I Never Dreamed About Success I Worked For It
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“It’s a shame that it’s come to this,” said the man, looking up at us from his chair. He was old and frail, thin-lipped with white hair in greasy tufts about his temples, like birds’ nests after they’ve been cleaned out.
He had the look of an old soldier about him, though whether he’d fought on any battlefields or not seemed unlikely given the way he moved. His legs were bent at odd angles; his arms hung down from them as if he’d broken them at some point and then put them back into place without bothering to heal properly.
The skin all over his face looked like it was too tight, pulled taut against the bone; his cheekbones stood out in sharp relief under it, even more so than normal. A small gold tooth sparkled from between the creases in his sunken cheeks. “You’ll be taking me off life support soon.” His voice sounded raspy, and thickly accented but not one that I recognized.
His eyes met mine for just a moment before returning to my father’s worried face. “The doctors told you, then?”
My father nodded grimly.
“And your family has agreed? To let me die in peace?”
“Yes,” Father replied.
“Then we will do our part. You have my thanks. And yours, sir.”
A smile crossed his lips and his fingers tapped the arm of his chair. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, breathing deeply through parted lips. After a while, he spoke again. “We must go very quietly from here. No fuss, no trouble, nothing.” My heart sank.
This was where things got messy. “They will expect that there is something unusual about how I died – I would advise that you keep them talking and confused until then.”
Father raised his eyebrows and I nodded. It didn’t take long to get a sense of who was coming down the hall outside the door: four men and two women dressed in black suits. They wore sunglasses despite the fact that it was night. Their guns were hidden by their coats.
We could see enough of their faces to know they weren’t locals either. One woman was clearly in charge, her features severe with dark skin and high cheekbones; she had curly brown hair cropped short around the ears. She carried herself like someone used to giving orders.
The other three men wore similar clothes except for one. He kept his head down and shuffled behind the others. I couldn’t see what happened next but suddenly the room filled with smoke, choking us. The woman turned to my father, speaking quickly in English.
He shook his head once and held out a hand to show he needed to speak privately, which I knew meant he wanted them to wait outside the room.
“I can help you,” he said, his voice low, hoarse.
She frowned at him, but then she shrugged and waved the others in. The woman stepped aside, holding out a cigarette as she waited for my father to light it. He blew the blue flame from the match into the smoke. When the fire went out, the woman smiled and took a drag on it.
The man who’d stayed behind the others now stepped forward, raising his hands like he was going to knock on the wall and ask what we were doing.
My father raised his gun and shot him in the chest. Blood sprayed across the wall, splattering onto the ceiling. He dropped heavily to his knees and fell sideways into my mother’s lap as she gasped and jerked back.
The woman threw up her hands and screamed. I saw the glint of the gun barrel in the shadows and fired my own weapon, hitting the woman in the stomach. She collapsed to the floor, clutching the wound.
The other two men opened fire at my father at almost the same time as his hand whipped around to his side and he pulled his pistol from beneath his coat. Bullets thumped hard against the woodwork around us as the other two men returned fire.
More rounds struck flesh: my brother ducked behind the counter and I hit one man in the shoulder; another bullet ripped into my father’s leg, knocking him backward. He rolled away, cursing. I saw blood seeping from the wound and realized it wasn’t deep; he’d probably broken it when he fell but hadn’t felt it yet because of the adrenaline.
I hoped the same applied to me. My ears rang, and I blinked rapidly to clear my vision of the smoke. I was dizzy and my breath came heavy.
My mother screamed again, and the sound echoed off the walls of the corridor beyond the doorway. I heard shouts, and the sound of footsteps running away. The woman who’d been shot rose unsteadily to her feet. “No! You’re dead!”
Her gun swung towards my mother. It was pointed directly at her face and she squeezed the trigger repeatedly, each time firing into my mother’s skull without pause. My mother’s body jerked with each impact, her head slamming back and forth on the table between them as my mother clutched at her temples, screaming.
