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She remembered the nights he’d collapsed on her body, sobbing, calling her
“Mother” when the pain was so intense she hadn’t been able to do more than dumbly stroke his hair with trembling fingers.
His lips drew back in a snarl. “Don’t pretend to be my child. Your face. Her face…you’re the same. I could see her in the things you did, said. The way you turned your head or laughed, the way you touched me. I see it even now. Had to punish her.
And you stop your sniffling and squirming!” It was a hoarse scream, making Natalie’s face fold into itself as if he had blasted a dragon’s heat across her tender skin.
“Miss M…”
It was the wail of sheer panic that recalled Marguerite. She shoved her anger and memories out of the way and was lunging forward when he put one foot on the ledge and thrust the child out into space.
“No!”
“Stop. ” He roared it. Whether he meant Natalie to stop crying or Marguerite to stop moving she didn’t know, but he accomplished at least one, for she came to a tense halt when she saw he had his hand screwed up in the cloth of the shirt. It gathered like a tight sling under her armpits, baring her midriff. While the sight of the child dangling over thin air was enough to stop her heart, his hold told her he didn’t intend to drop her. Not yet.
“Dad. ” She brought his attention back to her, compelling him with just the tone of her voice. She had to raise it to be heard over Natalie’s cries of distress and tried to keep her heart from tearing in two from the sound. Calling on the same discipline that had made her lie still when this man pressed a cigarette into her spine while sodomizing her, she sought that stillness inside, the ability to block everything out. “It’s time for it to be over. That’s why you came for me, called me here, remember? It never could have ended any way other than this. But we need to go together, all three of us. ”
“Damn right. We’ll all three go. ” He abruptly jerked the child back onto the ledge, taking his own foot back off to pull a bandana from his pocket. Natalie’s tiny hands came up, ineffectively trying to block him. Holding her head with a brutal grip on her hair, he roughly forced the wadded cloth all the way in until her mouth was unable to close, silencing her cries. He kept his gaze on Marguerite throughout so she had to hold her ground while Natalie’s eyes pleaded with her for rescue, filled with bewildered terror. The past hour of the child’s life was rapidly becoming a decade of nightmares to overcome.
No. It wasn’t going to happen like that. “Yes. We’ll go together, like we should have that day. Mom should have waited, so we could have all gone together. ” With the sun obscured by even more gray clouds, she could see the brown eyes they’d once shared. And they were thinking. When he focused on her, she drew in a painful breath. For just an instant she saw him, a glimpse of something remembered in the way he looked at her now.
“M-Marie. We have to do it. You understand, don’t you? It’s the only way she’ll be truly dead. She won’t hurt either of us anymore. She won’t make me hurt you to get at her. ”
“Daddy,” she said softly. “That’s why I survived, so you wouldn’t have to go alone.
So we could go together. ”
His hand dug into Natalie’s collarbone beneath the shirt and the girl’s lips pressed down on the cloth, registering pain.
“You weren’t with us that day, but you’ve been with me ever since. ” She took another step forward. While his grip didn’t ease, he watched her, his eyes searching her face so hard she thought he might be seeking the soul he’d lost, hearing it somehow in the words she spoke to him. “Are you tired, Daddy? Are you tired of hurting?” She pulled it deep from inside herself, remembered the years of loneliness. Of wishing, time and again, that David’s body had not turned at that last moment, that she’d not been left alone in the world with no one. No bulwark against the nightmares. She’d survived, built her life. And Tyler had come and given it all a purpose in a handful of days. If there was such a thing as last wishes, she hoped he would somehow know that the joy he’d given her was timeless, eternal. And if she could do it over, she would have embraced every second they were given, not fought it with such fear. She embraced every moment she’d had with him now.
“I’m tired,” she admitted. “I have been for so long, until recently. ” She saw the man who had lifted her on his shoulders at the fair and told her he’d ride the Ferris wheel with her, that he’d take care of her, always. In whose arms she’d fallen asleep, never thinking she’d have any reason to fear him.
Natalie coughed against the gag, strangling on the phlegm that was also coming from her nose.
“You—” The memory was gone, driven away by the fury rising in the red-tinted eyes.
“Let me help,” Marguerite said quickly. “I know her crying is upsetting you. Let me make her understand, the way Mom made us understand. ” He lifted Natalie to her toes and the child’s eyes grew even wider, the coughing worse.
