“If some guy is attacking you, and your life is in imminent danger, then you must put a bullet in that triangle. If you do, they die and you live. Simple as that.”
Angela looked over at the target he’d made. “So that’s the reason for the triangle at the top of the rod.”
“That’s right. It’s the size of the kill zone in an average man’s head. I made it so that it would move because when someone is intending to abduct you or murder you they’re moving as they come at you. If they see you have a gun they might even bob and weave. So, I made a moving target for practice.
“You’ll know when you hit it because the bullet will make a sharp ping against the steel.”
Angela let out a deep breath. “I don’t know if I can hit it when it’s moving.”
“You have to,” he said. “You’re going to practice every day until you can hit that wobbling triangle with every shot.”
“Every shot?” She shook her head. “I don’t know, Grandpa, if I’ll ever be able to do that.”
“If it’s ever necessary, your life will depend on you making that kill shot first time, every time.”
Angela nodded her determination. “All right. I’ll practice until I can hit it. Well, at least most of the time.”
“Every time,” he repeated with stern finality.
Angela looked at him for a long moment. “Every time,” she said with resolve.
Angela was determined not to quit. After a lot of practice she could hit the triangle every once in a while—when it was still. But once he wound up the device and it started wobbling around, it seemed hopeless. She missed the triangle every time. It was frustrating trying to follow the target and fire off rounds.
He urged her to settle down and not to fire until she was on target, but it was always gone before she could pull off the shot. She didn’t see how she was ever going to get good enough to hit it, much less good enough to hit it reliably.
It was several months and tens of thousands of rounds before she hit the wobbling triangle for the first time. When she heard the ping, it surprised her. She stood staring as the sound echoed back from the forest. She wasn’t sure if it had been by chance or intent.
Over the months that followed, she would shoot every day they were at the cabin, usually for hours at a time. There was little hiking or fishing, which she regretted, but the shooting had become important to her. It was a challenge, but also fed an inner yearning to do better. The effort of concentrating so hard often left her soaked in sweat at the end of a session.
One autumn night, as her grandfather was taking a shower, Gabriella sat on the edge of the fold-out bed as Angela snuggled under the covers. The fire in the woodstove was low, and the woodsmoke smelled good.
“Can I ask you a serious question, Grandma?”
“Of course. You know you can always talk to me.”
Angela turned her head, listening to the shower run through the closed bathroom door. She turned back.
“Why is he doing this? This isn’t just teaching me to shoot a gun. This is something different, I can feel it. There’s something serious about this, but I don’t know what it is.”
Her grandmother looked off in thought for a time.
“We think that maybe you’re different, Angela.”
Angela’s brows drew together. “Different?”
“Yes, piccolo.” “Piccolo” meant “little one” in Italian. It was a term of endearment her grandmother used on occasion.
“I don’t understand.”
She finally looked down at Angela. “We have long suspected that you’re different—special. You’ve shown it in a thousand little ways that we can’t really put our finger on or explain.
“But then, when you did what you did to that girl who hit you, we knew. It may seem like you simply defended yourself, and you did, but there was more to it. You’re not like other girls, other people, Angela.”
“I know. I don’t know how to explain it either, but I know I’m different. Sometimes it makes me afraid. Sometimes it makes me glad. I don’t know what it is, but I know I’m different than other people.”
“We think you are. We think you’re meant for something.”
“Something? Like what?”
Her grandmother shrugged. “We don’t know. But we think you have some purpose to your life. When you put that girl down the way you did, we knew. It was the first sign we could point to. You’re different. Your life will be different. We decided that your grandpa should start teaching you what you need to know for that life, for that person you will become.”
Angela made a face. “I don’t understand.”
Her grandmother smiled a sad smile. “I know, child. But one day you will.”
“What person will I become?”
“It’s too early to say for sure. Have patience and keep being yourself and you will grow into that person you’re meant to be. Now, get some sleep.”
THIRTEEN
Then, one day the following spring and over a half a year after starting, after thousands upon thousands of rounds fired, as she stood there in the woods, her gun in hand, her gun feeling like an extension of herself, Angela blinked as an unexpected feeling washed through her.
It was as if a doorway had opened in the darkness and she suddenly saw everything beyond in a new light.
She had come upon those mental doorways before. With each one she passed through she would discover that she understood the world in a new light. Things became clear to her. She had always thought of those doorways as simply part of growing up and learning new things, making connections she’d never made before, and maybe they were.
But this doorway was distinctly different, and decidedly more significant.
In that moment of insight, Angela was no longer aiming at a steel target. That was what she had been doing up until then—trying to hit a steel triangle as it wobbled and zigzagged.
Throughout her practice, she had often thought of the steel triangle as the bad guy. But it was always her conscious mind imposing that thought on the target. It was her imagining it.
