Rise: How a House Built a Family(87)

“This has to end.” It barely sounded like my voice. It held less power than Hope’s.

The 911 phone was talking to me, so I picked it up and turned to the back door. He stood there watching us through the glass French doors. The knife tip was as red as his leggings. With almost no effort he could break that glass and step right through. I pointed the gun at him, made sure he saw it. He held up the knife. A challenge. A draw.

I didn’t move. It wasn’t like there was any place to hide. Not really. No place to go. “Are they here yet?” I asked the 911 dispatcher.

“Thought I’d lost you,” she said. “I have two cars on the way, but they were across town. It’s going to be a little while yet. Hold on. Stay calm.”

I closed my eyes, wanting to keep them that way for a long time. I didn’t want to see Adam, and I didn’t want to see what I might have to do.

“Go upstairs,” I said. But I never turned to see if Hope listened or stayed to be my whispering conscience. If I listened to her, we would both regret it one day. The next time he came looking for his lost mind in our house, we would regret keeping the bullets clean and whole.

He tapped the window again, and I realized it was Morse code, but I refused to translate the dots and dashes. I opened my eyes and put the phone down. I didn’t need the nervous lady anymore. She had done her best to help me and failed.

I took a long step toward the door and felt strength rising up through the heels of my feet, coursing through my veins with the power of every woman who had ever stood like I stood, with no one else to lean on, no one to help. I felt their power all the way to the top of my head and the tips of my fingers. Yes, even the finger that was curved around the chipped, black trigger of Karma.

For a second, or maybe longer, I thought about shooting him through the door. How much trouble would I get in, and could I get out of it? My kids would be safe. No matter what happened to me, they would be safe. Was it worth it? He was too heavy for me to drag inside without making that obvious, so that was out of the question.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap-a-tap. Tap.

I looked at the deadbolt—not to see if it was locked, I knew it was, but because I was thinking about unlocking it, letting him in so the story would be right for the police.

I wasn’t panicked; I was calm and rational. I was clearheaded enough to know that I didn’t want to do this again, not ever. There was only one way I could guarantee that, and that was if he was dead. I didn’t want to kill him, I just wanted it to end, and there was no other answer. Time moved immeasurably slowly. I imagined what it would look like if I shot him, first in the chest, three times, then in the head if I could manage it before he fell to the floor. I could see what that would look like on the tile, on the painted door.

Tap-a-tap. Tap-tap. Tap.

Then what? What if all the bullets I had in the gun and in my pockets didn’t kill him? How far could I go? I walked to the kitchen and got a butcher knife from the drawer, the one he had used to chop veggies chef-style when he’d gone through his cooking obsession. I laid it on the counter. Plan B.

I could still see him from the kitchen, lips moving and knife tapping messages to me, or to someone, maybe to the house itself for all I knew. His left horn had fallen a couple of inches, making him look a little pitiful. I realized then that he was wearing lipstick. Bright red lipstick from Ivana’s collection. She wouldn’t be happy about that.

I wasn’t happy about it either. Most of all, I wasn’t happy with what he had made me face about myself. Ever since Hope was born, I could have guessed that I would kill for my kids if I had to, if I was backed into a corner. But I never imagined I would step over that line and want to kill, wish I could get away with it. Sure, I could tell myself it was still for a noble cause, not a cruel, cold-blooded desire without a grander purpose, but that didn’t make me feel all that much better.

The only thing that could was choosing not to do it.

The sun was setting behind him, a molten hell nowhere near as hot as the hell inside his own mind. I’m sorry, Cara, he had said about the schizophrenia. It wasn’t something he chose. And it was, without a doubt, the saddest thing I had watched in my life. A man stripped of logic and his family, left with only enough of his mind to know what he lost and that he still loved those missing things. Sad beyond words.

But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t still shoot him if he got through my door.

He moved around to the kitchen window where Hope had seen him so many nights since the divorce. I wondered if that was where Jada had seen him this morning. Minutes later, he appeared in the dining-room window, back to his starting point. Ring-around-the-rosy.

He was trying the front door, turning the knob and shouldering against it, when blue lights flashed up the driveway, moving slower than I thought they should. Four officers approached while his knife tapped a final, frantic message in code. Karma felt warm in my hand, pointed at the floor, but ready, just in case. You never know what might happen. Anything was possible in this crazy world. Anything.

Through the long leaded-glass windows in the front door, I didn’t see him resist or threaten, but he may have. Maybe I wanted him to so they could take care of the problem for me, but I didn’t think hard on that. It was going too far, stepping across a dangerous line in my mind that I’d already rejected. They pushed him to the ground, shouting and making a lot of noise I couldn’t interpret. I imagined my mom there with me, holding me together. Without her, all my pieces would have surely flown apart and left the house through the smudged windows.