“Dad. ” Marguerite’s tone became more firm, steady, a voice she’d used to good effect when subs started to panic. The sound of someone who was in control, who would make sure everything worked out. “Let me help. ” As she held his gaze, she stepped up to the child.
“Stop there. ”
When Marguerite stopped just out of reach, a muffled sob made it past the cloth.
“Shut—”
“Natalie. ” Marguerite reached out then, caught the child’s hands before her father could stop her. In the same movement she went to one knee, a non-threatening posture incapable of taking the child from his grasp. “Natalie, honey. Look at me. ” Glancing at her father, she carefully reached forward, removed the gag, easing it out of the small mouth, the saliva wetting her knuckles. “I’m going to help, Dad. Breathe, sweetheart.
Just breathe. Deep breaths. Watch my eyes. ”
She held both her hands, watched the little girl try hard to follow her direction, fighting the natural flight instinct of a young defenseless creature that could easily become fatal panic.
“M-Miss M…I…I’m s-so sc-scared. I wanna go h-home. ”
“We’re going to go home, sweetheart. I promise. ” She cupped her hand over the side of her head, the small ear, fingering the new piercing, drawing Natalie’s attention to something other than the man at her side.
“She’s not going home. We’re not going home. ”
“Yes, we are. ” Marguerite looked toward him. “Don’t you think so? Isn’t that what this is about? Bringing an end to it? Peace to it? Let me tell her, Dad. Let me tell you both what Mom said to David and me that day. And it will all be clear. Do you want to know what Mom said? Her very last words?”
He blinked several times, his mouth forming a tight line. His eyes glistened. “She didn’t understand the evil. The danger. ”
“It will all be clear to her shortly. Because you’ll see her and tell her. But first, I want to tell you both this. ”
Marguerite pulled her gaze back to Natalie, saw she had successfully acquired the attention of both of them.
“Did you know that I was once up here with my mother? And she told me and my brother something very special, something that made us not afraid of anything. Not even of being up so high, or the possibility of falling. I want to tell you what she said, but I need you to stop crying and be a very, very brave girl. Look just at me, honey. Just at me. ” She squeezed the girl’s hands, rubbed her cold fingers, willing her to be calm.
The child began to hiccup. Trying for Miss M, making Marguerite’s throat hurt with burning tears. “Remember how I told you I’d always love you, no matter what? And that I’d always tell you the truth. Remember?”
She could feel her father’s growing tension enveloping her and Natalie like a suffocating stench. She concentrated on locking Natalie’s attention in the cool blue of her gaze, visualized drawing her into peace, tranquility.
“Would you like to know w
hat my mother said?”
Natalie shook her head. “I want to g-go home. ”
“I know, sweetie. ” Marguerite stood up, let go of her hand and stepped onto the ledge in one motion, again arresting her father in mid-lunge as she proved to him that she was trying to move herself closer to the ledge, not take Natalie farther from it. He held on to Natalie’s shirt as Marguerite turned, faced him over her head.
“Are you ready?” She gestured at the ledge on the opposite side of Natalie, inviting him to join them. The child was staring up at her, quieted to strangled sobs of breath.
Marguerite did not know if it was her words that had brought the sudden stillness or if the little girl was retreating into the blissful numbness of shock. Her capacity for terror had to be long past overload despite the continuing dangerous menace of the man holding her.
A man who looked baffled, even deceptively docile as at last he put one foot up on the ledge, then the other, lifting himself up to stand across from her. Marguerite realized age and the hard life of prison had warped his bones to match his soul so that they were almost eye to eye. She was perhaps even a little taller.
His expression was uncertain, the aggressiveness broken for the moment as he sought the trick, not knowing where to look for it. Marguerite dared to glance down at Natalie for one precious moment, met the brown eyes.
“My mother said, ‘Don’t worry. The angels will catch us. And then we’ll learn to fly with them. ’”
Ripping open the neckline of the cape, she sent the garment into open space. “You didn’t know everything about me, Daddy. ”
His gaze jerked away from the fluttering cape to her, but that second of distraction was the only one she’d counted on.
Darting down, she seized Natalie under the arms, breaking his grip. As he howled and snatched at them, she shoved off the ledge. He latched on to Marguerite’s left hand and she tumbled all three of them over the edge.