I Mean You No Harm

by Beth Castrodale

  “I’ve got shower shoes in the trunk. You can borrow ’em if you want.”

  Shower shoes? Layla never knew such things existed.

  “I’ll just wait until I get home.”

  “Smart move. That’s what I’m doin’.”

  Her hands now raw, but clean, Layla looked to the hand towel on the wall bar. Though folded and bleach-white, and from this angle pube-free, she didn’t trust it. She wiped her hands down the front of her jeans.

  “Another smart move,” Bette said.

  Bette washed her hands almost as thoroughly as Layla had, then wiped them on her jeans. Just as she finished, a knock sounded at the door.

  “I got it,” she said, stepping past Layla to the door. She turned a steely eye to the peephole, then opened the door to the smell of pizza. After paying the delivery guy, she set the pizza box on her bed and opened the lid.

  Layla devoured her first piece of pizza. Halfway through the second one, she became distracted, once again, by the sound of Vic’s voice.

  “He’s been on the phone a long time. You think it’s with one person?”

  Bette lowered the piece of pizza that was on the way to her mouth. “You really can’t let go of this, can you?”

  “Well, it’s kind of hard to ignore. And it’s pretty disturbing.”

  Bette shrugged. “Welcome to my world.”

  “This happens a lot?”

  “Not a lot, but enough.”

  “Why?” Bette fixed her with another scowl. “Didn’t I tell you I have no fuckin’ idea?”

  Layla couldn’t help herself. “Not even a clue?”

  Bette swallowed another bite of her pizza and set it aside. “My sense of these situations—and it’s only a sense—is that some shit went down. Emergency kind of shit that can’t wait to be dealt with.”

  “What do you mean by shit?”

  “Something to do with Dad’s business. And don’t ask me another question about what that is.”

  Layla wasn’t hungry anymore. She set down her unfinished slice and considered another question, the hardest one of all. The one she almost didn’t want an answer to.

  “Are people getting killed because of him?”

  Bette didn’t answer right away, worrying Layla. “Dad hates the sight of blood.”

  That didn’t feel like a no to Layla. Why was Bette always covering for him? “That’s really reassuring—thanks.”

  Bette sat up, tense, like a trap that might spring. “Maybe you should stop asking questions if you don’t like the answers. Anyway, who says it’s any of your fuckin’ business?”

  Because he’s my father, Layla thought. Except that he wasn’t. Not in the ways she always wanted to think of fathers. This brought another wave of anger.

  “Everything you’re saying, everything you’re not, it just makes me even more certain that he’s involved in some really bad stuff. Bad enough that he can’t take calls when we can hear them. Bad enough that he has to lock himself in a room, away from us. During this so-called family vacation.”

  Vic had never called this a family vacation, not to Layla. But still.

  “Yeah? So what?” Bette closed the pizza box, shoved it aside. “Why do you care?”

  Layla had almost forgotten that Bette was bigger than her, and no doubt stronger. Now she remembered, and felt her courage fading. “I don’t know—it’s scary. It’s dangerous.”

  “Really?” Again, the smirk, and a laugh. “For me? For Dad? Nah. We can take care of ourselves, thank you very much. You know who’s got the problem?”

  Layla guessed the answer, correctly.

  “You. For thinking that being a good girl will make you immune from all the horrible shit in the world.” Bette studied her in disgust, as if she was an extension of the bathroom floor. “How’d that work out for your mom?”

  A charge rolled through Layla, and she sprang for Bette, aiming to take her down. But Bette got her by the arms, then the wrists. She pushed her back, pinning her to the bed.

  Layla twisted her body left and right, tried to kick her trapped legs. “Let me go!”

  Bette was smiling—delighted, it seemed.

  Layla wriggled even harder, but Bette only tightened her hold.

  “Let me go, you fucking bitch!”

  Bette swayed back, freeing her, still smiling. “Good!” she said. “That’s just the badass kind of shit you need to say.”

