by Nikki Pink
I’d managed to inhale a little air. I guess he hadn’t winded me that bad. “I was in there because of you!”
From my curled position on the floor I watched him pace back and forth, his head in hands that pulled at his hair as if in confusion.
“No! You were there because of you Karen. It was your fault.”
I was livid. How could he spout that bullshit? “How in the fuck was it my fault? You drugged me! You framed me!”
He stopped his pacing and glared at me again. “You know why! Because we were supposed to be together, and you nearly ruined it! You were an ungrateful bitch Karen!”
His twisted logic couldn’t have made sense to anyone but himself. Did he really believe the crap he was spouting, that he was the noble one and I was the bitch who had been ruining everything? That because I tried to break up with him and move away I deserved to be framed and sent to jail, and that I would take him back after his latest insane actions.
“You need help Dewey. You need to go to a doctor, a psychiatrist. Please. Stop all this.”
He looked at me wide eyed. “I’m crazy? Are you out of your fucking mind? You threw away four perfect years together. Four. Perfect. Years. And I’m the crazy one?” Yes, you are, I thought to myself, unable to speak as I continued to refill my lungs with air. “And now I’ve come back to you,” he continued, “given you another chance. If I’m crazy it’s because I was willing to give us another chance. “
I had managed to move up into a sitting position and I gave him an incredulous look. “There never was an us. There was only you. Crazy Dewey. You manipulating me, you using me, you tormenting me!” I was breathing heavily after my outburst, my body shaking with fear and exhilaration from getting those feelings out.
“I gave you everything! You... you ungrateful bitch!” He stopped pacing again and stood over me. His eyes cold with fury locked with mine. “You know what? We’re done. Done.”
“Hell yeah we’re done. You want to know something else?”
His eyebrows shot up. He wanted to know. Of course he wanted to know.
“It wasn’t just Red. Bottle too. The night after Red. And do you know what?”
His mouth opened, drooling blood, but no words came out. He was apoplectic.
“He fucked me so good, Dewey. So good. God, having his hot biker body ride me made me so wet. Not like you.”
He licked his lips and flapped his mouth like he was about to say something. I could see thoughts churning in his head but he was struck speechless by my venomous invective.
“You never made me come Dewey. Never. You’re no man. Bottle and Red, they are men. Real men. They know how to see to a woman’s needs. Not like you, you arrogant, crazy asshole. You’re just a fucking twisted, delusional psycho.”
His mouth gaped open and finally he managed to produce something. But it wasn’t words. It was a blood curdling screech of rage.
He pulled back his foot and gave me a determined kick in my side.
“That all you got?” I managed to spit out.
Another kick. “You no good lying whore!” Another kick. “Don’t think I’m letting you run away again,” another kick, “you are fucking done. You had your chance, and now,” a harder kick, “you’ve fucked up for the last time.” A bigger kick. “You don’t deserve me, bitch!”
My eyes were closed and I was wracked by painful sobs as he picked me up. From the tinny speakers the refrain of Ian Curtis singing Love Will Tear Us Apart continued on, an endless loop Dewey had been playing for years.
He slung me over his shoulder like a sack of miserable potatoes and stalked out of the room.
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
Karen
He took me outside into the bright sunshine. As best I could tell, we were approximately in the middle of nowhere. We came out of a dilapidated building that might have been an old farmhouse and he stalked around the side, not speaking to me. As he’d said, he was done. Done with me.
My body was still wracked with sobs and I hurt too much to offer any resistance. Even if I escaped his grasp now there was nowhere I could go, he’d catch me in seconds. I was done and I knew it. He was going to kill me and there was nothing else to do about it.
We arrived at an old weathered shed around the corner from the abandoned house. Everything about it looked ancient except for the sturdy padlock on the front. He let me hang on his shoulder like a corpse as he undid the padlock. A moment later the door was open, he stepped inside briefly and dumped me unceremoniously onto the dirt floor of a wooden shed.
“Goodbye, Karen.”
I didn’t and couldn’t respond, still finding it hard to breathe after the rain of kicks he’d poured into my aching, tired and defeated body.
I curled up on the floor making myself as small as possible. Behind me I heard the door close with a thunk and then the padlock close with a metallic scrape and a click. That was it, I was locked in.
The dirt floor was cool and welcoming. I stifled an absurd laugh as I realized what I was thinking. How far had I sunk and what had I become, that I thought a dirt floor in a dark shed was welcoming? I imagined teenage me and Katie in here. We would have been screaming and panicking about spiders. I let out another little laugh.
“It’s pretty funny, huh?” came a voice out of the darkness. Shock at the voice was quickly followed by elation. Bottle!
I laughed again. “No!” I forced out before a giggle followed. Was I manic, was I going crazy, or was I just making light of the fucked up situation? I wasn’t sure.
“That is you, Karen?” he asked.
I brought my giggles under control. “Yeah. Unfortunately.”
He let out a little laugh of his own before putting on a mock hurt voice, “What, you’re not glad to see me?”
“Ha ha”, I said, “I can’t see fuck all in here though.”
I heard Bottle shift around on the floor. “Give it a minute, your eyes will adjust. There’s light leaking in through some cracks.”
