by Megan Hart
“Lots of things are happening,” the soldier said after another half a minute ticked by. His expression never changed. His eyes looked dead and hard, but when they flickered over her face again she saw a hint of something that might’ve been compassion deep in his gaze. “You should stay off the highways.”
She thanked him, and as soon as she’d passed that roadblock, Abbie took the soldier’s suggestion. She kept to the back roads, her trip made longer and more complicated but without as much interference. She drove with her hands clamped so tight to the wheel her fingers ached. Her foot moved from gas to brake. She obeyed the speed limit and traffic signs. She took breaks when her body forced her to eat, to pee, to sleep. But mostly, she drove and drove with her eyes on the road and her mind shut down against the memory of what she’d seen in that farmyard.
She drove for three days.
She could’ve chased away the image of Cal’s mouth yawning open, the black cloud surrounding him. With a bottle or so of whiskey, she could’ve kept away the dreams of Marnie’s infant chewing its way out of her body with its tiny, toothless mouth. But drinking would’ve made her stupid and sick, incapable of getting up at the crack of dawn to get on the road as soon as she could so the tires of her car could eat up the miles toward the home she’d left behind.
So, instead, at night she dreamed and woke, never screaming, with her hands clapped over her mouth and nose in silent terror. She could still taste that…stuff…whatever it was that had exploded out of Cal and Tony and Marnie. She’d coughed it out, but the thickness of it lingered in the back of her throat. It weighted her sinuses.
The days she’d spent in the hospital after her accident had always been blessedly blurred. Whatever pain she’d felt in those first days had been dimmed by delicious narcotics, and later she’d welcomed the agony because it wouldn’t let her forget the magnificence of her mistakes. That pain, the one of being unable to forget, was worse than the physical, and that’s why she kept it close to her.
One thing she’d never forgotten was of how she’d fought for every breath. Her lungs had been damaged, and unlike other wounds that could be healed, ruined alveoli didn’t grow back. She’d been weaned off the oxygen, eventually. Warned that travel to high altitudes could be painful. Told not to smoke.
It hit her in odd moments. She yawned a lot even when she wasn’t tired, because yawning is a reflex to the body’s perception that it isn’t getting enough oxygen. She couldn’t scream on roller coasters. Weeping left her lightheaded and dizzy. So did climbing steep stairs or any sort of strenuous activity. She couldn’t dive into the deep end of the pool, and though she’d never gone scuba diving, she was sure that had become impossible too. She’d learned to breathe in short, shallow breaths when she got too excited, to maximize her intake and prevent herself from fainting.
Abbie tried that now, sipping delicately at the air inside of her car. It smelled of fast food grease and the orange juice she’d spilled two mornings ago. She breathed in through her mouth, blinking rapidly, to keep her vision focused. The road swam in front of her. The stench of whatever that stuff had been made her gag and choke. She pulled to the side of the road and stumbled from the car to bend over, dry heaving into the weeds.
Whatever it had been, it was still inside her.
At the thought of it, acid hurtled into her throat. She heaved again and spat bile. Then a thick black goo tinged with blood. It left her throat raw, her mouth sour. With shaking fingers she wiped her lips and studied the smears of black and maroon. Something writhed in it, or else her eyes had gone unfocused, and she let out a breathless, guttural moan and shook her hands. The ooze clung to her skin until she swiped at the ground, grinding her fingers into the dirt. She pulled them away, her fingernails encrusted with filth. The ground shifted.
Flowers bloomed.
Abbie pinwheeled her arms and took a few steps back. Her heel caught on something and she went to the earth without so much as a hand out to catch herself. Her ass hit first, then her back, hard enough to clatter her teeth together. She bit the tip of her tongue, and the pain was bad but the taste of her own blood washed away the sourness, and she was glad for that.
She lay on her back, staring at the sky. No clouds. Nothing but bright blue. A sky like that should look down on picnics and parades.
