Rites of Extinction

by Matt Serafini

  Sorry, Jaime, she thinks and pushes it back. The waitress stares like her honor’s been insulted.

  “My fault,” Rebecca says. “I’m not feeling well.”

  “I gotta charge you for it.”

  “Of course,” Rebecca says. “Think I’ll go see about that motel.” She was going to try it anyway. Needs a place to stay, after all.

  Sometimes, diners are no help.

  4

  BRET ANSWERS ON THE FIRST ring.

  “Becks—”

  “Stop it,” Rebecca says. “And listen to me. I had one last night.”

  “One what?”

  “A dream. Memory. I don’t know . . . whatever you want to call it.”

  “That’s two different things. Apples and shit.”

  “I have some questions.”

  “So do I.”

  “Mine are more important,” she says.

  “This wouldn’t happen if you’d take your—”

  “Meds? Fuck you. Pills make me forget.”

  “Meds help you to think straight.”

  “I don’t want to do this every time we talk. I can’t.”

  A long pause follows. Rebecca doesn’t dare fill the silence because it’s not hers to take. That’s the agreement. Therapy was fuck all, except the first rule they happened to pull from it. This one. It wound up being useful.

  Listen before speaking.

  “Okay,” Bret says. A defeated sigh that’s still happy to be in communication. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Remember that night on the beach?”

  “Lots of nights on the beach.”

  “This was summer after senior year.”

  “I remember we spent time on the beach, sure.”

  “We were there with Sara and Ty. The more we drank, the naughtier things got? We wanted to screw in public and figured . . . the beach at night is public enough. Kept waiting for them to leave, but they wouldn’t.”

  Bret says, “No.”

  “Come on.”

  “Never happened.”

  “Oh, god, will you stop doing this?”

  “Becks . . . who the hell are Sara and Ty?”

  “I,” she starts, because at first the answer is obvious. Sara and Ty. Old friends. Rebecca’s head is packed with memories of them. And at exactly the same time, she recognizes that Bret’s right. It kills her to admit that, but she’s never met these people.

  They’re faces in a dream.

  “I can tell by the confusion in your voice that you don’t know them any more than I do.” His voice wears insufferable validation.

  “I’m not crazy.”

  “If you have to say it—”

  “Oh, fuck you.”

  “I’ll just add this call to the list, then.”

  “Keeping score?”

  “Keeping a log. Doctor said I should.”

  “Doctor.” The word makes her spit. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “The house is so empty,” Bret says. It’s his way of pleading with her to get help. “Each time the furnace comes on, I think someone’s in here with me. I pretend it’s you, you know. Makes me remember the noises the house used to make when you’d get home late from work.”

  Rebecca closes her eyes. It’s tempting to let him finish that story. There’s no time for comfort, though. No promises of better days coming back. “I need to go—”

  “Get rip roaring drunk?”

  “It’s the only way to stop the confusion.”

  “Is it really?”

  “Yes,” she says. It only slows things down, and she’ll take that. She’ll take whatever she can get.

  “Come on,” he says. “Just because you think it’s the only way doesn’t make it so.”

  “I’m going.”

  “Where?”

  “Just pulled into a motel.” She hangs up without telling him about the mirrors.

  5

  “YOU FIND THIS PIECE OF shit, you tell him he owes me for three nights.” The manager’s name is Brian or Ryan or something equally utilitarian. She forgets as soon as he says it and it doesn’t matter enough to ask for a refresher.

  Rebecca says, “You’ve seen him, then.”

  The guy behind the counter has more than just seen him. You don’t react this way when you’ve seen someone. The sight of Paul giving a smartass-y okay gesture with his fingers is enough to make this guy pop. His cheeks flare bright red like he’s gotten into the Maybelline.

  It’s understandable. Paul leaves scars. That’s what he does. And this guy’s wearing more than a few. Rebecca is picking a few of his scabs clean.

