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Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828
Cyn doesn’t answer calls on her phone, doesn’t make calls, because the phone, battery pulled, is somewhere at the bottom of the side pocket of her leather tote bag with its cross- body strap, serving as combination briefcase and purse. The draft agreement documents for this morning’s meeting are still stuffed inside, but now the bag itself is crammed back into her backpack. She suspects holding on to the phone is a good idea, considering it has texts she never sent and received texts from Joe after she knew he was dead.
The last one, Where R U?
Fuck you, she says, thinking of the sheriff, or whoever shot Joe, and who would have killed her too if she’d ridden to the meeting in Joe’s rental.
Or…if I had screamed, or made any noise, or had walked along the road, or…
But she’s trying to stop these thoughts.
Or hadn’t stopped right at the mile marker, she can’t help thinking.
She is suddenly not sure if she’s talking out loud. She looks around and the nearest passenger is several seats ahead, apparently oblivious to any sound she may be making, lost, apparently, in the small screen built in the back of the seat in front—CNN, she thinks, a clip she recognizes as the fires, either the Northwest, or Colorado, or Yellowstone.
She turns her face up toward her own fuzzy screen and sees the caption identify the clip from Yellowstone.
Or killed if I wasn’t crazy, Cyn says to herself.
She thinks this, but not harshly, but softly. She is thinking about those days and months and years that followed the shooting of her father, right in front of her. Her two younger brothers were in their bedroom, their habit of retreat whenever their father grew in rage, their shutting the door on the ugliness always sure to result. She had called 911 that day, worried for them all, desperate for their mother who had plenty of scrapes and bruises and black eyes, the broken hand that one time, the other time when he wrenched her mother’s arm back, putting her arm in a sling for weeks afterward. She had grown hyperalert to the grimaces that would flit and flash across her mother’s face as she did simple things like laying down a casserole on the table or folding clothes.
She had been in therapy for almost five years after the shooting, although the last three were less frequent and mainly to check if she was disassociating again, retreating into the comfort of the separate self to abandon her day-to-day stresses that were normal enough ones for any kid, but not for her, not then.
With therapy across the remaining years of her childhood, she had come to realize she had done her best to help her mom, done her best to help and comfort, and she had learned, through practice, through the months and years of going to sessions, that she wasn’t at fault.
She had been strong, she had been a help. That’s what they all had told her.
Some help, she scoffs, a shadow of a snort that makes her again look up and around at the nearby seats—the bus mostly empty, thank god, which makes her snort again, a short burst of air pushed through her nostrils like a horse.
She works to quiet herself.
Who are you? Where are you? How do you feel?
The old habits of self-observation taught to her long ago, and here the habits are back, right on time, the deep breathing she tries, the self-forgiveness she has to re-practice, the recognition of her sense of guilt about Joe’s death, and recognition, too, that she hadn’t been at fault. These efforts mix with the horror of the shooting, the shock, her often tenuous hold on herself.
Cyn knows what makes sense, would make sense, and that is to go to the police when she’s far enough away. Las Vegas, where she’s heading, would be fine, but she’s still too shaken, too shaky, and she needs to give herself more time. More time to rest, time to practice being in her own self, time to resist the still strong tug of dissociative escape that had shaped her time after her father’s death.
And now, yay, reset, she tells herself, anger flaring.
Fuck me, she tells herself, but she attempts to tease out the tenderness too that she’s trying to give herself and is glad for it.
She is heading to Las Vegas, and it occurs to her there may be fire regions the route will bring them through, and so she waits until the cable story comes back around, but she almost misses it, snapping her attention back just in time to get an impression of the graphic of the major fires in the west.
Clear skies, baby, she says to herself, a giddiness rising, then vanishing as quickly, and she wishes she had some Xanax or Ativan.
The fires at these scales have been an annual occurrence for the last five years, maybe more. There was the bad year before Covid, and the Covid years were even worse, the skies over Portland and Seattle and San Francisco dull orange sometimes, just images from news stories until she was living in San Francisco after joining Carbon’s End. Even in her short time there she’d seen her share of smoke-choked air. The fire season this year had started ever earlier and was thought likely to run longer. If she remembers right, the count is already closing in on ten million acres.
You’d think we’d run out of trees, she tells herself, although she knows full well there’s plenty more to burn in the sixth year of significant drought.