I turned my head to look up, and sure enough I could see bright lines in the ceiling where light was forcing its way through boards which, while once tightly pressed together, had forced themselves apart after years of being teased by the elements.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice more serious than before.
“Still alive. For now.”
There was silence, for a moment, then “Oh shit.”
“What?”
“I was nodding sympathetically.”
I laughed at the thought of him sitting there nodding his head in the dark. “I’ll take your word for it. Hold on, I’ll come over to you.”
“Good idea. Wait, you’re not tied up?”
“No, not any more. He took the tape off my wrists before, when we were getting on better.”
“You were getting on better, huh?”
I let out another little laugh. “Well, he thought we were. Until I kneed him in the jaw.”
“Good girl!”
I followed his voice and made my way painfully over to him. It’s weird how even in the worst of times you can still feel a whole range of emotions, or at least I can. There we were, kidnapped, locked in a shed in the middle of nowhere, but when I crawled over to Bottle I felt a sense of elation and pleasure to be in his presence again, to not be alone in this mess.
My eyes had begun to adjust and I could make out his outline against the dark back wall of the shed. Unlike the other three walls and roof no light was coming in from that side, perhaps the sun was in the wrong position I thought.
He was leaning back against the wall, his arms behind him, his legs out, extended in front of him, secured at the ankles. I shifted over next to him, and joined him sitting leaning back against the wall.
“I guess the plan didn’t work, huh?” I said.
“Nope. Fuckin’ Gauge...”
“Tough break.”
He let out a chuckle. We were in the exact same situation but I was offering him sympathy. I winced in pain as I join
ed him laughing.
“Since you’re untied, wanta’ try the door? You know, just in case. I gave it a good kicking when he first threw me in here, but I couldn’t do much all trussed up like this.”
“Sure.”
I clambered to my feet slowly because of the thousand different aches and pains bothering my body. I felt the outline of the door. There was a simple wooden latch, but it wouldn’t move when I tried to lift it. Dewey had padlocked it from the outside, of course.
“Ain’t doing,” I said.
“Worth a try.”
“Yeah,” I said as I went to sit back down next to him again. If we were going to get out we’d need someone to let us in from the outside.
“So, you never finished telling me your story.”
I punched him on the arm. “You disappeared and left me locked in your room!”
He rubbed his arm, pretending I’d hurt him while I knew I hadn’t. “Hey! I was off laying a trap so we could catch the bastard.”
“Some trap.”
Bottle let out an exasperated sigh. “The bastard had night vision fuckin’ goggles. He was watching the area to make sure we didn’t lay a trap.”
“Fuck. Told you he was clever though...”
“Yeah. I guess you did. So go on, give me the rest of it.”
“Well, the last year of high school is when things really got fucked...”
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN
Karen
After Dewey made that comment about my mother’s impeding death, when he said to me, “We’ll be able to spend more time together soon, babe. Soon it’ll just be us.” Something switched inside of me. I knew I had to escape from his grasp while I still could.
I don’t know whether I ever really had a chance, but back then I thought I did. Maybe if I’d made different decisions and been more careful I could have gotten away with it. Ha ha... gotten away with it... as if I was committing some kind of crime.
It was the senior year of high school, and while for some kids that meant the beginning of adult life, for others it meant time to move on to the next stage and go to college. Dewey had decided that we would be going to the local community college together (it will save us money, it’s the responsible choice), taking a criminal justice course after which we would go to police academy. Together, of course.
Actually, he often dropped hints that maybe I didn’t need to go, maybe I should be home with the children. The children. He was always talking about our non-existent children - he wanted to have them young, but I don’t think it was because of a burning love for them, I think it was more to do with his burning love for control.
If we had kids it’d be one more way to control me, to keep me locked away from anyone else and one more anchor to keep me in place and stop me fleeing. And of course it’d give him one, then two, then more little people he could manipulate and control, only these would be ones he could sink his claws into from birth and no doubt truly fuckup.
I needed a plan to escape him, and it would have to be put in place soon after Mom died (it was inevitable by then). My biggest problem was a lack of time to think, to plan, to take actions to help myself without him around.
Ever the helpful neighbor/boyfriend/fiance Dewey had taken to spending ever increasing amounts of time over at our house. He would sit next to my mother in the evenings, talking to her. I listened to him sometimes, and his comforting words always made my blood boil. “Don’t worry Mrs. Levinson, I’ll take care of Karen,” he’d say to her. Or, “Shhh, go to sleep. Sleep as long as you like. Karen and I will be just fine together.”
I had to sit there and listen to his sickly platitudes mixed in with subtle hints at her impeding death. If I tried to escape to my room, he’d give a wounded comment like “You’re not going to leave your poor mother with boring ol’ me are you?”
This would make Dad turn around and glare at me between sips from his can of beer. I’d slink back in, doing my homework on my knees on the couch or at the small card table if I cleaned the empties off it first.
It was impossible to break up with him then. It would have broken poor Mom’s already-dying heart, and Dewey was too deeply entrenched in our family life now. He’d even started to stay over two or three times a week, telling people that it was to help out with Mr. And Mrs. Levinson who were having such a hard time of it, with Dad’s messed up back and Mom’s terminal cancer.
