by Ania Ahlborn
They all seemed so calm compared to Jack, who was hunched over in his chair, his knees bouncing nervously. He told himself Charlie was just sick, that she had the flu and that was it—but he couldn’t unknow what he knew, and he couldn’t unfeel the certainty that coursed through him like a quick-spreading disease. Charlie always said she wanted to be just like her dad.
Jack’s stomach twisted uncomfortably. His face turned down in a grimace.
It seemed that Charlie would get her wish after all.
“Charlotte Winter?”
A nurse clutched a clipboard against her chest, her free hand holding the heavy door that led to their assigned examining room ajar. Aimee tossed the magazine onto an empty seat, gathered her purse, and motioned for Charlie to get up. The girl stood with a dramatic sigh. She had repeatedly told her mother that she was no longer dying, that a visit to the doctor was ‘totally dumb’.
Charlie strode to her mother, took Aimee’s hand, and looked back to her dad with a blink.
“Come on, Daddy,” she said. “You can’t stay here by yourself.”
The nurse smiled as Jack pushed himself out of his seat.
“You must be Charlotte,” she said, too friendly to be genuine.
“Charlie, please,” Charlie said.
Aimee flashed the nurse a terse smile and stepped through the door. Charlie let go of her mother’s hand when Aimee tried to drag her behind, extending her arms out to Jack, waiting to be picked up like the baby she would soon no longer be. Jack didn’t argue. He hefted her up into his arms and stepped past the nurse without a word.
“Down the hall,” the nurse instructed. “You’ll be in room C.”
“C for Charlie,” Charlie whispered to her dad.
C for curse, Jack thought. C for catastrophe. Calamity. Chaos.
The examination room felt even colder than the waiting area. Aimee took a seat while Jack plopped Charlie on a padded examination table, her attention immediately drawn to the counter space next to a small steel sink.
“Can I have one of those?” she asked, pointing to a jar full of tongue depressors.
“No you can’t,” Aimee said, but Jack was already making a move for them.
“Jack.” Aimee gave him a stern look.
“You think they’ll be mad?” he asked, fishing a depressor out of the jar. “You think that maybe they can’t afford to buy any more of these after they send us our bill?”
“That isn’t the point,” she muttered. But she averted her eyes nonetheless, checking her nails.
Jack handed Charlie the depressor, which she immediately stuck into her mouth.
“Why are we here again?” Jack asked, taking a seat next to Aimee. Charlie traced the shape of smiling bear against the wallpaper, ignoring her parents as she sucked on the wooden stick in her mouth. Eventually, a soft knock sounded at the door.
Charlie’s doctor looked quite professional with his white coat and horn-rimmed glasses.
“Hi, folks. I’m Doctor Hogan.” He extended a hand to both Jack and Aimee, before turning his attention to the little girl sitting on his table. “Hi, Charlotte,” he said.
“Charlie, please,” Charlie requested, her words jumbled around the tongue depressor.
“Charlie, then. How are we feeling, kiddo?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I told that to my mom but she’s still mad.”
Aimee shifted uncomfortably, clearing her throat.
“Mad about what?” Doctor Hogan asked.
Charlie lifted her shoulders up to her ears and let them flop down. “I puked all over the floor and she had to clean it up.”
“So you were sick, huh?”
“And then Nubs got in the room and started eating it…”
“Charlie,” Aimee warned, her voice edged.
“…so that was gross.”
Jack held back a laugh.
“Nubs?” the doctor asked.
“It’s okay,” Charlie said. “He’s our dog. He isn’t a person or anything.”
“I would hope not.”
“Sometimes he eats his own poop,” Charlie explained.
“Charlie!” The name cracked like a whip. Aimee had the uncanny ability to shut anyone up by hissing their name.
Doctor Hogan cleared his throat, attempting to regain his professional composure, before turning to Aimee and Jack; but there was still a hint of amusement dancing in the corners of his mouth.
“So,” he said. “What seems to be the problem?”
