by C W Briar
Dina’s screaming ringback tone blared through the speaker until another text alert interrupted it. The new message read: plz dad.
Luke sighed. As usual, she was communicating only through text messages and refusing to speak over the phone. He typed: Where are you?
They waited through seconds that felt like minutes. Leah paced at the foot of the bed, her hands clasped against her chin, fear and anger swirling in her searching gaze. Luke remained in bed, clenching his phone, but he felt the same as she did.
The reply text appeared on his screen. “She’s at Thorne Park playground,” he said.
Leah hurried toward her dresser, but Luke gestured for her to stop. “No, no, I’ll go. She contacted me.”
His wife turned sharply toward him. “Luke, I need to help her.”
“What you need to do is let me handle this.” He rolled out of bed and hugged her. “Please, stay here with the other kids while I get her. In the meantime, try to stay calm and pray she’s safe.”
She puffed up and started to say something, then sighed. He was asking a lot of her. Of course she wanted to rush out to Dina’s aid, but he handled these situations better than she did. There was no telling how their daughter would react if Leah intervened.
Leah mouthed “Okay,” then bit her lip. Tears bled from her reddening eyes.
“Are you going to be ok?” Luke asked.
She stepped away from him and threw her arms up. “I don’t know, Luke. What have I done wrong?” Her voice wavered. “I mean, I’ve tried to bring her up right. I warned her about what a mess I made of my life at her age, you know, so she wouldn’t have to go through all the same mistakes. I thought she was smarter than this.”
“She is smarter than this, but smarts are not her problem.”
Leah’s expression hardened. “Go get her. And she is going to be in such big—”
He cut her off with his hand. “I said I’ll handle this, and yelling when she comes through the door won’t help.”
Luke put on a pair of jeans and fleece sweater, then made his way through the dark house. He checked on their son as he passed by the boy’s room. He was sleeping soundly by the glow of his nightlight. Luke likewise checked on their middle daughter, who was only a year away from joining Dina in high school. She too was fast asleep.
He navigated the barely lit stairs without issue, but en route through the living room, he crushed his toe against the leg of the sofa. The bones in his foot chattered against one another. Sucking air through his teeth, Luke withheld a cry of pain and limped to the garage.
The garage’s metal door rolled up with a hum. Cool night air rushed in and sapped what little warmth remained from the previous day. Luke put on his shoes, an act which heightened the throbbing in his foot, then slid into their SUV. As he started the vehicle, he noticed Dina’s rusted blue scooter just beyond the front bumper.
She used to ride that scooter for hours. It had since been handed down to her sister and then her brother, but they never smiled as widely on it as she once did. Now Dina stuck to her bike, which was missing from the garage. Again. He knew where she had ridden to. Her boyfriend, Liam, lived with his mother only a block from Thorne Park.
Luke backed out of the driveway and sped down the vacant suburban street. The night was submerged in a sea of churning fog, and the streetlights projected seemingly tangible cones of light in the mist. The only other glow came from his headlamps. The whole neighborhood was asleep save for the Shepherd family.
Please let her be all right. That thought, his dual-purpose hope and prayerful plea, played on repeat in his mind.
He sped down several residential streets and then, after rolling through another stop sign, turned onto Thorne Ave. A half mile later, he came to a hasty stop at the park. The beams from the vehicle’s headlamps reached only a short distance into the consuming fog, but it was far enough to illuminate the two-story playground. In the drifting mist, it looked liked a ship on the move.
A small figure was seated on the lowest platform, thighs clutched to her chest, chin resting on her bent knees.
Luke stepped out of the SUV, wincing when he put weight on his tender foot. He walked toward the playground. The night was silent, save the hum of a dim, faulty streetlight above the parking lot. Luke was halfway to the fog-shrouded figure before she coalesced enough for him to identify her.
“Dina?”
Still curled up, Dina raised her head and looked at him. She had been crying. Her tears had stolen from her dark, painted eyes and stained her cheeks.
“Dina, I’m here to take you home.”
She released her legs and swiped a forearm across her nose, sniffing hard. Without saying anything, she picked up her phone, slid off the platform, and righted her bike. She began to push it past him.
Dina’s unzipped, oversized sweatshirt exposed her outfit underneath. She was wearing a small pair of jean shorts and a black tank top with scrawled, misshapen hearts on it. The headlights and fog exaggerated the contrast between Dina’s pale face, darkened eyes, and tri-colored hair.
“Dina, talk to me. What happened?” Anger kindled within him. He already knew the answer; he only needed confirmation.
