Fear Itself

by Duffy Prendergast

  But the more I talked to Melanie the closer we became and the more I entrusted her with the girth of my story; my having been accused of killing my wife and our ensuing flight. I half expected her to be appalled and to think me guilty, but I felt the need to confide in another adult and Amber, with her short visits, had become less a confidant than I would have thought or hoped. She rarely even called by winter’s end. She simply showed up to be serviced once a week as though I were her stud bull. But Melanie surprised me with her understanding and acceptance of me.

  “I know people and I can tell that you wouldn’t hurt anyone unless you were provoked.”

  “You mean like when I was your security.”

  “That was different. You were protecting a lady in distress not attacking a lady.”

  “I only wish I could remember it. I still think you made it up to spare me.”

  “You really were wonderful. By looking at you I wouldn’t have thought you would have had that kind of strength or ability.”

  “I’ve really only been in one fight all my life before that one, and I never even struck a single blow in that fight.”

  “Well you must have a switch that you flip when you need to be tough because you were my hero that night.”

  With her story of my heroics Melanie made me feel like a courageous man, although with my secret phobia it was hard for me to feel gallant. The truth was that I had a hard time believing that I could have done something so brave and heroic as she claimed and not have remembered it. I was all but convinced that she had made the whole story up to make me feel better. I mean if I had fired a gun wouldn’t there have been police? Wouldn’t the cops have showed up at her front door? Her story was suspect, but I liked to hear her tell it anyway. She made me feel like a man. But the truth was probably that I had been conked on the head and knocked unconscious and she had managed to get us both out without further incident, probably with the threat of crying rape or something.

  Sarah and I settled into a comfortable routine and despite my continued espousement I stopped having those horrible disturbing dreams of having sex with her. I wondered if they might not have been inspired by the combination of the fact that she was not actually my daughter by blood and that I loved her more than anyone could love another human being. No doubt my espousement of her also played a role, and that her reference to me on rare occasions as lover contributed as well, but I had never had such dreams before Catherine died. I was just glad to have those dreams behind me. And Sarah had resigned herself to sleeping in her own bed at night and rarely crept into my bed in the mornings anymore.

  One Friday evening, after Sarah had gone to sleep, Amber and I were in my bedroom with the door closed in the middle of a heated session with Amber on top of me, bouncing like a clown on a pogo stick, and I thought I heard my bedroom door creak open so I grabbed Amber by the waist and stopped her in mid thrust.

  “What’s the matter? What are you doing? I was so close?” Amber’s eyes were green with anger and her tone was demeaning, as though she were scolding a subordinate.

  “I heard something.” I said defensively. “What was it?”

  I craned my neck and noticed that the door was slightly ajar, “I think it was Sarah.”

  Amber got up and opened the door but there was no one there. “You’re being paranoid.” She said. She crept out of the bedroom and checked on Sarah and then came back into the room and scowled at me.

  “Don’t ever pull that shit with me again.” She seethed.

  I sat slack-jawed and dumbfounded. I wondered what I had done that was so inappropriate. I was at a loss for words.

  I thought little more of the incident. My imagination must have gotten the best of me, I thought, as regarded Sarah looking into the bedroom while we made love. I worried so that Sarah would spy me making love to Amber and that it would somehow injure her psyche. She was obviously already damaged goods if she had, as I suspected, killed her mother, and I didn’t want her to be corrupted in any other way. I didn’t want her to have any animosity towards Amber because of our physical relationship. I didn’t want her to confuse her role as daughter with that of lover, or to be jealous again, as she obviously was of Catherine.

  And my paranoia that Sarah might have been spying on me was quickly assuaged when the next day she woke me to a breakfast in bed with a tray of bacon and rye toast and orange juice and a thick three-egg mushroom omelet that I ate while she gushed about how wonderful she thought Amber was.

  “Why can’t she come over more often?” she asked.

  I carved a hunk of my omelet and raised it to my mouth, “She’s a busy lady.” I said relieved that Sarah was so receptive to the company of another woman, and then I shoveled the gob of egg into my gullet.