  “Are you listening to me?” he barks. “In forty years I’ve never rented to a kid—”

  “Twenty-two is hardly a kid.”

  “Oh, I see, miss. You’re looking to split hairs. I could tell just by looking at the bastard he was gaming the system. That work better for you? But, see, his license looked real and he was paying cash. Business is business at the end of the day.”

  “In forty years you never rented this place to anyone from the wrong side of the tracks?”

  “What do you mean this place?”

  Rebecca gives a look like Come on, man, look around you, but holds silent.

  The manager brushes it aside. “Could afford to be choosy before the freeway. Back then, people had to drive right through the center of town. Now . . .” he trails off and his eyes swing back to the photo on the counter. He lashes out and slaps it with the back of his hand, as if Paul is directly responsible for the motel’s economic misfortunes.

  Rebecca’s hands are stuffed deep inside her pockets. She watches his tantrum through bored, dispassionate eyes. Thinks, Just give me something I can use . . .

  Without lunch in her stomach, her head continues to throb.

  The manager finishes thrashing the photo and she takes it back, asks to see the room.

  “Better I show you,” he says. “Otherwise you’ll be back down here in five seconds asking me what happened to it.”

  “That would be fine.”

  “Ain’t touching squat in there until the insurance company gets its ass out here to look. I mean, Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick, you think they can fit me into their busy schedule?” He steps out from behind the counter and storms past, shoving through the office door without waiting for her to follow.

  Rebecca has to hurry to catch up. “So he was here for three days?”

  “Seven. Paid by the day. Except for the last three. Son of a bitch . . .”

  “He alone?”

  “Had a girl with him on a few nights. At least one.”

  The room’s directly upstairs. The manager uses his universal keycard to open it up. Then he stands aside, leaving Rebecca to enter alone. She hears the flick of a BIC lighter at her back. Erratic footsteps begin to pace the wooden landing, leaving her to take it all in.

  What a mess.

  Paul, she thinks, and finds a shark’s grin on her face. I’m close and I bet you don’t even know it. Her mind may be jelly, but there’s the one thing that stands out. Finding him.

  The smell is the first thing that strikes. She puts the back of her hand against her nose as she sweeps the room.

  Shattered mirrors. A small camping hatchet cleaved straight through the plasma screen, where only the metal hilt juts out from the center crack. Clothes are strewn everywhere. Some his. Some belonging to women. Also possibly his, she guesses, though her gut is suddenly adamant against that conclusion. He liked girls too damn much.

  How in the hell can you know that for sure? she thinks.

  More people than just Paul have been here. That’s the only way to explain the sheer volume of shit smears decorating these walls.

  It’s everywhere. Rubbed in long comet streaks. Splatters on the inside windows like exploded brown snowballs. It’s ground into the rug like hardened gum. Different shades of brown and green soil the ceiling, various colors and consistencies. You have to drink a lot of coffee and maw through at le
ast a dozen fast food value menus before your movements start looking this unhealthy.

  Understandably, this sight is the trigger for Mr. Manager, who remains planted on the porch, peering in to see if it’s really as bad as his memory. Oh, it is. He screams “fucking savages” without an ounce of regard for his other patrons.

  The shit has symbols carved in it. Each of these markings impressed by fingertip. Rebecca doesn’t recognize the language.

  “In there,” the manager says, half his tilted head visible. His limp wrist flicks toward the bathroom.

  “But all the shit’s out here,” Rebecca says dryly and then goes to check. The bathroom floor is coated in ash. Burnt paper crunches like fresh fallen snow. She braces herself for the worst as she leans over the tub. Even more ash. Mounds upon mounds of it. Nothing salvageable. Or readable.

  “You said he had a girl up here with him,” she calls. “At least one. Know who she was?”

  “Cassie Pennington,” he growls. “And I’d take the money out of her ass if her family had a pot to piss in.”

  “Then you know where they live.”

  “Ain’t gonna do you much good,” he says. “Crazy bitch has been under house arrest since . . .”

