First Thrills

Cold, Cold Heart by Karin Slaughter

Even now, she could still feel the ice in her hand, a stinging, biting cold that dug into her skin like a set of sharp teeth. Had the flesh of her palm been that hot or the California climate so scorching that what had been frozen moments before had reverted so quickly to its original form? Standing outside his home, she had been shocked to feel the tears of moisture dripping down her wrist, pooling at her feet.

Jon had been dead for almost two years now. She had known him much longer than that, twenty-four years, to be exact-back when he spelled “J-o-h-n” properly, with an “h,” and would never have dreamed of keeping his curly black hair long, his beard on the verge of hermitous proportions. They had met at a young adult Sunday school class, then become lovers, then man and wife. They had taught high school chemistry and biology, respectively, for several years. They had a son, a beautiful, healthy son named Zachary after John‘s grandfather. Life was perfect, but then things had happened, things she tried not to think about, and the upshot was that in the end, the good life had called, and Pam had not been invited.

Her hair was too long for a woman her age. Pam knew this, but still could not bring herself to cut it. The slap of the braid against her back was like a reassurance that she was still a person, could still be noticed if only for the faux pas of being a fifty-two year-old school teacher who kept her salt and pepper hair down to her waist. While women her age were getting pixie cuts and joining yoga classes, Pam had rebelled. For the first time in her life, she let her weight go. God, what a relief to eat dessert whenever she damn well wanted to. And buttered bread. And whole milk. How had she lived so long drinking that preposterously translucent crap they labeled skim milk? The simple act of satisfying these desires was more rewarding than any emotional joy that could be had from buttoning a pair of size six pants around your waist.

Her waist.

She made herself remember the good things and not the bad, the first few years instead of the last seventeen. The way John used to trace his hand along the cinch of her waist-rough hands, because he liked to garden then. The bristle of his whiskers as his lips brushed her neck, the gentle way he would move the braid over her shoulder so he could kiss his way down her spine.

Wending her way through various backwater towns for the third-and hopefully last-time in her life, she made her way toward the western part of the country; she forced her mind to settle on the good memories. She thought of his lips, his touch, the way he made love to her. Through Alabama, she thought of his strong, muscular legs. Mississippi and Louisiana brought to mind the copious sweating when they first joined as man and wife. Arkansas, the perfect curve of his penis, the way it felt inside her when she clenched him, her lips parting as she cried out. Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico… these were not states on a map, but states of mind for Pam. As she drove across the Arizona line, she found herself suspended between the road and the heavens, and the only thing keeping her grounded was her hands wrapped around the leather steering wheel.

The car.

All she had left of him now was the car.

Two years ago, he had called late in the evening-not late for him, but the three-hour time difference put the ringing of the phone well into that block of time when a piercing ring caused nothing but panic. She foolishly thought of Zack, then the second ring brought more reason, and she thought of her father, a physically frail man who refused to live in a nursing home despite the fact that he could no longer do much of anything but sit in his recliner all day watching the History Channel.

“Papa?” she had cried, grabbing up the phone on the third ring. A fire. A fall down the stairs. A broken hip. Her heart was in her throat. She had read that phrase in so many books, but not understood until now that it was physically possible. She felt a pounding below her trachea; her throat was full from the pressure of her beating heart moving upward, trying to force its way out.

“It’s me.”

“John?” Even as she said his name, she imagined it spelled correctly, the “h” flashing like a neon sign outside a strip club.

In keeping with his new California lifestyle, he had said it so matter- of-factly, as if he were discussing the weather: “I’m dying.”

She’d been glib, said something she had watched him say so many times on Oprah or Dr. Phil: “We’re all dying. That’s why we need to make the best of our lives now.”

Such an easy thing for him to say. Independently wealthy people didn’t tend to have as negative an outlook on life as those who had to get up at five every morning to get dressed so they could go out and teach drooling teenagers the periodic table.

“I’m serious,” he had said. “It’s cancer.”

Her heart was no longer in her throat, but there was something stuck there that made speaking difficult. She managed, “What about Cindy?” The petite, dark-haired Pilates instructor who had been living with him for the last year.

“I want you to be there when it happens,” he’d said. “I want that healing.”

“Come to Georgia, then.”

“I can’t fly. You’ll have to come to California.”

Pam still cursed that day when they had first flown to California for a teachers’ conference. It had been a way to get out of Atlanta; an exciting adventure, their first trip out west. Their grief counselor had suggested they do something “fun” to take their minds off what had happened and John had eagerly suggested the conference. Pam had stared out the window most of the flight, shocked at the vast and varied terrain beneath them. Dense forests with dirt roads cutting into them like lashes from a switch gave way to barren desert and nothingness. How could people live in such desolate places, she had wondered. How could people survive with nothing but cacti and tumbleweed out their windows?

“Look,” John had said, pointing out the oval plane window to the patch of red dirt that represented the state of Arizona. “That’s where Ted Williams is.”

