The Gun

Lauren had not yet turned sixteen when she found the gun, buried in Natalia’s top drawer beneath socks the colour of smouldering coals. Sitting at breakfast that next morning, Natalia read the newspaper passively, her thoughts distracted by her job for that evening. She could not help letting her thoughts wander from the actual act to the implications it held on her future, and the future for her daughter. How is it, she thought, that she ended up here, in a house that was too big for just two people, with a daughter she was not sure she really knew? And she, after all these years, was still killing people for money. She could count the number of lives she had ended, because, as much as she hated to admit it, their faces always haunted her dreams. People whose lives she had stolen so that her daughter could have everything she ever dreamed of having; so she could have the kind of life that Natalia herself had yearned for as a child.
She glanced up from her newspaper, catching Lauren's gaze, and she felt the nagging sensation that her daughter felt guilty about something. Chewing the inside of her lip, she opened her mouth to speak. Before the words could escape her mouth, her daughter let spoon clamour into her Fruity Loops, raining the surrounding area with a milky shower, the piercing sound of metal on glass enough to stall her pending words.
“Mom, why didn’t you ever tell me you had a gun?”
Natalia grasped the newspaper tightly, accidentally biting her lip too hard, and she stared at her daughter with burning green eyes.
“Goddammit, Lauren, have you been digging through my drawers again?”
Her daughter’s eyes widened in what could have been surprise or confusion, and she avoided her mother’s gaze, looking down at her breakfast, a small rosy hint spreading across her ashen, almost translucent cheeks. “I was looking for— ”
Natalia frowned, her heart fluttering in her chest as if it were a butterfly trapped in a jar. “I don’t give a damn what you were doing, you know you're not supposed to go into my drawers without my permission!" She clenched her teeth and drew in a breath, debating if she should count to ten silently and talk it out, or just strangle the girl then and there. She frowned at the latter thought, feeling her stomach twist with guilt at the morbid thought, even if it had only been in jest. She took a deep breath as the guilt began to turn to concern - the steady, bleeding realisation that her daughter's invasion of privacy may have put her well being in danger.
She tilted her head and studied her Lauren, forming her words scrupulously and deliberately in her mind before opening her lips. "You are almost an adult now. You know better than to go through other people’s things without asking! Especially my sock drawer, my God…” Natalia shook her head, tearing her eyes away from her daughter, attempting to fully comprehend the situation she was in without jumping to conclusions. After all, she considered, Lauren was just a kid, maybe she did not really understand the significance of the gun. The thought barely left her mind before Natalia scoffed at it. Perhaps years of late night jobs and feeble alibis had forced apart the mother/daughter relationship Natalia had once so desperately yearned for; but that certainly did not make Lauren an idiot or Natalia naive. Of course her daughter knew what a gun was for.
Lauren crossed her arms and leaned back, narrowing her eyes in the same way her mother did, her words disrupting Natalia’s ponderings. "But mom, why didn’t you tell me? I mean, I am almost an adult now… I don’t see why you couldn’t have told me.”
Natalia set down the newspaper and pushed a strand of black hair from her eyes. "I guess it hadn’t occurred to me to tell you.”
"Why?” Lauren’s voice was thick with an emotion Natalia could not place. “Because you’re gone all the time? Because the last time you were home for dinner was over two months ago?” Lauren let out a loud breath, blowing her bangs up in a frenzy around her forehead. “You spend all your time with Richard anyway; I don’t see why you even bother coming home anymore.”
Natalia stood up, scowling, her thin lips stretched tight across her fair face. The morning had deteriorated into the usual banter between mother and daughter, and of course it always came to a head with Richard. Lauren’s father remained as distant as her mother through her short life, and Natalia could not shake the feeling that Lauren let herself be consumed by an anger driven by the fact that her unmarried parents on and off relationship was the only thing keeping her from something that resembled a normal family life.
Of course, as far as Natalia was concerned, Lauren could never understand the volatile nature of her relationship, which relied far too strongly on the fact that Natalia could not quit her job. She grasped her hand through her short hair absently, shaking her head. "I don't think that now is the time to talk about this." She remarked.
She watched Lauren's arms tightened around her chest. "Of course it’s not. You never talk to me about anything." The girl got up, jostling the table so much as she did that quite a bit more of the milk was added to the white puddles around the bowl. Giving her mother one last blazing look, Lauren stormed from the house.
