She was pretty, although looked a little ill and unkempt. She had a slender face with large, brown doe eyes that looked a little sad. While Phil’s jacket was large on Debbie, the blond girl was positively swimming in it.
“How did you find the jacket?” Debbie asked. She stood from the swing, stubbed out the cigarette on the railing, and wandered down to the edge of the porch to meet the girl.
“It was easy once all the cars left,” the girl said in a soft voice. “I was going to leave it with the bear on your front porch so you could wake up to it.”
“But then I wouldn’t get a chance to say thank you,” Debbie said.
“I don’t mind,” the girl replied.
“Well, thank you all the same.” Debbie took the offered jacket and bear, holding the former slung over her forearm and the latter by one leg letting it dangle. She didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but having the jacket and the bear mysteriously return to her possession before morning would only give weight to everyone’s already held belief that she’d made it all up. Once the jacket was off, Debbie noticed the girl’s farm dress was ancient, mended in two dozen places, and spoke of a hard life of labor. Farm girls on the edge of town weren’t always allowed to go past grade school in their education, which might be why Debbie had never seen her, and she certainly looked like she’d worked in a field recently. “Do you want to sit for awhile?” Debbie asked.
“With you? On the porch swing? Really?” the girl asked.
“Nope, by yourself on a hot poker, of course with me, silly.” Debbie walked down the step and took the girl by the hand. Her hand was slender and cold, but surprisingly soft for what Debbie assumed was her occupation. She set aside the bear and jacket unceremoniously and sat with the girl a moment, gently swaying on the swing. “What’s your name?” Debbie asked, finally breaking the silence between them.
“Margaret Mayhew,” the girl said.
“Well Maggie-May, you’re a brave girl being out and about at this hour just to bring me a jacket and bear,” Debbie said.
“Oh, I’m always out at night,” Maggie said. “Nobody notices me.”
“I noticed you,” Debbie said, “and I’m glad to meet you. I’m Debbie Poole, by the way.”
“I know,” Maggie said with a shy smile. “Everyone knows who you are.” She reached into one of the patchwork pockets on the front of her dress and produced one of the fliers that announced Debbie as the Harvest Festival Princess; it had a lovely picture of her wearing a crown of leaves and her million dollar smile.
“Oh, that,” Debbie said dismissively. “Small towns and their small town heroes. You aren’t just carrying that around, are you?”
“No, no,” Maggie said. “The man had it on him.”
Debbie’s head began to swim. Cold pinpricks rose on her skin. Something about Maggie seemed unexpectedly familiar. “Wh-what man?” Debbie asked, her mouth suddenly dry.
“The man who chased you into the woods,” Maggie explained, her voice taking on a distant quality. “I found this on his body.”
A scene of horror flashed through Debbie’s mind like a wildfire. A repressed memory restored, so fresh from earlier that day, she wondered how it ever remained hidden. Maggie was curled over the man’s body, her face smeared in fresh blood, hands buried to the wrists in the drifter’s shredded chest seeking out a major blood vessel that she finally pulled free to bite at with animalistic glee. The mental trauma of the moment that clearly buried the memory for her own protection snapped back on her, and Debbie fainted sideways onto the porch swing, making a soft landing on the jacket and teddy bear.
2.
Her parents awoke her the following morning, and as Debbie assumed, used the jacket and teddy bear as proof that the whole scare of the day before must have been a product of too much excitement and sugary snacks at the fair. They were on the way to a pancake breakfast for the local John Birch Society and told her she was allowed to play her records with Grace as loud as she liked so long as the neighbors didn’t mind. Debbie nodded her agreement and staggered back into the house.
The shaken feeling lingering from the night before faded and Debbie began to wonder if maybe she wasn’t going nuts. She didn’t even want to add fuel to the fires of disbelief by telling everyone the bear and jacket were returned by some farm girl, the same farm girl who had apparently saved her the night before by rending her nameless attacker limb from limb. The whole encounter with Maggie had to be a nightmare brought on by stress, but if she had the jacket and teddy bear, she must not have been attacked, so there wasn’t any reason for her to be stressed…the circular logic of it all didn’t fit together.
Debbie’s train of thought came to an abrupt halt when Grace knocked on the door. She opened the door to her friend’s full effervescence. Grace bounded in with a record case in one hand and a pint of ice cream in the other. It was a normal occurrence that smoothed over most of Debbie’s rough edges left ragged from the previous day. Grace didn’t know about the attack yet, although the entire town would probably hear about it before lunch. Debbie wanted to soak up as much of Grace’s happiness before rumors and doubts got too thick for anything to be enjoyed.