By the time she got to her feet again, the flowers had died and returned to the ground, leaving nothing but the faintest scent. It had been delicious in the farmyard, but here it only made her choke and gag again. She rolled onto her side and waited for a car to stop and help her, but the road was as quiet as it had been for miles. She waited for her head to explode.
Minutes ticked past, and she timed them against the beat of her heart, the in and out of each shallow breath. She closed her eyes and pressed her face into the dirty roadside grass. She wished for a drink, and not of cold, clear water that would wash the bitterness from her mouth. No. As usual, she wished for the bite of liquor.
Abbie had taken her first alcoholic drink at twenty-one, in celebration of her birthday. A glass of champagne at dinner with her parents. Sure, she’d had friends who drank in high school and throughout college, but she’d never felt the need for it. It had gone down smooth, so smooth, that having another hadn’t seemed like much trouble at all. She’d been pleasantly tipsy at the end of the night, had woken the next morning with the taste of it still in her mind. The bubbles. How it had made her feel, warm and dizzy and like she loved the world and everything in it.
She’d been dating Ryan then, already dreaming of a white wedding, a house in the country, babies and pets and car payments. She hadn’t counted on planning a wedding being such a painful thing. She hadn’t anticipated losing her dad to inoperable lung cancer three weeks before she walked down the aisle, or having to deal with Ryan’s family dramas. She’d never thought vodka would become her best friend.
Abbie wasn’t an alcoholic. Drunks were frowzy, stumbling women with smudged lipstick and slurred words who waved their cigarettes around and made scenes in the supermarket when they couldn’t find the brand of baked beans they wanted. Alcoholics reeked of booze, couldn’t manage a shower or clean clothes. They certainly didn’t volunteer for the PTA or be Cub Scout troop leaders, they didn’t organize bake sales to benefit the junior tennis team. Didn’t make homemade Halloween costumes and cookies from scratch. So what if she added a splash of Stolichnaya to her orange juice in the morning? Bailey’s to her coffee? What difference did it make if she treated herself to an afternoon rum-and-coke, a glass or three of wine with dinner? So what if she spent her days in a haze, moving from one drink to the next and counting the minutes in between them until she could convince herself it was okay to have another?
She was very good at it. The drinking. Keeping it hidden from Ryan and the boys, making sure nobody ever saw her take more than one drink. She blamed the hangovers on the flu, allergies, whatever bug was going around. Because only drunks sprawled on the couch all day and didn’t get up when their kids came home, Abbie never allowed herself to give in to the headaches or nausea. There were pills for that — combinations of vitamins and minerals you could take while you were drinking, other combinations to combat the sour stomach and blinding pain behind her eyes. Her world never stopped spinning, and that was okay, because as long as the world spun, so did Abbie.
She didn’t want to listen when Ryan told her she had a problem. What did he know? He was never there. Content to leave the daily grind of domesticity to her, he left the house at eight in the morning and didn’t come home until after six. He never had to worry about laundry or balancing the checkbook or waiting around for the repairmen to come when the appliances broke down, or getting the oil changed or school conferences to deal with Benji acting up in class and Jordan’s sudden plummeting grades.
“Who takes care of all that?” Abbie challenged him, her back against the kitchen counter, a glass of Jack-and-Coke in her hand that she desperately wanted to gulp but forced herself to sip no
nchalantly, as though she didn’t care. “I do, Ryan. I do all of that, and that’s fine, someone has to. But I do it and you don’t, so don’t tell me how I need to go about getting through my day when you have absolutely no idea about any of it.”
“I know that you shouldn’t need to go through a couple of bottles of vodka and rum every week,” her husband said.
It was never that much. Never. And if it was, the only way he could possibly know it was by sorting through the recycling she was so careful to take down to the curb herself. By checking up on her.
“I don’t need it,” Abbie said. “It’s not like I…need…it.”