“Completely ridiculous,” Aimee snorted, stomping across the parking lot. She reached the passenger door and crossed her arms over her chest, fuming. “Nothing wrong with her,” she sneered. “Where did that man get his medical license anyway? Off the internet?”
Jack put Charlie down next to the car and fished the car keys out of his pocket.
“You don’t just vomit buckets the night before to be fine the next day, Jack. That doesn’t happen.”
He held his tongue, unlocked the doors, and helped Charlie into her car seat—it was the only thing they had salvaged from the wreck. When he finally slid behind the wheel he sat quietly for a moment, transfixed by the Georgia plates on the back of a rusty red pickup.
“Isn’t it better that she isn’t sick?” he finally asked.
“She is sick,” Aimee snapped. “She’s been sick for the last few days. She had a fever of one hundred and three. Or do you not remember her clawing at your arm when you put her in the tub?”
“It was cold!” Charlie yelled from the back.
“It was probably just a bug. She caught something at school. It was a two-day thing and everything is fine.”
Aimee shook her head and stared out the window, refusing to look at him. Defeated, he exhaled and started the car, slowly rolling it out of the parking lot and onto the street.
A few minutes later, while idling at a red light, Aimee spoke up again, her voice low.
“There’s something wrong with her, Jack. I can feel it.”
Chapter Four
The day Jack’s parents suspected there was something wrong with him was the day they found a stray cat hanging from the tree in the front yard.
The cat had been a nuisance from the day Gilda and Stephen had parked their trailer on that land. Stephen had been trying to scare the thing off their property longer than Jack had been alive, and Jack had learned from his father that when that cat showed its face around the Winter estate, all was fair in hunting felines. Stephen made it clear: he didn’t care how Jack got the damn thing off their property just as long as it was gone.
Before Jack started school, he spent scorching afternoons chasing that stray across their two acres, wielding a stick as big as he was in case he managed to catch up with it. When he hit first grade, Stephen bought him a slingshot for his birthday. Jack spent an entire month nursing his new obsession. He taught himself to shoot rocks as well as Robin Hood, preparing for the next time that roving cat crossed his path.
He never did catch up to it. After years of poaching, he’d secretly grown fond of the trespasser that drove his daddy crazy. By the time Jack entered the fourth grade, he was leaving milk in a shallow dish behind the lot’s furthest tree. He didn’t dare risk placing it any closer: he knew that if he was caught fraternizing with the enemy, he’d get the beating of his life.
The year he went soft on that stray was the year he started visiting the graveyard more and more often. The cat, which had grown fond of Jack as well, crept through the tall grass, watching the boy through slit yellow eyes while Jack sat among the headstones for hours on end. It kept its distance, venturing closer as the days wore on until, one afternoon, that feline found itself sitting next to Jack as compliantly as a lifelong pet.
Jack patted the animal on top of its head, his eyes fixed on a point beyond the trees. For a brief moment, two sworn enemies found solace in each other, enjoying the spring breeze that rustled the leaves and bent the grass to the earth in gentle arcs. And then, with his hand s
troking the cat’s back, Jack saw those black bottomless eyes in the shadow of an oak.
His fingers tensed, biting into the animal’s fur like a pair of jaws. The stray shrieked and bounded away, then stopped to glare at its old enemy. It didn’t like what it saw. Reflexively, it arched its back, fur bristling with agitation. Opening its mouth as wide as it could, it exposed its fangs with a hiss, then turned and dashed out of view.
On any other day he would have shrugged it off and forgotten the whole thing, but that particular day wouldn’t allow Jack to let bygones be bygones. The way the animal’s back bent into an S-curve, the way it had bared its teeth—something about it made his blood boil. Rage curdled in the pit of his stomach. His fingers dug into the soil. All at once he was on his feet, running after it, determined to catch it once and for all, to string it up like he should have long ago. Years of effort burned in his lungs like oil; all the hours he had spent hunting.
The cat was mocking him. It had tricked him into bringing it milk, scratching behind its ears when nobody was looking.
