She took another sip of orange juice.
Jack looked at Susan and back at Gia.
“You had no choice when your father abused you,” Jack said and Gia looked up staring at him as she set her glass back down. “You let Don go on hitting you. We are going to break you of this cycle and set you free of this.”
Gia shook her head. “What the hell are you talking about? Don didn’t hit me. My father yelled and he left, but he never abused me. You’re the only one abusing me, Jack.”
He stared at Susan again before looking back at Gia.
“He has you brainwashed,” Jack said. “He is out of your life now and we will get him out of your head before this is all over.”
He reached out to touch her and Gia backed her chair away. The cuff pulled out painfully taut on her wrist stressing her elbow joint. She bumped the leg of the table shifting it and spilling her juice glass over its surface.
Susan backed up her chair and stood up.
“Damn it, Gia.” Jack stood up over her and Gia stared up at him unable to look away. This seemed to be the moment the happy breakfast would be over and the real business would begin. He stared down at her with his fists clenched. “Don can’t hurt you anymore.”
“He didn’t hurt me,” Gia said. “He was a little bit of an inattentive ass and he didn’t pay his bills on time, but you don’t kill someone for that. You are crazy, Jack. You couldn’t have me anymore, so you killed him and kidnapped me to make me yours. You’re the abuser, Jack. You are.”
Jack swallowed and shook his head as he stood over her. “No, he attacked her and she defended herself. She was standing up for you and Don tried to do to her what he did to you. We had to get away and you did too to free your head from what he had done to you. His violence and manipulation of you are over.”
“What are you talking about, Jack? Who are you talking about?” Gia shook her head. “None of that ever happened. He never laid a hand on me. None of what you are saying is real. Your head is all messed up.”
Tears welled up and Jack’s eyes and he whispered. “All lies.”
The bottom of the green phone slammed into the side of his head rocking his jaw and temple. The phone gave a strangled ring from the mechanisms inside with the impact and his face changed shape with all the loose flesh rolling from his left to his right like a shock wave. His eyes lost focus and went glassy as he toppled sideways. The wind of his fall flopped his hair from one side of his head to the other before he hit the floor and slid. He did not have the same amount of product in his hair as usual and the unexpected fall revealed that.
Susan pushed Jack’s chair back and stalked up to stand over him holding the body of the phone. “What did I tell you I was going to do to you, you idiot?”
She lifted the phone above her head as Jack lumbered up to his hands and knees. “What the hell, Susan?”
“Don’t let him get up,” Gia shouted.
Susan brought the phone down on the back of Jack’s head with another unintended ring from the body of the phone. He collapsed to his face. Susan lifted the phone and struck him three more times. The third hit in the series, the fifth hit overall, resulted in Susan losing her grip on the phone. It tumbled away from her out of the kitchen into the main room. The receiver fell off the cradle and slid out the length of its spiraled cord to stop behind the covered couch. The clear wire that would attach to the phone jack was wrapped up underneath the overturned body of the phone.
Jack wasn’t unconscious, but he was curled up in a ball with his hands over his head crying. Susan stepped over Jack and grabbed him by his right wrist. She pulled his arm out straight and dragged him across the floor in two, short bursts.
Susan locked a handcuff over his wrist and then locked him around the other side of the radiator. She lifted her heel and stomped down on his chest twice. Gia saw Susan was wearing her sneakers with her pajamas. Jack let out sharp barks of pain. Susan stepped over him and kicked him across the mouth as she passed. Jack spit blood out onto the floor.
Gia pointed with her free hand. “He has the handcuff key in his pocket. Get it. Quick.”
Susan turned and knelt down beside him. “Oh, right, thanks.”
She fished through the pocket of his dark jeans and lifted out the tiny key before she stood again.
Jack moaned. “You lied to me.”
Susan drew back her foot and kicked him twice in the ribs and once in the side of his head. He rolled up into a ball again at the end of the handcuff.
“Let’s get out of here,” Gia said scooting her chair back to give slack to her cuff.
Susan yelled. “Shit!”
She kicked the leg of the table turning it hard. The other two juices spilled and ran out dribbling off the edge onto the concrete floor.
Susan turned Jack’s chair around and straddled it. She set the handcuff key on the counter behind her near the toaster. Susan reached out to the cock-eyed table and picked up a half-eaten piece of Jack’s bacon from his plate. She took a bite and folded her arms over the back of the chair as she faced Gia and Jack.
“What are you doing?” Gia asked. “Get me out of here and let’s go.”
Jack growled from the floor. “Susan, you said he was abusing Gia and you confronted him. You said he attacked you and you had to kill him. You said Gia was damaged by him and this was the only way to save her. None of that was true, was it?”
“You do what I tell you to do, Justin,” Susan said. “You do what I tell you and you could have had her for yourself. We could have had her and lived happily together.”
