The End of it All Read online

  Kendra spent an hour in her room, crying. She wrote the word pathetic several times on her paper. I held her hand and tried to assure her that she indeed looked beautiful, which she did.

  That night as I was leaving—we'd taken dinner in Kendra's room, neither of us wanting to see Amy any more than we needed to—she was waiting in my car again, even drunker than she'd been the first time. She had her inevitable drink in her hand. She wore a dark turtleneck and white jeans with a wide, sash-like leather belt. She looked a lot better than I wanted her to.

  "You prick, you think I don't know what you did?"

  "Welcome to the club."

  "I happened to have fucking loved him."

  "I'm tired, Amy. I want to go home."

  In the pine-smelling night, a silver October moon looked ancient and fierce as an Aztec icon.

  "You killed Vic," she said.

  "Sure, I did. And I also assassinated JFK."

  "You killed Vic, you bastard."

  "Vic shot Kendra."

  "You can't prove that."

  "Well, you can't prove that I shot Vic, either. So please remove your ass from my car."

  "I really never thought you'd have the balls. I always figured you for the faggot type."

  "Just get out, Amy."

  "You think you've won this, Roger. But you haven't. You're fucking with the wrong person, believe me."

  "Good night, Amy."

  She got out of the car and then put her head back in the open window. "Well, at least there's one woman you can satisfy, anyway. I'm sure Kendra thinks you're a great lover. Now that she's paralyzed, anyway."

  I couldn't help it. I got out of the car and walked over to her across the dewy grass. I ripped the drink from her hand and then said, "You leave Kendra and me alone, do you understand?"

  "Big, brave man," she said. "Big, brave man."

  I hurled her drink into the bushes and then walked back to the car.

  In the morning, the idea was there waiting for me.

  I called work and told them I wouldn't be in and then spent the next three hours making phone calls to various doctors and medical supply houses as to exactly what I'd need and what I'd need to do. I even set up a temporary plan for private-duty nurses. I'd have to dig into my inheritance, but this was certainly worth it. Then I drove downtown to a jeweler's, stopping by a travel agency on my way back.

  I didn't phone. I wanted to surprise her.

  The Australian groundsman was covering some tulips when I got there. Frost was predicted. "G'day," he said, smiling. If he hadn't been over sixty with a potbelly and white hair, I would have suspected Amy of using him for her personal pleasure.

  The maid let me in. I went out to the back terrace, where she said I'd find Kendra.

  I tiptoed up behind her, flicked open the ring case, and held it in front of her eyes. She made that exultant cooing sound in her throat, and then I walked around in front of her and leaned over and gave her a gentle, tender kiss. "I love you," I said. "And I want to marry you right away and have you move in with me."

  She was crying but then so was I. I knelt down beside her and put my head on her lap, on the cool surface of her pink quilted housecoat. I let it lie there for a long time as I watched a dark, graceful bird ride the wind currents above, gliding down the long, sunny autumn day. I even dozed off for a time.

  At dinnertime, I rolled Kendra to the front of the house, where Amy was entertaining one of the Ken-doll men she'd taken up with these days. She was already slurring her words. "We came up here to tell you that we're going to get married."

  The doll-man, not understanding the human politics here, said in a Hollywood kind of way, "Well, congratulations to both of you. That's wonderful." He even toasted us with his martini glass.

  Amy said, "He's actually in love with me."

  Doll-man looked at me and then back at Amy and then down at Kendra.

  I turned her chair sharply from the room and began pushing it quickly over the parquet floor toward the hallway.

  "He's been in love with me since second grade, and he's only marrying her because he knows he can't have me!"

  And then she hurled her glass against the wall, smashing it, and I heard, in the ensuing silence, doll-man cough anxiously and say, "Maybe I'd better be going, Amy. Maybe another night would be better."

  "You sit right where you fucking are," Amy said, "and don't fucking move."

  I locked Kendra's door behind us on the unlikely chance that Amy would come down to apologize.

  Around ten, she began to snore quietly. The nurse knocked softly on the door. "I need to get in there, sir. The missus is upstairs sleeping."

  I leaned over and kissed Kendra tenderly on the mouth.

  We set the date two weeks hence. I didn't ask Amy for any help at all. In fact, I avoided her as much as possible. She seemed similarly inclined. I was always let in and out by one of the servants.

  Kendra grew more excited each day. We were going to be married in my living room by a minister I knew vaguely from the country club. I sent Amy a handwritten note inviting her, but she didn't respond in any way.

  I suppose I didn't qualify as closest kin. I suppose that's why I had to hear it on the radio that overcast morning as I drove to work.

  It seemed that one of the city's most prominent families had been visited yet again by tragedy—first the father dying in a robbery attempt a year earlier, and now the wheelchair-confined daughter falling down the long staircase in the family mansion. Apparently she'd come too close to the top of the stairs and simply lost control. She'd broken her neck. The mother was said to be under heavy sedation.

  I must have called Amy twenty times that day, but she never took my calls. The Aussie gardener usually picked up. "Very sad here today, mate. She was certainly a lovely lass, she was. You have my condolences."

