by Amy Faye
The phone rings beside me. Nobody calls me. Nobody’s ever called me. I’ve had the phone for three years now, and I’ve never gotten a single call on it. It’s always emails. There have been a few texts, but nothing I ever actually wanted to get.
I lean over. There’s a number across the top bar. It’s not one I recognize. I don’t recognize any numbers, though. I never call anyone, and nobody ever calls me. So there’s no reason to have anyone in my contacts.
I have Dad in, as “Dad,” and that’s it. But this isn’t Dad, so whoever it is, it’s someone else. What do I even do in this situation? I didn’t give anyone my phone number. Nobody could be calling me.
That’s not totally true, though, I remember. There is one other person I gave my number to. So I pick up the phone and hope that I’m not making a mistake.
“Luke?”
The other end is static-y, and cuts out more than it lets through. I do my best to catch what he’s saying.
“Sorr-oing throu-nnel. You-me?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Hello?”
It’s clearer this time.
“Luke?”
“I’m sorry, we hit a tunnel.”
“I guess. Wait. What do you mean, ‘we’?”
“I’m with your father.”
I close my eyes. Whatever reasons that they might be together, it can’t be good. It’s never good with Dad, and it always ends up being a situation that you regret more than you thought you were going to. I just have to hope that Luke realizes this, because it’s an extended conversation.
“How did that happen?”
“He just showed up… no, you can’t talk to her!”
I can hear the annoyance in his voice. It sounds like maybe I don’t have to worry about Luke thinking that he can just get away with hanging around Dad. There’s no need to worry.
“So what’s up?”
“I’m going to be a little late tonight. You alright there? Everything going good?”
Out late with Dad?
“You’re not going to… to hurt him, are you?”
“It’s no less than what he would deserve,” Luke growls on the other end of the line. “But no, I’m not going to hurt him.”
I can’t explain the feeling of relief that floods me, but I feel relieved regardless. I try not to think about it.
“So why are you calling, though?”
He doesn’t answer right away. I wait. “I was just worried about you,” he says softly. “Stay safe. Keep the doors locked. If you’re hungry, you can order out, or I’m sure there’s stuff in the house you can eat.”
“I’ll be alright,” I agree. The thought suddenly occurs to me. “You mind if I watch TV?”
“Knock yourself out.”
I nod. Okay, that works for me. “Drive safe. Don’t let the old man drive you nuts.”
“No,” he agrees. “I won’t. Have a good night. I’ll see you in the morning, alright?”
“Alright.”
I unmute the television after the phone hangs up. It’s a cable television showing of Braveheart, which means that for every five minutes of film, there’s ten minutes of commercials.
By the time that I realize that I’m hungry, it’s already late. So I pull a bag of corn out of the microwave and eat it. It’s bland and by the time that I’m halfway finished I’m ready to give up on corn for the rest of my life, but I finish anyways. Climb the stairs to bed.
Normally, Luke would be home by now. But today, he’s going to be a little bit late. So I don’t worry about it when he doesn’t show up at night.
I need to tell him, at some point. I don’t know when is going to be right time, but he needs to know. I can’t leave until I tell him, and I’m not ready to tell him yet. But I can leave, eventually. Somehow.
Sleep comes fitfully. Too much to think about, not enough time. Too much to worry about. I don’t know what is wrong with me, but everything seems to be building up in my head, and none of it is getting any easier.
I should just talk to him. I shouldn’t let myself freak out. It’s not as if he is totally unaware of how women get pregnant, after all. He did it to me, and he’s going to have to be an adult about it. If not, at least I’ve told him, and I can get out of this mess.
I let out a long, low breath. I just need to get all my thoughts out. Eventually, I’ll be able to figure out what to do with it all, and the time will come when I can tell him. When things aren’t all nuts, and he’s at home and calm and relaxed.
We can have the conversation then.
I take out a notebook and start to write. I don’t know where to start, so I start at the most obvious part. ‘I’m pregnant’ seems like a good start.
I want to tell him everything, from top to bottom. That means getting everything out. But some of it doesn’t want to come. Because staring at just that, I know that the next part I want to write is ‘I’m in love with you.’ But I don’t know why I want to write it. I’m not.
If I were, I would probably know. Love doesn’t fit what I’m feeling. I’m afraid of him, sometimes. I’m afraid of what he’s going to do, what he’s thinking, and how he’s going to react to things.
I’m afraid of almost everything, and I always have been. It’s only been very recent that I haven’t been able to deal with it. Only since I came here. The change was easy to detect, but hard to understand.
I’ve got to figure out what is getting me so wrapped up. But I don’t know what it is, and I don’t want to think about it. So I don’t.
I don’t write it down, and I move on. There’s other things that need to go down. When I suspected. When I found out. What I thought about it. I should stop there. That’s the important stuff for Luke to know.
He needs to know about the baby, because that’s what he’s not going to have when I leave. But I don’t stop there, even though that’s all he needs to know.
I can’t stop myself from keeping on writing. I write about when I was a girl, and my mom walked out. I write about my Dad, and the fact that he didn’t walk out. He stuck around, but he didn’t care.