When my mother fell silent, still and lifeless, the woman turned to the room and stared at us both. “Who did this? Who sent you?” Her voice was ragged with fury.
My father raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t we start at the beginning and work forward?”
“This is not how I envisioned dying,” she said, turning and walking to the far wall of the room. She pushed the gun into the wood so hard the barrel snapped. “Do you realize we’ve had these damn things since before you were born?
They’re practically antique and nobody cares anymore. I should be enjoying retirement in someplace warm and sunny right now instead of getting ready to go to war with a bunch of kids.” She glared at my father. “You owe us for this one. A lot of people are going to die, and it’s all your fault.”
***
We got home just after midnight. The cops had been called. There was no sign of the gunmen or their vehicle, but there were bullet holes in every panel of our car and a trail of blood leading to our driveway, where two men were being treated by paramedics.
They would have died if they’d stayed in that street any longer. Two more men lay on stretchers in the emergency ward of a nearby hospital. My father swore softly as he looked down at them, while my mother stood beside me.
We couldn’t tell whether either of the two who’d taken cover in the kitchen survived until later when we saw pictures of bodies. The third man was listed as deceased, having suffered a heart attack and a stroke during his ordeal.
One of the doctors told me the damage to his brain from the blow to the head might mean he lived for a long time—or he could slip into a coma and die within a few weeks. He wouldn’t regain consciousness, though, so I guessed he didn’t matter much to them anyway. I never asked why they’d tried to shoot my family.
We left the hospital in silence. My mother cried, her face wet with tears and blood from her scalp where it had lacerated her skull. She clung to my arm tightly, but neither of us spoke about what happened inside because we weren’t sure if anything else mattered anymore.
Not when the rest of the world seemed to care only about profit and death. When we got home and my brother met us on the porch, he grabbed my mother and pulled her into his arms.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. “We’ll figure something out.”
She shook her head. “I’m scared, Joe. I thought we were safe here, and then suddenly someone tried to kill me… What will happen next, do you think?”
He held her tight, stroking her hair. His eyes burned with worry as he looked at my father and me. “Are you really all right?”
“I’m fine,” I replied, even though I wasn’t. I’d lost three good friends that night, and one of my own blood relatives was lying motionless on a slab somewhere, bleeding to death because of some twisted ideology. But I knew we’d get through it somehow.
I’d always known there was too much love in my family to ever let the darkness swallow us completely. I hoped that would be true forever—that we could survive the things we saw, and keep moving forward as the monsters around us became more terrible than our worst nightmares.
As soon as we returned to bed, we slept like the dead, and I dreamed of a monster made of ice and fire, a dragon whose claws slashed through a city. I woke up in the dark hours of the morning to my mother crying quietly. “They killed him, baby. He’s gone.”
A wave of sorrow washed over me. I felt the same ache in my chest I remembered from the day my father died, a pain so sharp and deep I wanted nothing more than to curl myself up against it until it went away. But I knew this feeling didn’t belong to me, because it was too big to feel alone.
The next day was Saturday, and I sat with my parents on the couch in the living room, listening to my dad as he talked about a new way to save money that would pay off in less than ten years. It had been months since we’d bought the house in Westchester County, and he still hadn’t gotten used to the idea that we might leave New York someday.
My mother sat in the chair, staring blankly at a picture frame on the mantelpiece as if she was trying to remember where we’d come from and where we should go. I kept wondering how I’d live without my sister-in-law, my niece. She’d always been such an important part of my life.
But we had to move on. I’d promised myself we’d find a better way.
I took another sip of coffee—my first for the day—and looked out the window at the snow that covered everything outside. I’d heard people say winter was beautiful, but all I saw were drifts of gray and brown that made it impossible to see beyond my front gate.
“You know,” Dad said, “we’re very lucky. You don’t need to feel sorry for yourself.”
