Dead Spell

by Belinda Frisch

  “Please, please don’t take me to the hospital. Please.” Her words were slow, pained, and pathetic. She was in and out only long enough to think about what the doctors and Adam would say: “self-inflicted” and “suicide attempt.” Words that would get her hospitalized, medicated, and worse.

  Adam lifted her from the floor and carried her near-lifeless body into the bedroom. She couldn’t even hold on to him. She could only watch him cry.

  “Harmony, I…”

  “Please.” She closed her eyes and felt her weight sink into the bed.

  “Harmony, wake up. Come on, baby. Wake up. Look at me.” He shook her and patted her cheeks.

  She opened her eyes, but couldn’t focus. She was mentally shut down. Not unconscious, but apart from reality and unwilling to join him.

  17.

  Harmony woke up to the sensation of tape tugging her skin. Adam had cleaned her cuts and put steri-strips on the worst of them. The others he dressed with gauze before dressing her in one of his oversized sweatshirts.

  He was sitting on the end of the bed and looked like he was waiting for her to say something. When she didn’t, he handed her a bottle of water. “Can I get you anything else?”

  An exorcism, she thought, but shook her head “no.” Maybe Brea was right. Maybe contacting Tom did make things worse. She thought about their fight and needed to apologize.

  “Actually, will you hand me my purse?” She pointed at the camouflage bag on the floor next to the dresser.

  “Harmony, I think you should rest…”

  “I didn’t ask what you thought.” Harmony was about to stand up when he held out his hand to stop her.

  “I got it.” He set the bag down on the bed next to her and she saw right away that the zipper was zipped. She never did that because two of the teeth were broken and the thing stuck like crazy. He’d gone through it and not very slyly.

  “Where’s my cell?” She rummaged through the papers, pens, empty cigarette packs, and crumpled money.

  “I, uh…” He chewed his thin lower lip.

  “What did you do with my phone, Adam? It’s not in here.” She pulled on a pair of hole-in-the-knee jeans and went out to the kitchen.

  “Harmony, you need to relax. You shouldn’t be up in your condition.”

  “What the hell does that mean? My only condition is pissed. You had no right going through my stuff.” She picked up the pieces of her prepaid off the counter. “Where’s the battery?”

  Adam leaned against the counter. “I’m not letting you call him.”

  Harmony suppressed the urge to throw something at him. “Him who? What are you talking about?”

  “Lance, Harmony. Do you think I don’t know where the drugs come from?” He held up the old aspirin bottle that was normally stashed in her purse and shook out two pills of ecstasy. “You need help.”

  She scrambled for the pills and he put them down the garbage disposal, instantly hitting the switch. The blades chewed and the sink drain swallowed the last of her stash.

  “Hey!”

  “A joint now and again, I can forgive. But that? No way.”

  She pushed his hand off the switch. “I don’t owe you an explanation. I don’t owe you anything.”

  “You have to stop this. I’m trying to help you.”

  “Adam, give me the battery.” She grabbed for the pocket of his jeans, but he fended her off.

  “Will you just sit down a minute and talk to me about this?”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.” She yanked herself free, ignoring the pain in her leg. One of the deeper cuts must have ripped open because a hot spot of blood leeched through her jeans.

  Adam tried again to restrain her, but she fought hard enough that to do it would mean he’d have to hurt her. “Will you stop this? Please, calm down and listen.”

  She flung open the cabinets and pulled out the drawers, dumping them out on the floor and kicking through the mess. “Where’s the fucking battery, Adam? I’m not going to ask again.” She grabbed a pointed, chopping knife out of the butcher block before he could stop her.

  “Give me that.” He squeezed her wrist, hard, until the knife fell from her hand. It narrowly missed his foot as it buried its point in the linoleum.

  Harmony let out a scream and pushed him as hard as she could, but she barely moved him.

  He grabbed her from behind and crossed his arms over hers, holding them tight to her chest.