This was similar, but at the same time somehow profoundly different.
This was a visceral desire to kill those bad guys.
It gave her goose bumps.
She thought about Frankie and the kind of men who abducted and murdered women. In that moment of clarity, it was no longer a target. It had become a man coming for her, coming to hurt her, coming to end her life.
A kind of primal fear welled up from inside. She could taste it in her mouth. This had morphed into life and death.
This wasn’t about shooting at a target anymore. This was a savage coming for her. This was about killing him before he could kill her.
Some mysterious piece of a cosmic puzzle that had been looking for where it fit in her life finally snapped into place.
She no longer felt frantic about trying to follow the triangle. Instead, she felt a sense of calm come over her.
The random movements of the steel triangle didn’t exist independently. They couldn’t. A killer all alone didn’t bob and weave. He became connected to his victim. She became a part of that connection.
She no longer chased the target. Instead, it pulled her through that connection.
It was no longer a metal triangle. It was the area between two eyes and the tip of the nose of a killer coming for her. It was the portal into his skull, a gateway for her bullet, the pathway to her salvation.
Her one chance to live.
That understanding gave her a sense of purpose and inner calm. At the same time, in that calm she held on to a core of rage at a killer, letting that fire burn deep within her.
It all came together in a heady rush. It gave her goose bumps and took her breath. The frustration was gone. It felt as if she had passed through a hidden doorway into a new kind of connection with the target.
She was able to lock on to the target so solidly, so reliably, that no matter which way it jumped, the gun went with it
. The bullet found it.
She heard the salvation of ping, ping, ping with every round fired.
Angela couldn’t hear the birds anymore, the wind in the trees. The steel triangle wasn’t wobbling every which way anymore. It was instead moving with her in slow motion.
Time seemed somehow suspended.
Time was hers.
The target was hers.
Whether she was shooting fast or slow, every round pinged the steel triangle. Sometimes she fired with a slow rhythm, sometimes she fired as fast as she could pull the trigger.
Each time the gun emptied and she dropped the magazine, she slammed home a new one, racked the slide, and in a flash she was back on target. When that magazine was empty, the next one went in and was emptied in a heartbeat. From months of practice she could reload with a new magazine so fast that there was hardly any pause between one magazine and the next one feeding bullets into the chamber as she fired.
What mattered, what was important, was the connection she felt with that small area where the bullet had to go. The bullet went where she sent it, where she saw it going before she even pulled the trigger.
It all seemed to fall into place so unexpectedly, so profoundly, that she had to stop for a moment as tears rolled down her cheeks. It was almost like magic.
She felt that she had just mastered—not a skill, but her life in a new way. She had a new kind of vision. A new sense. All her senses keyed in to this singular purpose.
Angela knew it was somehow connected to what her grandmother had told her about her being different. She didn’t know how, but she knew there was a connection.
This is what her grandparents had seen in her. She now saw it in herself.
When she realized that she had used up all the ammunition for the day, she stood in the ringing silence for a long moment. She finally looked up at her grandfather. He was standing back, watching her with a strange, penetrating look.
He finally smiled and nodded. In that moment, in that look, they shared a silent understanding.
“This is the next step”—her grandfather snapped his fingers as fast as he could—“to fire this fast and hit that moving target every time.”
Angela had been immensely pleased with what she had just achieved. Now she was stunned at the impossible.
“Grandpa, I can’t think that fast.”
He smiled knowingly. “That’s the part you need to learn next—to do it without thinking. Thinking slows you down. Once you learn not to think, your subconscious will take over and do it. Like riding a bicycle without thinking of how to balance. Your subconscious can fire and hit the target as fast as I can snap my fingers.”
Angela nodded. “If you say I can do it, then I will.”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “How about some dinner.”
She pulled off her hearing protectors and looked around. It was nearly dark. She had been able to hit the target every time even as the light had faded and was almost gone.
The cabin smelled wonderful. Her grandmother was in the kitchen, and Angela saw that she was making Angela’s favorite meal: Italian bread torn up into chunks, soaked in scrambled eggs with basil, oregano, and some other spices, then fried up in olive oil in an iron skillet.
“How did she do?” her grandmother asked as she turned the bread and eggs with a spatula as they cooked.
“She’s got it.”
“Like you?” Gabriella asked without looking up as she stirred the sizzling dinner.
“Like me,” he said at last.
Angela didn’t know for sure what she had, but her grandmother lifted an eyebrow at the skillet.
Angela sat at the table spread with a white tablecloth with red strawberries on it, her head still spinning from what she had done. It didn’t seem real, and at the same time it felt more real than anything else in the world. It felt as if a whole new world had opened up for her.
As her grandmother leaned in and put a heaping pile of bread soaked in eggs on Angela’s plate, she looked up at Vito.