This was of course understood, but there were always whispered comments and implied statements about young love. People thought he had noble intentions, but that he was also getting to spend a lot of quality time, as they put it, with me. They meant we were fucking. And we were, I guess. I was being fucked, at least.
I hated how I loved it. His hot, hard body thrusting in to mine. How he made me moan, and whimper. He liked to do it when I’d been crying, when Mom had had a bad day, or Dad had said something mean. He’d comfort me, hugging me, and in those desperate moments of loneliness I’d welcome his warmth and strength, even while I hated him the rest of the time.
There was one brief moment of respite in the unending misery that was my life at the time though. Dewey got a job at the Walmart, stacking shelves (paid strength training!) It was only two nights a week, but it was two nights where I was free to do whatever I wanted. And what I wanted to do was plan my escape.
The answer, of course, was college. Not the community college he wanted me to go to, but somewhere far, far away. I trawled university websites, the University of Nebraska, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Idaho; anywhere that was far away from there, far away from Dewey.
A lot of the websites had little forms you could fill in to have a free catalog sent to you. I remember staring at those forms, desperate to fill them in, but knowing that if I did he’d find them. I couldn’t keep anything from him.
Instead of ordering the physical catalogs I looked at them online. It wasn’t the same; I wanted to feel the paper between my fingers, hold the photographs up to my eyes and read the text on something other than my flickering computer monitor. But I couldn’t risk it.
I did something foolish at school one day. I talked to my adviser about out of state universities and colleges. He looked at me wide eyed. “Are you and Dewey thinking of leaving? I would never have guessed!”
“No, no. I was just curious. Asking for a friend!”
The bespectacled adviser pushed his glasses up his nose and gave me a quizzical look. “Well, tell your friend to come and see me herself.”
“Yeah, sure, I’ll do that.” I said, scurrying away.
But luckily for me (or unluckily?) he realized I hadn’t been asking for a friend. He tracked me down again.
I will always have a soft spot for Mr. Leigh. I think he must have seen something in my eyes when I’d first approached him, he’d seen that something was wrong.
I told him a few things, not everything of course, but just enough. I said that I was thinking it might be better for Dewey and me if we could put some distance between us for a while, after all, we’d hardly spent more than a few hours apart in years.
He nodded understandingly. “And you don’t want anyone to know about your applications?”
I nodded fearfully, biting my lower lip as I gave him an imploring look.
He let out a sigh. “It would be best if you just told him, you know? Running away won’t solve anything.” I think he saw that I was about to cry, because he quickly abandoned that line of advice. “Well, I probably shouldn’t, but I’ll help you anyway. I’ll get you everything you need on the school end, and I’ll sign off on your applications. Write you a recommendation if you need it. But your parents will be okay with this, won’t they? I don’t want an angry call from your mother!”
I nodded. “Of course.” I didn’t want to tell him that my mother was weeks away from death.
When Mr. Leigh told me he’d help me I was elated. Surely some school would accept me, and then I would be free! Free from him, free from the hell tha
t my life had become.
How could I have been so stupid? I should have known he’d find out, he always seemed to know everything.
I don’t know whether the counselor gossiped with a colleague and a rumor spread to Dewey, or maybe Dewey went through my computer and found the websites I’d been visiting. But somehow he found out. I didn’t know he knew. Not then. He could keep secrets too.
Oh God, why did he have to find out? Why did I have to try and run away like a coward? Why did this have to happen to me?
Anyway, the bastard found out. And that ruined everything.
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
Karen
Mom finally passed, and I hated that Dewey was right when he told me it was a relief. It was. Those last few weeks were hell for her, for me, for Dad, and I guess even Dewey.
Dad managed to put on a suit, and for once Dewey didn’t complain about me not wearing ‘his’ nail polish, instead watching me remove it before the funeral. “You can put it back on again tomorrow,” he said, with a soft smile. I wanted to stab him.
It was late March and I hated how good I felt without Mom there. The ghost she’d become those last few months was not the one who’d raised me, she was a sickly shell of a woman whose slurred words often ended up repulsing me, which then made me feel repulsed at myself.
Dewey had a new excuse to spend excessive amounts of time at our house, of course. Dad. Dad was still sitting in his chair, bloated and miserable as he drank can after can of Natty Ice, keeping the ghost of Mom company. Sometimes he forgot she wasn’t there anymore and tried to say something to her, often tailing off into nothing, other times completing his sentence and then letting out a loud laugh. It wasn’t funny.
So Dewey claimed he was helping clean the house and looking after me. Technically he was doing those things, but I wished to hell he wasn’t.
Maybe with Mom gone I could have broken it off then, but I imagined the fallout. His parents, the neighbors, the teachers, the other kids at school. I didn’t have the strength or energy to deal with that, not when the end of school was in sight and my college admissions results due. If I was accepted I could flee, I could disappear and avoid all the small town gossip that would result when I broke up with him by phone. It would be less than six months, not even that long if I headed to my new college town early. If I was accepted.