Olivia

by Donna Sturgeon

  A parade of people started knocking on her door at all hours of the day and night. Izzie came first, and most often. Kenny stopped by a few times. Carla rang the bell for an hour on their regularly-scheduled EPT/Applebee’s night. Even Louise came over once or twice. Sam didn’t bother to knock, he simply yelled through the window that she was fired and to come pick up her crap and her final paycheck.

  Eugene didn’t knock either, but he started sitting on her porch every night while he smoked and drank Coke straight from the two-liter. One night he caught her eye as she watched him out the window, and they looked at each other for a long moment. It was the first time Olivia could ever remember Eugene holding eye contact with her, and it felt so good she cried. But she still couldn’t go outside.

  The only person who never stopped by was George. And he was the only person she wanted to see.

  Two weeks after she first locked herself in, Olivia dared to come back out. She was out of smokes, out of food, and going out of her mind with insanity. At three in the morning, when she knew Louise would be at home tucked tight in her bed, Olivia retrieved her car from behind the dumpster and drove to Walmart. A handful of cars were in the parking lot, none that she recognized. She parked in the handicap space closest to the door and made a run for it. She grabbed the first scooter she saw and made a loop around the store in record time. She skipped the booze aisle and the McDonald’s, and picked up the essentials.

  As she made her way to the registers, her eye caught sight of the claw machine in the arcade. Sitting right on top of all of the toys, proud as a peacock, was a stuffed parrot that looked exactly like the one Mitch had won for her at the Juliette Jamboree—identical to the one she had murdered.

  Rooted in trepidation, she was incapable of doing anything but stare at the parrot. Her heartbeat picked up, slowly at first, increasing in speed until it hammered painfully in her chest. The parrot called to her. It laughed at her. It mocked her with its smiling beak and bright red and green fur. It squawked and laughed and called her a fool. It flapped its wings and told her she was stupid, and weak, an idiot for falling in love with a monster.

  Olivia squeezed the hand control on the scooter and approached the claw machine from the side. The parrot’s eyes followed her every move as it cackled in cocky laughter. She dug in her pocket for two quarters and dropped them into the slot. The parrot grinned and stuck its scaly tongue out at her. Olivia gripped the joystick in a stranglehold and maneuvered the claw until it was square over the parrot’s head, and then she pulled the trigger.

  The claw descended painfully slow, its polished metal razor-sharp, and settled like a demented hat on top of the parrot’s head. The claws squeezed, clamping steel jaws around the parrot’s neck, and then slowly… oh-so-slowly… the claw began to lift the parrot off its perch on a teddy bear’s back, extracting it from the bowels of hell.

  The parrot’s eyes grew wide and Olivia began to grin. The parrot flapped its wings and squawked in panic, and Olivia laughed. She watched and waited as the captured parrot inched its way across the machine to the little hole in the front where it would be dropped and sentenced to death, this time by drowning. Just as the parrot was crossing the last bit of space… just as Olivia could imagine the feel of its slimy fur in her hands… the claw let go, and set the parrot free.

  “No!” Olivia screamed, and beat on the machine. “You motherfucker!”

  She dug into her pocket and pulled out two more quarters. The parrot dove for cover and the claw came up with a snake. Two more quarters and she got a raccoon. A quick slip to the change machine and five dollars in quarters netted her a baby doll, a Dalmatian, a rabbit, a Nerf ball, Shrek, a chicken, and an armload of other crap that she shoved into the basket of the scooter as fury exhaled though her nose in freight-train chugs, and the parrot giggled hysterically.

  Olivia jumped up and down, and stomped her feet. She beat on the machine like a mad woman as she cried and screamed, and the parrot mocked her and blew raspberries at her. Out of money and out of her mind, she broke down in wrenching sobs, and collapsed onto the scooter as the parrot screeched, “Olivia’s a loser. Loser! Loser!”

  Defeated, she squeezed the control. She scooted away from the machine, out of the arcade. The parrot was an asshole, but he was right. She was a weak, pathetic loser. She’d been one her entire life.

  She made her way out of the store and across the parking lot. She scooted past her car and through the flashing, yellow light onto the main road, headed into Juliette. She went south, and then west, and then south some more, until she was lost in the middle of a neighborhood in Northside.

  The houses were spaced further apart on the north end of town than they were in South, every lawn mowed, pristine and weed-free. Automatic sprinklers enhanced the tranquility of the street with a melodic chu-chu-chu. Front yards were landscaped with flowers and shrubs instead of discarded trash. Bikes sat tucked inside garages, not piled beside porches. An occasional dog barked, but none came charging at a battered and rusted chain link fence with teeth bared and foam dripping like they did in South.

  She had driven around Northside a million times before, but seeing it all in the dawn’s early light, she felt as though she had somehow wandered into an alternate universe, not into a neighborhood seventeen blocks north of her own house. Nothing felt real. But it was. The mocking tone of Northside’s perfection screamed, “Olivia’s a loser,” meaner and louder than the parrot’s screeching had.

