by Ania Ahlborn
“Yep,” the trucker said. “Looks like a loon to me.”
And he was right: Jack looked insane. He stood in that sickly yellow lamplight with his arms straight down his sides. His chin was tucked against his chest, and the ridges above his eyes cast an eerie shadow across his face—more like a skull than a boy.
Jack appeared the night after that as well. One of the girls nearly called the police before being stopped by a fellow waitress.
“Better not call the cops,” she said. “That’s Gilda’s boy.”
“Well what’s he doing just standing there like that?” asked the other. “He looks like he’s thinking about shooting up the place.”
If Jack could stash a gun in a pair of drawstring pajama pants, he very well might have shot up the place, just like they said.
The cops eventually got called, but not by the girls at the diner. The Winters received the call at three AM on a Sunday. Jack had been found standing on the town pastor’s lawn looking like he ready to slit someone’s throat. Worried for his wife and kids, the pastor called the police. Jack lashed out at them when they finally arrived. The sheriff had explained to a groggy Stephen that his son had been ‘acting crazy’. Like a wild animal, he had said. Like nothing I’d seen in all my days.
Stephen arrived at the police station and found his son in a cell all his own. They’d locked him up by himself to protect the few town drunks, afraid he would have twisted their necks the wrong way round.
“I know it sounds crazy,” the sheriff told Stephen, “but that boy didn’t seem human. He looked like the Devil had gone ahead and eaten his soul right out of his body.”
When Gilda caught wind of what happened, she refused to sleep under the same roof.
“I don’t care what you do with him,” she told him. “That isn’t my son. Look at his eyes, Steve. That isn’t Jack. That’s something else.”
That night, Stephen boarded up Jack’s bedroom window from the outside. He secured the door with two-by-fours and kept vigil by sleeping in an old recliner he’d dragged into the hall. Gilda tried to sleep across the house, but all she could do was cry. They had decided it would be the last night their son would be in the house, and she couldn’t even spend it with him the way a mother should.
Jack slept in the next morning. It had taken him hours to slip into a fitful and restless sleep, battling demons even in unconsciousness. He pulled the sheets over his head when the sunlight crept across his pillow through the blinds, but the smell of sizzling bacon yanked him out of bed like a fish on a hook.
Aimee was standing at the stove, humming under her breath. It should have comforted him, but her humming did little more than shoot a chill down his back. He pictured her turning to say good morning only to see his mother’s face—red and scorched and melting, torched by boiling oil. Jack grimaced, and Aimee turned at the perfect moment to catch his expression.
“What?” she asked. “You don’t want breakfast?”
Jack forced a tired smile and slouched in one of the kitchen chairs. “Breakfast sounds good,” he told her, pressing his face into his hands as exhaustion crept in.
“You were tossing and turning all night,” Aimee said. “Did you get any sleep?”
“Hardly.”
“Maybe you should call in,” she suggested, and Jack found himself considering it. He never missed work. Skipping out on the shop sounded far more appealing than welding on zero sleep.
“I was thinking…” Aimee set his breakfast in front of him before taking her usual seat. “Maybe we can do some grown-up stuff today, just the two of us. You know, like normal people.”
Jack plucked his fork off the table and dug into his breakfast.
“I thought that maybe we could go to some dealerships, check out a few cars.”
Jack hated using Arnold’s Olds and Aimee knew it. Yet, amid the recent chaos, visiting the car salesman had been put off indefinitely. Letting someone try to swindle them out of their money would be a refreshing change of pace.
“And then we could go get lunch in town somewhere,” she suggested. “Maybe Bijou?”
It all sounded fantastic. They’d be a childless, worry-free couple for a handful of hours. For half a day their problems would be pushed to the background, and maybe that’s all it would take—half a day to reestablish their sanity, to regroup and refresh and find their way back to the life they used to have.
But chaos had a way of finding them.
Before they had a chance to leave the house, the phone rang and their plans changed.
