by Dan Padavona
“You aren't going to remove those books, are you?”
“Of course not.”
“But what if she really does know people who could take away your funding?”
“I'm not afraid of her, and you shouldn't be either.” Renee leaned forward and met Jen's eyes. “Here's something I want you to take away from all of this. The people who are most set in their ways are usually the first to fail. Those who keep an open mind and adapt end up ahead in life. Know what I mean?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Good. Now let's forget about her.” Renee leaned back, and her lips curved into a smile. “A little bird tells me that you are still seeing a certain boy, one who thinks very highly of you.”
Crimson rushed into Jen's cheeks.
“A little bird, huh?”
“Well...I don't need to tell you how quickly rumors move through this town.” Renee grinned, and her eyes lit up. “So tell me. I'm so excited for you!”
“Tom's just a friend. Really.”
“Sounds to me like he is more than a friend.”
She rolled her eyes. “He's sweet. But it's not going to go anywhere. In a year he's going to graduate and go to a really good college. He won't even remember this town.”
“And what about you? Aren't you going to go to a really good college?”
“I haven't thought about it much...”
“You should.” Renee leaned over the desk toward her. “You're a very smart girl, Jen. Have confidence in yourself. I want to see you do more than take a few courses at a community college. You have the grades.”
“I guess so...”
“I know so. So this weekend we're going to sit down and go through some course catalogs. Will you do that with me?”
“Sure.”
“But we need to get started on this. Graduation is only fourteen months away.”
“I know...”
“Jen. Look at me. You have the intelligence to succeed. And you have a strength inside of you that will carry you through the difficult times that everyone faces. I can feel it. Have confidence in yourself.”
“Okay,” she said, her blush now strawberry red.
“If he likes you, and you like him, it will work. Nothing else matters. This weekend. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Six
Katy Lawrence shielded her eyes from the late afternoon sun, which poured out of the west like the high beams of a semi. They would be looking for her by now, so she avoided the traffic of Main Street and made the trek west out of downtown.
Her legs tired as she climbed Blakely Hill. She had walked all day, purposely avoiding the places she knew they would expect her to visit. The Red Lion was off limits. Besides, she wasn’t looking for company.
She had considered Jeff's apartment—it was the only place where she had felt safe lately, and he often left it unlocked—but it was too risky. The police might search the apartment, and so might her father.
She had seen Jeff awake and surrounded by his family during a risky trip to the intensive care unit. It had made her feel warm inside and relieved, but only momentarily. She remembered that she was responsible for getting him into this mess in the first place. So she had slipped down the back stairwell before anyone recognized her.
She was through crying, though regret festered in the pit of her stomach.
There was nowhere left for her to go, and so she wandered until she realized the only alternative she had was to leave town. She had an aunt in Hopewell who might help her out with some money and a place to stay. If she could get to Winchester Road, she could hitch a ride out of town. Any destination would do.
Katy continued up Blakely, the newly-sprouted leaves of elms and oaks creating a shaded tunnel which cooled her skin. Sparrows sang within the branches. Grackles congregated along the telephone wire.
The hill wound north into a sharp curve before ending at Maple Street. She was drained and numb, wandering without purpose like an emotional vagabond, when she saw the beaten path winding upward from the juncture of Blakely and Maple into the meadows which paralleled the backyard hills.
As she followed the path southwest into the meadow, where the westering sun made the tall grass and wildflowers appear warm and inviting, the trail beckoned her back to a place where she had once found comfort. The wind sent rippling waves across the grassy ocean. The air was thick with wildflowers, and her sundress flapped in the breeze.
She reached Becks Pond and found it unoccupied. She sat on the pier and dangled her legs above the water, her dress soaked with sweat and clinging to her body. It had been thirty-six hours since she had showered and changed clothes.
She surveyed her surroundings—nobody in the cemetery, no shouts from kids making their way up the hill from Maple Street.
She crouched in the grass and slipped the weathered sundress over her shoulders. A peek through the grass confirmed she was still alone, and she dived into the pond. The water was cold, still holding the memories of winter along its bottom. It took a moment for her body to adjust before she found the water temperature agreeable.
The water was clear along the top and cloudy along the bottom. She controlled her body movement to avoid kicking up the murk below. The pond refreshed her, and she began to feel that better days were ahead. If only she could put her father and Storberry behind her.
The meadow still appeared empty, but she wasn’t about to press her luck. As the water poured off her bare skin in sheets, she grabbed hold of the pier and pressed herself upward and out of the pond.
Water evaporated off her skin in a buffeting wind, which spread gooseflesh across her body. She wrapped her arms around her upper body to maintain body heat and waited for the power of the sun to dry her. Then she pulled the sundress over her head, leaving her sneakers off for now.
Soft, cumulus clouds morphed against a sea of blue. They reminded her of lazy summer days when her worries were few.
Had things ever been good?
They hadn't. She had only been too young to realize how bad things were.