She stopped with the bike between them.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” That had practically become her catchphrase in recent years. “Can you just take me home?”
“Dina, tell me.”
Stronger, “Nothing happened.”
A teenager who sneaks out at night doesn’t ask for a ride over “nothing.”
Luke clenched his fists, then slowly opened his hands and released his caught breath. He drew out his plea. “Dina, just be honest for once. Did Liam hurt you?”
“No,” she snapped. “Liam has nothing to do with this. I just want to go home and go to bed, all right? I have a test in bio tomorrow morning.”
“That’s not important right now.” He tried to touch her shoulder, but she recoiled. “Did he hit you?”
Dina buried her gaze into her hip pocket. She mumbled, “No, he didn’t do anything like that.”
“Dina, please, just tell me. I know something’s wrong.”
“But you’ll freak.”
“No.” Anger flared up within him in anticipation of the imminent truth, but he kept it in check. “I need you to talk to me.”
She looked in every direction except toward his face. “He”—she briefly bit her lip—“asked, and I told him yes, but—”
Dina choked on the tears dammed up inside of her. “Then I just wanted it to stop, but it was too late. I made a mistake, okay?”
His anger surged into tenuously restrained fury. Luke’s lips twisted into a scowl, and his muscles tensed beneath his shirt. “Did he force himself on you?”
Dina’s head fell forward, and she began to wail. She shook her head with a hollow ‘no.’
“I need to have a little chat with him,” he growled. Thoughts of pummeling the punk into the floor played in the back of his mind. Luke started toward Liam’s house, but he heard Dina’s bike crash to the ground, and a hand grabbed his arm.
Dina pleaded through sobs. “No, it’s not his fault. I told him yes. I told him yes.” She gasped for air. “He doesn’t know I didn’t really want to go that far. I mean, I thought I did, but after …”
Her lips kept moving, but the words melted into incomprehensible moans.
All at once, Luke’s attention returned to Dina. Healing compassion overpowered his vengeful anger. Liam could wait. He wrapped his arms around his beloved daughter, her cold skin soaking up his warmth. She sobbed into his shoulder.
Dina kept her arms between his chest and hers. When she had regained her composure, she pushed out of his embrace and shuffled into the back seat of the SUV.
Luke collected her bike and secured it to the roof rack, wondering the whole time what to say or do. He considered confronting Liam in spite of Dina’s protest, but he settled on taking her home. Luke slipped into the driver’s seat and glan
ced back at her. Dina was resting her head against the side window and staring down the street. The only thing visible in that direction was an illuminated CLOSED sign. The fog blushed with its diffused red glow.
The sign belonged to a diner. “Are you hungry?” he asked. Dina didn’t reply, so he took the SUV out of park and pulled out onto the street. He drove slower now that the urgency had passed.
She said nothing. He could feel her retreating into the same pit of silence she had been hiding in for months. He glanced at her in his rearview mirror.
“Are you feeling any better?” he asked, inviting her to conversation.
Dina merely rolled her eyes, then texted someone with her phone. The screen’s blue glow illuminated her face and reflected off her nose and lip rings. He and Leah hadn’t been pleased when she came home with the piercings without asking first. She had insisted on keeping them so she could be unique, just like all of her friends.
Luke squeezed the steering wheel until his knuckles paled. His mind swung wildly between the past could-haves and future should-dos. What other options were there for getting her life on track? They had already tried grounding, rewarding, family retreats, long talks, short talks, restrictions, pleading, reprimanding, and apologies. All that remained was to release her to the hard schooling of repercussions.
They had warned her about Liam, and they told her she was being irrational. Each conversation had been met by the same expression now on Dina’s face: looking at nothing in particular, head listing to the side, lips in a taut, slight frown.
“Dina, if you ever just want to talk, your mother and I are willing to listen.”
Her eyes darted away in the rearview mirror.
“We’d understand more than you’d expect.”
The uncomfortable silence persisted.
Luke drove up their street. They would soon be home, together yet separated. He rummaged in his mind for a way to utilize their final moments, to make some connection before Dina could return to hiding between her earbuds. What should I say?
He reached back to reassuringly pat her on the knee, but she twitched away from him. With a voice as low, strong, and calm as he could muster, Luke said, “I love you, Dina. We love you. We’re here for you, and we want to protect you. We only ask that you open up to us, and stop resisting everything we do and say.”
Dina curled her legs toward her chest again. She flicked the window lever absentmindedly. “I don’t have anything to say.”