Natalia sat frozen staring at the table and wondering in her mind what exactly went wrong. Not just now, right that moment, with Lauren; but with her life. When she was pregnant with Lauren, the option was valid; the only option really, Richard once implied. Over the years, she comforted herself with the notion that she never killed anyone truly innocent, not when he acted as her handler and certainly not now that she worked alone. They were all rapists, molesters, paedophiles, and adulterers; people who had escaped the clutches of the law but where still condemned still in the eyes of society. Natalia refused the offers of people who wanted her to kill simply for their own, selfish needs, and thus carried her head high in the dark underworld she inhabited, considering herself morally superior to all others in her field.
Of course, as wonderful as all that sounded in her head, it meant nothing when spoken aloud. It meant nothing if she would be forced to look into her daughter's eyes and tell her those very things. Because as righteous as she sounded in her own mind, she knew that her daughter would see her only as a common killer. After all, that was the way strangers saw her; and as much as her heart ached to admit it, Natalia knew her growing daughter was now very much a stranger to her.
She stared at the door, holding her breath, her thoughts consumed once again with the job she had to do that evening. She assured herself she could still go through with it, as she always did. She could not, however, use the same assurance to comfort herself that, in the morning, she could still look her daughter in the eye.
After clearing off the spilled milk from the table and cleaning up the discarded ruins of breakfast, Natalia called Lauren’s high school to make sure her daughter had actually gone to class. Comforted by the fact that Lauren was marked present for at least first period, Natalia climbed the stairs to her bedroom, the soft carpet giving way under her tattered tennis shoes, and she travelled down the hallway into the master bedroom. It loomed around her; bright, cheerful walls shining down on her like an indoor sun, illuminating the fall of shadows even in the corners. She grasped the hard wood of the antique dresser drawer, pulling it open slowly, listening vaguely to the scrape of wood against wood as the contents became visible to her. Folds of black cotton glared up at her from the drawer, and she pushed them away, exposing the cold metal of the 9mm Beretta semiautomatic pistol. The surface shone roughly, handle and barrel covered with small, black bumps that stood out like small blisters over a scorched body. She laid her hand on the object, the hard metal pressing into the softness of her skin, and she almost could feel it pulse with the eagerness of its next kill. She lifted it out of the drawer, as always surprised by how light it was compared to the guns she had used when she first started in the business. The silencer she screwed to the head of the barrel was locked away in the closet along with the other various tools she needed for her kills; but the gun remained in her drawer, close to her hand if ever needed; for as much as she attempted to be careful about revealing her identity, she always knew of the chance that one day the huntress would become the hunted. When it came down to that, keeping the gun in her sock drawer was a risk, with Lauren in the house, she was willing to accept.
She gathered together her needs for that evening robotically, the plan playing out in her head over and over so she was sure that she would make no mistakes. By the time she was ready it was early afternoon; Lauren would not be home for another few hours, and she never did a hit before sunset. She resigned to pay Richard a visit; her conflict with Lauren that morning left her feeling empty and alone. If nothing changed over the years for her, it was the way she always felt needed in Richard’s arms. She gathered her things together and, locking the door of the large house, and heading to her car, gun and tools stored away discreetly in a tattered gym bag.
Twenty minutes later Natalia stood in the dilapidated apartment's hallway, staring at the cracks in Richard's door, tracing them steadily with her eyes. The hallways sagged around her, the hollow sound of dripping water stinging her ears and she took a deep breath, trying to ignore the familiar feeling she always got when she visited Richard; the distinct suspicion that the sky was falling in on her, and there was no way she could stop it.
The door groaned open, and an unruly head of blonde curls poked out, the male face twisted in a look of annoyance, then surprise.
"What the hell –” Richard's words froze and he pulled the door open all the way, staring at Natalia evenly with widened, ocean eyes, and slight smile creeping over his face. "Nat, what are you doing here? Come in, hurry up." He opened the door more and she slipped through, and he shut it behind her, flipping the bolt closed. He turned and faced her, and she felt his eyes roam over her body steadily, examining her every curve, until his bright eyes locked once again with her own. He leaned in and she accepted his lips against her own, revelling in the texture of his sandpaper skin against her soft smoothness, allowing his gentle exploration of her mouth to calm the butterfly still beating wildly in her chest.
When they parted, he brushed dark hair from her flushed face, smiling down at her. “Well, this is a surprise. I thought you would have called, first.”