All that is why I can’t just walk away and pretend he doesn’t exist. Because I can’t imagine raising a little girl like myself. I can’t imagine having a kid who thinks that one of their parents doesn’t want them.
And suddenly, everything crystallizes in my mind and becomes clear. That’s what’s got me so caught up on Luke. He doesn’t want me, either. He’s just like my father. And he’s never wanted my baby, either. And that’s why I keep telling myself I need to get out of here.
Fifteen
Luke
“So what’s your plan here?”
I wait a long time for a response. Longer than I should have waited. And like everything about this, it gives me a bad feeling. But I’m choosing to ignore that instinct. Call it an exercise in personal growth if you like.
“Plan?” Bill says it like he’s been deep in thought.
“Yeah. You think I can help you out somehow, how’s that?”
“You just have to go in and, you know, have a talk to these guys. They’ve really got me by the short hairs, man. You’re doing me a big favor, you know?”
I don’t like having praise heaped upon me. It’s not something that’s appropriate, and most of the time when people are doing it, it’s because they’re trying to butter you up. I’d rather not be buttered up, and especially by Bill Ashley.
On the other hand, every indication I’ve ever gotten from him is that this is how he operates all the time. He’s not really capable of being genuine. He’s either mad at you, or he’s buttering you up so that you’ll do him a big favor down the road.
“Okay, so what am I supposed to say? Talk to me about this. We go in. What’s the building like? Big? Small? Office? Warehouse? Apartment over a liquor store?”
“Uh. I guess, second question, it’s like, an apartment? This guy’s apartment. He’s the boss.”
“And he lives in an apartment? I guess loan sharking doesn’t pay as well as it used to,” I joke. Technically, I wouldn’t know how well loans paid out before. But I have a general idea that people wouldn’t do it if it didn’t pay quite a lot. Maybe it’s in a central location, though, I don’t know.
“And as to what to say… I don’t know? They’ll want some kind of assurance that I can pay them.”
“But you can’t, Billy.”
“I don’t like it when you call me that.”
“Fine, I won’t call you that again. But you have to admit, it’s not much of a plan. You want me to lie to the face of some loan shark types, or they’ll break your knees?” I grip the steering wheel, driving off into the dark night. It’s not close by, this place, and I’m in for a long night’s drive. If I’m home by morning, I’ll be lucky. “Hell, if I’m not convincing enough, what’s to stop these guys breaking my knees? I don’t have the luxury of being able to take six months off work, man.”
“Oh, you’ll be fine. I know you will. Don’t worry about it. Please. You have to try, at least, you have to promise that you’ll try, right?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t going to try, but I can’t promise anything, alright? I’m just going to do my best, and that’s all I can offer you at this point.”
“Yeah. No, I get that. You’re really helping me out, you know? You’re a solid guy.”
“Yeah,” I say sourly. The drive continues into the dark. The night is long, and there’s a lot going into it. But I’m hopped up on coffee, and the minute that I feel the energy flagging, I’m going to stop for more.
I turn the radio on, and it’s playing old country music from the sixties. That’s fine. Not necessarily my style, but I can get by on it if I have to. There’s a certain comfort to it. A familiarity.
I feel my head starting to shift from unbearable pain of exhaustion to my eyes getting heavy, pulled off the interstate, and pulled into the first place that looked like I could get a drive-through coffee.
“You want anything, Bill? I can at least float you a couple dollars for a drink, right?”
“Yeah, could I get, uh, a large Dr. Pepper maybe?”
“Hey, man, whatever floats your boat.”
I order the coffee and the Dr. Pepper. They’re not taking cash at the window, but I wasn’t going to pay cash in the first place. The one thing I know for sure is, I was never going to bring a bunch of cash to go off to the middle of nowhere with Bill Ashley. He might get some funny ideas.
When I get the cups, I hand the larger one over to Bill, and balance the smaller, hotter one on my thigh as we drive back into the dark.
“So, uh…”
I look over at Bill, surprised that he spoke. Maybe I imagined it, even.
“What’s up, Bill?”
“How’s Kate doing? You treating her alright?”
“Alright enough, I figure. Why are you so worried? You suddenly decide that maybe you’re not going to be such a scumbag after all?”
“Now come on, man. Don’t be like that.”
“Fuck that ‘don’t be like that’ shit, Bill. You don’t just leave your daughter with some stranger. Poker buddy, whatever. First time I ever saw that girl and you’re telling her to come live with me? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Well, I mean… I didn’t have the money, okay? It’s like you said. I’m no squelcher.”
“But you are,” I said. I tried to keep the annoyance from reaching my voice, but I could more than feel it building inside me. “You keep walking into shit with no plan for how you’re going to get out of it, and then when you get trapped inside, you think, oh, poor me. Poor Bill. You ever stop to think about Katie and what she’s got to deal with, you selfish son of a bitch?”