Jack’s nostrils flared. He ran harder. He could see it ahead of him, dashing toward the trailer like a fur-covered missile. Jack slowed when Stephen stepped onto the sagging porch, aimed his BB gun, and fired as the stray bolted by him. It was a miss.
“Son of a bitch!” Stephen barked. He turned to his ten-year-old son, the kid winded and gulping for air, dark hair plastered to his sweat-covered forehead. “You think you’re gonna catch ‘im with your bare hands?” he asked.
Maybe not with my bare hands, Jack thought to himself. But I’ll sure as hell catch him.
That night, long after Stephen and Gilda had gone to bed, Jack snuck out the front door with a saucer of milk. He crossed the front yard with careful steps and placed the bowl at the base of his Momma’s oak—a huge old tree that shaded their trailer from the burning Georgia sun. Armed with a spool of his father’s fishing line, he tied a slipknot onto the end and looped the line along the ground, leaving that saucer in the middle as bait. Then he climbed up into the branches of that tree and waited, the end of the line held tight in his hands.
Gilda was the first to see it. She was stepping outside to beat the kitchen rug with a broomstick when her eyes snagged on something swaying in the shade of the tree. Squinting against the sun, she couldn’t make out what it was. She stepped off the porch, walked a few dozen feet, and saw the swinging sacrifice for what it truly was.
Despite not being the squeamish type, she couldn’t help the scream that punched its way out of her lungs. Stephen stumbled out of the trailer to see what his wife was screaming about, spotting his arch-nemesis strung up like a hate crime. Rather than exhaling a laugh, he gave his son a startled look.
“Holy Mary Mother of God,” he said. “Boy, what the hell have you done?”
Despite Charlie’s improvement in health, Aimee wouldn’t let it go. As soon as they stepped through the front door, she strode down the cramped hallway, stopped in front of Jack’s old piano, and fished a phone book out of its bench seat.
Jack watched her from the doorway, holding the screen door open for Nubs, who was making a mad dash for the front yard.
“What’re you doing?” he asked.
Nubs lost his footing on the wooden floor and nearly crashed into the wall, but righted himself just in time to leap on to the front doorstep.
“Looking for a second opinion,” Aimee said flatly. She dropped the phone book onto the piano’s bench with a crack. A puff of dust exploded from between the pages, catching the sunlight that filtered through the curtains, setting the dust particles afire with a supernatural gleam.
“Give it a day,” Jack suggested. “You’re wound up.”
“And you’re busy getting ready to take off to New Orleans,” Aimee said. “I’m sorry if you consider at least one parent being concerned as unusual.”
Jack glanced to his guitar, nestled snug in its case, crammed between a wall and a bookcase. Aimee flipped through pages, and Jack found himself wondering what letter she was aiming for: P for psychologist? Or maybe E for exorcism?
“At least let me pick up a new directory,” he said. “We’ve had that one since we moved in. It’s completely useless.”
He had a point, but he was also trying to stall her—throw her off her groove.
Aimee stared down at the phone book, fighting an internal debate. Eventually, she looked at Jack, rolled her eyes, and relented.
“Fine.”
She turned to leave the living room when Jack stopped her with a question.
“Hey, Aimes?”
Exhaling a sigh, she turned to face him. Her arms hung at her sides in defeat. For a moment, she looked like the girl Jack had met a decade before.
“Watch a movie tonight,” he said. “Pop some popcorn. You deserve it,” he said. “Just like old times.”
Despite her mood, a shadow of a smile crawled across Aimee’s lips; but she wasn’t done being angry. Crossing her arms over her chest, she smirked at him.
“Just when everything is falling apart, you have to say something romantic.”
Then she turned and wandered toward the kitchen, on a secret mission: wade through the pantry in search of popcorn.
By the time Reagan arrived, Jack had ordered the girls a pizza, made sure they were in their pajamas, and readied them for bed with an old Ren and Stimpy rerun. Aimee had been granted the entire afternoon off and was all smiles when Reagan turned up.