Ryan didn’t smiled or pull her close, didn’t kiss her. He stared. “Then quit.”
“Fine.” She poured the drink down the sink and glared at him in challenge. “See? There you go.”
“The rest of it too.”
“There isn’t any more.”
Ryan stared some more. “I know where you keep it, Abbie. The boys know where you keep it, for God’s sake. They know when you’re —”
“Don’t you say it! Don’t. You. Say it!”
She could see nothing like love in his expression. Ryan looked stern, unmoving. Like stone.
“You quit,” he said, “or I’m taking the boys and leaving you.”
She broke down then, sobs slicing at her throat. Tearing her apart. This was her life. Her husband and sons. This house. The bills, the cookies, the costumes, the conferences. This was everything she had become, and she could not bear to lose it.
“I love you,” Ryan said, “but you can’t keep going on like this. You’re tearing us apart.”
Abbie had taken his hands in hers, linking their fingers, and Ryan let her though he didn’t squeeze back when she did. “I would do anything, anything, not to hurt you and the boys. You know that, don’t you?”
She wanted him to say he knew it. That he believed her. That he loved her. Abbie wanted Ryan to tell her everything would be all right, that nothing had been ruined or broken.
Except of course it had been, because she didn’t give up the liquor. She just started being more careful with her lies. And one night, late, when she’d told her husband she was going out to the all-night grocery store, Abbie went instead to a local dive where nobody knew her and everyone minded their own business and the drinks came in clear plastic cups and the bathroom smelled of vomit and hairspray. Where the men didn’t seem to care if she was married with kids or drank too much or that she’d once imagined she might make a difference in the world.
And, late that night, when one man in particular had put his hands all over her and made her feel good about herself for the first time in what seemed like a lifetime, it seemed like the best idea in the world for her to give him a ride home to his apartment, even though she had no idea where he lived. That night the road had bent and curved in front of her car, even when she squinted. Her passenger had turned the radio up loud and opened the windows and told her to drive fast, then faster as they both laughed and screamed along with songs she hadn’t played in a decade or longer. He put his hand between her legs and called her by another woman’s name, and none of that mattered because everything was fire inside her. Everything was smoke.
That night, she woke up in a ditch with her face pressed against the ceiling of her car, her seatbelt cutting into her, and the steady sound of someone else’s screams that eventually stopped.
That man, whose name was Darryl Evans, had died. Abbie had suffered internal injuries, including additional smoke damage to her lungs that would never heal. She’d spent months in the hospital, recovering. The accident had actually been ruled not her fault — the tractor trailer that broadsided her had run a red light on a back country road with two other sets of witnesses to testify. She could’ve done nothing even if she’d been sober.
It hadn’t mattered. Ryan had told her she was not welcome to come home. She’d gone from the hospital to a shitty, barely furnished apartment and then to the hardly better double-wide trailer she’d bought with the divorce settlement so she could have a place of her own with room for the boys when they came to stay with her. Which they never did.
It would’ve been easy to say she’d lost everything in a single night, but the truth was, she’d been working at losing everything she had almost since before she had anything to lose. Nobody to blame but herself, at least she knew enough to carry the full weight of it and not try to pass it off on anyone else the way so many people in her support group meetings did. She hated the meetings, a room full of sad-sacks moaning about how shitty their lives had been and that’s why they turned to drink, to bear it. Abbie couldn’t relate. She’d had a beautiful life. She drank because she liked it. Shit, maybe because she needed it, and yes, it was fuckery of the worst kind. Yes, it had ruined everything she had. But there was no excusing it behind childhood abuse or domestic violence or even depression.
She drank because she liked it.
With that realization, and calling the house where she’d once lived to have her boys refuse to speak to her, having her husband send her checks not because he was legally bound but because he felt obligated…well. Understanding that nothing she did would make her life better than the ruin she’d made of it, Abbie had sold her trailer and packed her meager belongings into her battered Volvo, the car that had saved her life.