  She bucked and pulled him like an ox hitched to a plow, dragging him toward the table and then bit his hand.

  He pulled away and she reached for the coffee cup handle, swinging it around and hitting him in the protruding bone above his eye. The skin split and he hissed as his face dripped fresh blood and old, tepid coffee.

  “What the fuck?” He open hand slapped her across the jaw, sending her tumbling into the mess.

  She sat for a minute, stunned.

  He had never hit her before and had it not just happened, she would’ve never believed he could. She held her hand to her face. The burning pain turned to a weird tingling and her jaw instantly swelled.

  The next few seconds of silence felt like hours.

  “Oh my god.” He started to cry and bent down to help her up. “I’m…so…I didn’t mean to…”

  She shoved his hand away. “Don’t ever touch me again. We’re done. You hear me? Finished.”

  “Please, wait a minute.” He handed her the cell phone battery from his pants pocket. “Here. I’m sorry. I found the drugs and I snapped. Please, talk to me. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to…I just don’t want you to…”

  “End up like my mother? It’s a popular concern, lately.” She reassembled her phone and turned it on, refusing to cry, determined not to let him see how bad he had hurt her.

  It was his first time hitting her, but it wasn’t her first time being hit.

  She opened her mouth and moved her lower jaw side-to-side. It snapped, but it wasn’t broken.

  His eye, however, looked like it might need stitches.

  She tossed him a hand towel and collected her things.

  “Harmony, wait.” He hung the towel over the back of the kitchen chair, the blood running down his cheek. “You know I didn’t mean it.”

  “It’s not whether you meant it. It’s that you did it.”

  She piled her laundry, her make-up, everything she owned right down to her toothbrush into the garbage bag and slung it over her shoulder.

  Nothing he could say would make her stay. She knew better. She had seen his kind of apology before and, though she didn’t categorize Adam with the sleazebags her mother ended up with, she wasn’t about to end up fighting for her life in an emergency room, either.

  It starts as a push, then a slap, then a punch, and then so many punches it’s a wonder you’re alive and with every step along the way, they always say they’re sorry.

  “Please…”

  She held up her hand. “Just stop it, all right. We’re done. Don’t call me. Don’t look for me. Nothing. As far as you’re concerned, I’m dead.”

  She regretted it as soon as she said it.

  18.

  It was almost dark by the time Harmony got home and the air felt more like winter than fall. She blew out a puff of hot breath and it dissolved around her.

  “Welcome to rock bottom.”

  Looking down the bowels of Pinewood Estates, nothing had changed. Her trailer lights were off and probably the power, too. Lance’s, of course, were on and there were two cars parked out front of his place that she hoped were stop-and-go customers because she needed more than anything to settle in, drink a beer, smoke a joint—anything to take the edge off, if he would still have her.

  She felt her jaw and, deciding that the swelling was down, turned on her phone. Twelve new messages. Assuming they were all from Adam, she deleted them without listening.

  “Welcome home,” she said and climbed the rickety stairs.

  The heel of her boot sunk through t
he decking of the half-rotten porch and she gritted her teeth to stifle the scream. She pulled her foot loose and cursed the searing pain in her ankle.

  “Let’s see what’s behind door number one.”

  She turned the wobbly door knob and pushed. The door didn’t budge, its frame bent by a previous tenant’s domestic dispute that was anything but. The landlord had been promising for months to fix it, but so far had only showed up to complain that they were late on rent.

  “Looks like another break-in.” She knew just where to hit the door to knock it in and she tightened her muscles to minimize the pain. “Ready or not…” She checked the door with her hip and the vibrations rode up her bones and into her aching jaw. “Shit.” A thick blanket of kerosene fumes and the smell of sour vomit washed over her.

  “Oh my God. Mom?”

  No one answered.

  “Mom, are you here?” She kicked her way through mounds of trash to get to one of the few working windows and opened it.

  “Uhhh…” The guttural moan caught her off guard and she jumped.

