The Girl Next Door (36 page)
She’s calmer.
Like she’s not hearing me as clearly.
I’m losing something.
Some power drifting slowly away like a battery running down.
I begin to panic. I don’t understand.
I’m not done yet.
I’m not done yet.
Then I feel it. I feel it reach out to me from blocks and blocks away far across the city. I feel the breathing slow. I feel the heart stopping. I feel the quiet end of her. I feel it more clearly than I felt my own end.
I feel it grab my own heart and
squeeze.
squeeze.
I look at my wife, pacing, drinking. And I realize something. And suddenly it’s not so bad anymore. It still hurts, but in a different way.
I haven’t come back to torment Jill. Not to tear her apart or to shame her for what she’s done. She’s tearing herself apart. She doesn’t need me for that. She’d have done this terrible thing anyway, with or without my being here. She’d planned it. It was in motion. My being here didn’t stop her. My being here afterward didn’t change things. Zoey was mine. And given who and what Jill was what she’d done was inevitable.
And I think,
to hell with Jill. Jill doesn’t matter a bit. Not one bit. Jill is zero.
to hell with Jill. Jill doesn’t matter a bit. Not one bit. Jill is zero.
It was Zoey I was here for. Zoey all along. That awful moment.
I was here for my cat.
That last touch of comfort inside the cage. The nuzzle and purr. Reminding us both of all those nights she’d comforted me and I her. The fragile brush of souls.
That was what it was about.
That was what we needed.
The last and the best of me’s gone now.
And I begin to fade.
JACK KETCHUM
is the author of the novels
Off Season. Hide and Seek, Cover, The Girl Next Door, She Wakes, Joyride, Stranglehold, Offspring
,
Red, Ladies’ Night, The Lost,
and arguably,
Right to Life.
His short fiction is collected in
The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard, Broken on the Wheel of Sex,
and
Pcaceuble Kingdom.
His novels have been translated into Japanese, French, Greek, Russian, and Italian. In 1994, his story “The Box” won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction, and his story “Gone” won the same award in 2000.
is the author of the novels
Off Season. Hide and Seek, Cover, The Girl Next Door, She Wakes, Joyride, Stranglehold, Offspring
,
Red, Ladies’ Night, The Lost,
and arguably,
Right to Life.
His short fiction is collected in
The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard, Broken on the Wheel of Sex,
and
Pcaceuble Kingdom.
His novels have been translated into Japanese, French, Greek, Russian, and Italian. In 1994, his story “The Box” won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction, and his story “Gone” won the same award in 2000.
Stephen King has said of him that, “no writer who has read him can help being influenced by him, and no general reader who runs across his work can easily forget him.” In his introduction to
Off Season: The Unexpurgated Edition.
Douglas E. Winter writes. “When I read
Off Season
, I knew that its writer was different, that he was working from that raw and risky perspective known as personal vision... [It was] the genuine article, its horrors insistent, visceral, and disturbing.”
Off Season: The Unexpurgated Edition.
Douglas E. Winter writes. “When I read
Off Season
, I knew that its writer was different, that he was working from that raw and risky perspective known as personal vision... [It was] the genuine article, its horrors insistent, visceral, and disturbing.”
Ketchum lives in New York City.
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