Gia looked at Jack on the floor and back up at Susan. “What’s going on? Who is Justin?”
Susan rolled her eyes and threw the rest of the piece of bacon at Jack. He swiped it aside. “Stop it, Susan. Let me up.”
“No,” she said. “You both need to get your heads right now. I should have done this myself all along.”
“Let us go,” Jack said. “This has gone too far, Susan.”
“What are you doing?” Gia yelled.
“Justin and Gina, shut up,” Susan yelled back. “Both of you. Shut up. Right now.”
“What is happening here?” Gia screamed.
Susan jumped to her feet knocking the chair over. Gia scooted her chair back almost to the wall beside the radiator. Jack sat up on the other side and scooted to the wall too.”
“What did I tell you?” Susan said with clenched fists.
Gia’s lips twitched and she whispered. “Jack, what’s going on?”
He said back, “I’m sorry, Gia. I’m sorry about all of this.”
***
Chapter 11:
I Don’t Want to Talk About That
“Don’t call her, Gia,” Susan said as she took a step toward them planting one foot in the spilled orange juice. “And don’t call him Jack anymore. He did a shitty job of playing the part. He had his chance to have you and he screwed it up. Her name is Gina Sullivan and his name is Justin Simms. No one gets to be the star here except for me now, so everyone is going to use their real names. Because we are finally going to get real and get straight.”
Gia looked down at the man she had called Jack. “Your name is Justin?”
He turned his head and looked away. “Yes.”
“And you sent me all those messages as Jack the Liker.”
“No,” he said.
Susan laughed and took a step back. She pulled herself up and sat on the kitchen counter leaving an orange juice footprint under her. “He wouldn’t have the brain to think up the shit you and I talked about, Gina. He could barely keep it up to get his dick wet inside you when I got you all nice and worked up for him. He’s pathetic.”
“Shut up, Susan,” he said.
“Shut me up, Justin.”
He swallowed and looked down into his lap.
“What is she talking about?” Gia asked.
“She sent those messages,” he said. “She showed them to me later when she needed me to do the role pl
ay with you. I didn’t know anything about it until then. Susan is the ‘Jack’ you know and have been talking to online.”
Gia looked up at Susan and Susan blew her a kiss. Gia looked away.
Gia’s voice cracked. “Did you kill Don?”
Justin Simms swallowed three times and finally spoke without looking up. “She did?”
“You’re better off without him,” Susan said. “You would have figured that out if Justin could have played his part long enough.”
“Why did you kill him?” Gia whispered.
Susan shrugged. “Sometimes people have to die, Gina. Your mother, our parents, Old Pastor Jack, Don … lots of people.”
“She had already done it when she called me,” Justin said. “She said she had confronted him about abusing you and he flipped and that she killed him in self-defense.”
“That house was a massacre,” Gia said. “That wasn’t self-defense.”
“In our game, Justin believes what I tell him to believe and does what I tell him to do,” Susan said.
“Stop it, Susan,” Justin said.
“What did you do to him?” Gia shook her head.
Susan narrowed her eyes and shook her head back. “Who?”
“Don.”
Susan tilted her head having her ponytail tip into view over one of her shoulders. “Do you really want to know?”
“What did you do?” Gia’s voice came out as a weak breath.
“Before he died,” Susan’s voice pitched low. “I’d broken into his house and beat the living shit out of him with a cricket bat he had hanging on the wall. Who has cricket bats? LA is full of douche bags. Then, I cut him with glass. Then I broke his stuff. Then I cut him with other things. Then …”
“Stop it.” Gia yelled. She raddled her cuff as her whole body shook in her chair. “Just stop it.”
Susan sniffed. “Then … I stuffed him into the storage section of my car and called Justin to help me save you. I played all distraught. He is a sucker for distraught girls.”
“Stop it.” Justin closed his eyes and shook his head.
Susan stared at Justin and shook her head before she continued. “I didn’t let him see the scene you saw. I told him we were going to have to get creative to save a girl like you, Gina. I told him it was another role play, but it was the only way to set you free. I got him ready and told him we were going to your apartment. Then, you were calling Uber on your way to Don’s, so I gave Justin the new location and we improvised. If he had been in place sooner, you wouldn’t have had to see all of that, so this was really his fault.”
Gia swallowed on her saliva. After being dehydrated for days, now she felt like she had too much. As she stared up at Susan on the counter, it kept building up in her mouth and she kept swallowing. She couldn’t remember what she had done with saliva in her mouth before that moment in that strange kitchen sitting in a chair handcuffed to a radiator. She wanted to spit it out to get rid of all of it building up thick in her mouth. She knew that she hadn’t spent her whole life spitting on the floor up to that point, but in that horrible moment at the mercy of Susan, she couldn’t remember what life had been like before she was a prisoner. What had she done with all her spit?