  I cried till I could cry no more and then I took down a bottle of Black and White scotch and proceeded to do it considerable damage as I sat in the gray gloom of my den.

  The liquor dragged me through a Wagnerian opera of moods—forlorn, melancholy, sentimental, enraged—and finally left me wrapped around my cold, hard toilet bowl, vomiting. I was not exactly a world-class drinker.

  She called just before midnight, as I stared dully at CNN. Nothing they said registered on my conscious mind.

  "Now you know how I felt when you killed Vic."

  "She was your own daughter."

  "What kind of life would she have had in that wheelchair?"

  "You put her there!" And then I was up, frantic, crazed animal, walking in small, tight circles, screaming names at her.

  "Tomorrow I'm going to the police," I said.

  "You do that. Then I'll go there after you do and tell them about Vic."

  "You can't prove a damned thing."

  "Maybe not. But I can make them awfully suspicious. I'd remember that if I were you."

  She hung up.

  It was November then, and the radio was filled with tinny, cynical messages of Christmas. I went to the cemetery once a day and talked to her, and then I came home and put myself to sleep with Black and White and Valium. I knew it was Russian roulette, that particular combination, but I thought I might get lucky and lose.

  The day after Thanksgiving, she called again. I hadn't heard from her since the funeral.

  "I'm going away."

  "So?"

  "So. I just thought I'd tell you that in case you wanted to get hold of me."

  "And why would I want to do that?"

  "Because we're joined at the hip, darling, so to speak. You can put me in the electric chair, and I can do the same for you."

  "Maybe I don't give a damn."

  "Now you're being dramatic. If you truly didn't give a damn, you would've gone to the police two months ago."

  "You bitch."

  "I'm going to bring you a little surprise when I come back from my trip. A Christmas gift, I guess you'd call it."

  I tried working but I couldn't
concentrate. I took an extended leave. The booze was becoming a problem. There was alcoholism on both sides of my family, so my ever-increasing reliance on blackouts wasn't totally unexpected, I suppose. I stopped going out. I learned that virtually anything you needed would happily be brought to you if you had the money, everything from groceries to liquor. A cleaning woman came in one day a week and bulldozed her way through the mess. I watched old movies on cable, trying to lose myself especially in the frivolity of the musicals. Kendra would have loved them. I found myself waking, many mornings, in the middle of the den, splayed on the floor, after apparently trying to make it to the door but failing. One morning I found that I'd wet myself. I didn't much care, actually. I tried not to think of Kendra, and yet she was all I did want to think about. I must have wept six or seven times a day. I dropped twelve pounds in two weeks.

  I got sentimental about Christmas Eve, decided to try to stay reasonably sober and clean myself up a little bit. I told myself I was doing this in honor of Kendra. It would have been our first Christmas Eve together.

  The cleaning lady was also a good cook and had left a fine roast beef with vegetable and potato fixings in the refrigerator. All I had to do was heat it up in the microwave.

  I had just set my place at the dining room table—with an identical place setting to my right for Kendra—when the doorbell rang.

  I answered it, opening the door and looking out into the snow-whipped darkness.

  I know I made a loud and harsh sound, though if it was a scream exactly, I'm not sure.

  I stepped back from the doorway and let her come in. She'd even changed her walk a little, to make it more like her daughter's. The clothes, too, the long double-breasted camel hair coat and the wine-colored beret, were more Kendra's style than her own. Beneath was a four-button empire dress that matched the color of the beret—the exact dress Kendra had often worn.

  But the clothes were only props.

  It was the face that possessed me.

  The surgeon had done a damned good job, whoever he or she was, a damned good job. The nose was smaller and the chin was now heart-shaped and the cheekbones were more pronounced and perhaps a half inch higher. And with her blue contacts—

  Kendra. She was Kendra.

  "You're properly impressed, Roger, and I'm grateful for that," she said, walking past me to the dry bar. "I mean, this was not without pain, believe me. But then you know that firsthand, don't you, being an old hand at plastic surgery yourself."

  She dropped her coat in an armchair and fixed herself a drink.

  "You bitch," I said, slapping the drink from her hand, hearing it shatter against the stone of the fireplace. "You're a goddamned ghoul."

  "Maybe I'm Kendra reincarnated." She smiled. "Have you ever thought of that?"

  "I want you out of here."

  She stood on tiptoes, just as Kendra had once done, and touched my lips to hers. "I knew you'd be gruff the first time you saw me. But you'll come around. You'll get curious about me. If I taste any different, or feel any different. If I'm—Kendra."

  I went over to the door, grabbing her coat as I did so. Then I yanked her by the wrist and spun her out into the snowy cold night, throwing her coat after her. I slammed the door.

  Twenty minutes later, the knock came again. I opened the door, knowing just who it would be. There were drinks, hours of drinks, and then, quite before I knew what was happening and much against all I held sacred and dear, we were somehow in bed, and as she slid her arms around me there in the darkness, she said, "You always knew I'd fall in love with you someday, didn't you, Roger?"