by S. M. Parker
“That I escaped injury free.” Half lie.
“So are you going to tell me why you left the reception without saying good-bye?”
“Headache.”
He looks at me hard, suspicious. “Feeling better?”
“Much.” A lie trifecta.
“Can you hobble over there?” He signals toward the front lobby. “I want you to see something.” I walk beside him, an imposter faking health.
The red entry doors approach. I could leave. It is a bossy temptation. But I refuse to run.
Gregg halts in front of the award case. There’s a new, three-tiered trophy, gleaming silver: SUDBURY HIGH SCHOOL FIELD HOCKEY STATE CHAMPIONS. A female figure stands on top, a field hockey stick in hand, the wind in her immortalized hair.
The playoff game meets me here. The lights. The crowd. The green of the grass. I search the team picture propped next to the trophy, me smiling with victory. I feel that girl in me still.
“Cool, right?” Gregg says. “That trophy should have your name on it.”
“As if.”
“Oh right. I mean, you’re lucky your team let you sit on the sidelines while they brought home the championship.”
I smile, try to play along with his joke. But it is just that, a joke. The truth is that I played my ass off. For four years. And I want to be that girl again. “I’m not going to Michigan.”
Gregg’s posture bolts with the surprise.
“I’m going to try to play for Boston College. If they’ll have me.”
“I thought you said—”
“I did.” I straighten, ignore the twist in my side. “It was a mistake.”
“And what about Alec?”
“No Alec. No Michigan. It’s Boston College like we always talked about.”
“So did you guys . . . ?”
“Break up? Yeah.”
“Damn!” Gregg looks all impressed with himself.
“What?”
He shrugs like it’s nothing. Then, “That must have been some kiss at the wedding.”
It’s impossible not to laugh at his idiocy. “Yep, you got me. That’s why we broke up. Oh, except for the fact that we split up before the wedding.”
“Huh, so it wasn’t because of me?” He winks.
“Not because of you.”
“You doing okay?” Gregg asks.
“Are you?”
“Me? I didn’t break up with Alec.”
“No, but I think I owe you a million apologies. For pulling away like I did. I just didn’t see it. I couldn’t see it, you know?” I feel that lump rise in my throat, the unwelcome reminder of how much emotion I invested in a boy. The wrong boy. “That’s not true. The truth is I didn’t want to see how my relationship with Alec was driving all this distance between you and me. I never wanted that. I hope you can forgive me.”
“Done.” He bends to shove at my shoulder. He bites back on all the other stuff he wants to say and I am grateful.
“Let me make it up to you?”
“No need,” Gregg says. “We’re cool.”
We walk to French class and I grab his forearm as we enter the room. “Sit with me.”
Gregg claims his old seat and Alec never arrives. It adds a layer of torment, trying to calculate when he’ll show.
Gregg nods toward Alec’s empty chair. “Guess he doesn’t want another shiner.”
I can’t think what Gregg would do to Alec if he knew the whole story.
But I don’t tell him. I’ll never tell him.
When class is over I shuffle off to English, my books already tucked under my arm in an effort to avoid my locker. My elbow forms a hard pointed angle and somewhere, somehow, Alec’s blow hits me again. So hard I have to steady myself against the lockers. My breathing turns shallow and I wonder how long it will take until I forget. If I’ll forget.
Someone asks me if I’m all right and I wave them off. I’ll be fine, I tell myself. Just fine. And I will be. I can’t doubt that.
I head to the bathroom and my phone rings. A number I don’t recognize. I squeeze out a tentative, “Hello?”
“This is Atlantic Veterinary. We’ve been notified by the credit card company that a Mr. Alec Lord contested the charges for Finn Doyle so we’ll need someone to come to the office with a check.”
Anger rises in me.
But, then . . . maybe this is a good thing.
Alec’s pulling away from me.
“I’ll be by tomorrow.” I flick off my phone. I’ll talk to Mom about the vet tonight. Right now nothing matters beyond Finn being home safe, and me arriving that way too.
