The Fall

by Michael McBride

  Mare turned his head away and finally stole a breath that sounded more like a scream, sucking a stream of blood into his lungs, launching him into a coughing fit.

  “Christ!” his father spat, pawing at the blood speckling his face, only succeeding in smearing his son’s blood in swatches over his cheeks.

  “Get off!” Mare gasped through the throng of coughing.

  “You steal from me and then have the nerve to make demands?”

  “Please, dad.” A line of blood drained from the corner of his mouth.

  His father answered with his right fist, dimming Mare’s vision.

  “Leave him alone!” Missy screamed, throwing herself at her father’s back. She’d barely come through the front door when she’d heard what sounded like thunder from the bedroom above.

  Mare groaned with the addition of her weight slamming down on his chest, flinching when both of his father’s hands flew at his face, slamming to the floor by his ears to catch himself from the surprise assault.

  Missy wrapped her arms around her old man’s neck and started jerking at him, finally prying him off of her brother. The two toppled awkwardly backward. Missy hit first, dragging her father along to slam down atop her. The crown of his head battered her right cheekbone, immediately causing swelling around her eye.

  Her father moved more quickly than she even thought possible. She was used to seeing him slouching in his armchair, half-conscious, barely moving a muscle for hours at a time. He pounced like a cat, flipping from his back onto his stomach, and just like that, he was on his knees above her, both fists raised. His eyes glowed with blinding rage.

  “Daddy,” she whimpered, throwing both quivering hands in front of her face.

  Her right hand bent backward with the impact from his fist, hardly slowing what felt like a brick pulping her left cheek.

  She wailed and clasped both hands over her face, tears spurting from beneath.

  Maybe the blow had taken the edge off his liquor-fueled fury, or maybe an ounce of his former humanity had slipped through. He froze above her, both fists still raised like rattlers preparing to strike, staring down at her trembling, sobbing form. His face ran the gamut of emotions, finally settling on a shocked stupor. All he could manage to do was blink, his mouth working soundlessly around incomprehensible words.

  He lowered his arms and inspected his fists, the split knuckles dripping with blood. As he watched, entranced, the fluid formed crimson rivers running between his fingers.

  “Get out of here,” he whispered, mesmerized by the shimmering blood.

  Missy easily knocked him from atop her, depositing him onto his rear. He dropped the bloody hands into his lap, head falling slack, chin resting on his chest.

  “I’ll kill you!” Mare shouted, lunging from the closet. His eyelids were so swollen and purple that he could barely see. Blood flew from his lips when he spoke, his entire mangled face awash with it.

  Before he could slam his mass into his father, Missy stepped in front of him, forcing him to relinquish his momentum for fear of clobbering her.

  “Let him be,” Missy whispered to her little brother, frightened by the look in his eyes. In that moment, they looked precisely like her father’s had before he struck her. It physically pained her to see such emotion that she should have been able to shield him against.

  “I promised that if he ever hurt you—”

  “Mare.”

  He shuddered, his pause giving the tears a chance to overcome his puffy eyes.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered, drawing him closer and cradling his head to her shoulder.

  Her father still sat in the middle of the floor, staring at the slowly drying blood on his shaking hands, dripping onto the carpet.

  Mare sobbed against her, his whole body convulsed.

  “Time to go,” she whispered, pushing him gently against the chest and trying to force a reassuring smile.

  He fought to steady his quivering chin, sniffing back the tears and doing his best to look brave.

  “Pack only what you can carry,” she said.

  “What about the money?”

  It was scattered around the room, crumpled and folded from the scuffle, spattered with droplets of blood.

  “Forget the money! We’ll get by with what we have.”

  “Missy…”

  “Mare,” she said, taking him carefully by either side of his misshapen face. “Everything is going to be fine. Pack your things and meet me downstairs. We don’t want to be here when he comes back to his senses and realizes what’s going on.”

