical way Daddy talked about it as he worked made it easy to distance myself from it. So I can approach a gunshot wound, and I’ve seen my fair share—this made an even half dozen—I can see it for muscle, bone, sinew and blood. No person in the equation at all.

I made Blake wince a few times, but he never said a word. I felt fairly sure Sam was somewhere across town cursing a blue streak and biting down on a bullet as she repaired her arm from Blake’s shot. She must have been far away because I felt nothing, saw nothing. Maybe she was as tired as me.

“Were you ever planning on quitting?” he said, his voice so close to my ear he barely had to whisper.

“Yes,” I said, telling the truth. “With Lucas, he had to know eventually. Either I’d figure out a way to leave them or he’d find me on his trail of evidence leading to Calder and Rizzo’s door. I hadn’t quite figured out how to get myself free yet.”

“How hard were you trying?”

“Not hard.” I hated not being able to lie. Lies buzzed in my head like angry bees trapped in a jar. My tongue wouldn’t let a single lie out to sting anyone, so they all turned on me. My brain pincushioned with a thousand tiny pricks. Telling the truth is supposed to be cathartic. And for a secret I held in this long, I should be feeling a weight lifted off my shoulders, right? Wrong. I stood in a hole I dug myself and felt the growing weight of the dirt as it rose higher and I sank deeper.

“Blake, you’ve got to understand,” I said. “I’m going to try to make this right. I know I can’t make up for what I’ve done, and what’s happened over the last day and half. Nothing can. But, I’m going to make sure Calder and Rizzo go down and I know it will bring me down in the process. I don’t think it’s just because I can only do the right thing. It’s deeper than that. Or maybe it isn’t. The thing I do know,” I leaned back from his shoulder, a fresh bandage of torn Motel towels keeping the bleeding in check. “This side of me was always in there. It got covered over, or maybe beaten down by her. The other side of me. But, this Samantha, the good Samantha, the one you knew. She’s always been there.”

I know how pathetic I sound. I do. It’s the truth, though. I couldn’t tell anything else.

And Blake’s eyes? Soft again. Softer anyway. That’s something. If anything came out of this, forgiveness from Blake and from Lucas would be the greatest reward.

That and living through it all.

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