Regina stepped toward Lola in a gesture of comfort, but Lola erupted into a flaming rage, throwing Regina onto the ground with a scream, succumbing to gravity herself in the process. Her black hair was matted against her tear-soaked face. She lifted herself back to her feet in a swift move and began retreating from the girls who were more strangers to her and her to them with every backward step.
“You won’t stop me!” Lola warned the girls.
“No!” Regina screamed as she saw the thick piece of wood come cutting through the night air. Lola turned to face her attacker just in time for the weapon to make contact with her skull with a sickening crack. Lola was propelled several feet across the grass, her feet stumbling one over the other, unable to brace herself against the surprise assault. Regina squeezed her eyes closed at the sound of the second crack that sounded as Lola’s head hit one of the jutting rocks that decorated Nikki’s yard. Blood began gushing from both sides of Lola’s head.
“Natalie!” Nikki yelled. Regina crawled across the dewy lawn, grass staining the knees of her white jeans. Regina drew an unconscious and bleeding Lola into her arms. “Lola! Lola, please!” Regina cupped Lola’s lifeless chin between her thumb and index finger as she screamed her name.
“What did you do? What did you do?” Nikki was screaming in the frenzied chaos that surrounded them.
“We couldn’t let her tell.” With the deadly weapon still in hand and blood splattered across the side of her face, Natalie spoke with the same thrilling calm.
Regina’s mouth gaped open at the sight of the empty shell of a person that Natalie became in a matter of seconds as her soul escaped from her there in the garden.
As she sat there cradling her friend, whose body was beginning to cool, Regina could not believe the result of the opening of this Pandora’s box that Lola had so delicately attempted to orchestrate. Years of suffering bottled up into a few moments in time exploded leaving the bloody remnants of what had once been a delicate balance of functional dysfunction in its rearview.
“Oh my God!” Barron’s throaty voice ripped a hole in the fabric of the dream state in which Regina had cloaked herself in order to be able to reveal the Caliginous secret. Regina poured the remaining wine from her glass into her mouth, where it sat at the back of her tongue until she rallied the muscle to push the bitter liquid into her throat where it bounced twice before trickling down into her chest, soon entering her bloodstream where it toiled to disconnect her from the pain of the memories.
Another. The bartender came over.
“Two more shots, please,” Barron told the short girl with unnaturally black hair and a tattoo of a skull framed in colorful flowers on her hand. The little glasses of white liquid arrived in front of them and they both chugged them with no toast. Regina winced at the gruesome flavor of the elixir, but not as much as she had the first time. A magnificent euphoria was settling over her now like an obscure fog.
“… And then what?” he questioned. Regina cherished the sensitivity that Barron displayed by not asking her to revisit the Tuesday evening occurrences of the DeFrank estate. Barron’s reception of her heinous past made her heart malleable like clay and she wanted to kiss him, she wanted him to wrap her up, she wanted to step inside of him and have his compassion absolve her of all evil and emerge from him, pure gold, but that baptism was a fairy tale and the demon secret with which she was pregnant was a nightmare. She did not embrace Barron in any way; instead, Regina allowed her eyes to wander back to the bottle on the shelf across from her where her mental film begin to play once again against the backdrop of the brown liquid plunging her back into the abyss of mental despair like a caver on a last desperate descent to save someone that is already finished.
“What do we do?” Nikki asked. Regina’s expressionless face glowed in the soft honey brilliance of the garden lights. Regina studied Lola’s features. The injured girl lay against her forearm and was becoming more unrecognizable with every new stream of blood that cascaded down her sleeping face. Regina opened her mouth to speak ideas that had formed in her brain, but they had gotten lost somewhere inside of her before they had the chance to tickle her tongue to actual speech and she substituted with a grim exhale.
“People will think we killed her,” Natalie spoke to herself out loud.
“We have to call the police,” Regina whispered quietly as not to wake up Lola.