  “Mom.” She grabbed a flashlight off the end table and hit it hard against her palm to keep it lit.

  Her mother was balled up under a blanket in the corner behind a pile of worn out boxes that had been moved so many times it took a roll of tape to keep what was left of their shape. Boxes that after four months of living at Pinewood Estates still hadn’t been unpacked.

  Harmony climbed over the cardboard fortress and dropped to her knees.

  “Mom.” She slapped her cheeks and shook her shoulders. “Mom, come on. Answer me.” Even in the muted light her lips were visibly blue. Harmony pressed two fingers against her neck and found the faint glug-glug of a weak pulse. “Mom, wake up. Come on. Wake up.” She unrolled the thick, urine-soaked blanket from around her and she immediately shivered.

  “Oh, God. Not again.”

  Harmony plucked the empty syringe from the crook of her mother’s left arm and undid the belt cutting off her circulation and discoloring her arm from the elbow down. She was wearing nothing but a bra and a pair of torn panties and there were handprint bruises up and down her throat, arms, and legs.

  Like mother, like daughter.

  “Mom, please answer me.”

  She vomited a soap-like foam and started to seize. Harmony turned her on her side and dialed 9-1-1.

  “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”

  “I need an ambulance right away. Pinewood Estates, trailer 16. The last name is Wolcott.” Harmony hung up and buried the dirty needle in an overfull trash can behind her. “I can’t believe this shit.”

  She threaded her frail mother through a grease-smeared sweatshirt and pulled a pair of drawstring pajama pants up her legs and over her tiny, bone-protruding hips.

  A siren blared and lights swirled in the distance.

  “I have to go. I’m sorry.” She picked up her bag and went around the back of the trailer to watch through the window.

  A young paramedic stepped into the trailer and repeatedly flicked the switch. “The light’s not working.”

  Bill, a paramedic Harmony knew well from his visits to their house, pushed past and knocked the newbie forward with the big red bag slung over his shoulder.

  “Light never works.” He used an empty box like a bulldozer to clear a path to her mother. He set down the back board and rolled her on it. “Charity, it’s Bill. Come on, wake up.” He lifted her lids and shined a pen light in her eyes. “Charity, can you hear me?”

  Her mother grunted and Harmony sighed with relief. She was going to be all right. She had to be.

  Two police cruisers pulled up to the swarm of neighbors crowded together out front: filthy children with no shoes and drunken parents, toothless, elderly women with filterless cigarettes perpetually fixed between their puckered lips, drug dealers and clients, most of which booed the officers. Harmony used the chatter for cover and headed to Lance’s.

  The door opened before she could even knock.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” He tied his hair back in a black rubber band and slipped a pair of sneakers on his bare feet.

  “I need your help.”

  “Like you needed my help the other night?” He pointed at his blackened, swollen eye.

  “I don’t have time for this.” One of the cops was looking around for something she figured was probably her.

  “I have to come in.” She shoved past him and closed the door. “Listen, just let me explain.”

  He sat on the arm of the sofa, clearly aggravated.

  “I wasn’t going to keep the car, Lance. You know that. You fell asleep and I just borrowed it.”

  “I fell asleep, right, nothing to do with that pill dust in my drink? Shitty that you’d pull that on me, Harm.”

  “Pull what? What are you talking about?” She meant to rinse the cup and forgot.

  “And you won’t even fess up. That’s the worst part.”

  He stood and crowded her toward the door, closing in on her in a cold, threatening manner.

  She felt pressured to go, but couldn’t leave. Not with the cops kicking around. She settled on a viable story and started to cry.

  “You want to know why I took your car? Fine. I went to end it with Adam. I was going to tell him that I wanted to be with you. That’s why he attacked you.”

  It was a perfect little logical lie.

  “And what happened when you tried?”