“Hi, Reagan,” Aimee greeted while nursing a beer.
“Hey, Aimee. Getting drunk?” Reagan plopped himself down on the floor and put an arm around Abby, while Charlie climbed into his lap with a giant smile. “Hey, Charles. What’s the word?”
“Nothing,” Charlie said.
Abigail climbed onto the couch behind him while Charlie poked a finger through the round spacer in Reagan’s ear.
“I heard you were sick, man.”
“I was,” Charlie said. “I had to go to the doctor and everything.”
“You did?”
“Yup.” She sprawled out across him like a queen on a settee. “I had to go today because mom was totally freaking out, like…” She pulled at her hair and made a wild face.
Abigail giggled from behind them. Aimee smirked and took a swig of beer.
“So what happened?” Reagan asked.
“The doctor’s incompetence happened,” Aimee muttered.
“Clean bill of health,” Jack corrected, hefting Charlie off of Reagan’s lap by her ankles. “Right?”
Charlie dangled upside down with a squeal, struggling to reach the ground with her hands.
“Oh God, Jack, put her down,” Aimee said. “That’s the last thing she needs. I mean, really.”
“I’m gonna barf!” Charlie warned. “I’m gonna do it all over Uncle Reagan!”
“Do it,” Reagan dared her. “If I show up to the show with barf all over me, I’d be totally hardcore.”
Jack put Charlie down, and she immediately crawled back into Reagan’s lap.
“What’s hardcore?” she asked.
“You don’t know what hardcore is?” Reagan gave Jack a look of disapproval. “Jack, seriously, what aren’t you teaching these girls?”
“I know what hardcore is,” Abby said.
“You do, do you?” Aimee raised a curious eyebrow and waited for her eldest to define the term.
“It means awesome,” Abby said.
Jack puffed out his chest with a grin. “See?” he said. “It means awesome.”
“That’s right.” Aimee shook her head, a bemused smile playing across her face. “Because it’s awesome to show up at a gig with vomit all over yourself. That’s the definition of awesome. Abby hit that nail right on the head.”
“What does it mean then?” Abby asked.
“It means awesome,” Reagan assured her.
Charlie jumped to her feet excitedly. “Uncle Reagan, I barfed all over my room last night.”
“She did,” Aimee
said.
“That was hardcore, right?” Charlie asked.
“Wrong,” Abby cut in. “That was totally gross.”
Reagan: “You barfed all over your room?”
“You should have seen it,” Aimee muttered. “It was like The Exorcist in there.”
“Impressive, little buddy.” Reagan held his hand up for a high-five. Charlie slapped his palm and spun around with a laugh.
“I’ll do it again, too!” Charlie said, bouncing around.
“Over my dead body, kid,” Aimee warned. “Next time you pull something like that, you’re sleeping outside with Nubs.”
“In the dog house,” Charlie laughed. “Like a dog. With fleas.”
“And barf,” Abby added from the couch.
“And dog food,” Charlie said.
“And we should go,” Jack interrupted, grabbing his guitar case out of the corner.
Reagan stood, instinctively dusting off the back of his jeans. “Okay, ladies,” he said, “the hardcore dudes must depart.”
“Have a good time.” Aimee forced a smile. She was still not thrilled with the idea of Jack leaving. Not after the fiasco with the doctor, and certainly not after what had happened the night before.
Jack put an arm around her and whispered into her ear. “I’ll be home soon,” he promised, then pressed a kiss to the corner of her mouth.
“Bye, Daddy,” Abby said.
“Bring me back a toy!” Charlie called after them.
And with the latch of the door and the slap of the screen beyond it, the house went silent save for the sound of Ren and Stimpy, and a faint scratching against the wall.
He remembered his mother screaming. Sitting in darkness so black he was sure it wasn’t real, Jack stared at the slit of light that shone from beneath his bedroom door—light that leaked into the pitch blackness of his bedroom, too weak to penetrate the lingering shadows.