She shrugged. “I just needed to see you. Had a rough morning.” She moved away from him and sat on the couch, poking his tattered carpet with a bare toe. The apartment was not much better than the hallways; shadows clung around the badly lit walls like spider webs, the toxic green coloured wallpaper peeling away like dead skin off a blister. Richard was never one for decorating in the long time she had known him; over fifteen years she watched him fade from a prominent handler, living in a house much like her’s, too big for him to know what to do with; to this, a shack of a home, the lowest rent possible that he no doubt rarely bothered to pay, but free from the confines of the career she continued to pursue. It still made her sad though; watching him succumb to the consequences of his own choices. She gave him a hidden look of pity. He sat down next to her, taking her hand.
“You and Lauren fighting again?”
She shrugged, aware that he knew he was right. She scooted closer to him and laid her head on his shoulder, the soft flannel of his ancient shirt tickling her cheek. “I can’t talk to her anymore. I don’t know, maybe I never could in the first place. I just…” She sighed. “I wonder if I blew it. The only reason I ended up in the business was to give her a better life than I ever had, and now she can’t stand to be around me.”
“She’s a teenager, Nat. If she liked you, there would be something wrong with her.”
Natalia sighed, and turned her head so her forehead pressed against his shoulder. “It’s more than that, Richard. She found my gun this morning, started asking all kinds of questions.”
Richard pulled away, catching Natalia’s gaze, and she stared at him quizzically. “What did you tell her?” He asked, tilting his head. She sighed.
“Nothing. I yelled at her about digging around in my drawers.” She turned away and studied the walls again, clearing her throat. “She’s a stranger to me. I gave up everything for her… and I’m going to lose her forever.”
He reached out for her, and the brushes of his roaming hands and frantic duel of their tongues were a comfort to her, ridden with raw passion and heat. Her worries about Lauren faded when he held her, pushed away by the unfamiliar sensation of need and love.
A half hour later, they lay on his bed, a lumpy futon mattress on the one-room apartment floor. They remained wrapped up in swirling colours or blue and yellow mismatched sheets, tangled around their legs, which in turn were tangled around each other, their bare bodies pressed against each other in every way conceivable to remain intimate but comfortable. Her head lay on his chest to avoid his gaze, which seemed to be burrowing its way carefully into her body.
When he spoke, Natalia listened to the vibrations of the words against Richard's chest, jarring her from a lull she had entered, guided by the sounds of his breathing. She was fascinated by those sounds; the roaring of the blood through his body, the gentle song of his heart. They were the melodious sounds of his life, the soothing composition that became, over the years, the theme song of her existence. She lived for his touch, and they both knew that all too well.
“So what are you going to do?”
The spell broken, she propped herself on an elbow and stared up his chest, examining him. “About Lauren you mean?”
“Of course.”
She shrugged, tracing circles on his chest with her index finger, mesmerised by the rough skin beneath her. “What can I do? I’m afraid it’s too late now… she sixteen years old. I don’t know how to reach her.”
She pulled away, propping herself up against the headboard, pulling the blankets closer around her to cover her previously exposed body. Richard reached over to the nightstand and grabbed a cigarette, lighting up and smoking quietly, staring at Natalia out of the corner of her eye.
He exhaled smoke. "It’s never too late. She’s your daughter for God’s sake. But you can’t lie to her for the rest of her life.”
She looked around the apartment, watching the shadows meld into each other over the nauseating wallpaper. "Easy for you to say. You’re not raising her."
He breathed out again sharply, and the smoke lingered in the room around them, the thick smell burning her nostrils, and she tired to ignore the feel of his eyes boring into her, and she immediately regretted her words. She knew that Richard’s absence in Lauren’s life was not completely of his doing; he refused to marry Natalia until she left the business; but as much as her job haunted her, she had become much too accustomed to its presence. As well, she suspected that Richard and her as husband and wife would never really work; she would rather remain in her illicit love affair, instead of being haunted by the responsibly of being a wife. Her failure in motherhood so far was quite enough for her, she decided.
Hours after darkness fell, she left Richard’s sleeping side and found her way to her car, heading to the house where she was to make her kill. She slipped the gun into her pocket, feeling its length against her leg, pressing against her, as intimate as a lover. She started the car and navigated her way to the house, where a woman awaited; a woman who had no idea that this would be the last few moments of her life, directed by a man whom she had once loved as her husband.