“What if I want to? Do you think it’s fair that I get hit by a car crossing the street, then a week later my best friend is murdered in our own home? I’ve seen enough evil, and I’m sick of it.”
“I understand, honey,” Mom said. “It must have been hard for you.”
“And for my son, too. Did you miss your chance when you shot him in the shoulder?”
My mother winced, her face reddening with anger. “That was not my fault! Don’t you dare talk about—”
“No more,” I snapped. I pushed back from the table. “We can’t keep having this conversation every time we sit down to eat. We need to figure out where to go next, and how to make it a place we want to stay. And then maybe we can try again to forget the past.”
“Your mother means well, dear, but we’re going to die in this house.”
I stood, clenching my fists. “Maybe you’re right, Dad. If you think it’s a bad idea to live here anymore, I won’t argue. But I can’t help it, no matter how much I wish I could.”
“Then we’ll move,” he said softly. “I promise you that.”
We spent the next few hours looking at houses and found three that suited us: two on the coast of Maine and one along the shores of Lake Michigan. We’d never vacationed anywhere other than New York, but the more we saw, the more we fell in love with the state of Maine.
The mountains were just what I needed after losing all my closest friends, and they promised something more than safety. I’d always craved a sense of freedom and adventure, a way to break free from the things I couldn’t control—like my brother and his twisted ideals.
Maybe it was too much to hope that we could finally put the whole thing behind us, but now that we’d moved from New York City to New England and started building a new life for ourselves, I thought we might actually be able to start over and leave all of it far behind.
The second week of January rolled around, and my mother insisted we go shopping so that she could buy a present for my niece’s birthday party, which would happen the following weekend. I stayed close to Mom the entire time as we browsed through the local mall, searching for anything small enough to fit into a box and carry home in a suitcase.
We stopped in at the toy store first to look at Barbies and trucks. Then we went back to the shoe department and tried on heels before deciding on boots.
As we wandered through the mall, Mom’s smile began to fade. Her shoulders drooped; her eyes lost focus. I knew we both felt guilty knowing we wouldn’t get a chance to say goodbye properly to my sister-in-law and niece. But we also knew it wasn’t possible. They weren’t coming back.
Mom turned toward me suddenly, her expression desperate. “Do you want to see them, Rachelle? Can you handle seeing them again?”
A lump formed in my throat when I looked down at the little girl. She smiled sweetly at me when she spotted me sitting on the floor near the shelves of dolls and teddy bears. “Is she pretty?” she asked, turning to her mom with an expectant gleam in her eyes. “Can I take her home with me?”
“Of course, baby.” My father crouched beside us. He picked up the doll, kissed its cheek, and handed it to the young girl who clutched it in her arms like it was already hers. “She’s very pretty, isn’t she?”
I nodded and watched as the child examined the doll carefully, running her fingers gently over the tiny white dress and soft pink bow. “She’s pretty,” she repeated happily.
“How about you, sweetheart?” my dad asked. “Do you like her?”
“Yeah,” she nodded seriously, her attention focused on her new toy.
My parents walked slowly away, leaving us alone on the floor for a moment. “I want you to remember your aunt,” I told the girl.
“You know why she had to go?” The questions came fast now. “Did she get mad at you? Did you do something wrong?”
“She was sick, sweetheart. Really sick.”
“I didn’t mean to make her angry. I just wanted to play, that’s all. You can’t tell me it’s all my fault.”
Tears filled her eyes, and she stared at the doll in her lap. She held on to it tightly now, and I could feel it in my bones that the little girl had no intention of letting go. When my parents returned a couple minutes later, carrying a small backpack full of clothes and toys, the girl ran across the store to them and threw her arms around them, burying her face in her mother’s neck.
They left the toy store soon afterward, and I watched as the two of them walked out of the mall, arm in arm, talking quietly. There was a part of me that wondered if I would ever understand how people could let their children suffer and not fight for them; but another part of me understood better than most that sometimes, there wasn’t any choice.
The End