And here she was in a ditch on the side of the road, breathing in the scent of dirt and grass and that faint, repulsive perfume. Wishing, not for the first time, that she’d died in that car. She rolled onto her back again. Stared up at the sky. From far off, she heard the sound of sirens, but they were moving away, not closer.
She closed her eyes and remembered the sight of Cal’s head exploding. The blood, the stink, the boiling black mass of…whatever the fuck it had been. Handsome Cal, good in bed, with demons of his own she would never know, had become a monster. All of them had become monsters, so why hadn’t Abbie?
Maybe she hadn’t become what they’d turned into, Abbie thought as she rolled up from the ground and forced her suddenly stiff legs to take her to the car, because a monster was what she already was.
14
All you have to do is learn to listen.
Listen with your hearts.
Listen to the still, small voice, if that’s what it takes for you. It doesn’t matter what book you follow. Which prophet. Doesn’t matter if you go to church or temple or mosque or if you dance around a tree.
It doesn’t fucking matter.
All you have to do is learn to listen.
Oh, the language. I see you out there with your wide eyes and open mouths. I hear you mutter. Some of you are getting up and walking out, and that’s okay. The fact you came into this tent in the first place tells me you’re seeking something. Oh, sure, you can tell yourself and anyone else who’ll listen that you were curious. Or that you came to scoff. Or that you came to prove me wrong, that’s fine too.
But you came here for a reason, and even if you go, what I’ve said here today is going to stick with you. It’s going to get inside your brain like an earworm, worse than any disco song or nursery rhyme that ever plagued you. You’re going to go home to your spouse and kids or maybe just your cats, and you’re going to think about what I told you up here today, standing up here on this stage in my white suit. You can make fun of it if you want, make fun of me too.
All that matters is that you learn to listen.
Because the voice of the fathergod is trying to talk to you all.
Now listen. I know what some of you are thinking, that when I pass this basket it’s for my own gain. That these white suits cost money, that maybe I’m spending your cash on hookers and drugs. Well, I wouldn’t be the first godtalker to do that, would I? To take what was offered on good faith and use it for his own bad intentions? And I won’t tell you that I don’t use any of it to support myself, because that would be a flat out lie, one of many I could tell you that would lead us all down a different path. Because y
ou know, I’ve said, I see the results of my words and choices, and I know where it could go if I decided to cash your checks and buy myself a brand new car, a big old mansion. I could adorn my table with whatever I like, big screen TVs and drugs and women. Or men. But all I take is what I need to live, and to support my words and my work. That’s why I don’t tell you how much to give. A dollar is enough. I don’t need much.
See…pretty soon, once we all learn to listen, once we open our hearts and our minds to that voice that’s been trying to reach you for years, nobody will need money. It’ll be worthless. We won’t need money because everyone will work together, creating our paths, and we’ll all know how the results of our choices will end up, so we can all work together to make this world a paradise.
That’s right, I said it. I’m not talking about death. No Pearly Gates. No heaven, no hell. What’s beyond for us after we die? I have to admit that I don’t know. I’ve seen my own death a thousand times…I have lived my death that same number. Sounds funny, doesn’t it? Living your death? But the more you’re able to open yourself up to the fathergod, the more you’ll be able to experience, making your choices.
And of course, I did die, just that once.
And I came back.
That’s right, here I am folks, the man in white, the resurrected. Medical proof, I was dead for three days. If I’d been dead for just a few more hours, I’d have been cut up and in the ground. But instead, I came back. And what saved me? You want to know? What kept me from dying and being put in the ground, where it surely would’ve been an awful thing to wake up, all covered in dirt, nobody but the worms and beetles to hear me? You know in the old days, so many people were thought to have died from things like the plague that they’d actually rig a bell with a string over some graves, so that if you were buried alive you could ring the bell and be dug up before you died for real. That’s why we have that saying, saved by the bell.