by Jeremy Bates
Looped on the silver chain was the engagement ring she’d sent back to him.
She stared at it with dread and sadness—and mounting anger. Did he really think he would just show up on her doorstep, give her back her ring, and everything would be hunky dory between them. She’d cut off communication, moved to a different city. She wanted nothing to do with him. Couldn’t he take the hint?
“Take it,” he insisted. “You don’t have to wear it. But you didn’t need to send it back. It’s yours.”
She stepped away from him. “No, Luke.”
“Take it.”
“Listen to me, Luke!” she said. “No, okay? No to everything. I’m sorry you came all this way, but we’re not getting back together. We’re just not.”
She tried brushing past him. He gripped her left biceps, hard.
He said, “Where’s this birthday party of yours?”
“Let go of me.”
“I’ll come. Meet some of your friends.”
“Let go!”
She jerked her arm but couldn’t free it.
“You seeing someone?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“Who is he?”
“I’m not seeing anyone! Now let me fucking go!” She jerked her arm again, this time with all her strength, and stumbled free. She dashed from the kitchen.
Rashid’s bedroom door was ajar. He stood half in his room, half out, apparently eavesdropping on her and Luke.
Something loud crashed in the kitchen. It sounded like one of the metal chairs being launched into the wall.
Another crash, glass shattering.
“Jesus!” Rashid said.
Charlotte pushed him into his room and slammed the door closed behind them.
#
Two long minutes later Rashid whispered, “Should we go check?”
“He might be waiting in there,” Charlotte said.
“We can’t stay in here all night.”
“You don’t know what he’s like.”
“Do you want me to call the cops?”
She shook her head, then eased open the door.
“Hold on.” Rashid grabbed a bronze bookend in the shape of a bear, presumably to use as a weapon.
Charlotte peeked her head inside the kitchen first.
The table lay on its side. The glass bowl that had served as its centerpiece was shattered into a thousand pieces on the floor. Both metal chairs were overturned. A couple of the legs were bent at different angles. The door that led to the backyard was wide open.
Charlotte circumvented the mess and stuck her head outside.
Luke was gone.
#
Later that night Charlotte lay in bed, unable to sleep, the surreal scene that had played out in the kitchen turning over and over in her head, a hundred questions racing through her mind. Luke obviously hadn’t gotten better in prison, like he’d said he had. He’d been acting, the way practiced alcoholics could pass off being sober, only he was passing off being sane. So how bad had his mental state deteriorated? And where had he gone after trashing the kitchen? To a bar, to get drunk? Would he come back tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day? What if he decided to stick around Asheville? Jesus, he wouldn’t do that—would he? No. Once he calmed down, slept on what she’d told him, the reality that they were finished as a couple would settle in, he’d realize there was nothing to gain from harassing her. He’d leave, go back to New York. It would be over—
Charlotte sat up quickly in the dark. She’d heard a creak. The house settling, or a footstep? She tilted her head, listening. She heard it again. Floorboards. Someone was coming down the hallway.
It’s just Sarah, she told herself. Getting home from her boyfriend’s late.
Only the footsteps didn’t continue past Charlotte’s room; they stopped on the other side of her door.
Luke!
Charlotte threw off the covers and jumped out of bed. For a crazy moment she considered escaping through the window, but it was a straight drop to the ground.
Instead she pressed her back against the wall that was flush with the door, which was about four feet to her right.
The doorknob jiggled, rotated. The door inched open. Light spilled into the room, creating a triangular wedge on the floor.
Luke appeared in the crack between the door and doorframe, silhouetted against the bright hallway light.
Charlotte’s heart was galloping inside her chest.
What the fuck was he thinking? What was he planning on doing?
Screw it, she decided.
She reached blindly along the wall and flicked the light switch.
Luke spun toward her, squinting—only it wasn’t Luke. It was Rashid.
“Rashid!” she said, dizzy with relief.
“Oh, hey, you’re up.”
His eyes went to her legs. She was wearing a cotton camisole, panties, and nothing else.
“Don’t look!” She grabbed a pair of track pants from the hamper next to her and yanked them on, almost toppling over in her embarrassment. “Jesus, Rashid,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I just wanted to check on you, see if you were all right.”
She smelled alcohol on him.
“You’re drunk.”
“Naw, I’m good.”
“Haven’t you heard of knocking?”
“I was about to say something.”
“Well, I’m fine,” she said. “Thanks.”
“You sure?”
“I’m fine, Rashid! Now get out!”
“Okay, okay. Jeez.”
He left, pulling the door closed behind him.
She listened to him retreat down the hall, then down the stairs. She shook her head, thinking this night couldn’t possibly get any creepier.
Leaving the light on, Charlotte got back in bed, but she didn’t fall asleep for a long time.
Chapter 3
Charlotte got up as soon as dawn broke. She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the gray sky outside the window. Raindrops pattered the windowpane, foretelling a gloomy, overcast day. She’d slept lightly, waking every hour or so, and now she felt somehow both exhausted and wide awake.