“That was the school.” Aimee cocked a hip against the bathroom door while Jack rinsed shaving cream from his face. “Charlie’s in trouble.”
Instead of the car lot, they ended up in the principal’s office. She was a stern-looking woman—the kind of woman who was born to discipline small children. Mrs. Hutchins sat at her desk with her hands folded in front of her. She eyed Charlie’s parents with ferocious curiosity—a gaze heavy with judgment—before she finally spoke.
“Mr. and Mrs. Winter, we’ve had an incident.”
Incident: Jack hated that word. It made him think of worst-case scenarios. He pictured Charlie burying school children in the sand beneath the monkey bars, or poisoning the school lunch by sprinkling rat poison into the mashed potatoes.
“What kind of an incident?” Aimee asked, tugging on her bottom lip.
“Charlotte interrupted an exam this morning,” Mrs. Hutchins explained. “The children were in the middle of taking a vocabulary test when Charlie began to shake her desk.”
Jack and Aimee glanced at one another.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Mrs. Hutchins continued. “And I’ll admit, the idea of a child as small as Charlotte being able to shake her desk while sitting in it is, well, a bit like a magic trick. But her teacher insists it happened. She said the desk was shaking like an old washer on its spin cycle.”
“How can that be possible?” Aimee asked. Mrs. Hutchins shook her head, unfolding her hands to show Aimee that she didn’t have a solid answer.
“Mrs. Winter, I’m not a physicist, I’m an elementary school principal. All I know is that Charlotte disrupted an entire class, and when she was asked to stop she continued, which resulted in my calling you here today.”
“Did anything else happen?” Jack asked after a moment. “Other than the desk?” Like spinning heads and homicide?
Mrs. Hutchins cleared her throat and raised an eyebrow. “Funny you should ask,” she said. “Shortly after Charlotte was told to come see me she had an outburst.”
“An outburst,” Jack repeated.
“She called her teacher a name,” Mrs. Hutchins explained. “A vulgar name… one that I’d rather not imagine her learning at home.”
“What did she say?” he asked, but Hutchins snorted at his question.
“Mr. Winter, I’m not about to repeat profanity, even if it came from a six-year-old girl.”
“She’s been having problems,” Aimee explained. “We’ve taken her to a therapist.”
“I see.” Hutchins sounded less than interested. “Mr. and Mrs. Winter, under advice from Charlotte’s teacher, we feel that Charlotte should take a few days off.”
“A few days off?” Aimee shook her head. “Charlie just missed a few days last week. She can’t take any more time off of school. It’s just—”
“Unfortunately, the decision has already been made.”
Aimee’s eyes lit up with defiance. “Are you suspending my daughter?” she challenged.
“We don’t like to call it a suspension,” Hutchins explained. “It’s just a break until Monday.”
Incensed, Aimee stood with a glare. “She needs normalcy,” she said. “Something that you’re about to deny her.” Hutchins opened her mouth to offer a rebuttal, but Aimee cut her off mid-breath. “If my daughter’s condition worsens because of this little ‘break’…” She paused, considering her words carefully. “I’ll hold you personally responsible.”
Again, Hutchins was about to speak, but Aimee persisted.
“We may not have a lot of money, and maybe that’s where you get off,” she said. “I’m sure you have a picture-perfect house built off stolen lunch money, but let’s make one thing perfectly clear.”
Jack blinked at his wife. He was stunned into stillness.
“If this affects Charlotte badly, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer—and I don’t have a lawyer, Mrs. Hutchins, but believe me when I say I’ll hire one. I’ll pay one just to help me dig your grave.”
Aimee turned on the balls of her feet and marched out of the office, leaving Jack to stare at a wide-eyed principal left speechless in Aimee Winter’s wake. Jack slowly rose from his seat, cleared his throat, and offered Hutchins a slight nod.
“Have a nice day,” he told her, then rushed to follow after Aimee, desperate to get out of that office before the laughter burst from his throat.