I splash water on my face. I can finish this day.
I rejoin the crowded halls and head toward English until I stop short, my lungs firing.
Because Alec waits at the stairwell.
I turn sharply to avoid him but he races to me, hooks my waist. Pulls me beyond the crowd.
“I need to tell you how sorry I am.”
“You said that already.”
“But you didn’t hear me. It’s killing me not to be with you, Zephyr.” He ducks his head close to mine, whispers. “Yesterday was unbearable. I’d do anything to make you forgive me. Take me back, give me another chance.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. I know you want to.” His hand lowers onto the slip of my back. “Don’t give up on what we had. I love you.”
But I don’t see love. I see the moment when my fingers calculated the distance from the knife set. My heart quickens, reliving it. Again.
And I think I won’t survive months of this. Him skulking out of corners, tugging at my sanity. “If you come near me at school, I’ll get a restraining order.” I don’t know if orders of protection are granted to teenagers but the threat is enough to make his hand drop away.
“Zephyr, please.”
I leave him and his pleas in my wake, but I am still haunted by shadows.
In the library, I bury myself in the stacks until it’s dark, until I know Alec’s at practice. I call Lizzie when I’m in my car. “I’m heading home.”
“You want me to come over?”
I buckle in, turn on the defroster. “It’s been a long day.”
“Call me when you get there.”
“Promise.”
I pull out of the parking lot and the dark asks me to remember the abandoned building site with Alec, our forest bed. I wonder how long flashbacks of Alec will bubble up. The good memories hurt more than the welts. I’m assaulted by all the things I wanted. All the ways I messed up.
And I wonder how a heart can hold so much pain when it is a fist of an organ. Yet it throbs. It feels torn and shredded. It hangs dense in my chest, remembering its wounds.
I turn off the main road and the Ashland Drive pole has a cap of ice at the top, like the snow cones Dad would drizzle with maple syrup. I slow, the road frozen and rutted. My car bounces over the deep channels, spaghetting my spine.
The forest is too dark for dusk, even for early winter. I lean forward suspecting one of my headlights is out. And that’s when I see it. A mass of red fur curled in the road. I slow to a stop, switch on my high beams and squint into their spray of light.
“Finn?” I pop my seat belt, open the door into darkness. Cold air stabs me.
My heart reels as I kneel beside the lump of fur. “What’s happened to you?” I gather his head into my lap. He is warm. His middle labors with the rise and fall of breath. I reach over his fur, under him. My hand returns free of blood. “You’ll be okay.” It is a promise I want someone to make me. “I’ll get you to the vet. Come on.” I cradle him in my arms, set him onto the passenger seat. He lets out a groan from the faraway place he inhabits. “Stay with me, buddy.” I pet his head and something catches the dim interior light, throws it back at me like a knife’s edge. Something that is not his collar.
It is shiny.
And sharp.
My necklace. The heart Alec gave me at Christmas.
It hangs around
Finn’s neck.
My own heart catapults, leaping my pulse.
The air swallows me, the woods scurry too close. I run to the driver’s side and lock the door.
I can’t go to the vet; that is what Alec wants. I try to imagine where he’d be waiting for me along the way. Fear propels me to the house where it is warm and bright and I can shut out the dark.
Chapter 38
I bolt the door behind me, swim into the light that floods the kitchen. “Mom?” I call.
I place Finn onto the couch, recheck the locks. I find the card for the twenty-four-hour emergency vet clinic and pluck it off the fridge.
“Mom!” Only stillness answers, reminding me it’s Monday. Date night. I fumble in my pocket, my keys falling to the floor. I pat my jacket, my phone is in my car’s console.
I pick up the landline, dial Mom’s cell. It takes too long to connect. There is only the static silence of a dead line, and that’s when I know I’m not alone.
I drop the phone onto its cradle and eye the door, my car keys on the floor in my path. In seconds I calculate how my body will need to scoop the keys as I run from the house. I move just as a metallic snap echoes from under the house.
