Page 298 of Slashed Bonds

Papa. Who taught me to skate on a pond with a shovel in one hand to clear the snow and a pistol in the other because of what was in the woods. Who never once asked me if I was all right after a hit, because he knew. Who built a thing out of blood, freight, cold, and had two daughters, and only one of them has a conscience, and it’s not the one who’s alive.

“He’ll ask when.”

“Tell him when the tiny viper’s got a name.”

A pause while he writes that down. I can hear the pen.

“The location,” he says. “Where we did the work. Instructions?”

I ash the cigarette into the coffee tin. The two girls on my knee squint up at me from the dock.

“Burn the entire place down. All of it. Whatever’s left of him goes in the sewage. Scatter it. I want the river to carry him somewhere nobody fishes.”

“Understood.”

“That everything?”

A longer pause. The kind men take when they’re about to tell you a thing they know you don’t want.

“One more. We had another sighting. Last Tuesday. Portland. She’s using the name from the passport.”

My cigarette’s gone out. I don’t know when.

“Boss. Your sister.”

The river moves. Gray on gray. Somewhere four floors down a dog barks once at a balloon and twenty-two people laugh.

Dark hair to her waist. Hand flat on my back on the dock boards. I’ve got you. Ten years later a different hand and a different flat, this one a shovel, and the ground under the back porch in February where it doesn’t freeze because of the pipes, and no pulse check. She didn’t check. The one thing about her I’ll never forgive isn’t the shovel. It’s that she couldn’t be bothered to make sure.

“Leave her be.”

“Boss—“

“You heard me. Nobody touches her. Nobody follows her. If she’s in Portland she’s in Portland. Note the date. That’s all.”

“Understood, Boss.”

“Piers out.”

I end the call. Put the black phone back in the bag, under the wallet, where it lives. Take the lighter out.

Then I pick up the photograph.

Two girls on a dock. I look at it the way I’ve looked at it every day for thirteen years, which is to say I don’t need to, because it’s already in the drawer in my head and the drawer doesn’t close. I know the strawberry on the swimsuit strap that’s half hidden under her hand. I know the three freckles on her shoulder in the shape of a stick blade. I know the lake. I know the exact color of the light.

I flick the lighter.

The flame takes the corner. The dock goes first, then the lake, then the small blonde girl squinting with the gap in her teeth, who was happy, who had an arm around a neck. The bigger girl goes last. The face that said I’ve got you holds a moment longer than the rest of the paper, because of the crease, the way faces do, and then it’s black and it curls and I drop it in the coffee tin with the sand and the dead cigarettes and I watch it finish.

Bitch thought she buried me, but alas.

Sweet Madidelyn is still alive and well. Slightly ruined…a bit broken…but alive.

Alive, pink, and rostered, with a packship pending and a pair of penguins on a lounge four floors down and a woman who nodded at me from the ice because she sees what I am and has chosen, with love, to say nothing.

I didn’t come to Blackridge for the hockey.

I came because it was a town where the story was already about someone else.