The Dead Husband by Carter Wilson (best summer reads of all time .txt) 📗

The desire to kill.

I launch at her.

Fifty-Eight

She pivots too late. Cora’s unable to raise the poker again before I plow into her, crushing her into the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Tolstoy, Melville, and others scatter to the floor, spines cracked open, probably for the first time. We fall with the books, Cora landing on top of them, and I on top of her.

The poker leaves her hand and clangs against the hardwood floor. I’m dizzy and confused, scared and elated. I want to kill my sister, but I also want to hold her tight, squeeze the crazy out of her, tell her I love her. My arms are wrapped around her in a bear hug, and the battle of my emotions rages in my head, unable to make a next move.

Cora has no such problem. From beneath, she begins hitting me with tight, balled fists, alternating blows to each side of my rib cage. They aren’t desperate flails but rather measured attacks, each punch dealing swift, efficient pain.

She’s trained, I think. Why this thought overrides all others in the moment I don’t know. But my delicate sister who’s never worked hard for anything in her life knows what she’s doing.

How to fight. How to hurt.

I try to punch back but can’t get any momentum. She keeps hitting me, sapping more of my strength with each contact. I have to get off her, regroup.

I start to push up and she grabs my hair and yanks back, opening my neck to her. She bares her teeth, and for a moment, I picture them tearing into my skin, my jugular, gnashing, blood spraying.

She doesn’t bite. Instead, she grips the back of my head with both hands and crashes our skulls together.

The pain is blinding as everything goes dark for a second. I think I’m screaming. I don’t know. Someone is.

She releases her grip and I roll off, scrambling as fast as my rubbery muscles allow. I look at her and Cora’s grabbing her head, the impact just as debilitating for her.

I look over and see my father standing there, watching us from across the study. His expression hasn’t changed, that perpetual squint locked in place, analyzing us as he would a financial statement. He still has his goddamned drink in his hand.

Then I realize that’s all this is.

This fight. It’s an analysis to him.

Now I understand what all this means to my father. What this point in time represents.

This is a decision being made for him.

If Cora kills me, everything can be laid to blame on awful Rose. They’ll craft a posthumous narrative in which I was the girl who did a terrible thing as a teenager and tried to tell the world about it through her books.

But if I kill Cora, the liability of the family is finally removed. The daughter who can’t control her urges, the girl whose past mistakes were always sure to be revealed will be gone, her terrible acts buried deep along with her.

Either way, my father wins. Which is why he’s standing there, holding his drink, watching his offspring try to annihilate each other.

Logan Yates always wins.

I reach and grab the fallen iron poker, then lift myself up. As I get to my feet, my back is to my father as I face Cora, who scrambles to stand.

I raise the poker over my head, now grasping it with both hands.

Cora gets onto one knee before losing her balance and falling onto her back.

Now’s the moment. She’s vulnerable. I’m not. I have only seconds to make my move, and they might be the only seconds I’ll have.

She’ll kill me if I don’t kill her.

Max. Think about Max. Both parents gone.

Attack, Rose.

Attack with all you have.

And still.

Still, I don’t know how.

Don’t know how to swing this heavy poker and smash it into my sister’s skull. Don’t know how to keep hitting her with it after the initial blow incapacitates her. Over and over, blood spraying, bone crunching, skin and face turning into lifeless goo.

I don’t know how to do that, because I’m not Cora.

I can’t.

I just can’t.

The seconds pass, my body frozen, the poker held high and immobile. Cora manages to get to her feet.

She stares at me, a purple welt rising on her forehead, that toothless grin back in place.

She knows I can’t do it. Knows I’ll never be like her.

Her right hand slides into the back pocket of her jeans, and from it, she pulls out a folded knife. Black rubber grip. Like someone who’s practiced for this very moment a hundred times, she deftly thumbs the three-inch blade from its home.

It clicks into locked position with horrifying authority.

My father, behind me, still says nothing.

“Are you ready for this?” Cora asks. Her voice is gentle, as if she’s a young mother placing her child on the merry-go-round for the first time.

I don’t answer her. Instead, I keep my gaze on Cora but address my father.

“Everything was always about family.” I put more weight on my back leg and raise the poker higher. “We could have made things right twenty years ago, but we had to have secrets because that’s how families take care of themselves, right? We could’ve brought peace to Caleb’s family.” My voice grows louder. Beads of sweat run from my forehead and down my nose. “But you kept insisting that families keep their secrets. Families protect each other. Well, what about now? Who’s protecting us now?”

I direct the words at my father but keep my intense focus on my sister, watching her every twitch, every eye blink. Cora is half-crouched, knife in her right hand, coiled on the tightest of springs. I try not to think how I could be dead one minute from now. How my promise never to leave my son would be broken in the most painful way possible. I try to suppress the fear, work to calm myself, find a place of inner focus within this horrifying chaos. No guru could envision meditating during a life-or-death fight, but that’s