Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso

by Jeff Vrolyks

And at nine, you aren’t a hundred-percent sure of anything. The universe is still proving itself to you. Bogeyman under the bed? Monsters in the closet? Can’t rule them out. Maybe if Lester made visible his body, that would’ve dampened some of the impact of dread his lunatic face affected on me.”

  “Melinda?” Howard’s voice cracked.

  A slight rise in her brow.

  “You’re right about remembering it perfectly,” he said solemnly. “Maybe a little too perfectly. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do. It occurred seventeen years ago, but if it had happened yesterday it wouldn’t be any—”

  “Melinda?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You weren’t… Lester didn’t… I can’t even get myself to say it.” He peeled off his glasses and pressed both palms into his eye sockets and twisted.

  “Rape?”

  Howard looked away shamefully, nodded.

  “Let me tell the story. If you still have questions, I’ll answer them.”

  He nodded.

  “No, he didn’t rape me.”

  Howard shed some shoulder-weight with a deep breath.

  “So something inside me said this man was a bad man, and—”

  Howard’s iPhone began playing the Battlestar Galactica theme: he turned the ringer off and flipped the phone upside down.

  “I shrieked,” Melinda continued, “shrieked like the best of ‘em. Top of my healthy lungs. He smirked, shook his head and left. I didn’t care that he left, he was still in the house, so I wailed the Melinda siren until Big Brother came running upstairs. You asked what was wrong. I explained. You said I’m weird and stop screaming for no reason. My reason seemed as good as any to me. Nine-hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, you would have been right. I don’t blame you for being wrong. You’re not psychic.

  “You told me to keep it down and left. I closed my door, but it didn’t have a lock. I must have spent an hour stacking things in front of my door. My little TV wasn’t easy moving, but I put the lot of my treasures in front of the doorway, and then I felt better. But not perfectly safe, I still had a window. Being on the second floor helped a lot, but there wasn’t a lock on it. I couldn’t begin to figure out how he could get up to the window, but I knew he could. His eyes had told me that much, they were full of secrets—he knew a lot.

  “I opened the blinds and stood guard at the window from then on. I had a plan in my head, that if I saw him I’d tear apart the barricade and lock myself in the bathroom. But it wasn’t necessary. All I saw was Margo pretending to walk her dog back and forth in front of our house. She had her boobs all popping out of her blouse. She knew a lot too, Howard, but she was no Less Cobb. Nobody is Lester Cobb.”

  She cleared her throat and continued. “Your friends started thinning out before long. When my doorknob turned suddenly, I shrieked. But it turns out it was just you. You called me a nut job, said the boys were gone, and wanted to know what to cook me for dinner.”

  “Macaroni and Cheese with fish-sticks,” Howard mumbled.

  “You remember?” There was excitement in her voice. Howard had to assume she hated telling this story as much as he hated hearing it. A sudden return of his memory would put the story to rest. Permanently.

  But that wasn’t the case. “You loved Mac n’ Cheese and fish-sticks,” he said. “No, I don’t remember. I just figured you’d have wanted that.”

  “Oh.” Her disappointment was manifest. “I actually don’t remember what I said. And it didn’t matter one way or the other because we didn’t have dinner that night.”

  Howard felt the couch cushion vibrate by his knee. “Damnit.” He snatched the phone and read: Upon Missed Call; Upton Text (1); Felicity Text (1). “Get off my ass already.” He powered the phone off and chucked it over to the smaller couch.

  “Sorry,” Howard said. “Go ahead, Millie.”

  She gaped at Howard.

  “What? Upton and Felicity can wait. Go head, finish.”

  “What did you just call me?” Her calm soft voice was a lit fuse.

  “I didn’t call you anything. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Don’t you ever call me that again, or so help me God...”

  Howard didn’t know how to respond, so he didn’t. She was busy hating him with her eyes, so he waited for the moment to progress at its own volition.

  Melinda perched an elbow on top of the couch and rested her head in hand. She avoided her brother, watched old home-movies from the catacombs of her memory.

  Enough time passed for Howard’s skin to begin crawling. “I’m sorry if I offended you. Will you continue please?”

  She rolled her head off her hand and looked lazily at Howard. “Can I write it for you to read? Or dig up the newspaper instead?”

  “Why are you being like this? Why the sudden change? You were doing fine. You painted a hell of a picture: Lester Cobb is a creepy asshole. And I’m kind of hoping I accidently blew his head off. At least he didn’t… you know,” he said the word with his eyes.

  “Are you kidding me, Howard? You won’t say rape but you’ll call me Millie? A word is a word, yeah it’s unpleasant, but that name…”

  “I didn’t call you Millie,” he assured. “I’ve never called you Mille. I’ve never said the name in my life.”

  “When the boys were here,” she continued, detached as if she was reciting a boring bedtime story, “either Less or Damien unlocked the—”

  “Damien?”

  “Lester and Damien Cobb. Damien was the younger. One of them had unlocked the sliding back door while they were here. I was watching TV in the living room an hour or so later. You were in the kitchen, probably cooking us dinner. One of them or both of them had snuck into the house through the sliding back door and took care of you right there in the kitchen. You had head trauma; bludgeoned with something hard enough that you required staples in the back of your head that night. I don’t know how it went down or with what they used, but they must’ve surprised you because I never heard a peep.” Now her voice was a bit accusatory. “Maybe things would’ve been different if you warned me, maybe not.” She conceded, “They probably would’ve caught me anyway.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t warn you,” he said testily, “but if they snuck up and clubbed me, it’s hardly my fault.”

