Four

Then it was over. I'm not going to drag it out long, because it didn't last long, and because long isn't the point. The point is that it was four of us and it should not have been, the four of us should have been thirty years of birthdays and bad phone photos and the slow gray future that the golden bench day had promised, and instead the four of us were four people in a small room with one man and a short window of time, and the man was faster and we were not armed and we were four and he was one and it did not matter, it has never mattered, the number has never saved anyone when the other side has already decided.

Eli. He went first, or the man started with him, or Eli made him start with him, I don't know, I will never know the order of a thing that took less than a minute, but Eli was between me and him to the last and Eli fell between me and him and I had his weight on my legs and I had his hand in my hand and I felt his hand stop holding. I need you to understand I felt it stop holding. I felt him leave through my fingers, the way electricity leaves, the way warmth leaves, and my hand closed on nothing and that nothing is the thing I carry, that is the only thing of his I got to keep.

Mae. Mae screamed his name and not Eli's and not mine, she screamed Theo's name, and I want to hate her for that and I can't, because if I had been able to speak in that minute I would have screamed Eli's, and we love who we love and we call for who we call for, and I think she called for him because she still, in that second, did not believe, could not believe, that the Theo in the doorway and the man in the mask were the same errand, and so she called for the Theo who loved her to save her. He did not save her.

Mae went down in the doorway. She went down hard and she went down fighting, the way she did everything, and the man in the mask did not hurry, he had the unhurried patience I had seen on the motel floor, and I understood then that the patience had always been this, that the five days of lockdown and the boot prints at the tree line and the shape in the pines and the listening at the wall had all been this same patience, that he had been finishing something and he was finishing it now and the finish was what the patience had been for.

Theo. I don't want to write about Theo's end and I'm going to keep it short, because Theo's end was the strangest of all of us, because Theo was killed by his own plan, by the man in the mask, by the hands that had presumably planned for three hands and not four and had made an error, and there was a second of something on the mask, a hitch, when Theo was taken, a flinch, a surprise, like the man in the mask had not quite expected to kill Theo, like Theo had been a variable that moved wrong, and I watched the surprise go through the blue eyes in the holes and then get put away, packed down under the patience, and he finished Theo too, and that was four.

And then me.

I have to tell you I was last. I have to tell you that I lay on the floor of the cottage with the three people I had loved most in the world around me and the man in the black mask and the light blue jeans standing over me, and the lamp was on, and the lake was lapping, and the fire outside had burned down to nothing, and I was the last thing on the list, and I closed my eyes because the blue of his eyes through the holes was the one thing in the room I could not bear to look at again.

I closed my eyes, and I thought of the bench, and the lemonade, and Eli's cold can against my cheek, and the red ink LAKEHOUSE underlined twice, and I thought I'm sorry I didn't look, I should have looked, I should have looked at the tree line, and then I felt him, and then I didn't feel anything, and the lake went on lapping, and the night went on, and the door of the cottage was still open, and the firepit was ash, and the four of us were four and then three and then two and then one and then zero, and the world outside the cottage didn't stop, the water didn't stop, the night didn't stop, it just went on, indifferent, the way it always does, the way it always will, without us.