The city lights sparkled with more intensity at two a.m. in the morning, Natalia suspected, than they did at any other time during the night. She navigated the car street to street, attempting to follow the jealous husband’s directions, and she found the house rather quickly for how lost she became. It was in a tattered neighbourhood, similar to the area that Richard lived in, with the exception of the fact that these were decrepit houses rather than the ramshackle apartments that trapped Richard and his kind. She parked her car in the shadows and slipped out, feeling the hard weight of the gun slapping against her leg, her duffle bag of tools slung over her left shoulder. Her heartbeat did not even speed up as she crept through the shadows like a vampire, avoiding any possible light, feathery on her feet to not to draw any possible attention. The decrepit back door was loose on its hinges and involved nothing to open it, giving Natalia free and simple access to the shack, and the woman she was prepared to murder.
The house was small enough to navigate easily, even in the dark, and Natalia easily found the small bedroom where the woman lay, flat on her stomach under comforters, copper hair spread across her pillow like an autumn fan. Natalia raised the 9mm, but the gun was oddly heavy in her hands, and as she worked to aim at the woman’s head, Lauren’s image with the gun flashed through her mind, and her heart skipped a beat, and she felt her finger inadvertently brush the trigger too hard.
The shot fired almost silently, instantaneously, but the scream that erupted from the woman’s throat that pierced Natalia’s ears seemed to last for an eternity. The bullet entered the woman’s back, severing her spine without killing her, Natalia knew, but causing such great pain that she was violently wrenched from sleep. Natalia felt the gun slip from her fingers, but she struggled to catch it, captivated by the thick, red stain began to taint the gentle comforter around the woman, her screaming becoming a background humming of her blood’s pulsing journey. Natalia struggled to aim the gun again and then pulled the trigger with no hesitation, cutting off the woman’s razor-like scream with a single silent shot to the head. She watched the flesh split open, felt the patter of blood and brain matter sprinkle her face softly, as if it was drops of life-giving rain, and not the promise of death. She smeared the blood away with the sleeve of her shirt and slipped the gun back into her pants pocket, still feeling it pulse in time to the rhythm of her speeding heart.
She stumbled back into her house less than a half hour later, making her way quickly to the bathroom. She vaguely remembered Lauren mentioning something about spending the night at a friend’s house earlier that week, and Natalia was thankful to any higher power that would listen for that blessing. As she stared into the mirror, she examined herself sadly, an overwhelming disappointment slowly filling the empty void she saw in her eyes. Her short hair clung to her skull, dark and piercing around her pale completion, mottled with the stains of darkening blood. Her dark eyes, she thought, had once shone with a light; but the light vanish long ago, replaced with a hollow emptiness that no doubt reflected the very fact she knew all to well; that she sold her soul to save her daughter.
The truth became to clear at the moment, as she reflected on the suffering of the woman she just killed. Natalia never considered herself to be a cruel woman; she did not enjoy killing, but she did find a small amount of justice in it. She also considered herself to be careful, because she would not tolerate suffering of any sort; but the woman’s piercing screams were still stinging her ears, and the realisation of her profession began to sink in slowly, enveloping her self-righteousness with a layer of doubt.
She turned on the water and thrust her hands into the sink, the sound of the cascade drowning out all the sounds around her. She had no yet begun to splash water on her face when a piercing voice broke through the noise.
“Oh my God, mom, what happened to you?”
Natalia spun around, flinging water about her, catching the concerned gaze of Lauren. The young woman stood in the bathroom doorway, frozen in place, house keys hanging from one hand, her purse in the other. Natalia gasped.
“Lauren, what are you doing here?”
Her daughter stared at her, taking a moment to respond. “I just forgot…” She did not finish, and, not for a second tearing her eyes from her mother, lifted her purse. Natalia stared at her, silent, fully aware of the blood that still covered her face.
“Mom?”
Natalia took a deep breath and waved her daughter away. “Not now, Lauren. Go back to your friend’s house.”
Lauren’s eyes widened, and she stared at her mother intently. “Mom, are you crazy? You’re covered in blood! We need to take you to the hospital or something!”
Natalia shuttered a sigh and tore her eyes away, unable to look at her daughter. “It’s not… It’s not my blood, Lauren.”
Her daughter swallowed visibly, and took a step back. “Mom, what is going on?” she spoke very slowly and carefully, as if Natalia were a small child, and, taken aback and amazed, Natalia sensed that a girl no longer stood before her, but instead a woman, capable of properly handling a crisis situation. The tone of Lauren’s voice made Natalia want to trust her.
“I killed someone,” Natalia heard herself say. Lauren let out a strangled gasp, stepping forward again and staring at her mother, her eyes round and wide.
“God, mom, why?”
Natalia choked on her words. “It’s what I do, Lauren. I kill people for money.” The words fell from her mouth like stones, heavy and unmovable. She couldn't take them back, could not change their weight; they were already there, simple and clear, and there was not a thing she could do about it.