  Layla scrambled from the bed and backed away from Bette, wishing she could step back into her old life. Bette was crazy. Maybe Vic, too. Maybe that was the whole problem with them.

  Layla needed to get out of here, but how? It was still pouring outside, and she had no idea where or how to catch a bus. And she had how much money in her backpack? A five-dollar bill and some change? Not enough to get her anywhere.

  She went into the bathroom to pee and think, unsuccessfully. By the time she got out, Bette was stretched out on her bed, watching TV and smoking, acting as if Layla didn’t exist.

  Good.

  Layla crawled into her own bed, turned her back to Bette, and pulled the sheet up, over her head. She half-listened to the stupid jokes on some sitcom, then to detective talk on a cop show, unable to sleep. Though it was early summer, the room was cool and damp, and the sheet wasn’t enough to warm her, to help her relax. Then her mind started running.

  Her grandparents hadn’t told her much about how her mom had gotten killed, or about who they thought might have done it. They said Vic had an “excuse” that they didn’t want to get into. But from the sound of him on the phone, he was mixed up with bad guys. Maybe the kind he couldn’t control.

  Then her thoughts turned to Bette. How did Bette know her mom was a “good girl”? Was that just a guess, or did Vic talk about her with Bette? Right now, that felt like a betrayal.

  One of her last thoughts, before she finally drifted off, wasn’t a thought but a picture: a picture of the blue tarps. Were the lumps beneath them bodies? Bodies curled up like hers was, as the rain pounded down?

  From the television, a woman with a slow, low voice was singing of “sweet, steady darkness.” Sweet, steady darkness, bound for me.

  As the singer wound down, Layla felt something blanket her feet, then her middle, then her shoulders. She was too tired to check out just what. In a minute, the room went silent, then dark, and soon after she fell asleep.

  In the light of morning, she found a pair of jeans on her feet, a flannel shirt across her middle, and a hoodie over her shoulders: Bette’s. She didn’t thank Bette, nor did Bette say she was sorry for how she’d acted the night before. The best way to describe the almost-silent remainder of their time together—the packing up, the drive-through breakfast with Vic, the ride home—was a truce.

  And Vic didn’t force conversation on them, or between them. Maybe because he’d heard them fighting and didn’t want to reignite the conflict, which he probably hadn’t anticipated, and which was surely the opposite of what he’d wanted. Maybe because he didn’t want to invite questions about his own evening and phone calls. Two things seemed certain, from the silence; from the tension that pushed the three of them apart, into separate bubbles; from the way Vic could barely look at Layla the whole way home: this trip had been a huge mistake, and Layla would never have a real talk with him, about her mother or anything else.

  Her last physical connection with him was the half-hearted pat he gave her leg, before she climbed from his car. If, in the following weeks and months, he sent another letter to the P.O. box, she didn’t know. She never went back to it and threw out the key.

  Now, from the passenger’s seat of Bette’s truck, Layla considered how she’d never responded to the occasional birthday cards that Vic had sent in the years following the road trip. As for Bette, when Layla discovered, several years back, that she was on Facebook, she poised her finger over th
e “Add Friend” button, then withdrew it. What was the point? she thought.

  Layla looked to Bette, tried to smile. “I appreciate your apology.” She’d given up thinking it would come.

  Bette took a swig of her water, put it back in the cup holder. “I was jealous of you, Layla. Even though you lost your mom, your life seemed so much more normal than mine. You had two grandparents who seemed to love you, and who were making sure you were going to school, staying out of trouble. That’s what I gathered, anyhow.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much true.”

  Layla was well aware of Vic’s faults as a father, and from what her Grandma Alice had told her in the years following the road trip, Bette’s relationship with her mother had been strained since Bette had been “old enough to walk and talk.” Apparently, after getting into a run of trouble in school and beyond, Bette had drained her mother’s last store of patience and been sent to live with Vic. “As if that would make things better,” Alice had said.

  “Well,” Layla said to Bette, “I wouldn’t blame you for being pissed at Vic.”