  The houses were slowly waking up, the occasional kitchen or bathroom light on. Olivia scooted silently past the houses and imagined the lives being lived—mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters all living in perfect harmony behind vinyl siding and Pella windows. Every one of them was neat and clean and well-mannered. They were people who loved one another and encouraged each other to dream for the unobtainable stars. None of them smoked or drank to excess. No one yelled. No one fought. No one felt ignored or alone. No one went hungry or got scared at night. No one was lost or confused or unsure. No one wondered why their mother didn’t love them or why their father couldn’t bear to reach out and touch them. None of them would ever have to know what it felt like to be Olivia, and it wasn’t fair.

  She scooted down the street and around the corner, past the neat and tidy park with the fresh mulch under the jungle gym and the manicured shrubs in the picnic area, past the tennis courts with the new nets and the basketball court with bright, white lines painted on the blacktop—all things that the tiny park in South hadn’t seen since 1979, before Olivia was even born. The scooter hummed past the big houses on Waverly Road, and the even bigger houses on Peony Street. All of them were brick and beautiful, so spectacular Olivia couldn’t even dream big enough to imagine living in one. She traveled past them quickly with eyes adverted, and ended up on a street she had never seen before where brand-new construction was underway.

  There before her, in curing basements and skeleton frames, was the picture in her mind—her brand-new townhouse with the white, picket fence on the outside and the two-point-five kids on the inside. As she made her way down the street, past various stages of completion, she started to cry. Her dream was real, but it wasn’t destined for her. Someone who had already been handed everything in life had also been given her dream as their reality. She always knew in the back of her mind she would never live her dream, but seeing someone else live it hurt worse than anything Mitch had ever done to her.

  In all, there were twenty-four townhomes, the four on the end complete. A Lexus idled in the driveway of the very last house. Olivia stopped in the middle of the road and watched as a husband kissed his sleepy wife goodbye and carried his overnight bag to the car.

  The wife, who looked exactly like Olivia, but with beautiful hair like in the shampoo ads, waved and smiled and tucked her pink, satin robe a little tighter around her neck as the husband, who looked exactly like Mitch before he grew his devil horns, backed out of the driveway and headed off to the world of
‘important things.’ He would probably hop a plane in Omaha and fly out into the great unknown to make life-changing decisions for big companies who paid him more in a year than Olivia would earn in her lifetime. The wife watched as the taillights of the Lexus disappeared, and then she went back inside the townhouse that should have been Olivia’s. She shut out the world with a close of her bright red door with a grapevine wreath hanging perfectly in the center.

  Olivia remained rooted in the middle of the road and watched the townhouse, waiting for another peek at the life that should have been hers. Occasionally, a light went off or a light came on, and she caught sight of the Olivia-imposture through a window. One time, she was carrying a pudgy baby. Olivia felt her heart lurch. That should have been her baby, the one that would have started her two-point-five with Mitch. A boy she would have named after his father, a boy who would have been a football star at Juliette High. A boy who would have been a big brother to a vibrant little girl named Lily with blonde pigtails and a giggly smile.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?” a voice came from behind.

  She turned her tear-streaked face.

  A police officer stood beside his black and white with the lights flashing. She’d never heard him pull up, but there he was. Like magic.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?” he asked.

  In the strobes of red and blue, he looked more like a god than a man. He was strong and he was safe, but more, his blue eyes looked into hers as though he already knew every secret her heart contained. In one heartbeat, he read her every want, her every desire. He appreciated the fear and the turmoil storming through her soul. He accepted her every truth without judgment, without reproach. It was the spiritual comfort of those omniscient blue eyes that made her ask him the one question that had puzzled her all her life.

  “Why doesn’t the train whistle blow on this side of town?”

  “Excuse me?” He took a step closer to her.

  “The train whistle. It blows every eight minutes in South. Rain or shine, day or night, every eight minutes a train passes by and the whistle blows so loud it rattles the windows. But no matter how long I sit here, the whistle doesn’t blow. How come?”

  “Have you been drinking tonight, ma’am?” He took another step toward her.

  “Maybe it’s all the trees.” Olivia looked up at the leaf-laden branches swaying in the early morning breeze. As she slid off the scooter, the stuffed chicken fell out of the overflowing basket and landed on the road without a sound.

  “Ma’am?” He rested his hand on his gun.

  “It has to be the trees…”

  As though being pulled into a dream, Olivia walked toward the officer, and looked at him curiously. He kept his hand on his gun and their eyes locked together as she silently floated past him, their souls communicating in beautiful intonation.

  And then she blinked and the connection was gone, and she continued on by. She headed toward South and headed towards home and didn’t once look back.

  * * *

  Olivia slept the morning away. She would have gladly slept away her life, but the blaring of a car horn woke her up just past one o’clock in the afternoon. The trailer was hot, growing hotter by the minute with the afternoon sun beating down on it. She buried her head under her pillow and tried to ignore the sweat pooling in uncomfortable places on her body, but after ten minutes of smelling her own b.o. she couldn’t take it any longer and got up to turn on the air conditioner. As she adjusted the thermostat, she looked out the window, and saw her car sitting in her carport.