“You did kill her!” Nikki shouted over Regina, leaping onto Natalie with an uncharacteristic delirium. Both girls toppled to the ground; Nikki fell hard on top of her friend as the two began to struggle. Regina made no attempt to stop the match that clamored on before her eyes; she could marginally gather the potency to inflate her lungs every couple of seconds but any feat beyond that seemed a phenomenal task. Nikki and Natalie grumbled and screamed hysterically throughout their brutal competition. Natalie was on top of Nikki, showering her balled fists upon any open part of Nikki’s body.
Regina felt the guttural growling of the sky burrowing into the ground around her. With one of her wild swings Nikki landed a stalwart strike high on Natalie’s cheek, sending her glasses sailing into the rose bushes at the edge of the garden. Momentary shock hindered Natalie’s fists and in milliseconds a flashing tidal wave of pain began to sweep through the side of Natalie’s face. Nikki struggled to loosen her legs from under the girl who straddled her; she bent them and kicked Natalie with thoroughbred power. Natalie’s body came to a painful stop when her back collided with the wooden end of a picnic bench and the fight was over. Nikki moaned as she rubbed her shin, which was already beginning to swell to what would soon become a nasty bruise.
“I didn’t kill her! He did it, he killed us all a long time ago, and we have just been living through it, somehow bearing our existence through all of the suffering. Pretending to be resilient teenagers who don’t remember, who have gotten over it. Well I remember…I REMEMBER! Every day I think about it. He raped me and you and you and her. Why would she want to tell people that? We’re all suffering, just being eaten away a little at a time, prisoners of our insecurities. Tonight we all drank, but how many times have you drank this week, huh, Nikki? A little more every year, right?”
The skin under Nikki’s eyes was now puffy, red, and drenched with tears. Nikki sniffled, wiped her dripping nose with her wrist, her green eyes pleading with her accuser for an end to the hellish speech.
“And what about you, perfect little Regina? I haven’t quite figured the wicked by-product of our piano lessons that controls you yet. You don’t seem to drink much.”
“Stop,” Regina warned her.
“No!” Natalie screamed.
“And what about you, Natalie! What about you? What do you do?” Regina sneered.
Natalie’s face softened, tears streamed from her eyes and she spoke angelically. “I just become someone else. I disappear and someone else takes over.”
“You know, I read about a girl, once, who had been abused by her parents and as she became a teenager she began to get minor acne. The girl began popping her pimples and the pain felt so good to her that it became an obsession. She loved the pain and she loved the way she looked when she had gotten rid of yet another blemish. Soon she was picking at pimples that were not there and finally just picking chunks of skin out of her face until she was a gruesome reflection of a girl just trying to disappear.” Natalie told them.
Nikki was listening intently to the story about the girl who differed from her only in the sense that with drinking she attempted to make herself disappear from the inside out.
“But that’s not you, right, Regina?” Natalie spoke with a new venom Regina had never heard inside of the sheepish girl before.
“You’re too vain for that, too vain even for any vice, maybe just a personal torment…nightmares,” Natalie added, a light springing to life inside of her as she stumbled upon a treasure that had eluded her with its mystery for so long.
“Shut up!” Regina scolded her.
“And we all know
what Lola did …” Natalie was delirious with pain and vengefulness. She stumbled laboriously as she spoke.
“What?” Nikki asked in all of her blissful ignorance.
“Natalie,” Regina pleaded to no avail.
“You didn’t know?” Natalie asked with remorse finally filtering into the hurricane of emotions that swept over her as she peered down into Nikki’s face.
“She started wearing those dresses to cover the cuts in her thighs.” Natalie revealed as she threw up Lola’s dress unveiling a batch of healed, healing, and fresh slices in Lola’s thighs.
Nikki erupted with a whole new batch of useless tears.
“Natalie!” Regina screamed as she scrambled to cover Lola.