She has one of the new hoods, although this is back in San Francisco, in her bureau, one of those HEPA filter hoods, with a clear visor. The thing looks like something out of a science fiction movie, but a month earlier the winds moved the smoke toward the city from the Putnam Creek fire and the Atlas fire complex east of Napa. The smoke had plumed over the city for three days before the wind changed, and she had been plenty glad for the hood rig even if it all flashbacked to the coronavirus mask days.
She’s been an activist in some shape or form since her high school days, a climate change person, a person committing herself to the change needed, a long-term foot soldier, a veteran, is how she thinks of it. The Carbon’s End job was perfect, the divestiture effort exactly the sort of work she’d been aiming for, her years of volunteering and low wage work in the trenches finally paying off.
Well, not paying, at least all that well, she thinks, noting the pay was good only relative to the sort of hand-to-mouth existence she’d long gotten used to. The actual salary was a big deal, even if not all that big a salary, as she discovered when she couldn’t afford an apartment in the city, at least one that didn’t include passels of roommates. Not even the tiny studio she lives in, thanks to Roger, the executive director at Carbon’s End, who had owned a bunch of rentals around town. He had used these properties mostly for short-term rentals, at least until the new ordinances went into effect against Airbnb and its kind, but he’s kept one of the apartments, the one near the office. This studio apartment he included as part of Cyn’s remuneration, although she’d had to share it at times when out-of-town staff or contractors came to the headquarters.
When this happened, she usually stayed at her colleague Ellen’s place, and the two of them would BART in from Richmond together.
Joe had been by the studio apartment, after hours, a couple of times. He was charming, she was horny, lonely, but she had kept things frosty.
Until I didn’t, she corrects herself.
And then Cyn again realizes with a start, he’s dead, a surprise in the form of a periodic mantra.
She starts her exercises again, but after a few minutes she’s back to thinking about the texts on her phone, the texts she’d never sent, with their story of an affair, and these make her again feel guilty and alone. She cannot help thinking about it, about Joe, images still come and go like flickering shadows, and she despairs, she wants to wail, to shout, to tear this bus apart, throw the pieces, kick down the hills they’re passing through, pull the sky down and swallow it.
Of course, she had thought about sleeping with Joe, and Joe had talked about his wife, the new baby, the lack of sex, the exhaustion and routine that buried his days, and about everything he missed—the fun.
Of course, I would never sleep with my boss, she tells herself., and then out loud, “Never would,” she hears herself say, low, a whisper, and the sound of it outside of herself shocks her.
On this bus, she knows that she had been sleeping with Joe, and she wonders if they’d been followed, spied on, but the odd texts don’t suggest this one way or another.
And they hadn’t known she’d set off in her own rental.
Cyn is suddenly ravenous for news. She needs to know what’s being said about him, the story must be breaking, but it’s not going to be on CNN, for sure.
She scrolls through the channels, there are an even dozen, but neither of the other two news channels is Environmental Network News, which she figures is the only one likely to carry anything about Joe being dead, that, and maybe, local stations in San Bernardino, if there are still such things.
Or in San Francisco, she thinks, it will be a local story, there.
She won’t put her phone back together to check, of that she’s sure, and so she tries to decide whether to take a nap or watch reruns of Friends—the sort of old syndication programming one can expect on crap TV.
Crap TV, a great name, she thinks, but her effort at escape evaporates, and she’s up in the aisle, swaying gently as she pulls herself up to her neighbor several seat rows forward.
“Um,” she says, and the man, probably near fifty, slowly turns his face away from, yes, Friends, as if it has a precious pull on him.
He just looks at her, his eyebrows raised high, doing his talking for him.
He looks like a goddamn cowboy, she realizes, and then she sees a Stetson on the seat next to him.
He pulls one earbud free.
“Um,” she repeats. “Do you have a phone or tablet I could borrow, mine’s broken and I need to look something up,” she tells him.
He looks at her, his eyes surrounded by deep tan and wrinkles. She can smell his hair lotion, or maybe cologne.
He turns away and Cyn thinks she’s been dismissed, but he’s reaching for a small duffle bag stuffed into the footwell of the Stetson’s seat.
“Here you go, little missy,” he says, handing her a mini- tablet, and his grin reveals three missing teeth from his left upper canine back to a gold-capped molar.