  “Since what?”

  “Christ,” he says, growing really irritated with her ignorance. “You don’t know?”

  Rebecca gives him her most exasperated face. She’s too tired, too miserable for this tête-à-tête.

  “Your missing person’s a bad guy,” he says.

  Rebecca thinks of Jaime lying on that slab, every shade of blue inside the crayon box and with half her face cut away. She mounts her hands on her hips because, yes, that’s obvious.

  “He and his jailbait girlfriend killed a few people.”

  “A few?”

  The manager turns his index finger downward. “Here in town,” he says. “Shit, that was a month back now.”

  That sounds impossible. How could she not know something like that? But the more she thinks on it, on her recent situation and the way the orderlies there tried to keep information from her, Rebecca realizes that anything’s possible.

  She’s got her phone. Researching won’t be hard, but what’s the point? What’s done is done. She’s just looking to mop up.

  “Give me Cassie’s address.”

  The manager gives general directions, says it won’t be hard to find because there’s nothing out that way and I mean nothing. Rebecca types it into her phone. “Appreciate your time,” she says, stepping back out into the frosty air. Her breastbone radiates more heat than a furnace in February.

  “Who hired you?” he calls from the landing above, still puffing smoke into the afternoon air.

  “Book me a room,” she says. “Be back later.” She gets into her car without answering the question.

  6

  REBECCA DRIVES OUT TO THE middle of nowhere and finds an old saltbox sitting in a field of tall grass. Warped wood, chipped paint, cracked windows. It’s old and dilapidated and to pass it from the road would make one think it’s been abandoned since the days when horse-drawn sleds carried people into town.

  Rebecca thinks the address has to be wrong. Thinks this because clearly nobody’s lived here for decades. Nobody seems to live out this way at all. She hasn’t seen another vehicle for miles. And the old Ford junker that sits beside the house up there doesn’t count, all rusted and nearly swallowed whole by eager grass.

  But then she catches a flicker in the window. A pulled curtain and, beyond it, a curious onlooker who stands in the form of a shadow peering out. The fabric falls back into place as soon as this person realizes someone’s out there, staring right back.

  Movement’s movement, Rebecca thinks. It emboldens her to turn in on the driveway and coast toward the rickety porch. The car buckles on unkempt terrain, dirt and stone, and once she reaches the house, she kills the engine and steps outside. The world around her goes silent with the suddenness of an off switch.

  Not so much as a single chirping bird or fluttering insect wing to score the afternoon. A crucified scarecrow with its back to her stands a silent sentry against the far-off tree line, a couple of hundred feet back. There’s no farmland here that she can see, which makes its presence, and direction, off-kilter and odd.

  The porch is even worse beneath her feet. Spots of softened, almost entirely rotted wood. It wobbles and bends under her boot heels. It takes six knocks on the door for someone to answer. A woman with a long face and an even longer cigarette perched between thin lips. She matches Rebecca’s age, roughly, and has the bored eyes of a housewife well beyond her usefulness.

  Rebecca empathizes with that empty gaze, but common ground’s short-lived. The woman spits a yellow glob of emphysema at her feet and says “What” without a trace of interrogation.

  “Cassie home?”

  The woman flings the door wide and shambles out. Leans in on Rebecca’s face, scrunching close enough to see her pores. “Hell you want her for?”

  “Questions.”

  “She hasn’t been out since . . . since the last time.”

  Rebecca lifts her hands in surrender, hoping to ease the tension before it goes airborne. “Just here to talk,” she says. “About . . . last time.”

  The woman backs off, retreats and leaves the door wide as she heads for the parlor off to the left. Hideous flower-patterned wallpaper runs all the way to the ceiling, where it peels at the corners, forcing a few of the larger flaps to lean downward.

  The woman says nothing more, points to the center staircase as she sits stoic on the garish couch. The cushions are so depressed she nearly falls through to the floor.