The light on their front porch emerged from the fog like a lighthouse beacon. A few seconds later, the rest of their house materialized. Luke pulled into their drive slowly, even coming to a brief stop before turning off the road, in order to give Dina more time to speak.
All he received was, “Don’t hit the bike on the garage.”
His daughter unbuckled her seatbelt and hopped out a moment before they came to a complete stop. Luke hastily turned off the ignition and joined her on her walk to the front door. He wanted to put his arm around her shoulder, and she needed an arm around her shoulder, but he did not. He could not. No good would come of it until she was ready for his embrace.
As they climbed the stairs together, she muttered, “umm,” then spoke. Her voice was soft and sweet, but her request struck him hard.
“Please don’t tell mom.”
Somehow, that was the most painful thing she’d said all night. Stop hiding, Dina.
He opened the door. “No promises, but I had kind of hoped you’d tell her yourself.”
The screen door crashed shut behind them, and Luke’s wife stepped into the entryway from the kitchen. She was as visibly distraught as when he left.
The moments that followed were an all-too-familiar pattern of strife. Leah greeted their daughter with love and relief mixed with disappointment and condemnation. She hugged Dina, who tolerated it for a few moments before shrugging her off. Leah offered tea as invitingly as she could, but the offer went ignored.
Dina marched past Leah and her deluge of questions. She headed up the stairs, toward her room and toward isolation. In response, Leah ordered her back to the first floor, then chased after her. Their lopsided conversation, which started out warm but salty, devolved into shouting through a slammed-shut bedroom door.
“You’re not the least bit sorry for what you’ve put your father through! Do you have any idea how much you’re hurting him? He drove out in the middle of the night to get you!”
“I wouldn’t have to sneak out if you let me have some fun once in a while!”
“We can’t trust you to go out when you’re secretly going to your boyfriend’s like some whore!”
“Shut up, mom!”
Back at the open front door, Luke Shepherd fell to his knees while the cold drifted in at his back. His shoulders rose and fell as he wept into his hands. Warm tears flowed between his fingers, and his deep, muffled sobs echoed in his palms.
There would be no peace or sleep that night, only sorrow. He wept for his beloved daughter, for the pain she continued to put herself through. He wept because he was helpless until she was willing to accept help. He wept because after the pain of that night had numbed and scarred, she would sneak out again, forgoing his love and wisdom for a world she couldn’t overcome, a feral world that cared nothing for her. He wept for all of the senseless tears and regrets she would needlessly endure.
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Thank you for reading my book. I hope you have thoroughly enjoyed it.
If you would like to show your support for me and my future writing endeavors, please take a moment to leave a review of this book at your favorite retailer’s website. Thank you.
C.W. Briar
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the support of my Kickstarter backers, who raised over $1,000 toward editing and printing costs. I am extremely thankful for all of them.
The following backers gave above and beyond the cost of the book.
Bonus Backers
Stacey Morshedi Paul Smith
Shawn & Patty Birchard Lindsay Franklin
Extra-Bonus Backers
Bradley Streeter Danielle Heidrich Scott Sasina
Chad Bowden
Karen Colegrove
Extra-Extra-Bonus Backers
Nikki and Charles Wasielewski Kimberly Kinsley Judith Morningstar Robert Rhoades
About the Author
C.W. Briar is the pen name of Charles Wasielewski. Briar grew up in woodland country near Barton, a miniscule town in Upstate New York. He currently resides near Binghamton, NY, the birthplace of Rod Serling and spiedie sandwiches.
Briar has an Industrial & Systems Engineering degree from Binghamton University. He has worked as an engineer on various helicopters, airplanes, and trains. His interest in theology and philosophy led him to earn his certification in apologetics through Biola University.
Escape from Wrath and Ruin, which is included in this anthology, became Briar’s first published story in 2012. His writing focuses on fantasy and sci-fi stories threaded with quiet, traditional horror. He has always had a fascination with toothy, dangerous creatures, both real and imaginary. That fascination is reflected in the monsters that inhabit this anthology.
Briar is married to his college sweetheart. They have three wonderful children, two adorable corgis, and a pair of fluffy chinchillas. The children are adept at making messes, the corgis shed everywhere, and the chinchillas raise ruckuses while the family is trying to sleep.
Keep up-to-date on Briar’s writing projects at www.cwbriar.com and on Facebook.
Amazon Author Page
Table of Contents
Escape from Wrath and Ruin
Lust
The Other Edge
The Case of Elizabeth Flora
Stargazing
Turpentine
Ghoul: A Gideon Wells Story
Wrong Number
The Parable on Thorne Ave
Acknowledgments
About the Author