My Three Cousins

Chapter Thirty-Two

With the immediately threat dealt with, Joan fell to her knees over Ruth and lifted her sister into her arms.  The stunned look that came across her face was much like the one Ruth had when looking at Helen and told me that she had offered all of the help she could.  That left me and Lennox, who was now looking at the body in shock as if they hadn't driven right toward the man intentionally.

"Is he a person?"  They asked with horror in their voice.

"No clue," I said, trying to figure out what we should do.

Lennox, however, was a nervous talker and began rambling on, "shit, what do we do?  I just felt like it had been a long time since I saw you so I came to find you and..." they let their voice trail off in a way that suggested they didn't want to say so I ran him down with my car.

"Thanks," I said cutting them off and staring at the man.  If I knew anything about the electric man this far in, I knew that he didn't stay unconscious long so we had to act quickly.  I was afraid to get too close but at this point I had no one else to rely on.  I stepped forward and spit hard at him.  The wad of spit hit him squarely in the forehead but its landing was not accompanied by a sizzle so I knew we were safe, at least for now.

When I looked up Lennox was staring at me with eyes full of disgust as if spitting on him was more heinous of a crime than hitting him with a car, "What are you doing?"

"We needed to know if he's electrified." 

"Why?"  I knew I'd need their help, but I also knew I didn't have time to catch them up.

"We have to carry him to the pond." 

"No," they backed away from me as if my bad idea made me dangerous.

"Its the only way to get rid of him."  I walked forward despite my racing heart telling me not to and looped my arms under his armpits.  I half expected to be shocked when I touched him so I let out a sigh of relief when I didn't feel pain. "Please," I begged.

Lennox stepped forward, either comforted that I had touched him first or out of pity for me.  They grabbed his feet and together we waddled over to the edge of the pond.  The entire time I had to focus on not letting my hands shake so much I dropped him.  I was constantly afraid he would wake up and electrocute us both.  We sat him down at the water's edge.

"Now what?"  Lennox asked and I had a brief second of relief amidst all the fear and sorrow.  I was glad that I had met a help me dispose of a body kind of sales associate at the bookstore and not the call the cops kind.

"We have to push him in the water," I said definitively.  "But don't touch the water and don't let it touch you."  As I said these words it felt like someone else was saying them and I was just watching the scene from really good seats in a movie theater.  I was the girl whose Mom made her mom delete the apps on her phone at the beginning of summer and who argues with her younger brother about hot water. I wasn't the girl who watched her cousin die and fought electric men then callously disposed of the body.  Yet the person crouching next to the unconscious man didn't seem to realize that.  She started a count down, "push him in on three, but not too hard, we don't want it to splash.  One, two, three."  Lennox and that girl pushed him in the water.  Then they jumped back to make sure they weren't splashed.

The girl who disposes of bodies even wiped her hands on her jeans before leaning over the water to make sure she saw his body entirely dissolve.  She then bent down and picked up a handful of dirt off the ground and threw it into the pond to check if the water was still electrified.  I wouldn't know to do that and so I rationalized that the girl in my body couldn't be me.

"Is it over?"  Lennox asked the girl.

"Yeah, its over."  The girl said with a confidence that didn't feel natural on my face, if it was me, I would have felt scared and I wouldn't have known how to answer that question.

I wanted the girl who wasn't me to go tell Joan it was over.  She left Lennox on the side of the water and went to my cousin, she knelt beside her, "it's over Joan.  He's dead." 

Joan was still clinging to Ruth and didn't look up.  Through sobs she said, "so is she." 

For a moment I thought she meant Helen and then I realized she was talking about Ruth.  It didn't make sense; they couldn't both be dead.  There wasn't a world where Ruth could be dead, she was the person you didn't have to worry about doing something stupid like dying.  Dying wasn't part of Ruth's plan so she wouldn't do.  Ruth dying would make Helen sad and Joan sad and Mom sad and me sad so Ruth wouldn't do that.  She wouldn't do it to us.  The impossibility of Joan's words just added to my sense that this was all an illusion and that I was just watching a horrible scene in someone else's life.  Somehow the girl that wasn't me knew that too because she didn't react to Joan's words, she just stared blankly at my cousin.  Neither one of us seemed to feel bad for the fictional version of Ruth who had died.

"Addison," Joan said and her voice sounded far away, "help." 

The girl who was not me scanned her up and down, looking for an injury.  Joan's clothes were intact, there was no sign of blood, and her eyes looked at the girl with a clarity that ruled out head trauma.  "What do you need, Joan?"  The girl asked sounding almost bored.

"My sisters," Joan gasped as if the loss of her sisters was causing her physical, bodily pain.  She reached out for the girl that was not me before letting out a wail that seemed to swallow all of us.

I felt the wail in my body, and it seemed like it was shaking my organs but also letting me breathe.  My cousin was the one making sound, but I thought maybe the wail was mine too.  It reached to the core of me in a way that reunited the frozen, numb body with the part of me who had been watching.  I was once again just one person with a life I didn't recognize and a pain that I couldn't make stop.

I reached out to Joan and held her.  I wanted to hold Ruth and Helen too but I was afraid so I gripped on to the only cousin I had left, knowing all the while that my arms couldn't comfort her.