Ted Williams, the baseball player whose decapitated head had been cryogenically frozen by his nutty children.

“Liquid nitrogen,” John had explained. “His body’s floating in a vat next to it.”

Pam looked away from the window for the first time. She allowed herself a quick glance at John, his steely blue eyes, his long eyelashes that were more like a woman’s. She loved him profoundly, but could not see her way across the chasm that had opened up between them. She wanted to touch his hand, to revel in the way his voice changed, got deeper, when he was teaching someone something new.

Instead, she asked, “Why did they have to decapitate him?”

John had shrugged, but she saw the corner of his mouth twitch into a smile.

“You know,” he began, “The only other organ in the body with similar chemistry and composition to the brain are the intestines.”

Pam should have laughed. She should have made some silly comment about how we all really are shit-for-brains, but she had simply said, “I know,” and let the low hum of the plane’s engines fill her ears as they flew into the unknown.

Zachary had never been on a plane. His life had revolved around the Atlanta suburb of Decatur where Pam and John had lived all of his life. This was where he played baseball, went to the mall, and, judging by the empty condom packets Pam found in his pockets when she washed his jeans, managed to screw every girl in his class.

At sixteen, he had his father’s height, his mother’s sarcasm, and his grandfather’s addiction. The autopsy report revealed an alcohol level nearly six times the legal limit. The coroner had seemed to think it would comfort Pam to know that Zack had been so intoxicated that he had probably been unaware of any pain as his car had skidded off the road, tumbled down a ravine, and wrapped itself around a tree.

“I’m dying, Pam,” John had said on the phone. “Please. I want you here with me.”

Brain cancer. No pain, because there aren’t any nerves in the brain. She wanted to make a joke, to remind him of what he had said about Ted Williams, the decapitated popsicle, but John had brought it up himself. “Remember when we first flew out to California?” As if she had ever been again after that conference. She was lucky if she could afford a vacation to Florida during the summer, and then it had to be with a couple of other teachers so she could afford to stay somewhere nicer than the roach motel eight miles from the beach.

“I want to be put into stasis,” he’d told her. “I want to be cryogenically frozen so that I can be reanimated one day.”

She had laughed so hard that her stomach had literally clenched. The tears in her eyes were from the pain, she had told herself, not from any sense of losing him.

Yet, she had not thrown away the ticket when it came, had not told him to go fuck himself with his first-class plane ride and his fucking millions the way she had so many times before.

Millions. It had to be several million by now. Biological Healing was still on several bestseller lists and she knew that it had been translated into at least thirty different languages. At this very moment, people in Ethiopia were probably reading about John’s theory of using the “mind-body connection” to overcome loss and suffering. The funny thing was, Pam was the one with the doctorate in biology. John was just a high school science teacher with a message and he had through some fluke taken his message to the world.

“Grief,” John told an agreeable Larry King, “knows no one particular language.”

He had written a book about losing Zack, then losing his wife. Pam thought that’s what she resented most: being lumped in with Zack as if she had died, too. She hadn’t had that luxury, had she? She had been left behind to go to the morgue so that she could identify her son’s body because John could not. She had sorted through Zack’s address book to find his friends from soccer camp and baseball camp and band camp so that they could be notified. She had been the one to go to the mailbox and find the letters, a hundred at least, from Boy Scouts and pen pals that Zack had accumulated throughout his sixteen years of life. Because John had been so incapacitated by grief, it had been Pam who had chosen the suit for Zack’s eternal rest, then bought the new one when the funeral director kindly explained that it was several sizes too small.

The suit had been two years old. She had bought it when Zack was fourteen so that he could wear it to his cousin’s wedding. Fourteen to sixteen was a lifetime. In two years, he had grown from a boy to a man and as she had taken the dark blue suit and tie out of the cleaner’s bag where it had hung in the closet for two years, Pam had not even considered the possibility that Zack had outgrown it. The running jokes about his eating them out of house and home, the fact that he needed new shoes every two months because his feet kept getting larger, had been lost to her, and standing in his room, smelling his sweaty teenage smell that clung to his sheets and thickened the air, she had almost smiled at the thought of the old suit and taken it off the closet rod with some relief because that was one less decision out of the way.

John had to be sedated so that he could go to the funeral. He had leaned against her as if she were a rock, and because of this, Pam had made herself rocklike. When her mother had taken her hand, squeezed it to offer support, Pam had imagined herself as a block of granite. When a girl who had been in love with Zack-one of many, it turned out-had collapsed, sobbing, against Pam, she conjured in her mind several slabs of marble, cold, glistening marble, and built a fortress around herself so that she would not fall down to the ground, weeping for her lost child.

Pam had been the strong one, the one everyone turned to. She steeled herself against any emotions, knowing that if she allowed them to come, she would be overwhelmed, stoned to death by the guilt and grief and anger that would rain down.

