“Hello, Kinsley.” Her wrinkled face turns up, reminding me of a smiling pug. Her silver hair is pulled away from her face. Her liver-spotted cheeks are animated with warmth and amusement.
I feel better just being in her presence.
“Hey, Edna.” I glance around, taking in her nearly barren shop. Around this time of year, she pulls good business. It makes up for the other times of the year when people have no use for her wares. “I see things are going well.”
“Yes, yes.” Her smile widens. “And you have all the supplies you need?”
I glance down. “Actually, I won’t be needing them this year.” I pause. “I’ve been given passage.”
Her pale gray eyes widen, and she reaches for my hand. With a squeeze, she says, “Good for you, dear. You’re here for the usual, then?”
I nod.
“Just give me one sec.” She walks out from behind the counter and heads for the back of her store. I’ve always wondered what she keeps there, other than flowers.
I lean against the glass counter and gaze down at all the crystals and jewelry under lockdown. My eyes stop on a polished, lavender piece. It’s in the shape of a cone and attached to a silver chain.
Pretty.
I lean closer to check the price tag. Twenty-five bucks. I sigh. Maybe next payday.
“It’s amethyst.”
I jump at Edna’s voice, and she laughs, sounding like a small, silver bell. I narrow my eyes at her but her smile is contagious, and soon I laugh too.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
“Yes, I just got it in a week ago. It’s a pendulum.”
I shake my head.
“It’s used to find lost objects. Sometimes, to answer yes or no questions.” She smiles again and slides the door behind the case to the side. Then, she takes the small gem and holds it over the palm of her right hand. “Side to side is no. Front to back is yes.” She clears her throat. “Will Kinsley Lane find true love tonight?”
I laugh at her question, but she doesn’t. Her eyes pinch. She stares hard at the stone, as if she’s trying to see through it. There is a prickle against my skin, and I almost gasp.
I’ve only felt that prickle a few times, but enough to recognize it automatically. It’s the feel of magic in the air.
We both stare at the pendulum as it moves front to back. Yes.
I laugh and roll my eyes.
“I think your little gadget is broken.”
She smiles and places it on the counter. “Take it.”
I shake my head. “I only have enough money for these.” I gesture with my head toward the bundle of gardenias, sitting like tiny white clouds amongst a swell of green leaves. This is what I come here every day to buy. They’re said to aid mental function.
I can keep hoping.
“Take it on me.” She places the stone in my hand.
It’s warm. I start to refuse again, but she points an authoritative finger at me. I clamp my mouth shut.
She nods, satisfied. “That’s a girl. Now you be safe tonight.”
I hand over forty dollars for the gardenias, then slide the stone into my pocket and pick up the flowers.
“You, too.”
She grins once more, and this time it’s almost dangerous. Then, the woman who looks like the dream, cookie-making grandma scoffs and says, “Oh, you know me, honey, no dead things are going to fuck with me.”
I PULL INTO the parking lot of Metroplex Hosptial and check my phone. Ten-thirty. Right on time for visiting hours. Like every other place in Killeen, the hospital is half-dead, so I get a good parking spot. Near the front with the ambulances and security cars looking like relics in an abandoned city.
I grab my medicine bottle from the passenger seat and glance inside. Shit. Only four more. I’m going to have to make a date with Creeper. I glance at the towering hospital building, then hit his number on my phone.
He answers on the third ring.
“Yo, I heard you got passage.”
“Hey, can you meet me?” I say, ignoring his comment and popping another pill. In fifteen minutes when it kicks in, I’ll be able to go inside.
“Yeah, when?”
One of the best things about Creeper is he always puts business first. I won’t have to be on the phone talking about how I won’t be there tonight. Or answering questions about passage.
“Um, in an hour?”
“Where?”
“I’ll be at Metroplex.”
“Ah, shit. A hospital? Can we meet at your place?”
I roll my eyes. “Creeps, you know no one is out today. We’re safe.”
He crunches on something in my ear and doesn’t say anything for a few seconds.
“Yeah, okay,” he finally says through a mouth full of food. “I’ll meet you in an hour.”
I close my eyes and remind myself to give him a kiss when I see him. “All right, see you then.”
I hang up and pull the last of my money out of my pocket. I’ve got one hundred bucks on me. Just enough. And I get paid in three days. And it’s not like I’m addicted, I just have pain and the medicine helps.
It started as physical pain and has graduated to mental pain. And sure, Creeper isn’t a doctor, but…
Another burst to the brain.
I feel swimmy. That white pill wrapping me in a cocoon. It mutters, you’re safe now. You can face this.
I almost smile. Then, I grab the gardenias and head for the sliding glass front doors.
HE’S ON THE fifth floor.
Kai Wilson.
With all the other veg—
Fuck, I can’t even think it.
With all the other people on life support. The half-dead ones. The ones made into cyborgs, living through the grace of machines and medical technology.
I know this floor better than I know my apartment. As I walk down the blinding white hallways, I avoid looking to my left. That’s where all the glass is. The glass with pseudo patients behind them. Their loved ones gaze in on them and pray.