  “Oh, I went through years of being pissed, at both my parents. And I made them well aware of it. But you gotta move on, you know? Especially when you become a parent yourself.”

  As far as Layla could tell, Bette was a big improvement over Vic in the parenting department.

  Bette glanced her way, smiling. “Okay, your turn. Got any big confessions you wanna make?”

  What came to mind wasn’t really a confession, and it didn’t have anything to do with Bette or Vic. But it was big in Layla’s mind, and she wouldn’t mind picking the security-guard side of Bette’s brain.

  “Yeah. But I gotta pee. And I’m pretty hungry.” It had been a long first day on the road, hours since lunch. “What about you?”

  “Yes on both counts. There’s a GFL exit straight ahead.”

  GFL: Bette’s abbreviation for gas-food-lodging.

  “Let’s do it.”

  Chapter 8

  Fries and Sympathy

  Bette squeezed more ketchup next to her fries, closing in on another sisterly similarity: the two-to-one fry-to-ketchup ratio that Layla always observed. “Are there return addresses on the packages?”

  “Nope. The only sign of where they came from is the postmarks. Three of them were from different spots in Northern Kentucky. One came from Columbus, Ohio.”

  “Hmmm. He’s either on the move or wants to keep you guessing.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Layla said. She only wished the packages had come from farther away.

  “And there’s some handwriting?”

  “Yeah, in the notes inside. It’s really neat and blocky, like an architect’s writing. But the mailing labels are always printed from a computer.”

  Bette mopped some fries through her ketchup and downed them. “The handwriting might not make that much of a difference, unless some suspects are identified. But if that happens, it could help narrow things down.”

  Bette had been honest, and self-deprecating, about her qualifications to assess the situation with Layla’s mail stalker: an associate’s degree in criminal justice and an “endless appetite” for CJ textbooks, as she called them: part of a desire to pursue more-advanced degrees, eventually. But, so far, she was coming up with some smart questions, and answers.

  “Okay. Remind me again of the contents?”

  Layla ran through the list.

  Package one, which had arrived about six months ago: a color print-out of her painting The Woods, one of her attempts to deal with the loss of her mom through her art, and the only one she’d felt comfortable entering in a show. The stalker had pasted onto the painting a tree that he’d roughly cut from a photograph—a tree that reminded Layla of her Grandpa Roy’s arthritic hands. From the ground, its trunk angled right, then curved left, then thrust twisting, gnarled branches in all directions. With the defiled painting, the mail stalker included an article about the show that The Woods had been in, with this quote from Layla highlighted: There’s something more than an absence where my mom is concerned. I’d call it a void. With this painting, I was trying to deal with that void. In a sticky note next to the quote he’d written, Nature knows no voids, Dear Heart.

  Package two, from three months ago: a postcard of a Playbill from Cats, with its feline stare, and an “I love musicals” magnet and notepad. A pencil drawing appeared on the first page of the notepad, heavy-lined and spare but not bad, really: a head-and-shoulders portrait of a woman with shoulder-length, banged brown hair and glasses. Layla, it seemed. The portrait looked like the photo of her that had appeared in the article about the show.

  Package three, from two months ago: a plastic case of watercolor cakes, with a brush. Inside the case, a second rendering of the portrait, done in watercolor. Was he trying to show off his artistic talents? Gain her approval?

  Layla squirted more ketchup next to her fries. “I’m pretty sure he found out about me through the show, or the article about it.” The thought that he might have been in the audience of the show’s panel discussion, the main focus of the article, chilled her. “But I’m not sure why he got so obsessed with me, in particular. There were six other artists in the show, and four of them were featured in the article.”

  Bette shrugged. “Maybe you remind him of someone he’s felt some connection to, or got dissed by. Or maybe he just likes the way you look.”

  The fries Layla had just swallowed felt like a lump on the way to her stomach. She wouldn’t be eating any more of them.

  “Did this show have some kind of theme?”