“Write about it,” she had told John, begged him, because she could not listen to his anguish anymore without unleashing her own. “Write it in your journal.”

He had always kept notebooks, and just about every day he jotted down his thoughts like a little girl keeping a diary. At first, she had thought this habit strange for a man but later came to accept it as just another one of his endearing eccentricities, like his fear of escalators and belief that eating raw cookie dough would cause intestinal worms. When it started, she was glad when he stayed in his office writing all night instead of coming to bed, where he invariably cried himself to sleep, tossing and turning from nightmares, calling out Zack’s name. She had ignored these terrible nights as long as she could, wished them away because to acknowledge them would be to acknowledge the loss, and she could not bring herself to do that, could not admit that they had lost their precious boy.

Finally, in the heat of an argument, she had mentioned John’s fitful nights and he had turned on her like an animal, accused her of being cold, of not dealing with her emotions.

There was a switch.

John was always the rational one, Pam the emotional one. He had always used logic to defeat her and invariably won every argument because he didn’t let his feelings get the best of him. Even nine years ago, when Pam had found out that he was cheating on her with one of the front office secretaries from school, he had outlogicked her.

“You’re not going to leave me, Pam,” he had told her, arrogance seeping from every pore. “You don’t have enough money to raise Zack on your own, and you won’t be able to teach at the same school as me because no one likes you there. They’ll all be on my side.”

Sobering to hear from the man you love, not least of all since every word he said was true.

Through almost twenty years of marriage, he had consistently been the more reasonable one, the one who said, “let’s just wait and see” when she was certain that a raspy cough from Zack’s room in the middle of the night was lung cancer or that the rolling papers that fell out of his notebook one day in the kitchen meant he was a meth freak.

“Let’s wait and see,” John had said when she told him she thought Zack had taken some wine from the refrigerator.

“Boys will be boys,” John had said when she found an empty bottle of vodka in the back of Zack’s closet. The cliché had made her want to scratch out his eyes, but she had listened to him, made herself calm down, because the irritated way John glanced at her, the quick shrug of his shoulders, made her feel like a hysterical mother instead of simply a concerned parent. At school, they both dealt with overreacting parents on a daily basis: mothers who screamed at the top of their lungs that grades must be changed or they would go to the school board; fathers who tried to bully teachers into not failing their sons by threatening to sue.

The phone call had come at nine o’clock on a Friday evening-not one in the morning, not a panicked, wake-up-to-catastrophe time of night. Zack had left home earlier with Casey and some friends, and John and Pam were watching a movie. The Royal Tenenbaums. Pam was making herself watch the entire movie-not because she enjoyed it that much but because she knew Zack did, and she wanted to talk to him about it in the morning. He was at that point in his teenage life where any sort of discussion with his mother was pained, and she sought out things-literally, things: movies, football games, funny articles in the paper-that they could comfortably talk about.

“I’ll get it.” John jumped for the phone-he always liked to answer it-as Pam fumbled with the remote control to mute the television.

“Yes, it is,” John had said, his tone of voice low, slightly annoyed. A telemarketer, she thought, then John’s face had turned white. What a silly phrase, Pam had thought, as she sat on the couch, her feet tucked underneath her, to say that someone’s face turned white-but it had. She sat there watching it happen, a line of color draining down his neck like a sink being suddenly unplugged until all the red was gone from John’s usually ruddy skin.

Then, he had whispered, “Yes, we have a son.”

“We have a son.” The first words John had said to her when she had come out of recovery. The birth had been difficult, and after sixteen hours of labor, the doctor had decided to do a caesarian. Pam’s last memory had been the sweet relief of the pain being taken away by the drugs (she would have freebased heroin by then), and John’s crouching trot beside the gurney as they rolled her into the OR, tears in his eyes as he whispered, “I love you.”

He whispered again into the phone. “We’ll be right there.”

Only he wasn’t right there. It was the ghost of John who had sat in the passenger seat of the car as she drove to the county hospital. It was his ghost who had floated through the front doors and waited for the elevator to come. Pam had taken his hand, shocked at how cold it was, the skin clammy, his calloused fingers like ice.

Zack, she thought. This is how Zack’s hand will feel.

John had stood frozen outside the morgue. “I can’t do it,” he had told her. “I can’t see him like that.”

Pam had, though. She had looked at her son, stroked back his thick, black hair and kissed his forehead even though it was caked with dried blood. His eyes were slit open, his lips slightly parted. A long gash had flayed open the line of his jaw. She took his hand and kissed his face, his beautiful face, then signed the papers and took John home.

Pam’s second trip to California had been very different from the first one. First-class was a whole new world to her, from the hot towel to wipe her face to the warmed nuts to the endless supply of alcoholic beverages. A well-dressed man stood in baggage claim, her name on the placard he held in front of him. The black Lincoln Town Car was spotless, a bottle of cold water waiting for her as she climbed into the back seat.