Return to us, they plead.
Come back to us. We’re here. We love you.
At least, that’s what I imagine them thinking. That’s what I think, and Kai Nelson isn’t even family to me.
He’s my victim.
My shoes squeak on the shiny linoleum as I head to room 523. Kai’s room. As usual, the white curtains are drawn over his glass cage. For privacy, the nurses tell me, but somehow I don’t think he gives a shit.
Trixie says I need to stop having such negative thoughts.
I sit on an uncomfortable, beige plastic chair just outside his room and wait. I don’t usually have to wait long, and today is no exception.
“Hello, Kinsley. How goes it?”
I peer up into the severe face of Nurse Laister. Maria to me. Her Tweety Bird scrubs bring a smile to my face. She’s old school, and despite the fact that she wears the expression of an ornery nun, she’s as sweet as pain medication.
“It goes,” I say. “How are the twins?”
Her smooth, night-sky skin pinches until she looks like a wrinkled jack-o-lantern.
“The devil is in them these days.” She runs a hand through her short, curly locks. “Damn the terrible twos, I’m dealing with the terrible twelves.”
I laugh. “They say that’s a hard age.”
“They should say they are all hard ages.” Her expression melts into a smile like warm butter. “But they’re my babies. And I feel for them. Losing your mother is a hard, hard thing.
I nod, sympathy dripping through me like cool rain. “I’m sorry.”
She smiles. “Thanks, baby. I know it’s been two years but I still miss my sister.”
I start chewing on my hair. I’m useless with this kind of thing. Finally, I clear my throat and say, “They say it gets easier with time.”
Maria reaches into the front pocket of her scrubs, pulls out a stick of gum, pops it into her mouth and then offers me the pack. I wave the offer away.
“They h
ave a lot to say,” Maria says.
I pull my hair out of my mouth. “Yes, they do.”
She reaches for my shoulder, and I try not to cringe away from her touch. It’s not her; I just hate being touched. She gestures toward the bouquet I’m holding.
“You going in today?”
I lower my head to stare at my shoes and shake my head. Shame sets down on me, slumping my shoulders farther.
“Well, that’s okay. When you’re ready.” This is what she always says. She reaches out and takes the flowers from me without needing to be asked. With a final sympathetic smile, she slides open the glass leading into Kai’s room and enters.
I don’t look up until the door slides shut. I imagine Maria placing the gardenias at his bedside. I imagine her checking his vitals. Whispering a few encouraging words. The only thing I don’t have to imagine is the classical music flowing through the room.
It’s my playlist.
Maria plays it every time I come. I read somewhere that some people think coma patients can hear.
I have to imagine her doing everything else because I don’t know. In three hundred and sixty-five days, I’ve never been inside Kai’s room. Never even seen his face. Don’t know what color his hair is or how tall he is.
So, I imagine because I’m a coward.
I put him in here and I can’t even give him the courtesy of facing him.
One night. That night. Him against my shitty car. Me, under the influence. Sure, it was ghost influence, but the guilt still clings to me like an ill-fitting dress. I owe it to him to look at him. To face what I’ve done, but I can’t.
So I imagine.
I imagine holding his hand. Reading him books. I imagine him waking up and forgiving me.
The glass door slides open and out walks Nurse Maria. She smiles, pats my shoulder again and leaves me to my cowardly ritual.
I STAND AND rest my hand against the cool glass. Staring into the white curtain, I sigh. I try and tune out the buzz of machines behind that curtain. Try not to imagine him lying there. Try not to think about his family crying over his machine-assisted life.
I press my hand harder into that glass and lean closer. The fog of my breath leaves an outline around my fingers. I shut my eyes and start talking.
Not out loud. Don’t want to be shipped off to the seventh floor psych ward.
Hey, Kai, it’s me. I know I say this every time, but we’ve never met. I’m the girl who hit you with my—
I hit you with my—
The coward in me locks up at this point. I can’t even think the words. Can’t confess it to my own brain matter.
Pathetic.
Please wake up.
Please, please wake up.
Please…
I go on like this for some time. The repetitive nature of my words are meditative. Memories start to snatch at me.
The road, winding through flat land like a giant black snake under the dark moon. Me, laughing like a cartoon villain, out of my mind. High. Higher than I’ve ever been. There were two me’s. The visitor—the ghost laughing one minute, cautioning me to slow down the next.
“I thought you were going to teach me to live!” More crazed laughter. The two-toned effect of people possessed in religious horror films.
I pressed down on the accelerator.
Stupid.
The ghost inside me issued a warning. A warning that came too late.
His body thudded against the hood of my car—that wet whack of flesh on metal makes me cringe away from the memory. I open my eyes and stare at the curtain, breathing hard. Sweat streams into my eyes.
I glance around, a few eyes are on me, but their owners quickly return to what they were doing. Pushing around hospital equipment. Writing in charts. Answering phones. My gaze goes back to that curtain. For a second I think today is the day. I’ll go in. I’ll face him.
As quickly as the thought comes, it runs away. I back up and feel an invisible pressure push down on me. I have to get out of here.
