The Wild Zone by Joy Fielding

bothering to resist as Dave’s hands pushed her head down toward his groin.
    She thought of biting down, then quickly banished the thought from her mind. He’d kill her for sure.
    Besides, it wasn’t enough to maim him. Not anymore.
    Now she wanted him dead.
    She thought she might have found the man to help her.

SEVEN
    T HE FIRST TIME JEFF tried to kill his brother, he was eight years old.
    Not that he had anything against Will personally. Not that he wished him any particular harm. Just that he wanted him gone. Will was always there, always the center of attention, his every cry heeded, his every wish attended to. The Chosen One. He took up all the space of every room he entered, guzzling up all the oxygen, leaving Jeff abandoned on the fringe, gasping for air.
    He was a colicky baby, and he cried often. Jeff used to lie in his bed at night listening to Will’s howls and feeling strangely comforted by the fact that, despite all the attention lavished on him, his brother seemed as miserable as he was.
    Except for one crucial difference: When Will cried, everybody listened, whereas when he cried, he was told to stop acting like a baby. He was told to be quiet, to lie still, and not to get up, even if he had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, because he might disturb the baby. And so he would lie there in the dark, his stomach cramping, surrounded by his stepmother’s meticulously hand-woven quilts that loomed up at him, like hostile ghosts, from every corner of the room. And then, one night he hadn’t been able to hold it any longer, and he’d wet the bed, and the next morning, his stepmother, the squalling baby wriggling in her arms, had discovered the still damp sheets and berated him, and Will had suddenly stopped crying and started gurgling, almost as if he understood what was happening and he was glad.
    It was at that moment that Jeff decided to kill him.
    He’d waited until everyone had gone to bed, then he’d crept into the nursery. Will’s hand-painted wooden crib stood against one pale blue wall, a mobile of delicate, brightly colored cloth airplanes lazily circling his head. Toys of all shapes and sizes filled the shelves on the opposite wall. Stuffed animals—giant pandas and proud ponies, plush puppies and furry fishes—sat everywhere along the soft blue broadloom. It was a real room, Jeff understood even then. Not just some makeshift space in a room originally intended for another purpose. Like his room, with its small cot pushed up against the plain, white wall. His stepmother’s former sewing room. Of course he was only supposed to be staying there temporarily. Until his own mother got her act together and came back to get him. Which couldn’t have been soon enough. At least that’s what he’d heard his stepmother confiding to a friend one afternoon, as they cooed happily over Will.
    Jeff had stood over his brother’s crib, watching him sleep, then grabbed the largest of the stuffed animals—a smiling, moss-green alligator—and covered Will’s face with its fuzzy, lemon-yellow underbelly. Will’s little feet had kicked frantically at the air for several seconds, then stopped, his lithe little body going suddenly, completely still, whereupon Jeff had fled the room. He spent the night cowering under his cot, terrified the quilted ghosts would come after him and smother him as he slept.
    The next morning, when Jeff walked into the kitchen, there was Will, sitting proudly in his high chair, banging on its tray with his spoon, and crying for his cereal. Jeff had stared at him in awed silence, wondering whether he dreamed the whole episode.
    He still wondered.
    Even now, more than two decades later, lying in the double bed he shared with Kristin, poised between sleep and consciousness, Jeff wondered. Not whether he was capable of killing. He knew the answer to that. He’d killed at least half a dozen men in Afghanistan, including one man dispatched at point-blank range. But that