By the time she showered, dressed, and made herself up, it was six thirty, though no one else in the house had stirred. In the kitchen, which she and Rashid had cleaned up the night before, she grabbed an apple for breakfast and ate it during the twenty-minute walk along Broadway to the university. The campus was dead at the early hour. There was a scattering of cars in the parking lots she passed, and an odd person walking their dog or riding their bike through the forested grounds, but the organized chaos of academia wouldn’t kick in for another hour or so.
As she approached Rhoades-Robinson Hall she noticed a girl sitting on a bench, bent over, her head in her hands. Charlotte had seen her a few times downtown before, usually sitting outside restaurants and bars begging for change. She couldn’t have been any older than eighteen or nineteen, and Charlotte could never understand how her life had gone downhill so quickly, so one evening she sat next to her and tried to start a dialogue. The girl smelled like she hadn’t had a bath for a week. She was also incoherent and strung out, likely on heroin, which explained a lot. Charlotte left a couple dollars in the Bob Marley crochet cap the girl was using as a collection tin and went on her way.
Now she stopped before the girl and said, “Hi.”
The girl looked up at her with glazed, suspicious eyes.
“Are you okay?” Charlotte asked.
The girl looked away. “Get lost.”
“I’ve seen you around.”
“So?”
“Listen, I don’t want to sound like a charity case, but I’m friends with the owner of the Lexington Avenue Brewery. You know it?”
“So?”
“It’s just that, if you want, I’ll talk to him, and if you stop in on a Friday night, every Friday night if you want, I’ll let him know your meal’s
on me.”
The girl studied her dirty shoes in silence.
“What’s your name?”
“Krista.”
“I’m Charlotte. You tell the waiter that. Tell them Charlotte is paying for the meal. Okay?”
No reply.
Charlotte hesitated a moment, not sure if she’d gotten through to the girl, then decided there was nothing more she could do. She started away. She wasn’t actually friends with the owner of the LAB. She had met him. He’d come up to Tony and her table one night while they were dining there to introduce himself and inquire how their evening was progressing. They chatted for a good five minutes, and Charlotte believed him to be a kind, generous man who’d have no objection to Charlotte starting a tab to cover Krista’s meals each Friday—no booze permitted.
Buoyed by the good deed, Charlotte found a dry spot beneath a tree out front Ramsey Library and caught up on her reading, which she hadn’t gotten to the night before. At quarter to eight she made her way to Hospitality Financial Accounting. She had five classes in total today, but for once she was glad for the heavy load. They would distract her from thinking too much about Luke, and his state of mind.
#
She spotted Luke shortly past noon. She was rushing from Marketing to Food Safety—the classes were located in buildings on opposite corners of the campus—and she had to do a double take. He stood twenty feet away, a hood pulled over his head, staring directly at her. He turned and began walking away.
Charlotte chased after him, her incredulity that he was stalking her trumping her fear that he might have another meltdown.
“Luke!” she said.
He ignored her.
“Luke!” She gripped his shoulder. “Stop!”
He turned around—only it wasn’t Luke. He was the same size and build, had the same purposeful walk, but he had a bony brow, a birdish nose, and wide-spaced eyes. In fact, he didn’t look anything like Luke.
“You talking to me?” he said, taking ear buds from his ears.
“Sorry, thought you were someone else.”
She hurried away, her cheeks burning.
“Get a grip, Char,” she mumbled to herself. “He’s gone.”
#
Her final class was Food Production and Service Management. It was the only one she had with Tony that day. She sat at the back of the lecture hall and listened distractedly as the professor rambled on about time management skills. Tony arrived late as usual—ironic, she thought, given the subject matter of the lecture. He tried to ease the auditorium door closed, but it nevertheless made a loud clank, which earned him a few dozen glances. He sat next to Charlotte and doodled stick men and women having sex in different positions. He showed each to her, giving her a thumbs up or thumbs down. She ignored him for the most part and focused on copying all the bullet points on the video projector screen
Afterward, while she and Tony made their way across the campus to Broadway, he filled her in on all the happenings she’d missed the night before. He showed her a photo he had taken with his phone of Dan, passed out next to a public toilet, a striped party hat clapped on his head, a mustache and surprised eyebrows drawn on his face with permanent black marker.
Given it was only five o’clock by the time they reached the city’s downtown area, and the reservation Charlotte made at Eddy Spaghetti wasn’t until six thirty, they decided to kill some time at Lexington Avenue Brewery, which was where Tony took her when they’d first met. It was busy, the crowd a mix of locals, hippies, and students. Nevertheless, they found two seats on the patio at a long counter-like table that faced the street. The waiter brought a giant basket of onion rings to three guys a few seats down from theirs. The deep-fried smell would usually get Charlotte’s stomach growling, but right then she wasn’t hungry at all.
“Do you want anything to eat?” Tony asked her. “Or do you want to wait till we get to the restaurant?”
“I can wait.”
Tony ordered an Imperial Rye pale ale, while she asked for one of the five-dollar margaritas.
“So what’s up, Gilby?” Tony said when the waiter left.