Aimee was livid, and her anger didn’t stop with the principal. As soon as Charlie was strapped into her seat and the Oldsmobile was rolling along the street, she launched into a tirade that extended to both her husband and daughter.
“What were you thinking?” she snapped at Charlie. “During a test, Charlie? Are you serious?”
“I didn’t do anything!” Charlie insisted, but Aimee was too angry to listen. She turned her attention to Jack instead.
“And you,” she began. “You just sat there and took that woman’s bullshit.”
“You handled the situation like a champ,” he told her, but it just made Aimee more upset.
“That isn’t the point and you know it. The point is that I shouldn’t have had to handle the situation. You’re the man. You’re the one who’s supposed to stand up to that… that tyrant.”
“Charlie interrupted the entire class,” Jack reminded her.
“I didn’t do it!” Charlie yelled from the backseat.
“Are you taking her side?” Aimee looked flabbergasted. “You think this is the right course of action?”
“I’m not saying it’s the right course of action…”
“It certainly sounds like that’s what you’re saying.”
“What’s done is done. Maybe this is a good thing.”
“A good thing? Charlie missing more school is a good thing? Please explain to me how that’s possible.”
“I don’t know how it’s a good thing,” he told her. “I’m just trying to be optimistic.”
“Well thank you for that bit of sunshine, but your optimism isn’t going to fix things,” she told him, and she was right. He could hope for the best, he could convince Aimee and maybe even himself that Charlie was having some sort of mental break, he could even tell himself that it was all in his head, that he was the one who was imagining things, replaying his own childhood nightmare like some TV rerun. But none of that would change anything. Nothing he did would save Charlie from what he knew was torturing her. Nothing would save her because nothing had saved him.
The realization hit him head-on, like a bullet train on a one-way track. Steering the car toward the house, he was suddenly overtaken by a wave of nausea that threatened to choke him. The cabin of the Olds became claustrophobic. He felt a scream claw its way up his throat, threatening to punch its way through his teeth. His heart threw itself against his ribcage, desperately trying to escape the prison of his chest.
He drove the rest of the way home in a fugue state, not sure how he managed to get them there in one piece, not sure how Aimee hadn’t noticed the cold sweat that had bloomed across his forehead. Charlie sprinted across the lawn and into the house. Aimee followed shortly after, leaving Jack alone in the car. He couldn’t bring himself to step outside. Frozen in his seat, he was terrified by his bitter epiphany. He was going to lose his daughter and he couldn’t do anything to stop it. And he knew that because it had already happened twenty years earlier.
Chapter Eleven
After Abby had come home from school, Jack sat on the front porch steps of the house and watched the girls play with Nubs on the front lawn. He was walking a thin line between panic and defeat. His mind was racing, trying to pick apart a situation that hardly anyone would even believe. There was one option left—one that he could hardly bring himself to acknowledge. Calling an exorcist would not only mark his daughter as disturbed, but also mark his entire family as crazy, insane, out of their minds… the kind of backwoods hillbillies that believed in witchcraft and the end of the world. Jack was sure his own parents believed Jesus would walk the Earth one day, and somehow even they had counted demonic possession out of the equation. They were poised to send him to an institution, to lock him up in an asylum for the rest of his life—they were ready to make him a prisoner of the state before they would ever lash him to his bed and sprinkle him with holy water.
But he was at a dead end, and the last thing he wanted to do was send Charlie away. Despite their reasonable fear, he’d never quite forgiven his own parents for turning their back on him. They had given up and chosen the simplest solution: to get rid of the problem, you get rid of the kid.
Charlie and Abigail raced across the lawn in a bubble of laughter, Nubs dashing after them with his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, his ears pulled back as though he was racing through a wind tunnel. They were playing hide and seek, and despite Nubs’ inability to grasp even the simplest concepts, he had somehow learned the rules of the game. Abigail had taught him how to hide behind trees, plopping his butt down on the grass and waiting patiently to be found. In that sense, he was the perfect dog; always ready, his tail wagging as gaily as it had when he was nine weeks old.