  “Yeah. It brought together work by artists who’ve had to cope with violence in some way. There were victims of rape, assault, gun violence, and also a war veteran. The name of the show was ‘Reckonings.’”

  Bette drained her Pepsi and sat back. “Sorry to say, there’s people who get off on that kind of stuff.”

  Layla sipped her ginger ale, hoping it would calm her newly unsettled stomach. Then a motion to her right distracted her: a young mother lowering a toddler into a highchair at a nearby table. The mother noticed Layla and smiled. Layla smiled back.

  She tried to remember what she’d meant to say next. All she felt was frustration. “I just can’t figure out how this guy got my home address. I mean, I have a fairly minimal online presence: my artist’s website, and some Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram postings, which are pretty infrequent.” Social media wasn’t any fun for her. She used it mainly to get word out about showings of her art. “I try not to share any really personal information.”

  All she had on her website was a brief bio, email contact information, news about shows and other events, and an abbreviated portfolio of her work. She figured the stalker had printed his copy of The Woods from the portfolio.

  Bette wiped her hands with her napkin and tossed it on her plate. “Do you know about people-finder websites?”

  “I’ve heard of them.”

  “Well, it’s surprisingly easy for them to gather addresses and phone numbers from voter rolls and other records. Sometimes, you don’t even have to pay for this stuff. But let’s start closer to home. Can you think of any old boyfriends who might be capable of this? Or anyone else—a co-worker, or maybe another artist—who’s given you the creeps?”

  Layla hadn’t dated anyone seriously since she and Cooper broke up, nearly three years ago, and things with him had ended amicably yet definitively. Before and after him, most of her connections with men had been fleeting, unremarkable, or both.

  The only stalkerish figure who came to mind was the young man from the adult-ed course she’d taught a couple of years ago. He began by lingering after class, asking her questions that had little or nothing to do with the subject of the course: figure drawing. Then, toward the end of the class, he asked her out once, twice. Both times she turned him down. But that had been a long
time ago, and the stuff in the packages didn’t really match his personality. It seemed to come from an older and more diabolically savvy person. Dear Heart.

  “Not really,” Layla said.

  Bette was turning the saltshaker, looking lost in thought.

  “Those weren’t the only packages. I got another one, just last week.”

  She described its contents: black, elbow-length gloves and three pairs of faux silk thongs in black, orange, and gold. And this message in the neat, blocky writing: These match your palette nicely, no? She had no single palette; he seemed to be picking up on the main colors from The Woods. Once Layla had finished describing the package, Bette wiped a hand along her jaw, then lowered her head. She stayed silent for so long that Layla was starting to worry. Then Bette raised her head, turned a hardened, security-guard look on Layla.

  “Wanna hear my two cents? I should warn you, it’s not gonna be pretty.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I worry this guy’s gonna ratchet things up rather than just fade out. I mean, he’s gone from sending you fairly impersonal things, like that musical stuff, to underwear. And I don’t like that he’s messing with something so central to you, your art. That’s an intrusion, or worse.”

  Bette had spoken a truth that Layla had been carrying for months, but to which she’d put no words, not even to herself. Now these words, this truth, brought on a feeling she’d always done her damnedest to fight, in every situation life had thrown at her: helplessness. This feeling brought rage—and tears.

  “Hey.” Bette reached across the table and took Layla’s hand. “I’m with you on this, okay? We’re gonna figure something out. Together.”

  Layla gave her eyes a hard wipe with her napkin and tried to collect herself. “I appreciate that. But right now, I feel like there’s nothing to do. Like this creep has all the cards.” She wondered whether the guy at the diner had ever made her mom feel this way. Did drawing him take away any of his power, or just make it seem stronger, more present?

  Bette tightened her hold on Layla’s hand. “That’s exactly how he wants you to feel. He wants you worrying about him constantly, imagining who he might be, and why he’s doing what he’s doing, what he might do next—and when. That’s his whole M.O., Layla, and he’s getting off on the power of it.”