As she lay back with her arms behind her head watching the clouds change, waving bluestem caressed her bare skin, and the smell of barbecue carried up the hill from the backyards of Maple Street. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt at peace. She closed her eyes and the world became a serene mixture of oranges and pinks. Transient clouds cast moving shadows against her eyelids.
Becks Pond had once been a favorite place for her—an escape hatch from reality. She had avoided the meadow whenever other children were playing, for even then they could be cruel to her with their taunts. But when it was empty, it was idyllic. If there was one place she would miss when she was finally free of Storberry, it was Becks Pond. She drifted toward slumber, safely concealed in the tall grass.
Memories surfaced like developing photographs—her father, on an occasion when he was sober and lucid, pushing her on a bicycle with training wheels down a buckled sidewalk; reading a report on President Lincoln in front of Miss Allen's second grade class, beaming with pride, before teachers started to look at her differently; a woman who she could barely remember holding her close and telling her that she loved her...
A tear formed at the corner of her eye, ran down the contour of her cheek, and dried in the meadow breeze.
Why did you leave me, Mommy?
She drifted into dream.
Seven
The southwest flow meandered out of the Gulf of Mexico into Storberry. Though the afternoon heat was past its apex, the increasing humidity provided a preview of the coming summer. The moisture encouraged mosquitoes to awaken and feed. Preventing the warm temperatures from falling much in the waning sunlight, the stifling humidity guaranteed that window box air conditioners would rattle and hum across the town tonight.
Erin Kent pulled her rusty Subaru onto the asphalt shoulder at the corner of 16 and Jensen. She leaned against the car and looked into the setting sun, a bloody ocean in the west. The town appe
ared exactly as she remembered it.
It seemed that she had been running forever. She had traveled from state to state, worked a menagerie of temporary jobs and racked up a stack of unpaid medical bills. Scattered among it all was a vague blur of disreputable men who had treated her poorly.
There had once been happiness for her here, but it had been so long ago that she could not recall quite how it had been. She fumbled with the pill bottle in her pants pocket, twisted the cap past the safety lock, and popped two red and white capsules into her mouth before she could spill them into the ditch. She glanced at the prescription—
TAKE TWO CAPSULES BY MOUTH AT BEDTIME
DO NOT EXCEED TWO CAPSULES IN 24 HOURS
As she swallowed her fifth and sixth capsules of the day, she shook the bottle and estimated she had enough medicine to get her through another five or six days, and no refills.
Then what?
She stuffed the bottle into her front pocket.
The tremors and thoughts of violence lessened as soon as she swallowed the pills, much faster than the medication could reach her bloodstream. She was lucid enough to understand the medicine was a crutch, but she needed it now more than ever.
It was thirteen years ago that Erin Lawrence, as she was then known, had left her husband and daughter in the middle of the night.
Dell had known something was wrong with her for over a year. She had stopped eating, and her body trembled for no apparent reason. She flew into violent rages, smashed her fists into walls, and hurled glasses against kitchen cabinetry at the slightest upset. Dell had regressed, unable to support her. As his drinking increased, he began spending more time in bars than he was at home.
Erin hadn't comprehended what was happening to her. The women around town whispered she was losing her mind, but what did they know? Her doctor wanted her to undergo studies at a center in Raleigh, but she feared his real intention was to have her institutionalized.
The nightmare reached a crescendo in Richmond on a September evening.
She had come to the city on a job interview and stopped at a mall near her hotel. Shortly before closing time, she made her way through the darkened parking lot. It had taken her a long time to find her car. The anxiety of searching for her vehicle in an unfamiliar city had set her nerves on edge.
When she finally began to pull out of the lot, her hands were gripped to the steering wheel like vise clamps. She was near the lot exit when a man in a pickup barreled toward her from the passenger side.
The truck’s high beams had been like an oncoming train in the passenger side window. There was the blare of a horn, and then the pickup sideswiped her. The jarring force knocked her head into the driver side window.
The truck hadn’t relented. It pushed the car for several more seconds, tires squealing and smoke billowing.
The man had exploded out of the cab, his face red as a tomato. He had screamed at her that it was her fucking fault, and that he was going to teach her a lesson. She could still smell the liquor on his breath and see the sweaty hair matted against his forehead. He was going to kill her. Had he seen the look in her eyes, he would have retreated to the pickup and disappeared into the night.
She burst out of the driver side door. A mask of rage distorted her face, causing the man to take a step backward toward his truck.
A switchblade appeared in her right hand. The blade popped out with a sharp click, like a Jack-in-the-Box. Later she would not remember where she had obtained the knife, though she had found it weeks ago on the east side of Spruce, lying on the sidewalk as though it were Excalibur waiting for her to draw it from stone.
Before the man could react, her right arm swept across his vision and found his throat. He froze, like a cartoon character just realizing it had run off a cliff. An awful crimson streak appeared across his neck. He gasped, and blood flooded down his chest.
As his eyes filled with disbelief, he slumped toward the pavement, mouth moving but unable to speak. He made choking sounds and coughed out blood.
