He starts to walk away.
I watch him go. The wax cap. The L.L.Bean duck boots. The barrel of his open shotgun glinting dully where it crosses his forearm. The set of his shoulders, hunched against the cold.
His back, his back, his back.
His back, you fucking idiot,I sneer at myself.
It’s a back that he is presenting to me like a gift wrapped in tweed.
I lift the shotgun. It comes easily to me now, though I haven’t fired a gun in a long time. The stock settles against my shoulder. My cheek finds the wood. My breath goes long and slow on the exhale, and my finger slides inside the trigger guard.
This is for you,I think, aiming the thoughts toward Cass and the child inside her.For both of you.
A crow caws. Or is it two of them? Or is it seven?
Sorrow? Or joy? Or secrets never told?
And then the shot rings out.
29
CASS
The shot rings out.
But it’s not mine.
It comes somewhere down the line to my left, a flat, hard crack that punches through the still air, and a split second later, the world detonates around me.
The pheasants have been set loose. Squawking, fleeing, terrified. There’s a whirring, beating, frantic sound as they burst from the cages at the tree line, a hundred copper-and-emerald bodies climbing wild against the metallic sky.
Every man with a gun starts firing at once.
Bang. Bang. Bang-bang-bang.
The trees scream. The crows scream. Someone whoops. Someone else laughs the high, ugly laugh of a man with too much bourbon in him.
And me?
I scream, too.
My finger jerks against the trigger, and the shotgun bucks against my shoulder so hard it nearly takes my collarbone off. The blast goes well wide—high and to the left, a dozen feet over Raymond’s hat and up into the canopy where it shears a handful of birch twigs loose. They flutter down between us in slow motion, pale and curling, like sad confetti.
It goes without saying that Raymond does not die.
The recoil throws me back a staggering half-step. My ears are ringing, my eyes are watering, and my nose is full of gunpowder and my own armpit sweat. The whole symphony of gunfire is still going on around us, with every man in the firm too busy missing his own pheasant to notice that one wife at the edge of the woods just took a shot at her husband and pretended she was aiming for a bird. My misfire is swallowed whole by everyone else’s.
Thank God,I think.
And then immediately:Goddammit.
I lower the shotgun slowly, hands shaking so violently I’m half-afraid I’ll set it off again into my own foot.
Raymond’s expression is?—
I don’t know what it is.
His brows are still pulled together. The smarmy half-smile has gone from his face, replaced by a suspicious squint. But it’s not a look of outrage. Like, if someone had just tried to unload a shotgun into my piehole, I wouldn’t be nearly that calm.