Analysis

Sensitive Content: Contains discussions of firearms and contemplation of violence.

The morning sun streamed through the window, accentuating Tim's shirt as it billowed comically at odd angles. He turned to the left, stared at his reflection, and sighed. He hadn't worn a suit since the funeral, and the 40 pounds he dropped made him feel as though he was wearing an oversized apron instead of a dress shirt. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead as he again unzipped his pants, regrouped the excess length of white cotton, and frantically smoothed and pulled the shirt into submission. As he fastened his belt, he glanced at his tie rack, decided against it, and put on his sports jacket.

After checking the clock on his phone for the fiftieth time in the past hour, he opened the basement door and headed downstairs, careful to avoid brushing against the dusty walls on his way. The small storage area under the stairs had a padlock, an item he added years ago when he imagined his children might scour the house for hidden gifts around Christmas, whenever he and Anna were away. He wasn't sure that they ever tried, and didn't think they ever found any if they did - he always observed closely for, but never saw any signs of guilty recall as they opened their presents on Christmas morning - but this space occurred to him one late November many years ago, and thus the padlock was added.

Tim pulled at the string attached to the bare bulb, and his knees popped loudly as he crouched and picked up a small metal box. The handgun, like the padlock, had been his idea. Anna's office was over a half mile from her parking lot, and in the winter, she was apt to walk to and from her ancient Toyota in near total darkness. She sharply resisted, and about when he was convinced he'd need to try and return the gun, she acquiesced after her coworker was mugged during a trip to Toronto.

He paused, shifted the box to his left hand, produced a bandanna from his right pocket, and absentmindedly dabbed at his brow. His breathing was jagged, and as he inhaled, he noticed the faint odors of sawdust mixed with laundry detergent. He pressed his forehead against the underside of the stairs, closed his eyes, and willed himself to return his breathing to measured rhythms. Seemingly at once, the room felt overly hot. In a quick motion, Tim backed away from the stairs, yanked the string, and closed the door, foregoing the padlock.

He set the box on his workbench, produced his key ring, and unlocked the box. The gun was a small 9mm, selected as a size convenient for Anna's purse or coat pocket. In the midst of her chemotherapy and radiation treatments, she had presence of mind to remind Tim that it was in her glove compartment, and made him promise to put it someplace secure. He did so the day after she died, completely numb and in shock, when he desperately needed to do something he thought would make her smile. Listening to and following what she told him to do was something he did far too seldom when she was alive; it almost became a compulsion after she was gone. Although five years had passed, he still routinely performed tasks with the thought of Anna's approval.

As someone who had little interest in or knowledge of firearms, Tim didn't know whether the small cardboard box of ammunition sitting next to the was still "good," or if the passage of time in the damp, cold basement had damaged it. Fortunately, he had considered this in advance, and a new box was sitting on the passenger seat in his car, purchased for $14.99 the afternoon before from a sports store 30 miles from his home. He wasn't concerned about being caught, he only didn't want to run into anyone he knew. Any outside influence might start a chain reaction of thoughts and actions which changed his mind, and Tim had already spent far too much time making it up. Besides that, Tim's tolerance for small talk had always been exceedingly low, and what remained now was the barest level of civility necessary for day-to-day transactions.

As he climbed the stairs, he brushed his hands over each pocket in turn, checking for his keys, wallet, and phone, then stuffed the gun in his sports coat pocket. Moving more quickly now, he put on his overcoat and headed to the mudroom, freezing mid-motion as he began locking the door. He paused, briefly considered, and turned the lock.

The morning sun had given way to a cold drizzle while Tim was in the basement. He hurried to his car and methodically loaded the gun before buckling his seat belt. That done, he shoved the box under the passenger seat and returned the gun to his pocket. He reached for the ignition button, and stopped. The drops hitting the car took on increased intensity as the drizzle shifted to rain, and the sound reminded him of sleeping in his childhood room under the eaves, lulled to sleep by late summer rainstorms.

His face involuntarily crumpled, creating a look which could go either way toward a sob or scream. He again attempted to control his breathing, but he sounded like he was riding over railroad ties as he exhaled. Thinking was to be avoided, and today was for action. From the moment he woke, he willed himself to avoid any conscious thought or inner monologue, and operated on automatic, like a man who had rehearsed a role for so long, that the performance was pure muscle memory. Now that all the preparatory tasks were complete and he was still, his mind, like a faithful compass looking for north, tried to reassert and insist.

Once again, Tim slid into the mental struggle which had consumed him for the last six months. Though he had finally decided on this course of action, and there was nothing he wanted more, his brain kept insisting on inserting rationality, on preventing him from yielding to the strongest temptation he had ever felt. He sat silently, heart thudding, looking straight ahead at the faded paint of the garage door, wrestling with himself. He felt unhinged, his emotions completely on the surface, twanging like overtight guitar strings.

"What would Anna say?" he said aloud, jumping a little at the sound of his voice. This was the sole thought which had heretofore stopped him from doing what he was about to; it was what kept him at home on the day of the arraignment, what made him sit on the couch, staring at a blank TV screen all those days the man was out on bail, doing whatever it was he did at home with his still intact family.

He wrestled with this thought, mulled it over, tried to mold it into a form, like an old piece of clay. Anna hadn't been around when he last wore this suit. At the time, it gave him some degree of solace, knowing that as terrible as her cancer was, it had spared her the pain of burying her daughter. Anna wasn't there when her son sat at the kitchen table, an untouched glass of iced tea in front of him, quietly explaining to Tim that he couldn't bear to live in this town anymore, he had to leave to find peace. She was absent when he helped Tim clean out and then pack her Toyota with his things, both of them hiding their tears from each other.