  “Maybe you should ask her daddy to let her sleep over next week so that we can play games all night long.”

  “Maybe I’ll do that.” I promised as I forked a glob of mushroom and cheese into my mouth.

  And every day that week Sarah packed me the usual wonderful lunch with a note reminding me of how much she loved me.

  On Friday evening after work I stopped by Melanie’s house, still wearing my soiled work clothes. It had been a particularly hard work day as the weather had turned unusually cold and I had spent most of the day crawling around a frigid dirty attic on my knees drilling holes. By the time I was done, given the cold temperature outside and more importantly in the attic, I was frozen to the bone. I would have liked to have grabbed a blood-warming glass of bourbon with Tony after work, but of course he thought that I was a raging alcoholic so I couldn’t very well ask him to stop off for a drink. So I stopped by to see Melanie in the hopes of pouring just a little hard liquor into my system to chase the chill from my blood.

  Melanie, as it turned out, had no stripping engagements, and we sat and shared a half a bottle of whiskey mixed with cola and ice. We talked and we laughed and we grew drunk and foolish and I completely forgot about the little obligation waiting for me at home. I hadn’t truly indulged myself since the last night I spent with Catherine and I did like a drink from time to time.

  Even drunk, though, I knew that what we were doing was wrong when Melanie and I found ourselves entangled in a long passionate kiss on her sofa, and then we felt and fondled one-another, both our hands exploring territory that should have remained unfamiliar. We were violating our friendship to Amber, like Judas with his silver only we traded on lust, by touching each other, caressing the tender parts, tickling the sensitive curves and tasting each other’s fruits. But ever since I had first seen the voluptuous curves of Melanie’s naked body undulating in front of so many men I had wondered how her supple body would taste and feel. But she had been the forbidden fruit and I blocked her sensuality from my consciousness. I kept my eyes from wondering; wandering. But uninhibited by the taint of liquor my judgment was clouded and once I had tasted Melanie’s lips it followed that her shoulder would be just as sweet and tender and her arms, by extension, and her smallish round breasts and her navel and her thighs just as tasty. And we were naked on her living room floor in the time it took to exhale a heated breath, and the alcohol deluded my brain into misguided rationalizations that seem absurd upon sober reconsideration. By the time we had finished we were so drunk that we fumbled to her bedroom and made clumsy guilt-soaked love before contrition got the best of me and I dressed hurriedly and stumbled remorsefully from her chamber and thoughtlessly and fearlessly (the whiskey having erased my apprehension) into the night and out to my car and ultimately home.

  When I walked through my kitchen door Sarah was holding a large kitchen knife in her hand and I could tell from her expression that she was pissed. She was like an angry midget housewife, standing on a milk-crate in the kitchen with her tiny apron wrapped about her waist, one hand on her hip and the other pointing the gleaming knife at me.

  “I made a special dinner tonight. Where were you?”

  “I’m sorry,” I slurred, “I stopped by to see Melanie h
oney. I didn’t know you made a special dinner.”

  Sarah stepped off of the milk-crate and stormed toward me and dropped the knife onto the kitchen table and sulked out of the room with tears streaming down her face, “You don’t love me! You love Melanie and Amber, but you don’t love me.”

  I was heart sick. I followed her into her room and I picked her up and put her on my lap but she fought me all the way, kicking and covering her face. “I love you honey, more than anyone in the whole world.” I did my best not to slur my words but I was piss drunk.

  “No you don’t. You just want to kiss on Melanie and Amber like they do in the movies.”

  “Honey, I could never love them as much as I love you.”

  She pushed me away, “Go eat your dinner. I worked on it for four hours. You could at least eat your dinner.” She was so pathetic and adorable at the same time. In the fog of the whiskey I felt like I had somehow betrayed her. I had certainly let her down. But she made me feel as though I had been unfaithful, as to a wife. It was strange feeling subordinate to a child.

