Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [110]
One long branch refused to be lifted, and when she tugged at it, it broke off in her hands. It was weighted at the other end by a pair of shoes, slim and elegant but scuffed across the toes; above them, a gray suit, and a faded blue shirt pressed open at the collar.
She straightened, holding the branches close to her chest, and looked squarely into Andrew’s long, sad face. “Well,” she said.
Andrew said nothing. He held a little steel pistol whose eye was pointed at her heart.
Now, why should that make her want to laugh? The blue of the steel was lethal-looking, and she was holding the branches so tightly that her muscles were trembling. And above all, she had been through this before; she knew now that it was something to take seriously. Laughter tended to set explosions off. “Why is everything you say so inconsequential?” Timothy had asked, but now the most inconsequential remark of all came into her head, and she said it in spite of herself.
“Where did you get that gun, I wonder,” she said.
Andrew winced, as if he knew what a mistake she had made.
“Plucked it off a tree? Found it in your mother’s sewing box?”
“It was left with me by a friend,” said Andrew. “He went to Europe.”
“Funny friend,” Elizabeth said.
“Things always come to you somehow, if you want them badly enough.”
She had never heard his voice before, except above the noise of the bus station. It was light and frail, breakable-sounding. There was a pulse ticking in his forehead. The hand that held the pistol was shaking, which gave her some hope that his aim might be poor. “Andrew,” she said, “give me the gun now.”
“I can’t. I didn’t want to do this. I warned you and warned you, I wrote you letters. Nothing stops you. I know what you were up to in the gazebo.”
“Really? What was I up to?” Elizabeth asked.
“You’d better take this seriously. I mean it.”
“I am. I know you do,” said Elizabeth. And she did. It was beginning to seem possible that this was the way she would die—in a numb, unreal situation in the orange half-light of a Sunday evening. How could she have guessed, when she woke up this morning and brushed her teeth and chose what shirt to wear? She didn’t even know what date it was. “What’s today’s date?” she asked.
“June seventh,” said Andrew.
She thought it over. June seventh had never had any significance before. She pushed her mind back to Timothy, who had died one day in April because of mistakes that she had made and had rehashed again and again since then, but she had never been sure what she should have done instead. Started crying? Run away? Said she would take him south with her after all?
She made up her mind. She said, “Well, I can see how you feel. Shall I leave Baltimore and not come back?”
Then she spun away from him to start toward the house. She had completed the turn already (she saw Matthew with a suitcase, his back to her, his sisters straggling behind him) and she was just wondering what to do with these dead branches when the gun went off.
The sound had nothing to do with her. It was as distant as the diminished figure of Matthew, who pivoted in mid-step without a pause and dropped the suitcase and started running toward her. The others were a motionless, horror-struck