Page 134 of Our Last Resort

My brother was in danger.

(I was in danger.)

I had to make it stop.

It was that simple.

The next morning, I rented a car. That part of my scheme wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t own my little Fiat 500 yet. I could have taken a train, but that would have meant surveillance cameras, not to mention hundreds of potential witnesses. Besides, I wasn’t planning on being seen. I wasn’t planning on giving the police any reason to look at me so closely they’d come to learn about my rental car.

Here’s the truth about committing murder: There are no perfect crimes. Only lucky ones. Only a hundred cursed stars aligning just so.

I drove to Paterson Great Falls. Always in my inconspicuous clothes, my utterly forgettable jacket and baseball hat.

And then I waited for her.

They say that suicide happens in the moment. That if someone is considering ending their life, but you can get them to delay their impulse for even five minutes, the likelihood that they will go through with it drops dramatically.

The same goes, I have found, for murder.

It all happens in the moment.

That morning, at the top of the waterfall, I wasn’t sure I’d do it. I was split, sixty-forty. Then Annie was there, and I knew why I’d come, and it happened in flashes, my mind untethered from my body: step out onto the bridge behind her, put my palms to her back, underneath her shoulder blades, shove her over the edge.

If it hadn’t worked on the first try, I wouldn’t have tried again.

But it did.

My little body, stupidly strong for no reason. That’s how I’d been since girlhood. My ropy little legs, my buff little shoulders.

It was easier than I’d thought it would be. The act itself. In those brief, incandescent seconds, my mind was clear: I had a plan, and I’d executed it. That was a language I spoke fluently.

But it never felt good. At no point did I get any pleasure from it.

In fact, I came close to following Annie down into the falls.

The possibility crossed my mind like a bird darting across a window.

I thought about it for one second, then two, then three, and then I didn’t jump, and the impulse went away.

All that was left to do was go home.

All that was left to do was live with what I’d done.

41Escalante, Utah

The Seventh Day

What I did to Annie flooded my psyche like water inside a sinking ship.

My nose is full, always, with the smell of the waterfall and the woods that morning. The wet earth, the yellowing tree leaves. The sweet smell of decay that signals the height of fall. I can still feel the droplets of water on my face, the tiny particles of foam that landed all over me, even in my mouth, as I pushed her over the edge.

There was no dramaticsplash,no telltalesplat.A waterfall comes with its own sound, the kind that swallows up a person.

Another thing the waterfall absorbed: my ability to sleep. I didn’t even go to bed that night. For days afterward, I expected to collapse from exhaustion.

Never. For almost nine years, aside from a few, rare exceptions, I have slept in fits and starts, no more than three hours at a time.

It has felt fair. Deserved.

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