upstairs with Christian.”
The tension on the line slackened, and Charn was able to loosen the noose a few centimeters and capture a breath. He stared up at Fallows. His skull was shaved clean to show the stumps of two horns, long since sawed off, and he was backlit by a sky the reddish gold of new-minted copper.
A little girl stood beside Fallows, holding his hand. She looked gravely down at Charn—the stern, cool, appraising look of a queen.
“It’s come for you, Mr. Charn,” the little girl said. “It’s found you out at last.”
“What?” Charn asked. “What’s come?”
He was confused and frightened and desperately wanted to know.
Fallows cast one end of the rope over a bough of the overhanging tree.
“Daylight,” the girl said, and with that, Fallows hoisted Charn kicking into the air.
Late Returns
WHEN MY PARENTS WENT, they went together.
My father wrote a couple letters first. He wrote one for the Kingsward PD. His vision was very poor—he’d been legally blind for three years—and the letter was brief, composed in a hardly legible scrawl. It informed police that they would find two bodies in a blue Cadillac, parked in the garage, at his home on Keane Street. My mother had been able to look after my father until three months before, but she had received a diagnosis of progressive dementia, and her condition was worsening fast. They both feared leaving their only son with the burden of their long-term care and had decided to act before the power to choose was taken away from them. My father sincerely apologized for “any mess and any stress” their choice caused.
He wrote another letter for me. He said he was sorry about his shitty handwriting, but I knew about his eyes, and “Mom is worried she’ll get too emotional if she tries to write this.” She had told him that she wanted to die before she forgot the people who made her life worth living. She asked him to assist her suicide, and he admitted to her that he’d been ready to “get this shit over with” for a couple years. He was only sticking around because he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her on her own.
My father said I’d been a damn good kid. He said I was the best part of his life and that my mom felt the same. He asked me not to be angry at them—as if I ever could be. He said he hoped I understood. They’d never wanted to hang on for the sake of hanging on.
“I’ve said it a thousand times, but I still believe some words never lose their power, no matter how many times they’re repeated. So: I love you, Johnnie. Mom loves you, too. Don’t be unhappy for too long. The child outliving the parents is the only happy story us human beings get.”
He stamped both envelopes, put them in his mailbox, and snapped the red tin flag up. Then he went into the garage, where my mother was waiting for him in the passenger seat of the Caddy. The car ran until it was out of gas and the battery died. The car was old enough to still have a tape deck, and they went down listening to Portrait of Joan Baez. In my mind my mother’s head is on my father’s chest and he has an arm around her, but I don’t know if that’s how they were found. I was in Chicago, driving a semi for Walmart, when the police entered the garage. The last time I saw my parents was in the morgue. The suffocation had turned their faces the color of eggplants. That’s the last look at them I ever had.
The shipping and logistics company I was working for fired my ass. When the cops called my cell, I turned the truck straight around without delivering my freight. A couple midwestern Walmarts didn’t get red grapes for their produce section, and my supervisor went batshit and told me to take a walk.
My folks got to die the way they wanted, and they lived the same way. It didn’t look like they had so much from the outside: a one-floor ranch in a New Hampshire podunk, a twenty-year-old Caddy, and a heap of debt. Before they retired together, my mother taught yoga and my father was a long-haul trucker. They didn’t get rich, they didn’t get famous, and they lived in their house for twenty-five years before they could say they owned it.
But she read to him while