“Huh?” she said.
“What’s eating Gilbert Grape? You’ve been a hundred miles away the entire walk here.”
Charlotte had planned on telling Tony about Luke—at some point—and she decided now was as good a time as any. “You’re going to think it’s nuts,” she said.
“I love nuts—crazy nuts, I mean. Not balls, obviously.”
“My ex showed up at my house last night,” she said.
Tony’s eyebrows jumped. “Your ex?”
“He drove here from New York.”
“Just to see you?”
“Told you it was nuts.”
“Are you still seeing him?”
“No! He’s…he’s not well. I never mentioned him because I thought it was all behind me. I guess it’s not.” She shrugged. “Do you still want to hear?”
“Yeah, I wanna hear. This guy sounds psycho.”
“He just got out of prison.”
“You’re bullshitting me. What’d he do?”
“Beat up some of my friends.”
“And he went to prison for that?”
“He nearly killed one of them. She had serious head wounds and was in a coma for nearly three days. She’s okay now.”
The waiter returned with their drinks, and an uncomfortable silence ensued until he left.
“He beat up a girl?” Tony said, ignoring his beer.
“And a guy,” Charlotte replied. “And me. Well, he chased me. I bashed my head on the ground and blacked out for a few seconds. When I came round a bunch of guys staying in a nearby cabin—we were camping—were pulling Luke off me. That’s his name. Luke. It took four of them to pin him down until the police came.”
Tony blew out some air. “What a fucking tool monkey. Sorry, Char. I know he’s your ex. But going after girls? What the fuck’s wrong with him?”
“He was a solider, a gunner—you know, the guy who sits behind the turret in a Humvee. A bit over a year ago his unit was escorting a convoy of fuel tankers to a forward operating base. They stopped to examine a dead dog on the side of the road. Apparently terrorists used stuff like that to hide roadside bombs. It turned out they were right. There was a bomb. They called in the bomb guys—but the whole thing was an ambush. Everyone in Luke’s unit was killed except for him. The whole thing messed him up, and he did some stuff that got him kicked out of the army. He lived with me in New York for a few weeks, and he was a totally different person. He got nervous and paranoid in crowds. He had flashbacks and nightmares and all that stuff. He barely left the house, so I organized a camping trip, to get him out of the city. I thought, you know, nature would be good for him, quiet, peaceful. But then he just snapped over nothing.” She shook her head. “After the police took him away, he was kept in custody, and I never spoke to him again—until last night.”
“So what did he want?” Tony asked.
“To get back together.”
“I’m hoping you told him to go fuck himself.”
“I told him we were done, yeah.”
“How did he react?”
“Trashed my kitchen.”
“Jesus, Char.” Tony took her hand across the table, what felt like an oddly intimate gesture because he’d never done it before. “This guy really is a psycho. Where’s he now?”
“I don’t know.”
“You need to call the police.”
“He might already be back in New York.”
“Or he might be pitching a tent in your backyard.”
“What are the police going to do? He hasn’t really done anything.”
“If he just got out of prison, he’ll be on parole. Trashing your kitchen would probably be enough to get him tossed in jail.”
Charlotte shook her head. “This is going to sound stupid, but I don’t want to get him in trouble. I want him to go, yeah, but I don’t want him to go to jail, or to prison, o
r whatever. I dated him for four years, Tony. We were even engaged. He was a good guy. It’s just, what happened to him, it’s not his fault. It’s the army’s fault.”
Tony frowned. “The army’s?”
She shook her head again. She wasn’t going to get into all that. “Anyway, you wanted to know what was on my mind. That’s about all of it.”
Tony released her hand, sat back. Around them the cacophony of jovial voices and laughter carried on.
Tony finished what remained of his beer and said, “I’m getting another. Want something?”
She had about an inch of the margarita remaining. She nodded.
Tony went inside to the bar. Charlotte stared through the open window at the street, lost in reflection, when someone sat down in Tony’s seat. She was about to tell the guy it was taken, but the words died on her lips.
“Hey, Char,” Luke said.
Chapter 4
Charlotte barely recognized Luke. Yesterday he had been sober and well-presented. Now he reeked of whiskey and looked as if he’d slept in a dumpster. His hair was messy and unwashed, his clothes—the same black jeans and pullover—wrinkled and stained. His eyes shone dully from the booze. Beneath the gloss, however, they were dark and hard. They belonged to a stranger.
“Luke?” she said, gratified by how calm she sounded, because calm was the polar opposite of what she felt.
“Fancy running into you here,” he said.
“Have you been following me?” she demanded.
“You never used to lie to me, Char.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You said you didn’t have a boyfriend.”
She glanced the way Tony had gone, but she couldn’t see into the brewery from where she was seated. “I’ll call the police.”
“A guy can’t sit down with his ex?”
“What do you want? I told you—”
“I know what you told me, Char. Heard you loud and clear. You moved on. I get it. So don’t worry. I’m not here to beg you to take me back. I just wanted to tell you that I’m going to kill you.”