“I’m probably the only person with enough heart to have finally put her out of her misery. Maybe we should just all put ourselves out of our miseries.” Natalie’s battered body sunk into the living grass with a definitive thud. Nikki looked to Regina who dropped her head in the sheer despair of the moment.
“We’re all dead! We’re all already dead,” Natalie encouraged. Regina knew that there was something innately wrong with the thing that Natalie was proposing, but she had dealt with the pain of her past for years now and there were days when even getting out of bed was a battle. With Lola now gone at their own hands Regina knew that digging up enough self-worth to be able to even move her body would be damn near impossible.
She was tired. They were all tired.
A pang of guilt shot through her when she realized that she, in a moment of utter disconnect from the raw reality, was envious of the peace that only Lola had now. Nikki cried, but there were no new tears, this cry trickled out of the ghost of the little girl that she had once been. The cry of the girl who was entombed in the unfathomable depth of Nikki’s being reached out for her with a cry that was, at first, intimate and pleading, but had grown into the ravenous ranting of her lost soul. Nikki fought with her limbs in a laborious struggle to pull herself up from the ground; she limped toward her house, still wounded from the fight.
“Nikki?” Regina called after her.
“Just wait here,” she whimpered and they waited. Lola waited because she had no choice, Regina waited because she had no strength, and Natalie because she had no cause anymore.
Minutes later Nikki returned with a piece of black metal. As Nikki moved closer, Regina saw that it was a gun. Nikki raised it to Regina’s face. Just as Regina was about to throw her hands up in defense, Nikki dropped to her knees and held out the weapon for Regina to take. Regina reached out and grabbed the gun with her left hand while she let Lola slide out of her arms onto the ground. Natalie moved closer to the girls. The wind was developing strength and began blowing their hair in wild circles. No one spoke, but they had no need for such simplistic dealings; they were married of mind, and words were useless voice box retching in the light of the shared experiences, so perverse, so clandestine that speech could be only an impediment, for their hearts spoke directly to one another.
Regina gripped the cold metal object in her hands, lifted it slightly to feel the weight on her wrist. Regina passed the gun to Natalie so that she could hold it, so that she could touch it, feel it in her hand, and smell it as if they needed to become intimately familiar with the instrument that would soon take from them the only things they had left; life and one another. Having death so close was eerily comforting. The weapon passed hands once more until it was back to Regina. Calm settled over all of them. Regina lifted her head and she could smell the rain in the air.
“How shall we do it?” Regina asked the girls. All of them eyed one another carefully, wondering how something that had been said on a ranting whim had become reality so easily, but there seemed to be no turning back. They prepared themselves to die for this most vital sin and did their best to forgive the sin committed against them.
“Can you do it?” Nikki asked her friend pleadingly for one last favor. Regina looked at Natalie who nodded in agreement that she wanted a similar end. Nausea flooded into Regina like a hurricane plowing down the seawall and crashing every bit of normalcy in its emotionally unreasonable rampage. She imaged the world as it would be in the next couple of seconds with her there, gripping an unfeeling object in her feeling hand as her three friends lay on all sides of her, dead.
“Can I say something?” Nikki interrupted.
“OK.” A lethargic Regina released her grip and let her weapon-toting hand rest on the ground.
“For a long time, I have been angry with my mother. I couldn’t understand how she could leave behind the people that she claimed she loved most, but I think I understand her now.” And with that, Nikki took a long shuddering exhale, she maneuvered her body to a comfortable position and closed her eyes resolutely. Regina’s hand began to tremble under the weight of the gun as she tried to lift it, she had never before seen Nikki be so brave. By the time Regina had the gun to Nikki’s face, full-on, waves of anxiety pulsed through Regina’s arm, her hand was beginning to cramp and she needed to pee. Nikki moved not one muscle when she felt the cold metal press tightly against her forehead. Natalie participated in the living funeral with her reflective silence. Regina closed her eyes, turned her head away and tightened her finger around the heavy trigger and then…BOOM, BOOM, BOOM.