  Mare lumbered down the hallway toward their bedroom, using the wall to steady himself, drawing bloody fingerprints along the faded white paint. Missy followed him into the room. Rushing to her desk, she grabbed her backpack from the back of the chair and dumped her old notebooks and supplies out onto the floor, kicking through the resultant pile on her way to the closet. She tugged a handful of shirts from their hangers and shoved them to the bottom of the bag, hurrying to the dresser and cramming in all of the pants and sundries she could fit. Unable to bring herself to look at it, still neatly made as she could only imagine it would stay until either Ashley or Amber claimed it as their own, she confronted her bookshelf, brimming with hardcover texts and paperbacks, wishing there was at least time to grab her Chronicles of Narnia. But there wasn’t, she knew. It was only a matter of moments before her father broke through whatever funk had descended upon him. She didn’t want to be anywhere within shouting distance when he regained his faculties.

  Missy reached for the top of the bookcase and grabbed her old stuffed Winnie the Pooh, hurriedly stripping its red shirt. She flipped it over and ripped open the Velcro she had sewn into its back, thrusting her hand inside. Fistfuls of cash came out, the majority hundred-dollar bills in stacks of five rolled as tight as cigarettes. There was a crumpled mess of fives and tens she had yet to take to the bank to have converted into larger bills. She zipped open the front pocket of her backpack, pulled out all of the pens and pencils, tossing them to the floor and shoving the cash in their stead.

  Every lingering relic of her childhood tugged at her heart: the swimming trophies lining the windowsill; the dried corsage from her junior prom; the pictures rimming her mirror, mainly of her as a toddler with her mother; her Barbie Dolls and Beanie Babies; and her jewelry box filled with everything physically left of her mother. She forced the images and the memories they conjured from her mind as she imagined this would be the last time she would ever see them.

  Tears streamed down her inflamed cheeks, stinging the angry swelling rising from her cheekbones into her vision. Closing her eyes to the still waters of reflection and the wonderful times that had once upon a time been hers, she threw the backpack onto her shoulder and bolted into the hallway.

  Her legs quivered as she thundered down the stairs, alighting in the living room and ducking to the right into the kitchen. Mare was already there, his duffel resting on the table. Fruit Roll-Ups bulged from his overstuffed pockets.

  “Ready?” she asked, her voice tremulous.

  Mare nodded.

  “We can’t come back, you realize,” she said, unable to bring her eyes to meet his.

  “I know,” he whispered, slinging his bag onto his back.

  They stood there a moment in the silence, neither daring to take the first step toward the door that would lead them to Missy’s Escort, parked against the curb beneath the nearly skeletal dogwood. There were so many ghosts there with them in the kitchen, so many meals shared over laughter and tears.

  Whatever love had once lived in this house was now as dead as their mother.

  “I can still grab the money,” Mare said, though Missy could tell from his voice that the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to go back upstairs.

  “Would you forget about the money, Mare!” she snapped, far louder than she had intended.

  “After what he did to us, he owes us that mo—”

  BANG!


  It sounded as though a lightning bolt had pounded through the ceiling and nearly blown the entire roof off.

  Missy looked to Mare in the quiet that followed, unable to mask her wide-eyed fear.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered, casting her bag to the floor. She sprinted through the living room and up the stairs, bursting through the closed door to her father’s bedroom.

  His legs hung over the side of the bed, his body sprawled across it. Blood rained from the ceiling, shimmering amidst fragmented bone and sloppy chunks of gray matter, falling back down to his body. Crimson poured from his jaggedly rimmed crown, across the tattered flaps of singed scalp like a spilled pitcher. Curls of smoke wafted from the .44 Magnum, still clenched tightly in his twitching right fist.