Lauren stood in front of her for what could have been quiet minutes or a silent eternity for Natalia, before she turned out of the bathroom. “You might want to wash all that blood off.” She muttered as she disappeared from the doorway.
Natalia stood for a moment before scrubbing away the blood that stuck to her skin, dry and cracked across her face. She scrubbed her face raw, until it was bright pink and burned a little, as she bit back the pressure of tears fighting to get loose. The cold realisation of what she had admitted to Lauren haunted her, and what pained her most was there was no taking it back.
When she came out from the bathroom, Lauren sat in the dining room table, at the same chair her mother sat in that morning. Natalia sat across from her, noting that, in her haste to get to the bathroom, she actually left the 9mm Beretta on the kitchen table. It lay there, sparkling in the night shadows like a rough jewel, the silencer still screwed to the barrel. Lauren’s gaze wandered between the gun and her mother, and Natalia squirmed slightly under her daughter’s piercing gaze.
“So that’s what the gun is for.” Lauren threw the words out on the table, like chips in a poker game. The look on her face seemed to ask Natalia if she wanted to see her bet and raise her.
“Yeah, that’s what the gun is for.” She replied. “One of it’s many uses.”
Lauren’s gaze broke from her mother. “There’s only one use for a gun, mom.”
The two sat in silence again, but Natalia knew that this silence was foreign to them. It was not the heated silence of a mother and daughter argument; it was the silence of two people attempting to understand one another, and failing miserably. Natalia realised that her daughter was not only a stranger to her, but also, at some point Lauren grew up, and Natalia had never quiet noticed.
“Lauren, I–”
Lauren shook her head, cutting her mother off with her own words. “I get it, mom. You’re a hit man, that’s the job that you’ve had all this time.” Natalia watched Lauren examine the gun quietly. “This is crazy, it’s like something out of a movie.”
“No movie.” Natalia stated, keeping her voice low. Her face felt wet, though she did not know why, and she wondered slightly if they were the wetness of tears, or if it was, perhaps, the ghost itch of blood. “I’ve been doing this since you were born, Richard got me into it. But look at the life it has given us, Lauren.” She glanced around the large house, cavernous around the two wilting women. “I did this because I wanted you to have the perfect childhood.”
“The perfect childhood.” Lauren spoke as if she where weighing the words on her lips, and she shook her head. “I didn’t have a childhood, mom. If you had ever been home, you would have noticed that.”
Her words stung Natalia like daggers, and Lauren placed her hand over the gun, sliding it across the table to her mother. “You get it now, right mom? I had everything I ever wanted growing up… except for a mother.”
The aching sensation returned to Natalia’s throat, but she did not fight the tears this time, letting them well up in her eyes. She stared at the gun, eyes narrowed, feeling sudden, unfamiliar emotions for the object. It no longer pulsed under touch, no longer reached out to her as a lover; but rather, the metal felt frozen and dead beneath the pads of her fingers. “I chose my path long ago, Lauren.” Natalia said, looking into her daughters eyes. “I gave away my integrity to save you, and I never even realised it until today. I never really understood what it meant to kill someone, until today.” She reached out to her daughter across the table, begging with her eyes for a simple understanding from Lauren, an acceptance that what Natalia did at least carried the best intentions for her daughter. “When you were born, all I knew when I looked at you was that I loved you more than anything, that I would do anything for you. And I did. I sold my soul, so you would always be able to keep yours.”
Lauren’s eyes met her mother’s, and she laid her own hand across the table, grasping her mother’s hand. She remained quiet, unwavering, but her eyes sparkled with a light; the same light Natalia had seen in her own eyes long ago, filled with the hope of what the future held. Lauren stood up and hugged her mother wordlessly, disappearing from the kitchen without a sound, leaving Natalia alone at the table with the gun. Natalia hoped that Lauren understood her; maybe did not forgive her, for all of the lonely nights, the missed school functions and plays and piano recitals… but at least understood her. She stared at the gun quietly, seeing her life reflected in it, and she knew that one day she would have to make a choice. One day she would have to choose between a life with Lauren and Richard, and a life with the gun. She knew what she wanted the answer to be; she knew she wanted her normal life more than anything in the world; but she also knew she sold her soul for the gun, and there might be no buying it back. However, at that moment she was comforted by the fact that even in the hell she created around herself, at least she had her daughter again, whose eyes shone with hope and understanding, and whose soul would never have to be sacrificed.
At that moment, that was all Natalia really needed.