“Mom thought you might need back-up.”
“Did she now?”
“Pretty incredible, what you’ve done.”
Cornelius doesn’t say anything. Regina had been right. Not all problems could be tackled head on.
He and Drew sit quietly in Ana’s room. No need for chatter.
The knock comes at 9:19.
Emma is upstairs by 9:24.
The police arrive by 9:33, the social worker and an EMT fifteen minutes later. They talk to Emma alone for a spell before bringing her downstairs.
“We can take you to a shelter,” the social worker says. She looks at Cornelius. “She’ll be safe there.”
Cornelius shrugs. “Whatever Emma wants. We have a spot for her here.” He turns to the figure huddled by the window. “Emma, we’d love for you to stay.”
#
I watch the police cars pull away from the curb, my husband’s head a dark silhouette in the rear seat. I don’t feel scared or vindicated or resentful. I feel numb.
They want me to go to the hospital to document my injuries, and Regina and I are heading there now with the social worker. Then I think I’ll come back here. I touch the phone Cornelius gave me and relish its connection to the outside world.
“You’re lucky,” one of the officers says. He rattles off statistics.
I glance at Cornelius, who is sitting at the kitchen table without his cane, without his walker. Papa Stone, I overheard his son call him earlier. It fits, although not for the reasons he might think.
# # #
SMOKEHOUSE
By Shane Gericke
August 30
U.S. Special Forces Command
Fort Bragg, North Carolina
“Teeeeee,” my wife puffs as the sun slides below the horizon, washing our bedroom with a tangerine afterglow that would be pretty if it wasn’t for the chance it might be her last.
Groggy from months of sleep deprivation, I roll off our king-sized bed and walk toward her home-hospice twin. I slam my middle right toe on its left rear wheel. It’s the same toe I banged last week because turning on lamps even at twilight burns her eyes like road flares. I bite back my yelp so as not to alarm her . . .
“Teeeeee,” she puffs again, eyeballs bouncing wildly in her sunken sockets, white, brown, white, brown, white.
I limp for her iced tea, which is “iced” in name only because cold hurts her wounded teeth. As I swirl the sponge-on-a-stick through the amber liquid—we rotate through water, tea, and ginger ale depending on mood and moment—I mentally add the “Would you please get me some . . .” she would normally have included. Alex Delaney is the most considerate person I know. But she’s so exhausted now she has energy to puff only a few words at a time.
I paint her mouth and tongue with the room-temperature tea. Her lips, shrunken to inchworms from the GI system shutdown that began six weeks ago, curl with gratitude.
This is cancer.
This is love.
Night replaces dusk. I look at the clock. Ten. Her family is two hours late. I purse my lips and slowly exhale. I should have known they would blow her off—fool me once, et cetera. I’d held off delivering the narcotics because Alex wanted clear-headedness when they visited. But I can tell from the muscle jerks under her skin the pain is getting fierce.
I empty a syringe of morphine into her mouth. She conks out with a muttered sigh. I limp back into the king and roll next to her metal side rails, which hold her urine bags. I take her crabbed hand. Like her other palsied limbs, it trembles like a Frigidaire on its last legs. I fight off the anger that overcomes me, then lay my head onto the blanket bunched at the bottom of my mattress. My toes caress the walnut headboard that once held our heads in tandem.
I’m reversed so I can study Alex’s oval face, which is crowned by a starched white pillow anchored to a forty-five-degree mattress. The steep angle is necessary to prevent the cancer fluids in her stomach and esophagus from backwashing into her lungs and drowning her. This is what I think about when she’s asleep—the things I need to anticipate to keep her alive one more day. Along with what I’m going to lay on Bailey Perkins, her brother, for stabbing his baby sister so many times that Jack the Ripper would be jealous. I have many ideas for Mr. Perkins, none pretty. But I need to find him first . . .
I survey our bedroom, which is unusually large and airy for Fort Bragg. Then again, the colonel that commands Delta Force loves me and Alex, so he gave us one of the better houses on the base. It’s unusually cool for August, so the air conditioning is off and the windows open. We prefer fresh air to conditioned, so taking advantage is nice. I hear crickets, frogs, and the rapid-fire quack-quack-quack of an unidentified something in the trees—bird? Bug? We always meant to record it and ask an expert, but never found the time. We thought there’d always be time.