The breaker.
In the basement.
Someone has thrown the main switch, pitching me and this house and my escape into blackness.
Fear roils in my blood. Becomes me. I kick around for my keys but with each sweep, I am losing time.
I reach for the island, my eyes adjusting, carving light into the shadows. The smell of spearmint bleeds through the air, through my memory, as my senses conjure the last time panic joined me in this space. And how my fingertips reached for the knife set even then. But the block of knives is gone now. The counter cleared. I open a drawer, rifle for utensils, scissors. My fingers meet with the smooth wood of inner drawer and nothing else. I fumble around the sink, but even Mom’s pruning shears are missing.
The phone rings and I freeze from the impossibility of its sound. A second ring sears through silence. I wade across the black, remove the handset, place it at my ear.
I pray that it’s anyone besides him.
Terror climbs the ladder of my spine. My voice, reluctant. “Hello?”
Silence.
Then the dial tone cries beep beep beep and I hang up, quickly dial 911. But he’s quicker.
The line falls dead again.
He’s in the basement, where the phone line enters the house.
But then, no.
He could be outside. At the junction box.
All at once the woods feel too hungry, haunted.
My body tells me I need to flee, protect. My brain tells me to fight, engage. I tuck into the forgotten corner of the laundry room, quiet as my fear, and wrap my hands around the butt of my field hockey stick. I hold it tight against my chest, a weapon.
I try to reverse my breathing. Make it soundless. Make it so I cannot be found. The darkness is a comfort, a cloak. I blend into it. For anonymity. For safety. There was a time when I feared darkness. As a child. Alone.
Not now.
Darkness doesn’t have fingers that twist into my flesh. Darkness can’t stalk me. It can’t drive me into the shadows because darkness is fleeting. Not like the threat before me.
Then, impossibly, Joan Armatrading joins me. The familiar steel guitar notes creep over my skin, unseaming my flesh. Alec manipulates electricity now, just as he did in our forest bed. I grip the stick tighter and trace the music to my bedroom. I picture him at my desk then, a flashlight in hand. He will be so much more prepared. All of this carefully planned.
Does his beam of light scamper over my Boston College catalog? The faces of friends in photos? Does he see the absence of his tokens? How they are smashed into the well of my trash can?
I want to run for the door but can’t drive without my keys. Still, I know the woods. Better than anyone. And I can run. I’ll come back for Finn. I tiptoe one foot toward freedom, until Alec freezes me.
“Your favorite song.”
His voice surges through the air, galloping my pulse. He is close. In the kitchen close. Inches away. I grip the neck of my stick tighter, silently retreat my foot. My breathing impossibly loud.
“You don’t have to answer me, but you should. I know you’re here. And you know I’ll find you.”
Then, Joan:
Oh the feeling
When you’re reeling . . .
All those times I reeled from Alec. His touch. His promises.
“You know, this really isn’t a love song.” He raps his knuckles against the butcher block top of the island, a slow, dull metronome that lets me know he is patrolling its outer edges. “You should have listened more carefully, Zephyr. This is a song about rejection, something you know too much about.”
She’ll take the worry from your head
But then again, she put trouble in your heart instead
“I want you to hear it for what it is. You put trouble in my heart, Zephyr.”
His voice tracks to the living room. I tighten my grip, plan my escape. Then, only Joan:
Can bring more pain than a blistering sun
But oh when you fall
How did I not hear the heartbreak in this song? How did I miss so much?
Alec calls over her lyrics. “Favorite song to hear again?” he asks the darkness.
The universe pauses. Joan sings.
“No? Nothing.” Another pause. “I vote for a repeat. Let’s play it again, shall we?”
I raise my foot, waiting to step, to escape. I wait for the shuffle of his footsteps on the carpet, his shadow skulking to my bedroom, toward the source of the music. I wait for Joan. A noise to locate him, any little sound that will buy the seven seconds I need to get a head start out the door.
But the room hangs motionless for a dozen eternities.