He got quiet. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“I’m not saying you’re a bad guy to the bone, and you’ll never get better, right? You could improve a whole lot, and surprise the hell out of me. All I’m saying is that you’ve got to get your head straightened out, because as it stands you’re heading down the wrong road, and I ain’t going to lie to you and say that I care that you’re going to get hurt by it, but she’s going to get hurt by it, too.”
“No, no, I get that,” Bill answers, but he’s all quiet.
“And besides, I already told you, she’s fine. You just saw her.”
“So you haven’t heard anything from, you know, from these guys?”
“Not hide nor hair.”
He seems to relax a little bit. What kind of people is he dealing with that they would go after some unrelated guy’s house, try to take a woman from this guy’s house, because her father owes a debt?
That’s not really loan shark territory. It’s not even mobster territory, unless you killed one of their guys, or something.
“So you want to tell me how, precisely, you got yourself into this?”
“I was playing the tables, right?”
I look at him out of the side of my eyes. “You’ve got a problem, man. You need to get away from that shit.”
“No, you don’t understand, okay? I needed money. I needed to pay you back, I’ve got other guys on my back, and I needed the money.”
“So you sell a kidney, or something. Don’t go back to the table. You’re not a born winner, Bill. You just aren’t.”
“I got a system.”
“Okay, so your system went sideways, and you owed the house a bunch of money?”
“No, it went great. Apparently too great,” he says. “They wanted me to give back the money, plus a blow-off fee, or they’re going to break my fingers.”
“What, you don’t even have a little bit of money?”
“I told you, man, I have other guys on my back. Not all of them are as solid as you.”
“So you pissed off the owners of some casino. What is this, the forties? Casino owners will mostly just throw you out if you piss ‘em off that bad.”
“Yeah,” he says. “At casinos, you’re right.”
I don’t have any more words for this man. We drive quietly as the miles tick by, the only noise coming from the sound of the road on the tires.
“There,” he says suddenly. He points. “Left turn ahead.”
Three hundred yards out is a left turn. It’s not the only one for miles, but it’s no different than any of the others, either. I don’t know how he can pick it out, but I don’t say that. He has a way, and I just don’t know what to look for.
I ease the car around the corner, and slowly, the area starts to become more crowded. Very slowly.
“There,” he says, pointing. It’s not an apartment complex, as far as I can tell; more like a no-tell motel. But whatever. All I have to do is talk to some guys, right?
I pull up in front, shut off the headlights, turn the car off, and pocket the keys. Then I get out. It’s so cold that I feel like it’s going to pull my nuts right off.
“Let’s make this quick,” I announce. He knocks on the door. A second later it opens, and a handful of guys are sitting around a small round table on the opposite wall. They’ve pushed the bed away from the wall to make room. In the middle of the table is a Sorry! Board game, unfolded and clearly in the middle of the game.
“Come on inside, you’re going to freeze your ass off out there.”
I step inside, careful to keep close to the wall. I don’t know if I trust these guys. I could take any one of them on without worrying about it. Two, maybe, if I were lucky. But there are six, and no amount of luck is going to make up that difference.
“Hey, guys, this is, uh, the guy I was telling you about.”
“This is him?”
“This is him,” Bill says. I don’t like this. I turn and take a step towards the door, and run face-first into a big, balled up fist.
Sixteen
Kate
I stay up late as a rule. When you can sleep in, you can stay up late because you’re not as tired. Then you sleep in later, and you stay up later. So
staying up all night isn’t unusual for me.
But last night was.
Last night was the first time that I can remember in my entire life when I was waiting for someone to come home, and it was the first time in my life that the person I was waiting for didn’t show up.
Then again, Luke said that he’d see me in the morning. It’s not as if he doesn’t know that I wake up late. It’s not as if he doesn’t know how late I sleep, so maybe he meant that he’d see me in the afternoon, or even the evening. Maybe he was using it to mean ‘see you tomorrow,’ rather than ‘home by dawn.’
“Where are you?” I say it to the open air. I look outside, as if that is going to answer. There’s nothing out there. There never was going to be; he parks inside, and I know it. But I can’t help thinking that if he had come home, it would have woken me.
Nobody answers. The house is silent, except for the sound of my heart thumping in my ears, like it always seems to.
“Great,” I huff. “Now I’m talking to myself.”
The ground is cold. I ought to have left the heat on overnight, if I didn’t think that Luke was going to be back, but I did. I had assumed he would turn it on, if the house were chilly. Evidently, that hadn’t happened.
I pad out into the hall, my nipples making uncomfortable peaks in my thin tee-shirt, and tap the thermostat on the wall until it says that it gives, and it’ll turn up the temperature after all. Somewhere in the bowels of the house, I hear the boiler turn on, and hot air starts venting through the house.
That done, there are other things on the agenda. One in particular. Or, put another way, a mystery to solve. Where could he possibly be? Why would he call and tell me that he’d be home if he wasn’t? If he was home, why is it that every sign seems to suggest that he never made it?
I don’t know what to think, and I want nothing less than to try to figure out what I’m supposed to be thinking. There’s a lot that I don’t understand, but one of the biggest is what’s supposed to be going on today.