End of Story

by A.J. Finn

Fellow’s wife and son up and vanish one night, the cabbie had said. New Year’s Eve, nineteen ninety-nine. When Hope and Cole Trapp, wife and son of the acclaimed detective novelist, disappeared from two separate locations in San Francisco . . . never to be seen again.

“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.” He strokes his tie. “It came for Dominic on a dark road. Left him there, too. Midnight hit-and-run on the Pacific Coast Highway. Talk about stooping low. A cruel twist—he’d kept me alive after Hope and Cole disappeared.”

“there is one pursuit, and one alone, that engages a man who has lost his wife and son in a single night, and that is resisting the almighty urge to blow his brains out.”

“Our mother was—she felt a special tenderness toward anyone who might be perceived, or self-perceive, as inferior. The loveless. And the luckless. The hopeless. The helpless.”

“People your age—young people, I mean—you treat your lives like galleries, for public display, open to all. My life is no gallery. It’s a vault, a black box, and—I’m sorry I can’t put this more elegantly—it’s nobody’s damn business.”

“I felt ashamed. That’s illogical; I know that, intellectually. But you don’t feel with your brain, and I felt ashamed. I wondered if someone might assume I was of a mind to take my own life, too.”

“As Simon St. John tells us, the past is a poison. Tolerable only in trace amounts.” “I remember. But the past is gone.” “Oh, no.” Now he turns to her, and his smile is so sad she could cry. “The past isn’t gone. It’s just waiting.”

A woman who doesn’t lie,’” she replies, “‘is a woman without imagination and without sympathy.’”

“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.”

“Life is loss,” says Diana, very softly. After a moment, Nicky shrugs. “Life is change. And—discovery.”

“We say ‘She’s full of heart’ or ‘He’s got guts,’ but the fact is, most of us are made of not a little scar tissue. I’m interested in the wounds a person keeps secret. Even the madness. Why do we hide them?”

“What else did Cole like?” she asks. At her back, Sebastian sighs. “Oh—long weekends traveling with his mother, I remember. Every few months, they’d drive to Disneyland, or Yellowstone, or take the train anywhere they pleased. Neither of ’em cared for planes.” Nicky has read about these trips in Cole’s postcards. “I can’t fly without sedatives,” she says.

“I wait and hope,”

“Gossips everywhere. There is an expression: moral indignation is envy with a halo.”

“I don’t think I can imagine wanting to die,” she says, slowly. “But I guess I can imagine not wanting to live.”

“We’re all in that story. Life is a thriller. The ending is fatal and the conclusion is final.”

“Some stories, they just end without you finding out what happened. You know?”

Today mama and me saw a lady who is a spycologist who asked why I wanted to die. I said I don’t but it hurts to live.

“Grief might feel like fear, but it also feels like memory, and with memory, there’s no—a story doesn’t end.”

It’s human nature . . . ,’” she recites slowly. “‘. . . to hate him whom you have hurt.’”

Nemesis is long delayed sometimes, but she comes in the end.’”

And none of you—none of you knew me!”

“When you strip and skin someone until they feel like nothing—what you told them all along they already were: nothing—you shouldn’t be surprised to find that at last you’ve whittled them down to a fine point. You’ve made a weapon of them. You’ve made them dangerous. And once you rip everything away, they need nothing except air to breathe and your heart to run through. So well done: you’ve sculpted your very own nemesis, you’ve armed her, you’ve instilled her with one purpose and one alone. And here I am.”

Wouldn’t it haunt you? Taking a life, Simone had asked me. It’s haunted Madeleine.

“You became who you always were.”

“We hate those we hurt, my child,” Sebastian Trapp tells me. “We hurt those we hate, and we hate them still more. It’s a drain we spiral. It sucks us under.

There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

Now: it is my experience that everybody wants the truth until they find it. To wait and hope can be preferable.

We hate those we hurt.