  “I know. I shouldn’t have insinuated that.” She looked away for a moment, sniffled, felt tears in her eyes. “If it wasn’t for you… I’ve never thanked you in these seventeen years.”

  “Thanked me? Don’t you dare thank me.”

  “I was sitting on the couch,” she continued, “watching TV. I never saw it coming. A hand slid over my mouth, another around my throat. I was pulled off the couch from behind.”

  “By, by the neck?” He squeaked.

  “Mhmm. Then Lester took me to the room by… he dragged—” Her voice seized up. She hung her head, ran a pair of fingers through her scalp until she felt it, parted the overlying hair back, exposing a little bald pink spot the size of a penny.

  Howard cringed. The image he conjured up was rueful. And infuriating.

  “Lester was strong. Or maybe it was just that I was weak. I beat on his arm and any piece of him I could reach, all the way to their room.”

  “Their?”

  As if she had committed a sin, a thin uneven voice said, “Mom and Dad’s bedroom.”

  Glowing hot cinders burned in Howard’s chest. “Please tell me this,” he said with a madman’s calmness. “Please tell me I killed them.”

  Maybe it was the unexpected words, maybe it was his tone, but her bright eyes widened: she knew he meant it.

  “You told me he didn’t do that to you,” he said pointedly. “You lied to me?” Almost imperceptibly she shook her head. It was a weak no, but it was a no nonetheless. But now she was crying, and Howard couldn’t help but read into that. His thoughts stoked the smoldering cinders into flames. “Then Damien? Be honest.”

  “I d-didn’t lie.” Her voi
ce was wholly different. Laden with emotion. Howard wouldn’t believe it was Melinda’s if he wasn’t watching her mouth move. “Once they had me in their r-room, Damien pushed me into the closet, closed the door. As dark as it was in the closet, blinding darkness, I was relieved because I was alone in there. I tried to scream for you, but I had no voice. A burning ache in my th-throat.” Melinda, whether she knew it or not, began rubbing that little soft spot of her lower throat. “Nothing came out but a whisper. Was like that for days. The younger one, Damien, gave me a warning. ‘Don’t say a word; don’t scream.’ His brother Lester had already taken care of that, though.” She got up from the couch and walked away.

  Howard gnawed at his cheek, hardly registering her departure. She came back with a roll of paper-towels and tore off a few to blow her nose and blot her eyes. Howard said inwardly, “I wish I killed them and I wish I remembered doing it. I’d give anything.”

  “But would you give everything?” She asked as she situated on the couch—a little farther away this time. “Because it costs a hell of a lot more than just anything.

  “While I waited for the unknown to happen,” Melinda continued, “blind in the closet, they went and beat you an inch away from your life.”

  “Wait,” Howard said. “Maybe that’s why I can’t remember. Maybe it’s physical, not mental.”

  “Nope. Like I said, you gave the details to the police, Mom, Dad.” She gave Howard a trying look and said, “If you should remember one thing, it’s how wonderful Dad was in all of this. He was an emotional lifesaver for me. And you. Dad dove into this thing wholeheartedly, supported us to the ‘enth degree. To the point that his business suffered dearly for it. He tried everything: enrolled us in a private school (which we hated), took us to Disneyworld in Florida for a week, a trip to uncle Ed’s in Vancouver. None of it did shit to help, but it was the thought that counted. He sold the house, their dream house which he and Mom had designed, and moved us into the house that we decided we liked the most: the one on Belford Court, the single story three-bedroom place, half the size of our last house. It was an untainted brand new house, the polar-opposite of the last one in every way. That’s a sacrifice Mom wasn’t on board with. Mom loved our old house. Her soul was in that fucking thing; it was her American Dream materialized. Maybe she never considered that our souls were in that fucking thing too, only for us it was more of a sentencing than an American Dream. Souls stolen in her American Nightmare. Dad couldn’t move out of there fast enough. He was consumed with trying to undo the impossible.

  “Mom changed, too. But she was more like you. She wanted Dad to stop talking about it already, and act like everything was peachy. But of course he didn’t. So then Mom would bring up how it was Dad’s idea to not hire a sitter that anniversary weekend, making it all his fault. She was right, it was his idea, but it’s hardly something you can pin blame on the guy for—we’d still be living in the Garden of Eden if we had foresight the way we have hindsight, ya know? We’re only as perfect as God wants us to be, after all. But her saying that to him didn’t go over too well, as you can imagine. They fought, and fought, and fought. It was the beginning of the end of their marriage.”

  She sank back into couch a little deeper and muttered, “God… to think Dad died knowing how my life turned out, what a failure I am.”

  “Was,” Howard corrected. “You’re not a failure. I wish Dad somehow knew how you’re doing, because he’d be so proud of you.”

  “You don’t know how many times I thought about how disappointed Dad must’ve been in how I turned out. Even when I was high I couldn’t escape the thought for long. When Landon Realty expanded to Vegas, I had to see his commercials from time to time. Shit, when I was high and saw him on my TV?—I hated myself. It was almost like he was watching me from the tube, shaking his head and speaking straight