I feel the distant thumps of late-summer basketballs on cracked asphalt driveways. I listen to the ins and outs of Alex’s breath. It’s Saharan, her breath, and crackles from the potions I drip into her mouth and patch onto her skin to keep her comfortable. She breathes. She stops. I count the seconds: Three. Six. Seven. I heave off the mattress and begin the familiar runaround to the head of her bed, my adrenaline gushing . . .
She breathes.
I stagger back—she’s still alive. Our time has not yet ended. It will, and soon: the oncologist made that clear. But sitting on a cliff and dangling from its narrow, wind-swept edge are two separate things. Now there are three seconds between each snoring breath. Occasionally, it kicks up to five. One time it hit thirty seconds, prompting my first frantic rush—and my original busted toe—then dropped right back to three.
Ding-dong.
Sighing, I throw on my boots and trundle for the door. Her sister Doris called last week, asking me if four of the nine siblings could visit. I said yes on the condition they were not to hurt Alex. Doris’s promise sounded sincere, so I told the MPs to meet them in the parking lot and bring them to our house. I really hoped I wouldn’t regret my decision, but two hours late was already pushing my buttons.
“They don’t sell clocks in your time zone?” I snap as I open the door.
“I’m sorry we’re so late, Mr. Delaney,” Doris says as the other three nodded. “But an accident blocked the highway and we had zero bars on our cells.” Her frustration is real. “Is it too late to come in?”
“No, it’s not too late. The question is, do you really want to?” I say.
“Yes. We love her,” Doris says firmly. “She’s dying. We want to say goodbye.”
“There’s a lot of broken road between you and her,” I pressed, adding menace to my voice. I’m very good at menace, having had lots of practice. I’ve spent my entire adult life in the Army, most of that in combat zones.
Doris looks at me without fear. “Roads can be mended.”
I survey the group. “Mom and Dad?”
“MIA,” Arthur says.
“Rest of the sibs?”
“They chose our parents,” Jake says. “We chose Alex.”
“We can’t change what happened, Mr. Delaney,” Lizbeth says. “But we’re here now, and we’ll be with her as long as she wants us.”
I nod. Doris, Arthur, Jake, and Lizbeth are not Psycho Bro Bailey. But as one of our Presidents said, “Trust, but verify.”
“I understand your conflicted feelings,” I say as I walk them through the slate-blue living room that displays Alex’s hand-painted landscapes. She’d been pricing commercial space in Fayetteville with hopes of opening a gallery, but the bastard’s knife ended that dream, one of the many mortal sins in my mental Book of Bailey. “You grew up with Alex as your brother.”
“But you met and married Alex years after her transformation surgery,” Doris says. “You know her only as a woman.”
“Full and loving, with everything that implies.” I smile in remembrance. “If she hadn’t told me when we started getting serious, I wouldn’t know to this day.”
“She’s hot, all r
ight,” Arthur says. Doris glares. “Hey,” Arthur says, laughing as he holds up his hands. “You showed us the photos she sent, Sis. Unlike my plug-ugly self, she could be a runway model.” He looks at me. “No offense meant, Mr. Delaney.”
“None taken,” I say. “She’s my dream come true—pretty, smart, funny, devoted, and puts up the long absences my job dictates.” I stop the group at the stairs to the master bedroom. “Speaking of job, you know what I do for a living. I can and will hurt anyone who disrespects her, and I don’t mean just your feelings. Clear?”
All four nod.
“Good. Then let’s go see Alex.” I hesitate one final time, then think, What the hell, they’re making the effort. “Please drop the mister and call me Pig. All my friends do.”
“Thanks for that,” Doris says with a relieved smile. “Pig.”
“Thank you for coming. Seeing you will mean the world to her. Me, too.”
“I really want to be here,” Jake says, lightly tapping his fist in his palm, like he’s keying up for the kickoff. “It’s time I faced my . . . sister.”