The man hadn't given Anna cancer, but he had destroyed what remained of Tim's family. Tim's mind shifted again. Yes, his son was alive - thriving, even. He had switched colleges, switched majors, switched girlfriends, and sounded moderately happy when he called Tim every Sunday afternoon. Tim suspected the moderation was for his own benefit; by all accounts, his boy was doing very well. When they spoke yesterday, Tim, who had difficulty discussing anything involving emotions, had made the point to convey to his son that it was "OK to be happy."

"I know," he had said, after a pause. "I want you to be, too."

Tim didn't recall what more was said, but he likely turned the conversation to the more mundane and concrete, away from the emotional and fraught. Tim would be happy if he did what he wanted to do in the next hour - what he had wanted since the night the Sheriff came to his door, hat in hand and a look of professionally crafted sympathy on his face. The thought had occurred to him before he even knew what had happened, in the vague, inarticulable way shock, anger, and profound despair can coalesce in an instant.

As soon as the thought occurred to him, he recognized the danger of it, like the inexplicable thought of jumping when standing on a viewing platform of a high building. It was a thought like a red-hot poker, impossible to touch but mesmerizing to stare at. As the weeks turned to months, he started wrestling with the notion; tentatively and timidly at first, then with more insistence and brazenness.

Primarily, he fought with what he mentally referred to as the "what abouts." What about his son? What about his job? What of his life, such as it was at this point? He vaguely assumed, not without some slight and ambiguous degree of egocentrism, there would be forgiveness and understanding. Absolute forgiveness, no, but generally? He was pretty sure people would not think him a monster.

Yet, his brain insisted, yet there was the drive-by. The one day a few weeks ago when he summoned the courage to drive by the man's house, without any fixed plan or intent. He wanted to see where it was he lived, and expected to see something that could help him make up his mind one way or another. The address was easy to find, it was in the first news article about the event - his mind refused to call it an "accident" - and as he drove, heart racing, he imagined countless scenarios. A ramshackle hut with beer cans and whiskey bottles strewn across the yard, a metal trailer with a beat-up F150 truck and a mangy dog on a rope, or some combination thereof.

He also considered the opposite; a white picket fence, an old grandmother sitting on the porch as the man worked on the lawn, a wife and children playing in the grass. Flashes of every trite and saccharine or maudlin and heart-wrenching family scene of every TV show, movie, and book he had ever seen or read crossed his mind in alternating blips.

When he had arrived, he parked in a space across the street and two houses down, and, with what felt like a herculean effort, put the car in park and his hands in his lap. He was trembling like a boy, and found he had to go to the bathroom. When he raised his head and fixed his gaze on the house, all sound stopped; he couldn't hear the children playing in the park next to him, nor the sound of his own breathing. Despite the feelings of something momentous about to happen, there was nothing remarkable to see. None of his fantasies seemed to bear out, and he was momentarily discombobulated and confused.

The house was completely nondescript, with a well but not obsessively maintained yard. The curtains were drawn, giving it the feel of a house not recently occupied, though there were no signs of stacked up mail, and a some sticks from a recent windstorm were in a semi-neat pile by the curb, next to a garbage can ready for pickup. Tim's eyes swept over every feature again and again, but he found nothing to hate, nothing to love, nothing that gave him the answers he was looking for. It enraged him more than anything had since the night it happened; he needed something.

After what felt like hours, the trance broke, he put the car in drive, and pulled out. He briefly paused directly across from the house, looking one last time for a sign of something. On the far right side of the house, out of his vantage point from where he had parked, he saw a small bicycle, likely owned by an eight or nine-year-old child. The bicycle was on the grass, leaning against the siding by the left handlebar. He stared at it for a long moment, then drove off.

As soon as he returned home, he had poured himself a stiff scotch, but did not drink it; the following morning, he carefully poured it back into the bottle after debating whether to pour it in the sink. The bottle had been one of Anna's last gifts for him, a surprise after he got a small raise at work, and he intended for it to last as long as it could. All evening and well into the night, he sat thinking, but no thoughts came. He felt cheated, and realized he had placed a great deal of stock into this trip, and couldn't believe it was so anticlimactic.

It was harder to rationalize his plan after the trip. He had hoped for help, one way or another, and had received nothing. Well, next to nothing, he thought, as he considered the bicycle. But what of it? A bicycle didn't mean anything. With effort, he told himself he could be a hero, a vigilante, a wronged man who was trying to make it all right. Tim considered himself a man of principle, a holder of some degree of morality, and it was difficult to consider the inconsiderable. With effort, he was able to craft a rather magnificent story, where he could give in to his desires and still come out on top of the moral heap.

All these familiar thoughts swirled in his head in the span of a few moments, like hiking on a well-worn trail he'd seen countless times before. Almost reluctantly, he loosened his mind and allowed those thoughts - the ones he knew made him cry, made him hurt - to flood in. His wedding, taking his daughter to the Daddy-Daughter dance, her small hands clenched firmly around his back as they shuffled back and forth to Disney tunes on the dance floor, so many Christmas trees, Halloween costumes, birthday cakes. They didn't feel trite or saccharine, only real, strong, and personal.

He had spent so much time pushing these memories away, they almost seemed new and unfamiliar, like a favorite movie unwatched for decades. His throat was constricted and vision blurred slightly as tears formed in his eyes. He pulled the gun out of his pocket, looked at it, and slowly released his fingers, feeling the weight as the gun fell back into his coat, uncomfortably bulging against his side.

He opened the door and stepped into the rain.