This was John’s personal driver, she gathered. Bestselling millionaire authors didn’t have to drive themselves around, especially when they lived in the Hollywood Hills. Pam took no delight in the palm-tree- lined streets, her first glimpse of the famous Hollywood sign. She felt like a whore for taking John’s money. At the dissolution of their marriage, she had insisted they split everything down the middle: selling the house, the cars, their meager stocks so that it could all be done in cash. Money had been the noose he kept around her neck for years. They couldn’t go on vacation or buy a new car or splurge on a dinner out because of money. To say John had kept a tight grip on the purse strings was an understatement. Everything was on a budget and even Pam was kept on an allowance. She seethed with hatred every time she thought about their life before, the way she had allowed him to control everything. How easy it must have been for him, how boring in its own way, to have so much power over her.

When John had gotten his first royalty check from Biological Healing, he had offered her a share of the money, but Pam had told him where he could deposit it. She had read the book at least three times by then, had gone to school where her students had read about the “pedestrian” sex life she had shared with her husband. Her colleagues had read about how she had simply walked away when John had accused her of not loving their son. Her drycleaner knew that she had once told John that she was disgusted by the thought of being with him.

“Take the money.” John had reasoned, “I know you need it.”

“You bastard,” she had hissed. Her teeth were clenched, and she wished they were biting into his jugular, twisting it out of his neck like a root from the ground. She cursed him, something she never did, because she thought cursing was base and showed a lack of intelligence. “Fuck you and fuck your money.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Pam.” His tone was reasonable, the same tone he had used when she questioned him about where he had been until one in the morning, why there was a key in his pocket that didn’t fit any of their locks. The tone that said, “Why are you being so silly? Why are you letting your anger ruin your life?”

She could even picture that smirk, that knowing smirk that said he knew that he had won. Money was his way back into her life, his way to control her again, to make her want nice things only so he could snatch them away at will.

As if she were a prostitute, he had offered: “I can send it to you in cash, if you prefer.”

Pam had slammed down the phone before he could say anything else.

Mostly, she got news of her ex-husband from magazines, television shows, and helpful friends. “Did you see John met the Dali Lama? Did you see John spent the weekend with the president?”

“Did you see that I don’t give a shit?” Pam had said to one of them, but this had been a mistake, because God forbid she should be bitter about the man who was helping heal the country. Funny how he never mentioned his affair, or how he had told her when she was pregnant with Zack that she was too fat to be attractive. Why were these amusing little anecdotes missing from his precious little book? And why was it that the world didn’t notice that disgusting smirk on his face every time he talked about the nature of healing your soul?

Pam’s mouth had gaped open when the Town Car pulled past the open gate and into John’s driveway. She had never seen a private home this large before. The school where she taught was not as big as this building. The same man who had ten years ago insisted they keep the heat off during a snowstorm could not own this stunning mansion.

“Pam!” Cindy, the gorgeous, young Pilates instructor/whore, had said. She looked Pam right in the eye, but Pam knew that as she’d walked down the front steps toward the car the woman had taken in her wide hips, the wrinkles at her eyes, and the inappropriate braid.

“He’s been waiting for you,” Cindy told her. She had a bag of ice in her hand, the sort of thing you’d have if you sprained an ankle.

There was a man in a dark suit leaning against a white van that was parked in the shade of one of the many trees. NuLife was written across the door, the print small and unassuming. Pam imagined they didn’t advertise much considering the morbid nature of their jobs. She had looked up the lab-if you could call it that-online when John had told her about it. Their secret facility in Arizona held dozens of heads and bodies in stasis, all awaiting reanimation. Fees were listed on the site as well. A neuroseperation (or decapitation, as it was known to the rest of the world) ran around two hundred thousand dollars. The whole body cost over half a million. For an additional fee, you could even store personal objects with the body so that when they were reanimated, they had some of their favorite things to remind them of their “first life.”

“Let’s just get this over with,” Pam snapped, and Cindy seemed surprised. Yes, Cindy was young enough to be John’s daughter, but she’d certainly read Biological Healing. Surely, she’d paid close attention to the chapter that talked about Pam’s coldness after Zack’s death, the way she had turned away from John, blocked him out and denied him the one thing that would bring them back together.

Sex played a large part in Biological Healing-not just sex, but lots of it. Sure, Pam and John had gone at it like bunnies until Zack was born, but then, as with most couples, their lives had changed when they had a child. Who knew that John was so interested in screwing? Certainly not his ex- wife. Apparently, it was the elixir of life, the succor through which both John and Pam would have reclaimed their marriage, if only she hadn’t been such a frigid, uncaring bitch. The fact that John hadn’t been able to perform the one time after Zack’s death that they had tried to have sex, had also somehow been left out of the book.

“You’ve killed me,” he had said after that failed attempt, rolling onto his back, more bereft about his flaccidity than he had ever seemed about Zack. “You have finally killed me.”