  Food was the last thing I wanted at that point, but I wasn’t about to disappoint Sarah any further. I shouldn’t have stopped off after work. The guilt of having slept with Melanie was beginning to eat at me too. I hoped that Melanie wouldn’t say anything to Amber. I cut up and shoveled what should have been a delicious breaded veal cutlet into my mouth followed by heaping helpings of mashed potatoes and butter-corn, but to my churning intestines pickled in hooch the food was as vile to me as ipecac. Poor Sarah, I thought. I had let her down. I shouldn’t have done that. I remember the disappointment I felt as a child when my father had made a promise to take us to a movie or some such event only to come home smelling of whiskey much too late to fulfill his promise. What right had I to go out and have fun without Sarah while she was home slaving over a stove at the age of seven. I was all that she had and I had left her alone at home while I went out and had fun. And the fun I had had seemed to weigh like a rock in my stomach as I shoveled food into my face.

  When I was finished I stumbled into the living room and I sat next to Sarah on the couch. She was watching an old Bela Laugosi vampire movie on the television. I pulled her to me and she reluctantly let me sit close to her, but I fell asleep in the middle of the movie and must have begun to snore loudly because Sarah elbowed my in the stomach.

  “If you’re not going to stay awake you can just go to bed.” She sounded like an angry little wife.

  “I’ll stay awake.” I said, but as hard as I fought to keep myself focused, before long I was snoring again. Once more she elbowed me in the gut.

  “I thought you were going to stay awake?”

  “I’m sorry honey; I guess I had better go to bed.”

  I got up and staggered to my room filled with onus and I stripped myself, down to by boxer shorts, of my filthy work clothes and I collapsed into the bed still stinking of whiskey and Melanie’s coital scent. I don’t know how long I had been sleeping, but I remember having a dream where I was in a fight with Tommy Sullivan. I was throwing and dodging punches after accusing him of killing Catherine. But Tommy somehow got the upper hand and he ended up sitting on my stomach bouncing up and down on top of me. I remember asking him to stop but he wouldn’t. And then I realized that I wasn’t dreaming. That someone was actually bouncing up and down on my stomach and I felt like I was going to throw up. I slowly opened my burning bloodshot eyes and I was horrified to find Sarah, completely naked, straddling my waist (I still had my boxer-shorts on) and bouncing up and down on my belly as if she were trying to fornicate.

  “No! Sarah, what are you doing?” I grabbed her by the waist and tried to shove her off of my stomach but she slid her tiny feet beneath my thighs and continued to bounce. I did my best to keep from heaving. I had grown extremely nauseous from a combination of the whiskey in my gut, Sarah’s bouncing on my abdomen and the revulsion of the image of my daughter simulating sexual intercourse with me. I sat up at the waist and I pushed Sarah back onto the bed, perhaps a little too hard. “No! Sarah, what are you doing?”

  Sarah began to sob heavily, “I’m doing what married people do, like you and mommy did and like you do with Amber. It’s what married people do, daddy!” she screamed as tears ran down her reddened face.

  “But baby,” I covered my nakedness and I tried to pick her up; I wanted to cradle her, “I’m your daddy. We’re not married.”

  “Yes we are! We went to church, remember?”

  “Yes honey, I remember, but that was just pretend.”

  Sarah pushed me away and jumped off of the bed and ran out of the room. I rolled off of the side of my bed and I heaved into the little blue garbage can I kept by my nightstand. I heaved until my dinner was gone. I heaved until all of the whiskey that was left in my stomach was gone. I heaved until the image embroidered on my brain of Melanie was gone. But I couldn’t heave away the vision of Sarah on top of me naked. I got up, staggering and stumbling, carrying the garbage pale filled with my vomit while holding a sheet about my waist and I went into the bathroom and fell to the floor and poured my puke into the toilet. I turned the faucet on in the tub and rinsed the pail and then I crawled into the tub banging my chin on the side as I rolled into the tiny white porcelain cavity. I needed to sober up to deal with Sarah. The poor child was so confused.

  She deserved better than me. I was filled to my eyebrows with peccancy. I began to think that maybe Sarah would have been better-off if I had left her with Catherine’s parents and gone to jail. At least then she would have been in school. At least then I wouldn’t have further espoused her. At least then she wouldn’t have been trying to fuck me.