  Every step creaks like a rusty hinge. Gotta be impossible to sneak out of this place. The air in here’s thick, like breathing syrup. Cigarette stench lives inside everything, even the wood, and a thick sheet of resting dust is settled atop every surface. People live here now, but this place is already auditioning to be a haunted house.

  The girl who has to be Cassie Pennington stands in the doorway of her bedroom, smiling broadly as if she’d been posed there all day, just waiting for someone to come calling. Cassie’s jailbait so blatant you’d have to register as a sex offender just for looking at her wrong. A billowy nightgown clings to her curves, inviting gazes. An electric monitor is strapped to her ankle.

  Rebecca speaks first. “I’m—”

  “Don’t matter who y’are,” she says. Retreats inside her room and leaves the door wide open.

  This is what passes for manners in this house.

  Rebecca enters and stays against the wall, watching as the girl moves to the barred window across the way. She’s backlit there by enough sunlight to render her gown see-through.

  Cassie’s well built. Large breasts, wide hips, and a behind that curves like sculpted porcelain. Has the kind of pin-up look usually reserved for calendars that hang inside garages on oil-smeared walls.

  Rebecca gets lost in the sight. Not lustfully, but because she remembers yesterday like it was yesterday. A stab of nostalgia slices her as she realizes just how long ago yesterday was. So much wasted time between then and now. Dreams given to other dreams, resulting in promises unfulfilled.

  And now here Rebecca is, mid-forties and carrying envy for a girl who can’t legally drive.

  Cassie catches this gaze and smiles at the attention while Rebecca stays lost in the memories. She remembers what it was like to turn heads this way. For her, it had been her long, tanned legs sheathed in late 80s running shorts. Dark blue and bordered white, stamped with the embroidered logo of a prowling puma. She looked good in those. Used to hike them up an extra inch as soon as she hit the sidewalk, for the confidence, jogging and greeting each neighborly wave with a blasé grin. Innocent, but deliberate. Life then was wide open and limitless.

  Rebecca’s still got her assets, each day’s a fight against age and gravity—and those bastards come constantly to try and take them.

  “Not gonna find him, you know,” C
assie says.

  Rebecca snaps out of the daydream and asks, “Who?”

  “Quit it, bitch. You’re standing in my room checking out my tits. Least you can do is be real with me.”

  “Paul,” Rebecca says, embarrassed that her mind has wandered so far away. “You’re talking about Paul.”

  Cassie nods expectantly at the mention but her eyes swivel toward the window. Stares down at the distant scarecrow as she remembers the truth. Truth she’s never going to give.

  “Where did he go?” Rebecca asks.

  Cassie turns. One blink and she’s back from her own nostalgic trip. “Hm?”

  “You’re so sure I’m not going to find him. I’d like to know where he went.”

  “That’s the thing,” Cassie’s voice is airy now, with a playful inflection that’s maybe a little mocking, though Rebecca doesn’t think so. She’s just nuts. “I don’t know where he went. Only know that he’s gone . . . gone, baby, gone.”

  “So tell me what you do know.”

  Cassie rubs her eyes with the back of her hand. “I know everything’s going to be different now. I know that I’m not going to see him again.”

  “How does that make you feel?”

  “Knock it off, okay? If you wanna know what we were, why don’t you just ask?”

  “Okay,” Rebecca says. “I’m asking.”

  The girl shrugs, glides over to her bureau from across the room. She checks herself in the empty frame sitting atop it. The spot where a mirror should be, though the girl doesn’t appear to notice it’s missing. “He liked fucking me. Whatever passes for fun in this part of the world, right?”

  “That passes for fun everywhere.”

  Cassie gives a knowing point like at last they’ve found common ground. “Right? Universal language.”

  “You weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend?”

  “Cute, Mom. Call us whatever you want. I give a fuck?”

  “And you stayed in the Harvest Hill Motor Inn?”

  “Not all the time. We liked new places. Tried lots of them.”

  “Adventurous.”