If only she had.

Cindy led her into the house, which had the largest set of oak doors Pam had seen outside of a castle. The foyer was huge, their footsteps echoing up to an enormous chandelier as they walked into what must have been the living room.

“They’re from NuLife,” Cindy said, indicating a man and a woman sitting on a couch beside the fireplace. They had coolers stacked around them, the kind you would find at a family picnic, and they were each scooping ice into baggies similar to the one Cindy held in her hand.

Cindy said, “They’re just waiting.”

“Waiting for-” Pam started, but Cindy interrupted her.

“He’s in his study,” she said, leading the way down a long, art-lined hallway. The Pilates instructor’s shoes were strappy little things, the kind that Pam had never been able to wear because they made her back hurt. The flip-flip of the sandals echoed in the hall as they made their way to the back of the house. Outside, there was a courtyard with a fountain. The windows and doors were open so that the splattering of the water mixed with the flopping of the shoes, some kind of mad cacophony that served nothing but to annoy.

John’s study was slightly different from the converted garage space they had made for him back in Decatur. No flimsy pine paneling buckled off the walls, and the antique leather-lined desk was a far cry from the two saw horses and the piece of plywood that had held his computer for all those years.

He was lying on a hospital bed in the back of the room, facing the large windows that overlooked the fountain in the courtyard. The glass doors were open here, too, and the water was more soothing, now that Cindy had stopped flipping her idiotic shoes. A ray of light beamed down from the heavens, showering the bed in warmth. Pam would not have been surprised if he had hired a chorus of angels to sing beside him, but no, there was just the usual apparatus of lingering death: an oxygen tank, a heart monitor, and the requisite plastic pitcher on the table beside his bed.

“Honey?” Cindy asked, her shrill voice cutting into the soft hiss of the oxygen tank. “Pam is here.”

A frail voice echoed, “Pam?”

“I’ve got to go fill up more bags,” Cindy said, then left, more like an overworked nurse announcing a visitor than a lover. The girl couldn’t be older than nineteen, Pam thought. The fact that John was dying must be something she took as a personal affront rather than a fact of life.

And dying he was. As Pam walked toward the bed, she could smell death, the same odor that had clung to her mother as she rotted away from breast cancer several years ago. John’s skin was yellow and his beard was completely white. He had always had a full head of hair, but most of it was gone now. Some of it had obviously been shaved by a doctor-she could see the healing scar where a surgeon had cut into his head-some probably chased away by what ever medications they were giving him to keep him alive for a few more days.

As if he could read her mind, he moved away the oxygen mask and said, “It won’t be long.”

She was facing him now, seeing an older version of John, the face of his father, his grandfather. Would Zack have looked like this if he had managed to survive that accident? Would her son have aged this badly if the first, second, third, millionth time Pam had told John that she thought Zack had a drinking problem, instead of saying, “He’s just a boy,” he had said, “Yes, you’re right. Let’s do something to help him.”

Would Zack be alive if for just once in her life Pam had stood up to her husband and said, “No”?

There was a large cooler beside John’s bed, and she could not help but shudder at the sight of it. Were they going to chop him up and throw him in the van?

“Open it,” he told her, and despite her better judgment, she did. What had she been expecting to find? A head-sized thermos? A steaming vat of liquid nitrogen? Certainly not the little baggies of ice she found.

“To preserve me while they…” his finger made a dragging motion across his neck.

“What?” But Pam understood. She could see where his finger had traced across his throat, a cut that would be real soon enough.

“Of course… the procedure is… illegal,” he managed, his breath raspy so that he had to put the mask back over his face.

“What do you mean?” she demanded. When he did not answer, she found herself staring at the bags of cubed ice as if they were tea leaves and she a wise old gypsy.

“In California,” he finally gasped. “It’s illegal to cut off…” He took another breath of oxygen. “The law considers it mutilating… a dead body.”

“Well, it is mutilation,” she said, letting the cooler lid slam back into place. Of course it was illegal to cut the head off a dead body-even in this Godforsaken loony bin of a state. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

He laughed, the old John bringing a sparkle into his eyes.

“You’re absolutely insane,” she told him, but she laughed, too. My God, over twenty years with this man. A house, a home, a son, a life. Twenty years of her existence meshed in with his like the weave of a blanket.

“Don’t cry,” he said, reaching out for her hand. Before she could stop herself, she took his hand, felt the coldness of his skin. Had it been like this since Zack’s death? The truth was that the reason she couldn’t make love to John was because his touch sent a deathly chill through her. Had John been a ghost all this time? Had he cried so many tears, wept for so many nights, that the life had seeped out of him?

He was wearing silk pajamas, a dark burgundy that only brought out the sallowness of his skin. There was a blanket folded at the end of the bed, his feet resting on top of it.

