Page 130 of Gone Tonight
But this time he was at my mercy, not the other way around.
I didn’t hesitate. I took the bat and raised it over my head.
I brought it down on Coach again and again as a roaring noise filled my ears. I know now it was the sound of my rage.
When I was spent and sweaty, I handed the bat back to James. He took it from me and set it down on the floor.
Coach was no longer moving.
Every word I wrote in my journal was truthful. But I didn’t write the entire truth.
When I described the night of Coach’s attack in my green spiral notebook, I skipped over the details of my involvement. I picked up the story by detailing what happened after James took the bat from me, after I’d released my blind rage and come back into my own body.
Of all the images of the night of the attack that I keep replaying, the one I go back to the most often is this: James setting the bat down on the floor, then looking at me as he grabbed Coach’s limp arms and dragged Coach deeper into his office, leaving a trail of smeared blood.
James’s eyes were as gentle and untroubled as if we’d just finished making love.
When James saw what I was capable of, he knew he’d found his soul mate.
After my rage passed, I regretted what I’d done. I wanted to call for an ambulance.
But in the moment, when I was hearing the thud of the bat slam onto Coach’s body?
It felt right. More than that, it felt good.
James never told a soul that I was the real murderer of Coach Franklin—except for Catherine.
Let our daughter see you’re a killer,James taunted me while I pointed my knife at him in the parking lot of Sunrise.
Catherine missed the clue.
And now the truth will go with me to my grave. I will never share it with a soul.
Not even Catherine.
Especially not Catherine.
I think about this on my drive from Harrisburg to Baltimore.
Even with rush-hour traffic, I make it to Catherine’s new city in just under ninety minutes.
I find a spot near the entrance of Hopkins on the corner of Broadway and Fayette—but not too close—and cut the Bonneville’s engine. It sputters a few times, as if in protest, before settling into silence.
Catherine should be arriving soon. When she telephoned last night, she told me she planned to walk through the main entrance as a way of marking the occasion.
“My energy level has been through the roof lately,” she’d said, laughing.
It was the sound of her bubbling laughter that made me grow very still, my sponge halting midway through its arc across the kitchen counter.
Should Catherine be this joyous, this lit up, given what happened less than a week ago?
Now that our apartment is so empty at night, I can hear all my old fears crashing around within its walls. That’s why I’ve been overthinking things, I tell myself as I unclip my seat belt and step out.
I stare up at the redbrick buildings that compose different parts of the hospital. A young nurse walks out of one of the doors, pushing the wheelchair of a boy whose leg is in a cast.
A question I’ve asked Catherine pops into my mind again. I’ve never received a satisfying answer from her. She may not even have one.
Why did she choose geriatrics as her specialty? Unlike obstetrics, or pediatrics, or any number of other departments, she was drawn to afield with an intimate proximity to decay, to death. Because Catherine worked in a nursing home when she graduated from high school, she has watched many people take their final breaths. This was fully her choice, an unusual one for a girl of eighteen.