I can’t deal.
I need more drugs.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. Then, I dart down the sterile hallway with tears leaking from my eyes like someone full of bad plumbing.
I don’t even wait for the elevator, opting instead to take the stairs two at a time back to ground level.
II
The Afternoon
CREEPER IS LATE. He’s always late. Even though he’s as white as Michael Jackson was near the end, he’s always late, so we joke about him being black. I can make the joke about black people always being late because I’m half-black.
Anyway, he’s late again, and I don’t have time for this. I pick up my phone and check my messages as I bounce my leg rapidly up and down. Nervous tick. I have a lot of them.
There are no messages. I throw my phone into the passenger seat and grab my medicine. I jiggle the bottle around.
Only two left.
Yes, I can tell by the rattle.
I bite right into the little white pill and let the bitter taste calm me down. It kicks in faster this way, though not by much. Maybe it doesn’t even kick in faster. Maybe it’s all in my head. I’ll take it. When I started these things, after the accident, they’d kick in within five glorious minutes. A year later, they take something between fifteen and twenty minutes to float me away. I don’t always have that kind of time.
Just when I feel like I’m about to claw my way out through my own skin, Creeper’s beat up Ford truck comes rolling into the parking lot. I let out a long sigh as he pulls into the space next to mine. I grab my purse and step out to meet him. When he sees me, he gives me a nod in greeting. I have a small smile for him as I wave, and I eye the wheelchair in the bed of his truck.
I used to wonder about that. How being paralyzed from the waist down might affect a man’s, well, you know. The one time I asked him about it, he said it was more work, but it could be done, and if the dick was down, the tongue was always ready. Then, I got first-hand experience. And he can get it to work, not always, but often enough.
Not that Creeper has a long line of women waiting for his tongue. Not because he’s ugly. He’s actually quite handsome with his square jaw, impressive chest, and shaved head. He just looks like someone who would take you out… to his kill room and torture you for days. Then kill you.
Of course, his close friends know better than that. Creeper is one of the nicest guys I know. He even sells drugs to help his parents pay off the debt they’re in for having to wheelchair-proof the house. He even managed to pay for hand controls to be put into his truck.
They don’t ask where the money comes from, but they probably know. And he doesn’t tell them, although he doesn’t try real hard to hide it.
I grab the door handle and pull. Locked. Leaning forward, I narrow my eyes at him through the muddied glass and mouth, “Open the fucking door.”
He gives me that flat, serial killer look I so love him for, then waggles his eyebrows. I jerk on the handle as if it will magically pop open, and he starts laughing.
“You must not want to get paid!” I raise my chin in the air.
He waves me off. “I got mad dough, Ley. But I’ll bet you’re low on pills.” He leans forward and studies me with razor sharp concentration. He looks at everything like that. It used to make me nervous before I got to know him.
I try to look cool, like I have all the pills in the world.
It lasts about two seconds. Then a strand of hair is in my mouth, and I’m chewing on it.
Creeper nods at me. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
I spit my hair out and stare at him. He laughs again and clicks the unlock button. I open the door, shove all his girly magazines from the passenger seat onto the floor, and slide inside, shutting the door after me.
“Hey! That’s my porn! You don’t defile a man’s porn.”
I glance at him and shake my head. “Just use the internet like normal people.”
He leans over and picks his magazin
es up, then stuffs them safely in the glove compartment. “The last time I used the internet, you charged me two hundred bucks to clean up my computer.”
I giggle. “There are safe sites.”
He looks at me, and for a minute, I get the sensation he’s about to drive off, take me deep into the woods, and slit my throat. Then I remember he’s harmless. Besides, I could probably outrun him.
“You know, you could give me one of your private shows.” He runs a finger down my bare arm.
I slap it away. “I don’t like to talk about that.”
“I don’t see why not. You do good work.”
I start chewing on my hair again. For extra money, sometimes I do a live web cam show. It helps pay the bills. But I only strip down to my underwear, and I always wear a mask. A Cheshire cat disguise that Trixie made for me. She’s good at pretty much everything. I’m good at popping pills and getting dudes who are into bigger girls to put in their credit card information for twenty minutes of me dancing around in the back room of Geek Gear.
“You got the stuff or what?”
“Straight to business, Ley?” He clicks his teeth. “I’m hurt. Just got off the phone with Trix. She says you got passage this year.”
I nod. “Yes.”
“How’d you swing that?”
I shrug and stare down at my lap.
He bursts into laughter. “You don’t have to feel bad about it. Hell, if those Harker Heights bitches would take me in, I’d take them on in a heartbeat.”
“I don’t feel bad.”
“You just worried today might be the last day you see any of us again?”
I snap my eyes in his direction. “Don’t joke about that.”
He laughs and holds his hands in the air. “Relax, Ley. Don’t you go worrying about us.”
I breathe relief. “Thanks,” I say in a tiny voice.
“Yup, yup.” He reaches in his pockets and pulls out a bottle. “I threw in a little extra. I know this day is a hard one on you.”
Wicked Legends: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Collection Page 165