  I remember thinking: Fuck Oedipus and his whore of a mother! Fuck women! Fuck Catherine for dying. Fuck her for cheating! I have never wanted to be dead more than at that moment, still stinking drunk, scalding water pouring over me as I tried to burn the shame and guilt from my body. I swore I would never drink again. I swore that I would never espouse Sarah again. I swore that I would never cheat again. I was confused and vile and filled with self-loathing. I was a despicable human being. I wanted to march down to the local police precinct and turn myself in to the authorities. In my head I screamed “I’m the one you’re looking for. I’m the murderer! And now I’m a child molester too! I’m the piece of shit that cheated on his married girlfriend with her best friend!” I just wanted to blow my brains out and rid the world of my existence. But before I did any of that I needed to make things right for Sarah. I needed to straighten her head out. I needed to show her that it was possible for me to love her more than anyone could love someone without inserting my prick into her. I needed her to know how much I loved and adored her, but as a father not a wife. I held my head under the scalding water and I let the stream cauterize my scalp. I used a washcloth to scour the stink from my flesh, from my arms and my face and my chest and my belly (where Sarah had pressed her vagina) and may prick where Melanie had wrapped her open cunt, until all of my body parts were red and burning.

  When I got out of the tub I painfully toweled myself dry and went to my bedroom. I was still sick to my stomach with the acrid taste of whiskey tattooed on my tongue, like a permanent stain. I looked at the clock on my nightstand. It was only just past three in the morning. I could still smell the stench of vomit in my room. I dressed in a clean pair of jeans and a white cotton tee-shirt. I went back to the bathroom and I brushed my teeth and combed my hair. I needed to be clean. I made coffee and drank it down, scorching my throat. I needed to be sober. Then I went to Sarah’s door and I knocked softly.

  “Sarah baby, can I come in?” I pleaded. “Go away.” Her voice was still choked with tears.

  “Honey, I think we need to talk.” I tried to push the door open but there was something obstructing the door from the inside.

  “There’s nothing to talk about.” She said with her childish voice.

  “Honey, I love you. I need to talk to you. I think we got a little confused and we need
to talk about this.”

  “I want to go back to live with grandma and grandpa.”

  Her words were a stiff blow to my gut. I started to weep. I slumped to the floor with my back pressed to the door while a stream of saline drizzled down my cheeks. “Come on honey,” I cried, “let me in. I need to talk to you. We need to make this right. If I don’t have you then I might as well be dead.”

  After a few minutes I heard her slide off of her bed and her little feet hit the floor before she padded to the door and pushed something aside. She padded back to her bed and I heard the squeak of her mattress springs as she hopped back into bed and I heard the shrug of cloth being filled with air as she pulled the covers over her body.

  I struggled, my motor skills still affected by the whiskey, to pull myself up by the door handle; then I slowly opened the door.

  Sarah had the covers pulled over her head. I knew that she was both confused and embarrassed. I knew too that it was not her fault. I had encouraged her, not with the intent of molestation, but by having her overtake the physical role which Catherine had once held. She had confused matriarchy with marriage; sex with love.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and I reached under the covers and found her warm little hand. I squeezed it. She pulled it away.

  “You don’t love me.” She said again;

  the white cover still over her head made it seem as if I were talking to a Halloween ghost.

  “Oh, yes I do, more than you will ever know.” I tried to speak in an authoritative and fatherly tone.

  “You love Amber more than me.”

  “Not true. What I have with Amber is very different than what I have with you, but I could never love anyone as much as I love you.”

  you?”

  “You were with her tonight, weren’t

  “No, honey, I wasn’t.”

  She pulled the covers down enough for me to see her eyes. “What was Amber doing to you when I saw you together?”

  I took a deep breath. It was quite obvious that she had spied on Amber and me during intercourse. I had hoped never to have to have that conversation with her. “That was sex. It’s something grownups do. It’s how we make babies.”