“No,” I said to Rob in a voice that sounded much stronger than I felt. “We can’t kill her. We’re going to help her.”
I had to grit my teeth in order to make the words come out without choking on them as I set my uncle’s lifeless body down onto the ground and stood up.
“Help?” Adam asked. “Lisette, come on. I know you want to do the right thing, but you can’t be serious about this. She’s killed people.”
“We were able to help David,” I reminded him. “David killed people too. Hell, we’ve killed people ourselves.”
“Yeah, but we’re not psychotic,” Adam said, half sarcastically and half completely serious. “Not yet anyway.”
“What are we going to do with her, Lisette?” Michael asked as he closed Mark’s eyelids with a gentle stroke of his hand. He knew better than to argue with me right now. “It’s not like we can just throw her in the backseat of the car and take her back to Charlotte. She’s dangerous.”
“Why not?” I asked. “There’s four of us and only one of her. She has no weapons, no one here to help her, no traps that she’s been able to set. I don’t see any reason why we can’t put her in the back of the car and take her home.”
“Home?” Rob asked.
I nodded. “I’m going to create a sanctuary for anyone who is troubled, like my aunt. I’m going to build it in Charlotte.”
“You mean we’ll build it together,” Michael reminded me.
I nodded once more before I continued. “We’ll build it, get it off the ground, hire people to run it, and then once it is self-sufficient enough to take care of the residents there, then we can leave and go back to Asheville or wherever else it is that we all want to go. My mother’s wish is to have it built and help people inside of it, including Naomi. So, that’s what I’m going to do.”
Michael teased me a bit. “If I have to keep correcting you to say ‘we’, I’m going to start feeling offended.”
“Sorry,” I said with a soft smile. “That is what we’re going to do.”
“Alright,” Adam sighed as he shrugged his shoulders, knowing he wasn’t going to get any further toward dissuading me in this argument. “Let’s bind her up at least. She’s a crazy bat.”
Naomi spit on his shirt, and Adam looked at me with his hands lifted in the air as if to say “See, told you so”.
Michael took care of my uncle’s body while I gathered up all of the inheritance documents and my mother’s journal. Rob held Naomi still as Adam wrapped a cord around her wrists and ankles. I could tell that the cord was painfully tight by the way she was screaming and cursing at them.
Good.
I hoped it hurt her.
Just because I was going to follow my mother’s wishes didn’t mean that I was going to make this an easy experience for Naomi, not after everything that she had done to hurt me and the people that I cared about.
“When I get out of these bindings, I will make sure you pay for what you’re doing!” Naomi screamed at the guys.
“Sounds to me like that makes it a good idea to never untie you then,” Rob sneered.
Adam chuckled and Naomi lurched forward and tried to bite him. He was right; she was a crazy bat. I walked up to her, not close enough for her to spit on me or bite me, but close enough that she could hear me and see the look in my eyes.
“Naomi,” I said. “I’m going to try to help you because that is what my mother wanted me to do. But I’m not going to put up with any more of your violent, selfish bullshit. If we need to keep you tied up with cords so that you don’t try to kill us, then we will. If we need to knock you out in order to get you to be quiet, then we’ll do that, too.”
She laughed at me as her eyes flared with rage. “You couldn’t knock out anything,” she said with a cruel smile on her face.
I took a step closer to her, cocked my arm back, and punched her in the face so hard that I felt the tiny bones in my knuckles crack. Naomi’s head slumped forward and her body went limp in Rob’s arms.
“Damn,” Rob laughed. “That was quite a punch.”
“I’m really glad she finally shut up,” Adam said. “I wanted to punch her myself, but I thought you would have gotten mad.”
“I would have,” I said as I cradled my hand. “I wanted to be the one to do it.”
Rob threw Naomi over his shoulder and Adam held the door open as the two of them went out to put her in the car.
“How’s your hand?” Michael asked as he reached for me and carefully tried to unfold my fingers which were still clenched into a fist.
The skin on my knuckles was cut open and I thought that I could even see the white protrusion of a tiny piece of splintered bone. But I didn’t care. I only hoped that I broke her nose or gave her one hell of a black eye. At the very least, I would be happy for a concussion; anything that would cause her a tiny fraction of the pain that she had caused others.
“We should wrap that up while we’re still here and have supplies at hand,” Michael said as he turned to walk toward the bathroom.
I didn’t want to wait, though. I wanted to leave this house and go home. Not necessarily to Charlotte, in fact I dreaded going back there. But I wanted to get back to the mountainside cabin in Asheville, and if this was the way to do it then I wanted to get it done and then be able to return home again. I sat down on a chair in the kitchen and waited for him to return.
He appeared a moment later with a handful of gauze wraps and antiseptic.
When Michael poured the antiseptic onto my open skin, I didn’t even flinch even though I could see it sizzling against my raw flesh and felt the burning sting.
“Wow,” he said. “Doesn’t that hurt you?”
“Nothing really hurts much anymore,” I answered flatly.
It was true, too. I felt like almost everything was numb, almost. My feelings for the guys still gnawed at my soul as if I was being eaten alive from the inside out, but aside from that, nothing else really mattered. My mother’s vision mattered, and that I would make sure to accomplish for her. But when I had finished, I would go back to the cabin with Michael and we would finally be free and happy. I would tell Adam and Rob about my choice, and they would probably move somewhere close by so that we could all still hang out, but far enough away that we would have privacy, and they would be able to move on and find someone else.
In my head, the fantasy of that happily ever after wasn’t a fantasy at all.
In my head, that was the goal that I would work toward.
