by James A Ross
“Of course I forgive you,” Andrew said.
“Bullshit.”
Karen tossed the covers aside and strode unclothed and unselfconscious toward the mini-bar. Andrew stared after her, reminded of the line from Aristotle about a pretty face being the best ambassador. Despite the abuse she had put it through, his wife had somehow managed to preserve the body of a twenty-year-old. In rare moments of frank self-examination, Andrew wondered if he would have put up with half of her crap if she hadn’t. Watching her fondle a handful of mini booze bottles, he suppressed a familiar surge of frustration. “Don’t,” he said. “You’ll just make it worse.”
“I’m just having one.”
“Is that likely?”
Karen looked at him straight and wrung the cap from the bottle with a closed fist. “We have to talk.”
Here we go, he thought. You’ve had Group and Dr. Feelgood twice a week for a year, and now you’ve just had six weeks of it straight, twice a day. The psychobabble gets more polished with every rehearsal. But your behavior keeps getting worse. And now there’s a child.
“I’m listening,” he said.
Karen smirked and then opened her throat for an exaggerated gulp. “No, you’re not. Nothing I say or do gets through to you anymore. You’re numb. You don’t feel anything, you don’t see anything, and you certainly don’t listen—unless it’s about Maggie.” Andrew’s chin floated warily toward the horizon. “See?” said his wife. “Now you’re listening.” Andrew opened his mouth to protest and she stuffed it with, “You don’t love me anymore. You know it, and so do I.”
Andrew expelled a hiss of pent-up breath and asked, as if to a child who has done her sums wrong yet again, “Then what am I doing here? How many guys do you think would stick with someone through all this?”
“Oh, you’re a rock, all right,” she said. “Pride yourself on that. But somewhere along the way, you switched girls. You’re here for her now. Not me.”
Not somewhere, he thought, and his mind unprompted screened a tape whose every sad and scary frame he knew by heart:
Arriving home from work, he found Maggie tearing through the house in a filthy diaper, screaming for a mommy who wasn’t there. He tried to calm the hysterical toddler while he phoned the familiar round of police, hospitals and doctors. Father and daughter kept vigil at the front window into the evening. The child fell asleep in his lap hours past bedtime, waking finally to the sound of a car scything through the mailbox at the bottom of the driveway and her mother stumbling through the front door. The child ran to her mother and held onto her leg until almost the top of the stairs before losing her grip. Andrew stared frozen as the frenzied toddler hurled her tiny body again and again against the locked bedroom door, screaming for a mommy who either didn’t hear or didn’t care. Through the door, he could hear his wife on the phone with her latest doctor calmly asserting that she was not really sick at all and that she was not going to take any more goddamn medicine!
That was six weeks ago.
“Karen,” he said, his voice almost without expression. “It’s not a contest between you and Maggie. Kids her age are helpless. You’ve got to feed them, change them, play with them—keep them away from hot stoves. None of that is optional.”
“Mr. Mom!” His wife emptied another miniature bottle of booze into her glass. “You think you’re a better parent than me?”
“Frankly, I’m the only parent, Karen.”
“Not for long.”
Goosebumps erupted on the surface of Andrew’s arms and across the top of his scalp, heedless of the moist, tropical air. I guess we won’t be going snorkeling tomorrow, he heard himself think.
“I met someone,” Karen explained.
“In the bin!” The surge of incredulous anger took Andrew by surprise, but it made no visible impact on his wife. “Some crack-head biker?”
“A cop,” she said proudly. “And he’s only mildly depressed.”Andrew looked at his wife over the top of his glasses, wishing at that moment that she were wearing something more than just flaming nail polish. “You know the irony of it all is I did it for you.”
“What?”
“Motherhood. I did it for you…to keep you…”
“Right.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” his wife hissed. “You never have. I LOVED YOU!” she shrieked. Then she grabbed her crotch like a ballplayer, “But all you ever loved was this!”
That’s all you’ve left me to love, thought Andrew while the rest of his mind split and tumbled down a dozen different paths at once. ‘Can I afford to quit work and stay home? Can Karen get medical insurance on her own? Is my mother too old to come and help take care of Maggie until things settle down?’
Karen watched the play of emotions ripple her husband’s face. “Let me guess,” she said. “You’re thinking about me. About how you’re going to fight for me and win me back, no matter what.” HHHhhhh
Her husband sighed. “I don’t know what to think,” he admitted.
“I’m so surprised.”
A rumble of receding thunder filled the silence before he could respond. “What are your plans?” he asked, noting wearily the puzzled expression that was his wife’s only response. “You haven’t had a full-time job in over five years and your knight in shining armor is a patient in a psychiatric facility,” he explained. “What are your plans, Karen?”
His wife opened another mini-bottle and took a defiant pull. “We’re leaving as soon as Tom gets out.”
“We?”
“Maggie and I.”
Andrew Ryan’s throat clamped shut over lungs that fought to surge their way up and out.