As though she were a spectator in a macabre dream, her arm moved on its own. She remembered the helplessness in his eyes as the knife plunged into his shoulders and chest. As the blade struck flesh and bone, torrents of red splattered across the side of the truck.
The blade disappeared with a click of the thumb.
She rushed back to the car and drove to the interstate. The reality of what she had done slammed into her with such force that she nearly fainted. It was all she could do to keep the car on the road.
She recalled a rain storm and traffic jam on I-95. There was no other memory of the trip home until she arrived in Storberry.
Erin now knew what she was capable of. Would the next time be Dell, or Katy?
The next day while her daughter napped and her husband was away at work, she packed essentials into a duffel bag and slipped it behind the bushes outside. She ate dinner with her daughter, the sadness of knowing it would be the last time she saw Katy boring a hole through her.
She retired to bed after Dell returned. Watching the clock until he was sound asleep, she lay with one eye open. Shortly after midnight Dell was snoring and mumbling something indistinguishable. She had slept in her clothes, and he had been too drunk to notice.
When she pushed herself out of bed as quietly as she could, the mattress squealed, and Dell muttered again. She froze. Several seconds later, he was snoring again.
As blue moonlight drifted through the living room bay window and spread down the hallway, she could hear the electrical hum of the refrigerator. A lone car passed by, and its beams traveled across the window. The pitch of its engine fell, and the car faded into the night.
She crept into her daughter's room to kiss her one last time.
She slipped out the front door. It locked behind her with a kind of cold finality.
The outside world lay obscured by tears as she grabbed the hidden bag. She walked four miles to Jensen and Route 16 in the pit of night, alone in the dark, but without fear for her safety. Erin Lawrence no longer cared whether she lived or died. All was lost.
As she hitchhiked from 16 to nearly twenty miles west on Winchester Road, she eventually caught a ride with a man traveling to Lexington. The ultimate destination was not important, as long as she was too far away to hurt her daughter.
For the next thirteen years she drifted, changing names to escape creditors and to stay a step ahead of her past. The Richmond murder went unsolved.
Now she had returned, Storberry shimmering before her like the ghost of an old friend.
What exactly was the plan? Did she really think she could show up on their doorstep and everything would be forgiven? There might be another woman now, a real mother to Katy.
She had found their address in the phone book, and that was where her ill-conceived plan ended.
The first step was to find lodging for the night. As she followed 16 to Jensen, reversing the route she used to walk out on her family, dark storefronts stared back at her with indifference. A quarter mile before Main Street she pulled the Subaru into the parking lot of the Pink Flamingo Hotel. She had no bags to carry in.
At the front desk, a disinterested young man named Clark Samson waited on her. He grumbled something about overnight shifts and lack of sleep. She checked in as Jody Rogers and paid with a fake bank card.
Eight
The blood-red sun disappeared below the horizon. It left a spectrum of striations in its wake, which began as vermilion over the forest and faded to gray at the zenith. Light slipped away.
Greg Madsen stopped his bike on the corner of Jensen and Main and watched the woman with no bags walk into the Pink Flamingo. He didn't recognize her, but there was something about the way she kept her head down and avoided eye contact that made him suspicious. He waited until she had entered the building, then he copied down the Virginia license plate number of her car and radioed Art Stults to run a check.
Mary Giovanni bolted the front door to the Sweet Nothings Caf
é. The evening smelled of summer—humid with a rich earthy scent on the wind. As she looked forward to a glass of wine on her back deck and a good book to keep her company, a sudden wind gust off the hill caught her off guard, and she dropped her keys. She bent to pick them up and surveyed the sky. The clear blue of twilight revealed no clouds, but the atmosphere felt like a compressed spring. The tension reminded her of how it felt before a bad storm.
Benny Marks, the spitting image of his brother but ten years younger, pedaled furiously along Court Street. He had stayed too long at Mike Bailey’s house, and now he raced against the coming darkness. His legs pumped like pistons, the 10-speed Schwinn speeding through the building gloom. The wind from his forward speed felt cool on his face. A car beeped as it passed him on his left. In the distance he could see the lights of the public library.
He knew there was no hope to make it home before sunset and that his parents would be worried. He had tried to call them from Mike’s house, but all the phone had done was ring and ring. A gust of wind struck him from the south, as though he had passed parallel to a wind tunnel. The bike wobbled, and he had to jerk the handle bars and shift his weight to keep from crashing. Then he heard what sounded like a train approaching from the south. But that was impossible because there were no tracks in the area.
The lights flickered inside Armstrong General Hospital. Jeff Branyan had been moved to a regular room and seemed to be recovering well. His doctor said he had a few broken ribs and a concussion but that he would fully heal. Trying to find something interesting to watch on the tiny black and white television bolted to the wall across from his bed, Jeff saw the signal go out. He pressed the remote control but every channel was snow and static.
In the hallway a young female nurse talked to a cute orderly. She was building up toward asking the boy for a date when the window at the south end of the hall rattled. There came a loud moaning sound from without, and the southern wall groaned like a dying animal. The nurse had a panicked look in her eyes.
“Jesus. Was that the wind?”