  VI

  Eugene, Oregon

  JILL DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO MAKE OF WHAT SHE’D SEEN. SHE TRIED TO CONVINCE herself that it had all been some sort of waking nightmare, but the harder she tried, the more unlikely it seemed. Obviously, she hadn’t actually seen her sorority sisters lying dead and bleeding on the lawn or they would still have been there. Wouldn’t they? It hadn’t been a trick of the sunlight or a mirage. She had clearly seen it, though. There was no persuading herself otherwise. She could still recall the awkwardly folded limbs, the seething open wounds, the still eyes, unblinking while swarms of insects buzzed around them, crawling across them like a living skin.

  What had she seen then? She had to approach it from a logical and rational perspective. It couldn’t have been a dream as she was positive that she had been awake. She didn’t have a fever and she’d been inside of the air-conditioned house at the time, ruling out any sort of fever-fueled delusion. She wasn’t taking any medications and there wasn’t a chance in hell that she might be pregnant. What did that leave? A vision? A premonition? That sounded absurd. Of course, there had been the time when she was twelve and was convinced that she had seen her grandmother at her bedside in the middle of the night. When she went downstairs for breakfast the following morning, she’d been prepared to tell her parents all about what happened, but instead found her father stroking her mother’s back while she sobbed into her hands. Logic dictated that it couldn’t have been her grandmother since she had died during the night.

  She’d experienced several cases of déjà vu, especially in recent years. Several times during the homecoming dance, she’d had the feeling that she’d already lived that night before, making her just uneasy enough to head back to her house early, avoiding the car wreck that put her friend Allison in the hospital for a week. When Jill had moved into the dorm, she’d known her way through the labyrinth of hallways to her room by instinct, but had chalked it up to a series of lucky guesses. Even Rick. The first time she saw him, she felt as though she had known him for years, as though he’d already been an intimate part of her life, but that was easily explained away as attraction. Still, though, there were times when she saw him where she could almost touch the dream of him, imagining him through a swirling mist of steam, his face framed from above and below while rain and hail drove him sideways.

  This was something different entirely.

  Jill didn’t have the slightest clue what she was supposed to do about it, but she felt as though she needed to do something. It was eating at her like a parasite, refusing to allow her a moment of peace, even inside her own head.

  “Earth to Jill,” April said, waving a hand in front of her face.

  “Sorry,” Jill said, clearing her throat.

  “What’s going on in that head of yours?”

  “Nothing,” Jill said, forcing a smile.

  They were sitting on the porch in front of Rick’s house, staring past the parked cars to the front of their sorority house. The lawn was still covered with sunbathers, but the thunderheads building over the distant horizon had brought out thicker T-shirts and shorts. Jill just couldn’t look at the house the same anymore. Rather than seeing the aged stone façade riddled with flowering ivy like veins, huge rectangular windows covered from within by multicolored curtains, all she could see was a cold, stoic house like a European castle. No life within: simply stone walls standing against the elements where once there had been nothing but laughter and life.

  “Don’t let him get to you,” April said.

  “Who?”

  “Rick! I can see right through you, Jill. Sometimes you have to practically hit a guy over the head with a brick before he realizes you like him.” April smiled. “And no offense, but Rick is definitely denser than most in that regard.”

  Jill laughed.

  April had caught up with her across the street before Jill made it up the lawn to the Kappa Delta house and had somehow managed to get her turned around and walking back in the direction of the guys’ house. She hadn’t felt like going back in. Not yet. Not after her complete meltdown and the looks she had seen on their faces as they leered down on her.

  “You ready to try going in again?” April asked, draping an arm over Jill’s shoulder and giving her a squeeze.

  “Not just yet.”

  “No one’s going to hold it against you, Jill. I think everyone’s just more concerned with making sure that you’re all right.”

  “And not a head case?”

  “You did freak out pretty well.”