It was Charlie’s turn to be the seeker. She stood against the side of her grandpa’s car and covered her face, counting as loud as she could while Nubs and Abby searched for a hiding place. Abby was particularly good at finding random nooks and crannies to squeeze herself into, like a contortionist squeezing herself into a tiny box.
She’d once managed to get herself stuck beneath the front porch. Jack and Aimee wiggled her out into the open right before Aimee was set to panic, ready to call the fire department. Nubs, on the other hand, while good at hiding, was bad at finding new trees to hide behind. Predictably, he dashed to the same tree every time and sat wagging his tail.
Charlie reached fifty and yelled the well-known childhood battle cry of “Ready or not,” then dashed across the lawn. She searched the front side of the house, scouring all of Abby’s usual spots. When Charlie didn’t find her, she moved to Nubs’ tree. She let out a little yelp as soon as she saw him and ran at him, determined to tag him on his furry butt and disqualify him from the game. Nubs pressed his front paws to the ground, his hind quarters pointed toward the sky—a position that assured Charlie he was ready to play. She darted toward him and he sprinted away, stopping a few yards down the lawn, taunting her with that puppy-like pose. She ran at him again, and Nubs dashed around her. Jack was impressed by how agile the old dog still seemed to be, and relieved by how utterly normal Charlie appeared.
Charlie stopped to catch her breath. With her hands on her knees, she peered at Nubs from across the yard. This time, when she looked at him, Nubs’ tail stopped wagging. Instead of running, Charlie strolled toward him, sing-songing, “Here puppy puppy puppy.” At first the call was innocent, but Charlie’s tone changed when, a few feet from her target, Nubs dashed away yet again. Nubs’ body language had also shifted. Rather than his typical puppy-like jaunt, he ran away with his tail between his legs. Charlie stared at him from across the yard, her hands balling up in to fists as she stopped to consider her next course of action. Nubs laid down, his nose buried in the cool blades of bluegrass. He exhaled a quiet whine from deep within his throat.
The game had turned dark. Jack watched Charlie’s mouth curl up into a sneer, but he didn’t move. He wanted to leap from that front step and put an end to it, but something held him in place. The old Jack sat frozen in place while the new Jack watched the hunt with a sick sense of fasci
nation, wondering if she’d manage to catch him, wondering if she’d let him go when she finally did.
This time Charlie took her time moving across the grass, taking step after slow step, as though trying to fool the stupid dog into thinking she was standing still instead of moving toward him. Nubs held his position; Charlie continued to inch closer. When she was only a few yards away, she lunged like a predator. Nubs scrambled to his feet, almost comical in the way his legs bent and wobbled beneath him. But Charlie showed no sympathy for her loyal companion, running after him despite Nubs’ palpable fear.
Just then, a UPS truck rambled down the far end of their road. Charlie stopped, waited, glared at Nubs while he panted in the sun. She waited until the truck was in the perfect position to leap again.
The dog ran from her the way an animal runs from a bigger, stronger opponent. Had it not been Charlie, he would have bared his teeth and dared her to come closer. But in his confusion—attacked by someone who he thought was his friend—he could do nothing but run. His nails clacked against the asphalt as he ran into the street, but the sound was muffled by tires skidding on pavement.
Charlie stood along the side of the road while the UPS guy bounded from his truck, yelling, “Oh my God!” with a heavy Southern twang. Abigail erupted from her hiding place, running at the truck with a strange sort of garbled scream; as though the scream was unsure of itself—as though reality was, for the briefest of moments, too horrible to be happening. Jack was off those steps right along with her, but Abby had become the fastest runner in all of Louisiana. She outran her father and reached the truck first. That’s when a genuine scream tore loose from her chest.
Nubs was wedged beneath a tire, his bottom half crushed, nearly torn in two by the impact. Surreal as it was, his top half was untouched. He looked as though he could have still been alive if you didn’t look at him from the waist down. He was dead before the truck ever came to a complete stop.