“Was he …” Gia swallowed the buildup of saliva again. It was a different temperature than the rest of her mouth. She tried to remember if it had always been that way.
“Was who what, Gina Sullivan of Dark Orchard, Kentucky?” Susan said. “Spit it out, bitch.”
Gia swallowed again. “Was Don still in the car when you drove me to his house?”
Susan smiled and winked. “Well, it’s not like I had anywhere to keep him. I checked the news on my phone this morning.” Susan patted one of the loose pockets on her blue pajama pants. “They still hadn’t found him, if they are reporting correctly. So, he is either still in there with tickets piling up on my windshield a few houses down from the crime scene or they towed the car to impound without opening it up. In that Los Angeles sun, it has to be getting ripe in there. Death is one smell that never comes out either. That’s true in life and in upholstery.”
Gia leaned forward and spit a wad of clear saliva on the floor between her feet. She paused and then her stomach muscles tightened into rock hard knots. She heaved and threw up a swill of orange juice, bacon, eggs, and gummy toast bites that had not had time to digest. She heaved again and spilled clear liquid from her mouth on top of it that burned her throat after it had passed. She heaved a third and fourth time, but nothing more came up. Gia spit a few times to try to get the raw taste out of her mouth, but failed.
She sat back up and laid her head against the wall behind her so she wouldn’t have to look at the mess. The trees outside the window over the sink were swaying again. The motion started to affect the twitching muscles of her stomach. Gia closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see anything.
Susan laughed. “Thank God the floors in this damn group home were mostly concrete, huh, Justin? There was a lot of throwing up in here. You remember how you used to hold my hair?”
Justin’s voice shook. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“I used to throw up so much after Pastor Jack used to visit. You remember, Justin?”
“I don’t want … to talk about it, Susan.”
“Then don’t talk,” Susan shouted. “Shut your fucking mouth, if you don’t want to talk.”
Gia’s eyes fluttered open. Susan was red in the cheeks where she sat on the counter. Gia slid her eyes to look at Justin slumped beside the radiator. Gia’s head started to throb and she moved her eyes back forward to stare at the ceramic clown with the dead triangle eyes. She wondered if there were any cookies still inside and her stomach turned again.
“You said you were going to kill him for me, Justin,” Susan said. Her voice broke with the shake that indicated she was about to cry. Gia cut her eyes in Susan’s direction. Susan was shaking. Her eyes were glossy. She looked more full of rage than she did sad. Gia looked back at the cookie jar because the clown was less frightening than Susan. Susan continued. “You said you wouldn’t let someone do that to your sister, but you did, Justin. You did let him do it.”
“We were just kids,” Justin whispered. “I was scared too.”
“We are all scared,” Susan growled. “But I didn’t let that stop me from cutting Pastor Jack’s brake line and I didn’t let it stop me from taking care of Don Blackheart.”
“I shouldn’t have left with you,” Justin said. “I shouldn’t have gone with you.”
“Maybe not,” Susan said. “But you felt guilty that you hadn’t killed Jack for me. You were my brother and after mom and dad died, it was up to you to protect me. The police were asking questions. It probably didn’t help that Gina’s mom was drunk during the accident either.”
Gia blinked, but kept staring at the clown. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m sorry,” Justin said. “I didn’t know she had cut his brake line until the accident had already happened. I was seventeen. Susan was sixteen. We just took off and headed to California as soon as the police showed up here.”
“What are you saying?” Gia shook her head.
“Your mother was on the wrong road at the wrong time when Pastor Jack came off this hill to pay for his many sins,” Susan said. “Was that five years ago? Time flies. We are all grown up now, but here we are back in the Sweet Orchard Group Home throwing up on the concrete floor together just like it was yesterday.”
Gia swallowed on the sour taste in her mouth staring into the clown’s shiny, dead face. “You killed my mother? You killed Don?”
“Your mother was an accident,” Susan said. “I was making that up to you with Don. I was going to give you what you needed and wanted through Justin. You see?”
“You’re a monster.” Gia breathed.
“You can’t be too upset. You didn’t even come back for the funeral … until now. We are back to deal with our dead now. Aren’t we?”
; “Are we back in Kentucky?” Gia shook her head.
“Sweet Orchard Hill,” Susan said. “The kids may be gone, but the water and power are still on. The website says they are raising money to renovate and then will rent the place out for parties. Why wait? We are having a hell of a time now. Pastor Jack had his last party here too.”
“We are back in Dark Orchard?” Gia closed her eyes feeling dizzy and weak.
“Sweet Orchard Hill overlooks the bridge the bad girls use to go over to Mount Seller for cheap booze and blow jobs,” Susan said. “When you left, your mother started going over there to take your place. She was on her way back that morning after laying one on and sleeping it off in the parking lot. Turns out she was still a little drunk when Pastor Jack flew off the hill like a pervert out of Hell.”
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