“Choosing to stay put, are you? Smart girl, Zephyr. You make the chase fun. You always have.” The curtain in the living room draws back too quick over its rod. Metal scratching metal. He’s searching. It’s only a matter of time and he can’t find me cowering.
“Oh, hello mangy dog. Not feeling so hot?” Finn. On the couch. The playfulness in Alec’s voice distorts reality. “You know it didn’t have to be like this, Zephyr. I gave you every chance to come back to me.”
His words bounce off the photos in the hall, the path to Mom’s study. I move from the laundry room, marrying my back to the wall, my stick firmly in my grasp. The front door is within reach, its knob glistening in the dense dark. I step quietly, my feet barely touching the floor. I reach for the doorknob and that is when I find my keys. They clink underfoot, kicked by my creeping toes. The clanking is a bullhorn, a siren, the dull foghorn call of a lighthouse.
I grab the knob with lightning quickness, turn it, and pull.
But my fingers slip, clutching air. A hand grabs the back of my hair, yanks me away from the freedom of the woods. I fall to the floor. Crashing onto my hip. I writhe against the siege of pain as my body is stretched, dragged.
Then there is my scream.
The only sound in a sea of dead air.
He tugs harder on my rope of hair, uprooting me. “Quiet.” His word is clipped, hard. “Be quiet and I’ll let you go.”
I have to trust his words. Mute mine.
Every follicle, every inch of my scalp screeches in protest. And then, my head drops, hitting hard against the unforgiving floor that blunts and swallows my cry.
A minute. Maybe two. Maybe a hundred.
He stands over me and there is a beam of light casting a dance of shadows around the room. A flashlight rests on the island. It is enough to illuminate his face. His eyes, the cut of his jaw. Malice makes the person tented over me unrecognizable. I work up a scream but then Alec’s fingers are at my throat.
He straddles my waist, pins my arms under his knees. The pressure of his weight on the inside of my forearms is too great to fight against. I cut my eyes to my stick, just out of re
ach.
Then, in an almost intimate gesture, he brushes back my hair, floats it onto the floor around me. “Such a beautiful neck.” He presses against the tender cords hidden beneath. My throat becomes smaller, pushed into submission.
“Don’t,” I choke. “Please.” Finn groans and my heart breaks.
Alec pushes harder, my voice box bruising. “I like it when you beg. Remember how you’d beg me, Zephyr? With that arched back? Your eager tongue? I know you still want that.”
“Alec, don’t.”
“I will.”
Cold rushes down my neck as he unfastens my buttons. I swim my fingers along the floor searching in vain for my stick.
He opens my coat, pins its sides under his knees along with my arms. His hand releases from my throat and I cough out the bruising irritation, my chest convulsing.
“Tell me you love me.”
“Alec,” I beg. “Please.” I wriggle to kick, but he’s pinned me fast.
“Yes, like that. Beg me.” His hands pull at the bottom of my tee as if he’ll rip it.
“Alec, don’t!” I yell, but the words only find life as a whisper. “You don’t want to do this.”
He traces his finger along the lines of my lips. His skin tastes sour. “I didn’t want any of this, Zephyr. I only wanted you to love me. I wanted to be there for you. After Finn got sick. After Slice was hurt. You made me do those things.”
I gasp. The sound is thick, underwater. “What did I make you do?”
“It was nothing that would kill him, just some herbs to make him sick enough for you to need me. And Slice, well, you needed me then, too, didn’t you?”
Gregg’s skates. Finn’s health. My future. Blue turns to black in this ocean under the ocean where no light can penetrate.
Then his lips are on mine, his tongue forcing its way into my mouth, pressing too hard, too fast. I twist my head to gasp for air. I heave oxygen into my lungs, panting.
“Alec, let me up. You’re scaring me. I’ll do anything.”
“You’ll apologize?”
“I apologize.”
“Hah.” A slap singes my cheek. The sting is vicious and rings across, under, through my skin. I twist my head, press it against the floor. “You don’t even know what you’re apologizing for.”