They grabbed two spoons from the kitchen and ran up the stairs to Debbie’s room. Draped over the bed, they listened to Grace’s rock & roll records, sharing the pint of butterscotch ice cream available only once a year through a local dairy during the annual county fair. Debbie began to feel the tension and fear seep from her as they sang along to the songs they’d listened to dozens of times. Grace’s popularity was almost entirely owed to her records as her parents were possibly the only ones in all of Vermont who didn’t object to the new wave music and thus allowed her to buy as much as she liked.
Debbie didn’t want to talk to Grace about the day before, which would only bring it all back to the surface, but she did want to confide in someone about her future plans for New York, and more than that, she wanted to make a proposal with time left for it to actually stand a chance of coming true.
Grace wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon and was going ape over it; her father had gotten her an office girl job downtown, filing papers for the ancient accountant their family used come tax time. With no boyfriend to become a future husband, Grace would work the job, live at home, and hope for a chance to catch the eye of a townie at some point, just like her parents wanted. But Debbie had another option in the form of enough saved money to purchase a second bus ticket to go along with the one she had for herself.
Debbie shut the door and leaned her back against it, biting her lower lip in anticipation of what she believed was a hatching conspiracy with a willing partner. “I have something to show you,” Debbie said.
Grace, catching on Debbie’s barely bottled excitement, hopped onto her knees on the bed and beamed. “Spill, dolly! You look like you’re about to burst.”
Debbie rushed to her hope chest, buzzing with a sugar high and expectations. She pulled aside clothes and her stack of yearbooks to pluck out the acceptance letter to Barnard College, a bus ticket, and an envelope with fifty dollars. “I’m going to New York next week,” Debbie blurted out, “and I want you to come with me. Cast an eyeball on this!”
Grace’s lovely green eyes went wide with excitement. She bounded from the bed and rushed to Debbie to get a closer look at everything she had in her hands as though she couldn’t believe it all existed. The letter, the bus ticket, and the envelope full of cash passed every authenticating test Grace could think of in her excitement.
“I’ll absolutely cop a breeze with you!” Grace said. “I have a few bucks squirreled away I can throw in. We can get a place, and when you and Phil get circled, you can leave the trendy New York loft to me when you move out to the…”
“Phil’s not coming,” Debbie interrupted her. “It’d be just you and me.”
“What about your parents?”
“They’ll know when I’m gone.”
“What about the ring Phil said he’d buy?”
<
br /> “We’ll split first and save him the money.”
“What will people say?”
“Are you writing a book? Just say yes or no.”
“Yes, obviously yes,” Grace said. “Two girls in the city living it up—no need to apple butter me into this deal.”
Grace threw her arms around Debbie’s shoulders, adding a little hop to their hug. The embrace lingered a little beyond where it normally ended. Debbie closed her eyes, letting her chin rest on Grace’s shoulder. She licked her lips as the world slowed down around her. Shaking hands grasped Grace around the waist. Underwater-slow, their lips came together. Debbie inhaled deeply, pressing further into the kiss with Grace responding in kind. It was a gamble in an excited moment, but Debbie was certain Grace understood.
Debbie was wrong. Grace reared back like a frightened horse, shattering the kiss with a hard slap across Debbie’s left cheek. “Freak!” Grace shrieked and shoved Debbie away from a kiss that moments before seemed entirely mutual. Grace’s face was flush with excitement and her hands shook with uncertain anger.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Debbie plead. “It was a mistake. Can we please forget…?”
“I knew there was something wrong with you,” Grace hissed. “The girls were whispering that you didn’t go all the way with Phil, and now I know why. You’re a freak!”
“I was just confused,” Debbie said, frightened, hurt tears running freely down her cheeks. “Can we forget this ever happened and go to New York?”
“I’m not going anywhere with you and you’re not going anywhere when I tell your parents what you did.” Grace scooped up her records and stormed out of the room.
Debbie followed her down the stairs pleading with no result. Grace stormed out the front door hurling a final insult over her shoulder that Debbie had never heard before. Dyke. She was a dyke. It was spit from Grace’s mouth with such venom that Debbie knew it must be a horrible, hateful thing. She collapsed on the living room couch to sob. She finally had the word for what she was feeling—dyke.
An officious knock came on the open front door, which swung on its hinges after Grace’s slamming only rebounded back to ajar when the force was too much for the latch to catch. Debbie tore herself away from the pillow she was crying into to find the same two police officers from the night before standing at the threshold of the living room.
“We have a development in your case, Miss Poole,” the shorter of the two officers said.