  She had to be careful. Either they hadn’t told them they’d found her at the cemetery or he was giving her enough rope to hang herself. “Then Brea called me and begged me to take her to Oakwood which was where they arrested me. At that point, I was at Adam’s mercy. I needed bail.” She pressed her lips to his, tilting her face so he would feel the tears.

  He kissed her back, but she could feel his reluctance.

  “I need you to get me out of here before he finds me.”

  He withdrew and she knew it was the wrong thing to say.

  “I can’t keep doing this. I’m not getting between you two and I’m certainly not getting the crap beat out of me again. You need to leave.”

  He opened the door. The crowd had cleared. The ambulance was gone, but she couldn’t go home. Child Protective Services was surely looking for her. She couldn’t go back to Adam’s either and though she’d slept on the streets before, it was far too cold. He was her only option. “Lance, come on. Let me stay tonight, please?”

  “No,” he said, “not this time. Fix your own goddamned mess.”

  19.

  Harmony walked away from Lance’s trailer feeling like a roadside discard. Her eyes stung and her nose filled up from holding in the tears. This was the most alone she ever felt and, as she opened the door to her cluttered trailer, she calculated her options: live tortured or die.

  The place stunk of urine, kerosene, and vomit.

  The floor was only clear where the medics had worked on her mother.

  “No one should live like this.” She ripped off the bandages that Adam dressed her cuts with and picked the fresh scabs until they bled.

  “You’ve been waiting for this, Tom. You want me, take me.” She dug her nails into the edge of the deepest cut, but the barely healed scab wouldn’t budge. “You want to see me hurt myself? Is that it?” She took a dull knife from the cluttered kitchen drawer and tore it through the scab, clenching her teeth to keep from screaming. “I know you’re here. What are you waiting for?” The blood gushed down her forearm and Tom’s presence tightened around her like a blood pressure cuff. “Ah, there you are.”

  The heaviness let up and she lost her balance.

  “Where’d you go, my friend? What’s wrong, don’t you want to help me.”

  A shadow moved in the darkness—gray on black and barely visible—and something flickered in the only framed picture of her and her mother; the one of them blowing bubbles outside when she was two-years-old. Someone she’d never noticed appeared in its background. She picked up the frame for a cl
oser look.

  A cool breeze blew across the back of her neck and the picture started to change. The faces in the picture went pale and thin and a greenish hue washed over them, growing progressively darker and more gruesome until decay and rot boiled them to bones.

  “I hate you.” She threw the picture down the long hallway and it shattered on her mother’s bedroom floor.

  Tom shoved her from behind, pushing her down the hall and knocking her to her knees. Glass shards from the broken frame poked through her pants and burrowed into her skin.

  “There you are. Angry, just like I like you.”

  She rummaged through the glass and raised the largest piece. A quiet, almost imperceptible laugh surrounded her. Her hands were bleeding and she knew better than to think whatever Tom had planned for her was going to be quick. She waited for him to bury the spike in her leg, but he didn’t. He thrust her hand downward into the photo and scraped back and forth until she broke through the photo paper to the yellowed edge of a newspaper clipping hidden underneath.

  The back of the frame was glued shut and she looked for something to smash it.

  She grabbed her hardcover journal and bashed the edge of the binding into the frame until it was in pieces.

  Inside it, behind the picture, was the rest of the obituary cut from the bound newspaper in the library archives.

  She couldn’t believe what it said: Known to his friends as Tom, Gerald Thomas Shippee died suddenly at his Maple Street home. Beloved husband and father, he is survived by his wife Charity and his daughter, Harmony.

  Tom was her father.

  She picked up a half-spent fifth of vodka from the floor, twisted the top off, and took a huge swig. The rank, clear liquid spilled down the bottle’s neck and into the throbbing gash in her hand.

  Why would her father do this?

  She tucked the obituary inside her journal and refused to remember. Seventeen years of wondering, of longing, of what ifs consumed and disappointed her, leaving her raw and empty.

  “Mom always said you were a ghost.”