That brief hesitation sets off a hum in my lizard brain, but only a small one. So, I lead them into the bedroom that Alex painted in her favorite color: a gentle yellow called “Old Straw Hat.” I hear soft gasps behind me, but to their credit, no cry-outs. I know how tough that is. Four months ago, I couldn’t have imagined this scene either. But it’s real. According to the MP investigators, Bailey called Alex and asked to visit. He swore he’d changed and really wanted to reconnect with his baby sister. I was on a dark op overseas, hunting ISIS, which prevented me from checking him out first, as my professional paranoia would have demanded. Alex was so overjoyed at the chance to have a brother again that she told the gate guards to send Bailey’s car to the house the moment he arrived.
She ushered him in with a smothering hug, cracked open a couple of beers, and they drank to fond memories. Alex hadn’t lost her male instincts with the transformation, she just allowed her female ones to come out and play. She enjoyed hunting, fishing, shooting, and poker with the guys, along with knitting, book-club, school activities, and wine and gossip with the gals—with an egalitarian vice-versa for whoever was game. Her real passions were painting and helping new military families adjust to life at Bragg, which let her get to know practically everyone on the sprawling base. Bailey finished his beer, asked for another, and when Alex turned to get it, he crunched her skull with a blackjack.
When she finally blinked awake, she was tied to our bed with harness straps, arms straight out and legs together and down, as if on a cross. Blood hissed and burbled from the hundred slits he’d already punched into her breasts, pubic region, and rest of her body with what the forensics lab identified as a knife with a very short blade. Alex told investigators that Bailey was raving about disobeying Father and Mother and God’s will and that “Alexander’s transformation into a woman was a sin” that he, Bailey, would fix by “carving Alexander back into my brother, the way God and our Father made Alexander.” Alex pleaded, cried, and begged me to save her, but I didn’t hear, nobody heard, because he’d fastened the gag so tight . . .
The doorbell rang. Bailey’s rants had gotten too loud. A neighbor heard something she deemed suspicious, and marched over to check. The bell rang again. Bailey, frightened, scrambled out the back door for his car. The bell changed to heavy pounding. Then the house phone chirped. Alex couldn’t move, tied as she was to the “cross.” It chirped again.
Ten minutes later, bellows of “Fort Bragg Police! Open up!” erupted, followed by the thunder of a door rammed off its frame. MPs flooded the house, followed by our heroic neighbor. They rushed my wife to Womack, the base hospital, whose combat-trained doctors stabilized her long enough to be airlifted to San Antonio, the U.S. military’s premier trauma center. Specialty surgeons did a fine job reassembling Alex—but they couldn’t fix the cancer tumors the CAT scans unwittingly discovered. They’d been growing for months before the attack, rooting like buckthorn and spreading like kudzu. The colonel ordered me home . . .
“Baby?” I say, shaking her awake. “Look who’s here.”
Alex’s eyes flutter open. “Jakey?” she puffs. “Doris? Is it really—?”
“Yes, it’s us,” Jake says, taking her hand. “How do you feel?”
“Over . . . joyed,” Alex says, her voice becoming almost strong. Adrenaline is a miracle drug. “How . . . are . . . you?”
“We’re fine, honey,” Doris says. “But we’re here to talk about you. We want to apologize for how we treated you. We were young and brainwashed by Mother and Father, but that’s no excuse. We should have found you after we were grown.” She shakes her head, tear flow already ruining her mascara. I offer a box of tissues. She plucks two.
“Not enough wise, not enough soon,” Lizbeth says, entwining Alex’s fingers into hers. “I know you can’t forgive us, but we just want to make your time as happy as we can.”
“I . . . forgive . . . you,” Alex says.
“You do?” I say, surprised, yet not. I’m jaded. She isn’t. Simple as that.
“I . . . dying . . . want . . . family . . . they . . . come . . .” She stops to pant, the effort wearing her out.
“Honey, rest a while, catch your breath.”
“Sleep . . . when . . . I’m . . . dead,” Alex says, eyes glinting slyly.
I snicker. The group bursts out laughing. Jake touches Alex’s collarbone.
“Remember when you got cancer the first time? You were a teenager,” he says.
“Yes,” Alex says, a wistful expression crossing her face. “Remember. Hospital.”
“Father drove you to the hospital, right. He paid the doctors out of his own pocket to make you well because we didn’t have insurance.”
“Yes, I know.”