“Apparently a few women reported a drifter skulking around in the hall of mirrors that afternoon, but he was gone already by the time we got down there,” the other officer said.
“If you hadn’t insisted it was a black man, we might have connected the incidents sooner,” the short officer said.
Debbie wanted to scream in their faces. She’d told them repeatedly it wasn’t a black man only to have them insist over and over that it must have been. “I told you, he was a white man with black stubble,” Debbie said through clenched teeth.
“That’s not what we have in our notes,” the shorter officer said. “We’ve picked up a few possible suspects. If you’ll come down to the stationhouse with us, you can point out your attacker.”
Debbie huffed and shook her head. “Fine.”
On her way to the door, the two officers exchanged a look when the taller one spotted the letterman jacket and teddy bear sitting on the kitchen table. She heard the shorter one scoff and mutter something behind her back.
3.
The time spent at the stationhouse was a colossal waste. The three men they’d picked up as suspects appeared to be nothing more than random farmhands from surrounding farms. They were all clean shaven and well-fed, not remotely matching the disheveled and lanky description she’d given the police. They assured her they would keep looking, although she heard the same scoff and mutters following her back out of the building as the shorter officer no doubt shared among the other officers that the allegedly missing bear and jacket were remarkably discovered on the hysterical girl’s kitchen table.
Debbie arrived home to find her parents waiting for her along with Pastor Gunderson. They had the acceptance letter, envelope full of money, bus ticket, and a signed testimony from Grace stating how sexually perverse and sinful Debbie was. The intervention for her soul pressed on Debbie from all sides. Bible verses were read to threaten her with eternal damnation and suffering in hell. The betrayal to the family implied by the college acceptance letter and bus ticket to New York only further confirmed Debbie’s wicked, sinful ways. Finally, the entire business with the attempted rape was hurled at her feet—Pastor Gunderson demanded that she confess to making it all up under the devil’s advisement. Showing remarkable strength that surprised her parents, her pastor, and most importantly herself, Debbie refused to crack under the pressure. She denied wrong doing in wanting to go to college, denounced Grace’s recount of what had happened as overly dramatic, and reasserted the same story she’d had all along regarding the previous day’s attack. She had a label now, a word for what she was, and it gave her strength—dyke.
The defiance made the decision that was already made before Debbie had even walked through the door all the more valid: she would be committed and cured as soon as possible. Pastor Gunderson knew a doctor at the state mental hospital he could call. The sin of homosexuality was a recognized mental illness with a proscribed cure of electroconvulsive therapy. Debbie was roughly escorted to her room by Pastor Gunderson and her father to the wails and bemoaning of her mother. Debbie kept the stoicism of Joan of Arc on the surface, but secretly screamed inside for the injustice of it all. Her money earned by her work, her spot in college achieved through four years of diligent study, and her very freedom to choose for herself were all torn away from her a mere week before she could use all three.
Sitting in her room, with the door nailed shut behind her, she considered the contents of her life with an eye toward setting herself free in the last way left open to her. Commitment and electro-shock were a fate worse than hell and she was determined to make a final choice for herself before succumbing to it. Her parents had apparently foreseen this eventuality, most likely under the advisement of Pastor Gunderson who talked as though he’d successfully completed this plan on more than a dozen occasions before, as every sharp object she knew had once existed in her room was suspiciously absent. Debbie, resourceful and clever in ways her parents weren’t, set about tearing and braiding her bed sheet into a proper rope.
She had nearly completed the project that would be her salvation when a knock came at her window. Phil’s face, under illuminated by a flashlight, appeared in the side yard window. She rushed over and gently slid the squeaky window up. He was standing on a twelve foot ladder liberated from her neighbor’s garage with a savior’s grin on his face.
“Grace told me what happened,” Phil said, “and then she made a pass at me. I told her off and came right over. I’ve got a way out of this if you’re interested.”
“Your car’s here?” Debbie asked, hope creeping into her formerly void future.
“Parked around the corner,” Phil said, waggling his eyebrows.
She slipped out the window, abandoning the bed sheet noose and her former life without as much as a note to mark her departure. She wouldn’t take anything her parents could claim was theirs, leaving no recourse for them to follow her. Sure, she would have to work, maybe borrow money from Phil if he was willing, but the letter to Barnard wasn’t what was important—her acceptance would be on file even if she showed up a week early, and her scholarship could more than pay back Phil for the bus ticket when the money…but they weren’t heading toward the Greyhound station. Phil’s car was crawling along the back roads leading around the edge of Vigil’s Wood to make out point.
The Vampires of Vigil's Sorrow Page 2