He said, “Gross,” and she took a minute to realize he meant his toenails. They were long and yellow, disgusting to look at. “John Hughes.”

“Howard Hughes,” she corrected before she could stop herself.

There was a flash in his eyes, but he didn’t pursue it. The John she knew would have never let her get away with correcting him. For the first time since she had heard from him, Pam realized that he really was dying, that this was it. No matter what she did with her life, where she went, she would do so with the knowledge that John no longer walked the face of the earth.

Granted, he would be in stasis in a vat of liquid nitrogen somewhere, but still.

“Remember,” he began. “With Zack… you bit… his toenails.”

She felt herself smile at the memory. Once, very early on, she had accidentally trimmed one of Zack’s nails to the quick. Her heart had broken at the sight of blood, and Zack’s screaming still reverberated in her ears if she thought about it long enough. After that, she had used her teeth to clip his nails, terrified she would hurt him with the sharp metal clippers. Standing beside John’s deathbed, she could almost feel Zack’s thin nails between her teeth, taste the sour, baby-soft skin of his feet.

“I…” John moved the mask back over his mouth and nose, and she could see his chest rising and falling. “I need to…”

She shushed him. “It’s okay.”

“I want to…”

“Don’t worry,” she said, thinking that if he apologized now, she wouldn’t know what to do with herself.

He took a few deep breaths, his eyes slitting almost closed. Suddenly, he opened them wide as if he remembered that he could die if he closed them too long. “I… I left you something.”

Years had passed, but she could still remember the shame she had felt when she’d had to ask him for lunch money because she’d run through her allowance before the week was out.

He had refused her request and told her to be more careful the next time.

“I left… you… something.”

She tried to keep her anger down, saying, “I told you I don’t want your money.”

“Not money,” he said, his lips twisting in a half smile. “Better.”

“Don’t give me anything, John. I don’t want anything from you.” Why had she come here? Why had she agreed to get on a plane and fly all the way out here?

To watch him die. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had known it all along that she wanted to watch him die, watch John succumb to something over which he had no control. She had wanted to see death wipe that knowing smirk off his face, and she wanted to be standing over him while this happened, watch him realize that there was one thing out there that he could not get the better of. Let the world think of him as their loving healer, but let Pam watch him die with them both knowing what a lying, conniving piece of shit he was.

The heart monitor gave an irregular beep and the oxygen mask cleared of fog from his breath. She waited, counting… one… two… three… until he took a gulp of air into his lungs, the machinery of life moving forward.

Pam felt ashamed. What kind of person was she that she could take such plea sure in his pain? How could think these things about the father of her child?

John’s chest rose with effort. “Need to tell you…” he tried again.

“No,” she said. She couldn’t hear his apology, not now, not after hating him for so long. “Please don’t.” She could not bear more shame.

He waved his hand out, saying, “Sit.”

She went to his desk to get the chair, but stopped when she saw the stack of old notebooks piled on top. She recognized the journals, remembered them from their married days when he would sit in his chair, scribbling down his private thoughts. Pam had been tempted, especially after the affair, but she had never read them, never violated his privacy.

Pam started to roll the chair over to his bed, but he waved her away. “No,” he said. “Read.”

“I’m not going to read your journals.” She didn’t add that it was hard enough reading his damn book.

“Read,” he insisted, then, “Please.”

Pam relented, or at least appeared to. She rolled the chair back, her hands gripping the soft leather. God, he had probably paid more for this chair than she had for her car.

She sat at the desk and opened the first book she put her hand on. She did not want to read the journal, could not handle the further blow to her self-esteem of reading his early diatribes on her failures. Her fingers found a letter opener, and she winced, jerking back her hand as she felt the sharp edge slice her skin. The letter opener was actually a stiletto. The small knife looked to be made of brass. Jewels decorated the handle, and the blade was finely sharpened as if John needed to defend himself from strangers entering his office.

The only person he would ever need to defend himself from was Pam.

“Read…” John admonished, his voice weaker than ever. “Please…”

Pam sighed, giving into curiosity as she picked up one of the journals. She thumbed to the first page. It was dated three years into their marriage, and she skimmed the parts about whiny students and a blister he’d gotten from grading papers.

Her eyes stopped on one word: Beth.

Pam finished the journal in under an hour-a year of John’s life encapsulated in the blink of an eye.

Another year, another name: Celia.

Year six brought two names: Eileen and Ellen.

The door opened and Cindy asked, “Everything all right?”

Pam could not open her mouth to speak. She nodded.

“He just needs to check,” she said, letting in the man Pam had seen in the living room. He went to John, pressed a stethoscope against his chest for a few minutes, nodded, then left.

Cindy told Pam, “We could use some help out here with the ice if you’re-”

“No,” Pam said. Her tone of voice was alarming, the kind she used to stop students in their tracks and elicit confessions of chicanery and cheating.

The door clicked shut and Pam returned to the journal.