“He didn’t understand how boys got breast cancer,” Jake says. “We were all confused. But the doctors explained boys got it too, it just wasn’t publicized as well as women’s breast cancer,” Jake says, his voice becoming a shade less friendly. I move in a little closer, wondering where this was going.
“Sure, Jakey, she remembers,” Arthur says, waving a hand in dismissal. “We all do. The important thing is, they cured her. So what?”
“So what?” Jake snaps. “So what is that Father paid to cure his son. Son. Cure Alexander. His son.” He puts a finger in Alex’s face, quick as a viper. “He’s ashamed of you, Alexander. We all are. We’re mortified by how you embarrassed our family by desecrating the body God gave you.” He stares at me with eyes aglow with hate. “Then you let this . . . pig rut you like a filthy—gahhhhhh!”
Jake might point like a viper, but I bite like one. I wrap him in an arm bar and break his left elbow. The snap reverberates like a gunshot, and I know from experience it hurts like a bomb going off. I put my boot in his knee, rupturing tendons. He screams in pain. I grab him by the scruff and belt and heave him through the bedroom window. Fortunately for him it’s open, so he gets only a face full of screen, not glass. He hits the ground with a meaty thump, screeching like a bear hit by a timber truck, which wasn’t far from the truth.
“Oh my God!” Doris cries as she leaps to her feet.
“I warned you,” I say as waves of anger crash around my ears.
“No, not you, Pig,” Arthur says. “Jake. We thought he was with us. He convinced us he was serious.” He shakes his head angrily. “Goddamn it. He screwed up what we wanted, which was to be here for Alex.” Who, at that moment, is weeping so hard she’s hiccupping. “Can we stay?”
“Are you braindead?” I rage. “Get the fuck out of our house.”
“Please, Pig,” Lizbeth pleads, taking my hands. I throw them off. “Jake was a Trojan horse. We didn’t know. The rest of us really want to be here. I swear on every Bible ever printed we’re here for your wife and our sister.” She takes my hands again. This time I keep one.
“No more bullshit?” I ask, stroking Alex’s hair and cheeks with the other as the stor
ms in my head ease slightly. “No more hurt? Cause if there is—”
“None,” Doris says. She turns to Alex. “Pinky swear.”
Miraculously, Alex manages to raise her arm and crook her right pinky. Doris hooks hers into Alex’s. They burst out laughing, then begin to cry, this time with affection, not fright. Arthur and Lizbeth hug my malnourished wife around them.
“Keep it gentle like that,” I say, finally breathing easy. “If she asks for tea, water, or ginger ale, it’s right there on the bed table. Use the sponges.”
I leave Alex to their tender mercies and walk outside. A Fort Bragg patrol car pulls up, lights flashing. Inside are two old pals.
“Everything all right, Pig?” the shotgun rider, Bronc, says as he looks at the twitching, crying lump on my lawn.
“This is Alex’s brother,” I say. “He came here seeking her forgiveness, then stuck it up her ass. I impressed upon him the error of his ways.”
“I’ll say,” the driver, Anders, says, admiring the busted screen and the odd angles of the brother’s arm and leg. “Toss him in the brig?”
“Nah,” I say. “Rest of the family’s inside visiting. They’re okay. Dump this POS by their car. They’ll collect him when they’re done.”
“Roger that,” Bronc says.
I bat my eyelashes. “You know how goosebumpy I get when SEALs pretend to be military.”
Bronc snorts. “Someone’s gotta be spit-and-polish around here. You D-boys sure ain’t, with your beards and civilian clothes and saucy mien.”
“Mien?”
He brightens. “You like that? I think it’s French for ‘Delta eats a bag of dicks,’ but I could be wrong.”
I laugh. Bronc is a Navy SEAL who broke his back rescuing American hostages from a Somali pirate ship. The Navy was going to retire him on medical, but I mentioned him to my boss, who offered Bronc an MP position at Bragg. Which is a more interesting gig than it sounds, because MPs here don’t just write speeding tickets or break up bar fights. They subdue and arrest Deltas, Rangers, and other Special Forces operators—in other words, America’s most highly trained professional killers—when they go rogue. Bronc also participates in the most cherished ritual in SEALdom—insulting Delta Force. Which was fair since we gave as good as we got . . .
Betrayed: Powerful Stories of Kick-Ass Crime Survivors Page 6