“In that case,” her grandmother said, “then maybe it’s time you showed her the basement?”
What? The basement?
The basement door was always locked. She had never, ever, been down in the basement. It wasn’t even talked about. She had absolutely no idea what was down there. She had always been curious about it, but now she felt an unexpected sense of apprehension about going down there.
Angela looked between her grandmother and grandfather as they shared a long look. In that moment, they looked like, to them, they were the only two people in the world.
Her grandfather nodded slightly. “I think you’re right.”
Angela was still looking between them. “What’s in the basement?”
FOURTEEN
Not long after that eventful day when a new doorway had opened to her, another closed.
Her grandparents were found by the side of the road, both shot in the back of the head with a .22-caliber bullet.
It was a sensational murder mystery on the local news for a few days and then it was gradually forgotten. Angela didn’t know if the police were looking hard for the killer, but it didn’t really matter because even if they were, they never found him and no one was charged with the murders. What mattered, though, was that her grandparents were dead and even if they found their killer that wouldn’t bring them back.
Angela was beyond devastated. She stayed in her room and cried for two days. She felt totally lost. She didn’t want to eat, or for that matter, to live any longer. She wished she had been there with her grandparents and that the killer had put a bullet in the back of her head first so she wouldn’t have to endure the agony of losing them.
Sally took it mostly in stride.
She spent the morning of the funeral smoking meth. She drove them to the funeral in her ratty old Pontiac GTO, a car that had been a fixture in the dilapidated trailer park since long before Angela had been born. Angela sat in the backseat crying. The sky cried, too, with a steady drizzle.
Standing beside the open graves, rain plastering her hair to her head, Angela felt numb. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. All she wanted to do was to hold them and be with them. She didn’t think she could go on without them.
In their will, they left money to pay for their funeral and burial. They left their home in town to Sally. But they left the cabin to Angela, along with an endowment she would receive when she turned twenty-one.
Sally was angry about the cabin and the endowment going to Angela. She ranted and raved that her parents hadn’t left everything to her. She was their only daughter, after all. She resented her parents for it. She hated them for it. She was consoled by the fact that the house in town was worth more than both the cabin and the endowment together.
It didn’t take her long to sell the house. It would have been better to move into the house and sell the trailer, but Sally didn’t see it that way. Selling the house got her more money.
Angela wished she could escape to the cabin, but it was way too far to walk there, and she wasn’t yet old enough to drive.
Once Sally had what she thought of as a fortune from selling the house in town, she started spending it on drugs. Angela knew that her grandparents would not have wanted their house to be turned into money for drugs. But she also knew that it was more important to them that the cabin go to Angela. In a way, Angela thought that giving the house to Sally, even though it would go for drugs, was a way to distract her from what they thought was more important—that Angela have the cabin.
On many a night, the trailer became party central. Friends, neighbors, and strangers smoked, got drunk, and were rowdy late into the early-morning hours. Some did lines of cocaine on a mirror on the coffee table in the living room. Most of them smoked, either cigarettes, meth, or pot. A few shot up heroin. Even when there wasn’t a party, there were frequently tweakers hanging around to share the meth her mother scored, or to supply it.
When Angela left her bedroom in the morning to
go to school, there were often people asleep on the couch, in the chairs, or in their own vomit on the floor. She knew most of them, but it wasn’t uncommon for strangers to be there in the house when she left for school.
After Frankie had vanished, Sally had gradually become more and more involved with a new guy, Boska. Boska was some kind of shadowy supplier to dealers, so he had no problem satisfying Sally’s needs. More often than not he spent the night.
Boska was a big man, thick-boned and barrel-chested. He rode a Harley and had a scraggly beard. He hung out with other bikers and sometimes brought them to parties at the trailer. They were the scariest guys Angela had ever seen, but it was Boska who made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
Angela would shut herself in her bedroom when there was anyone other than her mother in the trailer. One night, Boska broke the door so it wouldn’t latch anymore. Then, when her mother was sleeping, he would come in, sit on her bed, and ask her stupid questions, like how she was doing in school or what she wanted to be when she grew up. All the while he leered at her. Boska scared her to down into her marrow.
With her now-ample supply of drugs, Sally was out of it much of the time. She would be up for days, strung out on meth; then she’d smoke pot for hours to bring herself down so she could sleep. Those periods were less like sleep and more like a coma.
It was during those periods of her mother’s comatose sleep that Boska came into her room and the serious abuse began.
Sally’s continual quest for oblivion had earned her badges of scabs. The teeth she had left were rotten. Her eyes were bloodshot and ringed with red. Her once-beautiful face looked like badly crinkled paper plastered down over a skull.
Even though Sally was only in her midthirties, she was used up.
Angela, on the other hand, was maturing into a leggy young woman blossoming with the femininity her mother had lost.