  Jill smiled and stared across the street. All of the girls were still there: every bit as alive as they had been the moment prior. She’d heard that people suffering from strokes or aneurysms had similar episodes. Maybe she’d just had some sort of transient ischemic attack, momentarily blocking the flow of blood to her brain, and now everything had gone back to normal. That had to have been what happened. She’d just make an appointment with the doctor and he’d be able to work everything out for her. Yeah, that sounded like a prudent course of action, but still…

  “Have you ever…dreamed of something and then had it happen?” she asked nervously.

  “All the time,” April said. “Just last week I dreamed that I got an A on the psych test, and that’s exactly what happened.”

  “I mean more…” Jill paused to carefully formulate her words. “Have you ever dreamed something so real that you could remember every detail clearly: the sights, the sounds…the smells—?”

  “Lucid dreaming?”

  “In a sense, and everything is so lifelike that you can’t tell the difference between reality and the dream?”

  “Sure, sometimes anyway. I had this nightmare once where I was running through a cornfield. I couldn’t see who was behind me, but I was sure that someone was. I could hear my own heartbeat, feel the cold sweat on my skin, the stalks tearing at my clothes. I couldn’t scream or I knew he’d find me. Finally, when I reached the point where my legs were burning and I couldn’t catch my breath for the life of me, I turned to look over my shoulder, but he wasn’t there. When I turned around again, he was right in front of me. This dark shape that I can still remember precisely to this day. He raised his arms and that’s when I woke up.

  “I jumped out of bed, expecting to find my feet covered with dirt from the field, scratches up and down my arms, but there was nothing. My heart was pounding like crazy and I was on the verge of popping my bladder, but after I went to the bathroom and got back in bed, I could tell it had been a dream. And I sure as heck haven’t done any sort of running in any cornfields since. It was a dream after all. Just a dream.”

  Jill nodded.

  “Come on,” April said, hopping up and dusting off the rear of her shorts. She extended a hand to Jill to help her up. “Have one of more man tears. That’ll make you feel better.”

  “What?”

  “I said let’s go in and have one of Gorman’s beers. That’ll make you feel better.”

  Jill grabbed April’s hand and rose to her feet. “I’d swear you said ‘more man tears.’”

  “What in the world is that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know; that’s why I did a double take.”

  “Maybe you’ve got some sort of
inner ear thing,” April said, or maybe you’re crazy as a loon.

  “What?”

  “Geez, Jill. I said maybe you’ve got some sort of inner ear thing.”

  “No, after that.”

  “That’s all I said.”

  “I’m sure you said…” Jill started and then stopped. “I must have heard someone across the street.” She smiled. “Now, you said something about having one of Ray’s beers?”

  “That’s the Jill I know.”

  They walked through the front door. Rick and Darren were already sitting on the couch, having dragged the corner table into the middle of the room. Each had an opened bottle of Killian’s Irish Red, preferring that to the canned Olympia in the fridge while they could still taste it. On the table was a leaf from a wooden table that had been flipped over and converted into a board game of sorts. The guys called it “Doomed,” and Ray had specifically designed it with the end result of leaving everyone hammered out of their minds. She’d played it with them a couple of times and had to admit that it was a lot of fun, even with the squares written in Ray’s chicken scratch. There were a half-dozen game pieces already set in the large “Start” circle, having apparently been borrowed from the game Sorry.

  “Sit down,” Darren said, scooting further to his right against the arm of the chair to make room for the girls. April plopped down beside him, while Jill stepped over her friend’s legs and eased onto the couch between April and Rick.

  “Come on, Gorman!” Rick hollered. “It’s time to be Doomed!”

  “Did someone say Doomed?” Ray called, peering around the staircase from the second floor. “Go ahead and start it up. We’ll be down in a second.”

  His footsteps pounded quickly over their heads.

  “Okay,” Rick said. “You’re first, Dare. Roll them bones.”

  Darren cupped the dice and sent it clattering across the wooden board.

  “Four,” he said, grabbing the blue piece and tapping it four spaces down the hastily drawn board. He leaned over to read what was written beneath his piece. “Take two drinks and sing your favorite commercial jingle.”