17
A rapid succession of deafening claps of thunder rang out as a series of lightning bolts reached down from the sky striking the earth in crooked purple needles of electric fury. Nikki’s eyes were squeezed tight, anticipating a transient moment of pain that never came. Natalie thought that the sound of the gunshot was lost in the beautifully chaotic tumult of the storm. When she opened her eyes, she saw the metal still pressed tightly against Nikki’s un-afflicted forehead. Nikki was next to open her eyes and her hands shot up to her forehead where she searched frantically for blood that was not there. No blood, no hole, she was relieved and disappointed.
Regina was the last to open her eyes and all six orbs were drawn to the open sky, which gave another vibrant display of nature’s exquisitely wicked fireworks. Nikki had been quite resolved to the unknown fate, but Regina was not so sure.
What good would another sin do? Regina wondered to herself. It would have been a death much more honorable than the one that they now deserved.
Regina let her hand fall slowly to the ground, the sky opened up and the rain began to fall on them in bulbous drops. Nikki gripped the golden crucifix that hung protectively around her neck.
They could not finish what they could not begin.
Nikki and Natalie each grabbed one of Lola’s arms and Regina grabbed her legs. Once inside the house they wrapped her in a comforter that Nikki retrieved from her bed. They struggled to get the heavy body out the front door and into the trunk of Nikki’s pint-sized sports car. Blood matted Lola’s straight black hair, but her face still maintained a somewhat mortal hue. The three girls stood over the trunk peering down at the secret that they would keep in this trunk, in that house and most eternally, in their hearts. The rain fell down on top of them and dripped over their shoulders falling insensitively into Lola’s face. They draped the top of the comforter over her and closed the trunk, casting her down into full blackness.
The girls sat silently in the car as it rumbled down the hill bumping up and down, each bump making the girls stomachs tense up at the thought that Lola was somehow feeling the pain of the jolts against her lifeless body. At the bottom of the hill, an eighteen-wheeler noisily rumbled across their path. They sat with no directional inclinations until Regina spoke.
“Left,” Regina said and Nikki pulled the steering wheel to the left without any questions. With one- and two-word directions, Regina directed Nikki back through town under the dark of night, cloaked in the storm. They went south until Nikki could see the place that they were approaching.
“Langford woods?” Nikki asked as she pulled into one of the parking areas at the start of a trail.
“Someone will find her here,” Natalie cried out
.
“That’s the point.” Regina said dryly as she opened the car door and stepped into the thundershower. Natalie jumped out of the car, meeting Regina at the trunk.
“We said we’d always take care of each other, Regina, remember that? We promised.” Natalie spoke loudly enough to be heard over the steady pattern of rain hitting everything around them.
“Are you serious, Natalie? You killed her.”
“She was going to destroy us!” Natalie screamed hysterically. Regina was relieved that Natalie was finally exhibiting the kind of emotion that made Regina consider the fact that she may not still be the unfeeling psychopath that was with them in the garden.
“You killed her and I am helping you. I am not going to go to the police, but if you think that I am going to bury Lola or dump her somewhere where no one will ever find her body, you are wrong! Soon someone will find her and…and…I don’t know what will happen then, but whatever it is…we will deserve it!” Regina said, her face now less than a foot from Natalie’s. With a click, the trunk popped and Nikki emerged from the car. “Let’s just do this!” She screamed over the roar of the thunder.
The girls pulled the corners of the comforter up in a fashion allowing them to lift the body from the trunk. Natalie scanned the dark surroundings, but there was no one anywhere. Taking occasional breaks the girls followed the trail about a hundred feet into the wooded area. When they could not carry the bulky cargo any longer, they changed their direction, taking the funeral procession a few feet off the path into the brush where they let the makeshift body bag come to a rest on a heap of wet brown leaves that covered the ground. The oversized white comforter was now painted with lavish blotches of red where Lola’s head had rested against the sides.
Black Water Tales: The Secret Keepers Page 19