Mindy. Sheila. Rina. Yokimito.

Blowjobs, finger fucking, ass fucking, sixty-nine, and a position that, even with her doctorate in human biology, Pam would have needed a diagram to understand.

She turned the page.

He had drawn a diagram.

From the bed, John wheezed. Pam thumbed through the journals, looking for the year of Zack’s death. She found the day before, February sixteenth. John’s cramped scrawl revealed that he had finally found love. He had been with a woman named Judy the day before their son died.

Judy Kendridge, the math teacher down the hall. Pam had tutored kids with the woman after school. They had both complained about their corns, their aching backs, their husbands.

The date on the next page was May third, three months after Zack’s funeral. Pam recognized it as the first line of Biological Healing. “The biggest obstacle to overcoming the death of my son was finally admitting to myself that I could not be the perfect father, the perfect husband.”

“No shit,” Pam hissed, slamming shut the notebook.

She pushed herself away from the desk and walked over to John’s bed.

“Wake up, you bastard.” He didn’t comply, so she poked him, then violently shook him. “Wake up!”

Slowly, his eyes opened. He glanced at the journals, then back to her.

“What does this accomplish?” she demanded, anger and humiliation bringing tears to her eyes. “This is the ‘healing’ you needed, dragging me all the way out here so I can read your deathbed confession?”

An eyebrow went up. She could have sworn he was enjoying this. He pushed the mask from his mouth and she saw it then: the smug smile on his lips, the twinkle in his eye. All of his self-help bullshit and his healing from within and his millions of dollars slapped her in the face like a wet rag.

“You…” he said, his breath coming harder from the effort. “You…”

“I what, John? I what?”

“Came,” he said. “You… came…” he panted with exertion. “You… stupid bitch.”

Pam’s mouth opened-she felt the jaw pop, the breeze drying the back of her throat. The first class ticket, the warm towel, the nuts. She had even sipped from the bottle of cold water in the car. She had fallen for it all without even thinking.

“You…” he began again, smiling, showing his teeth.

Pam stood there. It was five years ago. Fifteen years. Twenty. She just stood there the same way she had from the beginning and waited for the ax to fall on her head.

“You…” The smile would not go away, even as he struggled to breathe. “You’ve… gained… weight.”

The mask popped back on and he inhaled, his breath fogging up the plastic.

“I should kill you,” she hissed. “I should kill you with my bare hands.”

His left shoulder went up in a shrug, then he froze in place, his eyes opening in shock. The monitor went off, a piercing, metallic beep that signaled a flatline. The doors flew open and instead of doctors rushing in, the well- dressed man and woman entered, each carrying a cooler between them.

“Please step out of the way,” the woman snapped, elbowing Pam aside. They opened the coolers and started to pack the bags of ice around John’s body. Oddly, Pam wondered if the man she had seen out by the van was the person who actually chopped off the head.

“Mrs. Fuller?” the NuLife woman asked. Pam was about to answer when Cindy stepped forward.

“Yes?”

So, he had married her. He had married her in the end so that she would have all of his money. Pam wondered if he had put her on an allowance.

“We need you to pronounce him,” the woman said.

“I… I don’t think…” Cindy faltered. She burst into tears, her hands around her face, shoulders shaking. “Oh, John! I can’t do it!” she sobbed, crumbling to the ground. “He can’t be gone!”

“Oh, for fucksakes,” Pam snapped, turning off the whining heart monitor with a snap of her wrist. “He’s dead,” she told them. “Look at him. He’s dead.”

And he was. Even without the heart monitor bleating its signal, any fool could see that John was gone. His eyes were still open, but there was no light there. His skin was slack-everything about him was slack, that is, except for that trace of a smirk on his lips.

He had gotten her. Even in death he had gotten the last word.

The NuLife woman opened the cooler and started handing bags to her partner. Pam watched as they packed the ice around John like a bowl of potato salad.

“Leave us alone,” Pam said. She had used her teacher voice, the voice that shook hallways and sent students running for their homerooms.

“You can’t order me around!” Cindy shrieked, but she wasn’t very persuasive sitting on the floor.

“Get out right this minute,” Pam commanded, and perhaps because she wasn’t much removed from her high school days, Cindy obeyed.

John’s beautiful library cleared quickly, but Pam took her time. She found herself staring out the window at the fountain, water burbling over into a copper bowl. There was a rock garden in the corner that she hadn’t noticed before, and chairs were scattered around for guests. He’d had parties here. She knew he’d had parties here. They had never had parties at home. John had said they were too expensive and that they couldn’t afford it.

Pam walked to the desk and picked up the knife. She couldn’t kill him-John had robbed her of that plea sure, but there was one thing she could do, one thing she could take, that he would sorely miss after his reanimation.