“She needs her mother.”
“You’re joking,” he stuttered. “You’re not fit.”
“My doctor says I am.”
“When you lie to her! ‘Yes, doctor, I am taking my medication. No doctor, I haven’t had any hallucinations in quite some time’. And what happens when you crash and burn?”
“You’ll come to the rescue. That’s your role. Remember? ‘The Rock.’”
“I’m worn out with it, Karen.”
“Then you’ll come for her.”
Andrew sat hard on the rattan couch and waved a hand at his naked wife. “Put some clothes on, will you?”
“Oh.” Karen looked around as if there might be a suitable change of costume nearby. “I guess I thought we might be making a fresh start on our romantic weekend,” she said. “I thought I owed you one last chance, at least. You blew it, Mr. Perfect.”
The long-time lovers stared at each other, the one numb, the other uncertain but vaguely triumphant. Then the telephone trilled back to life. Andrew picked it up, and his face, which a moment ago had been flush with blood, drained abruptly and then slowly engorged again. “Jesus Christ!”The receiver pressed the side of his head and his free hand cupped the ear on the opposite side. “Get her to the Emergency Room!” Andrew whirled on his naked wife and, in a calm more menacing than fury, explained, “It’s the babysitter, Karen. Maggie found your ‘candies’ and ate them. What the hell was an open bottle of anti-psychotics doing in the nursery—on the nightstand—next to her bed?”
Karen Ryan did not respond, but the look on her face was chillingly familiar. Neither guilt nor fear, Andrew remembered it clearly from the very first time they met. “Oh, my god,” he whispered. “You left it there on purpose.”
***
Karen stared through the cottage window at the tow truck that was hauling away the wrecked rental car and at the men who had driven over the replacement vehicle and who were exchanging papers with her husband. Waves of nausea oozed through her pores in emulsions of heat and sweat. “Radio says there’s another one coming right behind this,” she heard one of them say. “You got maybe twenty minutes. Waiver says it’s your nickel for any damage if you get caught in it.” The brew inside Karen’s gut heaved suddenly and her legs propelled an unwilling head toward the bathroom. With her face half-buried in the toilet, she hear
d thunder begin to roll again. Then Andrew was standing in the doorway, the keys to the rental car squeezed through the side of his clenched fist.
“Do you have any idea how terrified Maggie must be?” he asked, in a voice that was no longer the patient instrument of reasoned persuasion she had come to resent. “Lying on a gurney, surrounded by strangers. One of them shoving a tube down her throat to pump her guts out, and no mommy or daddy anywhere near?” Karen gave him the deer-in-the-headlight mask, but nothing else. “You don’t, do you?”
“Kids are tough,” she blurted.
Andrew shook his head—not in disbelief and not in resignation, but finally and irrevocably, in dismissal. He hesitated for only a moment before pulling the door shut between them.
“Aaaan-Drew!”
The voice on the other side of the door was artic. “All those times you left her alone, Karen—scared, hungry, reeking in her own filth—how long is a day, when you’re two years old and Mommy has suddenly disappeared? Again.”
“AAAAA-Drew! There’s a SNAKE in here!”
“I can’t let you take Maggie, Karen.”
“AAAA-Drew! Don’t do this!”
“Can you feel now how Maggie must have felt? Can you imagine how she must be feeling right this second?”
“A-A-ANDREW!” Karen tried to stand, but the panic that inflated her lungs had also jellied her limbs. “I’LL GO MAD!”
Her husband’s voice was a frozen whisper. “But you can come back. Remember? ‘Any time you want.’”
A staccato rip of lightning plunged the cottage into darkness. In the silence between screams, the sound of spinning tires on crushed shell driveway masked the hiss of something close, but unseen.
“AAAAAANDREW!”
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A Note From the Author
I have two sons, close in age. When they were about to enter high school, their mother remarked, “My worst nightmare is that they’re going to fall for the same girl.” Voila! The idea for COLDWATER REVENGE was born.
Of course, COLDWATER REVENGE is not simply the story of sibling rivalry run amok, with a dead body thrown in for color. It’s a roman a clef of the place and people I grew up with. I wrote it, not to settle old scores (though there may be one or two zingers in there) but to capture in words a particular place and time, while there’s still time.
I hope you enjoy the Morgan brothers and the place and culture that made them. Because they’re coming back. COLDWATER CONFESSION, book two of the Coldwater series, is due out in April 2022. Watch out.
About the Author
James A. Ross has at various times been a Peace Corps Volunteer, a CBS News Producer in the Congo, a Congressional Staffer and a Wall Street Lawyer. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary publications and his short story, “Aux Secours,” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has appeared on the MOTH Mainstage, and is a frequent participant and several times winner of the live story telling competition, Cabin Fever Story Slam. His historical novel, HUNTING TEDDY ROOSEVELT, was published by Regal House Publishing in 2020 and is available wherever books are sold.
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https://www.jamesrossauthor.com
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