Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [21]
She could see right away the devastating effect her speech had on him and she hated herself for it. She’d been cold and calculating and brutal, even to the extent of intentionally using the male pronoun in referring to her unspecified caregiver, so that he’d be forced to imagine another man doing all of those things she described. She’d never before played the cripple card like this, and though she’d done it for a perfectly justified reason, to save him from throwing his life away in a noble but futile gesture, she regretted it instantly, even as she saw that she’d won. She’d defeated him thoroughly — in detail, as the military men like to say. She could see from his expression that he’d stay here now if she wanted him to, to preserve and protect the agreed fiction of their lives, even at the terrible cost of letting Max go. She’d won, unless she turned it around right now and gave it back.
Should she let him go?
Could she?
She leaned her elbows hard on the table, putting as much weight on them as she had, and clasped her fists tightly in front of her. She stared down intently at her whitening knuckles. Peter didn’t try to say anything, because this was her “I’m trying to think of how to say something really important in just the right way” pose. Even while he was as miserable as he’d ever been, torn between two absolute but conflicting responsibilities, he was content to give her the time to conjure whatever it was she needed.
She looked up at him and fixed his eyes with hers, which were red and swollen with unshed tears, but there was a cold anger in them too.
“When you find him you’re going to have to kill him,” she finally said, low, controlled and without emotion.
“Yes, I know.”
“You know, Peter, but you don’t really absolutely, down-in-your-ugly-depths know. You can’t hope to kill him only as a last resort. You can’t try to reason with him first, or look for one tiny scrap of potential redemption. You can’t even talk to him, because I know that’s what you desperately want to do. You want to find out why he did the things he did and why he let himself become the creature he turned into. You want to understand him and have him explain everything in a tidy, storybook denouement. But that will never happen and you need to know it. If I let you walk out that door — and believe me, I can still stop you if I need to — then it will only be because I have your solemn promise that you won’t try to talk to him first. You’ll use every dirty thing I’ve ever taught you and just do the bloody business and walk away.”
“I think I can make that promise,” he said, after considering her words.
“I think you can, too. I just wish I was more confident you will.”
Peter looked down at his hands, studying them as if they’d only recently grown out of the ends of his arms. The cottage was full of the cooking aromas and he savored them for a moment, realizing that they added to the weight that held him there in their home that he never wanted to leave. Finally he said, “Who’ll we get to come out here then? Who can we trust?”
“No one,” she said and there was adamant in her voice. “You said you’d only be gone for a week at most? Well, I can hold out here alone for a week. It won’t be pretty, and you’ll have a hell of a mess to clean up when you get back, but what’s left of our stunted dignity and reputation will remain intact.”
He started