Until she died, Pam would always remember those last moments with John, the smirk on his face, his last words to her about her weight, the way he felt in her hand when she had walked out of the room and into the beautiful courtyard. She had crossed to the living room and taken a small lime-green cooler before leaving through the front door. The driver hadn’t asked questions when she got in. People who worked for millionaires had seen stranger things. The man had simply driven her to the airport where she easily changed her ticket and flew back home. First-class wasn’t full, so the cooler had even gotten its own seat.

She certainly drank enough for two.

A week later, Pam had gotten a certified letter informing her that John had left her something in his will. Two weeks after that, a cargo truck had pulled up in front of the house, blocking most of the road. Pam had been too shocked to say much of anything when the shiny BMW had rolled off the truck, and without thinking, she had signed the papers the driver handed her.

Every morning, she got into her six-year-old Honda and drove to school, her heart racing at the sight of the X3 parked in the street, exactly where the truck driver had left it. She was bound to let it sit out there until it either rotted or got stolen.

Then, one morning, her Honda would not start.

She would have gotten into a car with a convicted rapist with less trepidation than she felt when she first climbed into John’s BMW. When the seat wrapped around her body like a well-worn glove, she suppressed a shudder. At school, the window snicked down with the press of a button, and the security guard gave her a wink.

“Well,” the old fool had said. “Somebody’s moving up in the world.”

Pam was determined to get her old car fixed. The last time she had taken in the Honda, the mechanic had said the transmission was on its last leg. Pam had saved accordingly. Two thousand dollars and it would be fixed and the X3 would be back in its spot, waiting to be stolen. Maybe she would even leave the keys in the ignition.

Days went by, then weeks, then months. A year passed and she was still driving the BMW. The car had been John’s way of rubbing his success in her face. He knew that her old beater was on its last legs. He knew she would eventually end up having to drive the damn thing. What he could not have anticipated was that Pam would enjoy driving it, that she would look forward to getting behind the wheel at the end of school every day with the same eagerness that she had looked forward to seeing John in the early part of their marriage. The soft leather reminded her of his soft touch. The wood grain called to mind his masculinity. Even the air bag behind the steering wheel reminded her of the way he had made her feel safe, protected. Until… well, she didn’t let herself think of the “until,” did not dwell on what had happened at the end, the way he had betrayed her, the way he had exploited her after Zack’s death.

For almost two years, she had kept the cooler in the freezer alongside a much-contested slice of their wedding cake that her mother had insisted Pam keep until their tenth anniversary. When the anniversary rolled around they had found that freezer burn had claimed the cake and no one wanted to eat it. “Jesus, just throw the damn thing out,” John had said on those rare occasions when he had opened the freezer. “It’s just a fucking piece of cake.”

She couldn’t, though. They were having problems by then and she wanted to keep the cake, wanted to hold on to those early years of their marriage like a talisman. Throwing out the cake was the one thing she had resisted him on and in the end, it stood as a testament to her ability to stand up to him. Even after the divorce, Pam had kept the cake, moving it from their old house to her new one, tucking it into the top shelf of the freezer, where it stayed until five days ago, when she had bought a map and planned her trip during the summer school break.

Pam’s third and final trip out west had lasted several days, and now, as she drove the BMW into the parking lot of NuLife Laboratories (not such a secret location, considering the large sign out front), she was almost sad to reach John’s final destination. She smiled at the thought of the green cooler beside her, the piece of John she had taken sitting beside the piece of cake that represented their failed marriage. Pam imagined that in ten-or fifty-or a hundred-million years from now, if they ever figured out how to jump-start John’s body, it would be a small thing to sew his penis back on, and the slice of cake would let him know who had done him the favor. Her one act of disobedience would allow her the luxury of having the last and final word. John could visit her at the cemetery, could urinate on her grave, but he was a scientist at heart and did not believe in souls or angels looking down from on high. He would know that Pam was gone, that Pam had finally gotten the best of him. There would be nothing he could say or do to hurt her, and he would live the rest of his second life-perhaps all of eternity-knowing this. The anger would be like a new cancer, and it would eat him from the inside out.

She could still hear the deep tenor of his voice, the tone he took when he was teaching someone.

“Pam,” he’d cautioned her, his tone low as he tried to teach her an important lesson. “Don’t let anger ruin your life.”

She took out the cooler and shut the car door, smiling as the sunlight bounced off the X3’s windows. The paint was an electric silver that went from gray to blue to green, depending on how the light moved. She ran her hand along the curve of the door the way she would stroke a lover.

It took everything she had not to skip across the parking lot, let the braid beat against her back. John’s body would be rolling in its stasis tank right now, if he could see her. He would be doubly annoyed to know that the reason for Pam’s happiness was a product of his own devising.

She was happy. She was finally happy.

God knows it helped when you drove a nice car.

KARIN SLAUGHTER has written nine books that have sold seventeen million copies in twenty-nine languages. A New York Times bestselling author, Karin’s books have debuted at number one in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands. She lives in Atlanta, where she is working on her next novel.