  She frowned in confusion and went to the door. Last she knew her car was still at Walmart. And, last she knew, it couldn’t drive itself. She peeked out the little window, but the road in front of her trailer was empty. She dared to open the door and stick her head out. Again, no one was there. She opened the door, crossed the deck, and peeked around the corner of the trailer toward the backyard.

  Deserted.

  She hopped down the steps and into the carport and opened the driver-side door. A note and her keys were lying in the seat.

  Saved your ass from gettin’ towed. U can thank me with a 6 pack.

  The note was signed “Niko.” It took her a long minute to remember who the heck Niko was. When she did, she let out a little laugh. He was a kid named Eric who worked the midnight shift in the Electronics Department of Walmart and truly believed he was Niko Bellic from ‘Grand Theft Auto.’

  “Hey, Liv! How’s life treating you?”

  Olivia turned toward the direction of the voice and saw her neighbor, Mr. Turner, in his open bathrobe and boxers, his black dress socks pulled up to his pasty-white knees, taking a stack of newspapers to the curb. Mr. Turner was always in a robe and boxers and never ventured further than the curb. His sister delivered him food and a stack of newspapers—one from every state in the union—each morning. He had them delivered to his sister’s house instead of his in case the FBI was still tracking him. Olivia had no idea if the FBI really was tracking Mr. Turner (if that was his real name) or if it was all in his head, but she hoped they were, because she was dying to see some SWAT action.

  “Hey, Mr. Turner!” Olivia called back and waved.

  “Tell Eugene, Chester molested my cat again.” Mr. Turner set down his papers, and then went back inside. Forty-seven seconds in the sun was all Mr. Turner’s skin could handle before he blistered. All of his conversations were short ones.

  Olivia bounced the keys in her hand and looked at Mr. Turner’s trailer. It was a rusted and ramshackle mess of weeds and trash. The car sitting in the carport had four flat tires and garbage piled on it, and hadn’t moved an inch in close to fifteen years. He was the disgrace of Valley View, if there could be such a thing. Olivia was well on her way to becoming him if she didn’t get off her ass and back into the real world.

  “Humph,” she grunted to herself. “We’ll see about that.”

  She went inside, showered, brushed her teeth and brushed her wet hair into a clip, put on the freshest-smelling clothes she could find, got in her car and headed for the Get ‘n Go.

  “Pack of Reds,” she said to Vicki, the cashier, as she slammed her gigantic cup of fountain Dr. Pepper onto the counter and slapped a ten beside it.

  “Where the heck you been, girly?” Vicki asked. “I thought you was dead.”

  Olivia smiled. “Nah. Still kickin’.”

  She took her smokes and change and got back into her car, and drove straight to Garretson. She parked between Kenny’s beat-up LeBaron and Carla’s Caddie, and headed for the time clock with the smile still on her face.

  She scanned the cards for hers and when she didn’t find it she hollered out, “Where the hell’s my timecard, Sam?”

  “I fired your ass!” Sam hollered back. “Get outta here before I call security.”

  Olivia stormed across the hall into his office. “Give me my card back.”

  “Go home, Liv.”

  “Give me my card back or I’ll sit in your office until midnight and sing to you.”

  “Go home, Liv.”

  “I’m warning you…”

  “Security!”

  “Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton,” she sang as loud and as proud as she could. “Old times there are not forgotten!”

  “Liv…”

  She amped the volume. “Look away! Look away! Look away, Dixieland!”

  “Liv,” Sam warned.

  And added some dance moves. “In Dixieland where I was born, early on one frosty morn!”

  “Liv!”

  “Look away! Look—”

  “Liv!”

  “What?”

  Sam’s face turned red and his chest puffed out as he stared her down. She opened her mouth to belt out the next line, but he cut her off with a grunt of profanity. He reached into his top desk drawer and pulled out her timecard. “Don’t make me regret this.”

  “Thanks, Sam.” She tried to take the card, but he held it tight.

  “Is everything ok?” he
asked, his voice tinged with concern.

  “Nothing I can’t handle,” she said.

  He stared at her for another moment, debating, and then let go of the card. She leaned over the desk and kissed his cheek.

  “Thanks, Sam,” she repeated with sincerity.

  “Get outta here.” He dismissed her with a wave and a hint of a blush.

  Olivia clocked in, found her smock and took a deep breath for courage before pushing through the vinyl curtain to the Quality Control room. At once, she was surrounded by the women who were her nighttime sisters. They gushed and worried and pawed all over her, and as they passed her from one hug to the next she fought back tears. A hundred questions were fired at once. She tried to answer them all without the truth, but Izzie’s eyes settled on the faint, greenish-yellow hue around her eye that still betrayed her circumstances, and Olivia knew in an instant that Izzie knew.

  Izzie clapped her hands. “Let’s get back to work and let Liv breathe.” As soon as everyone else dispersed, she asked in whisper, “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I couldn’t,” Olivia whispered in reply. “I’m sorry.”

  Izzie wrapped Olivia in a fierce hug. “I’m gonna boil his balls and feed ‘em to my cat for a midnight snack.”

  “You don’t have a cat,” Olivia reminded her.

  “I’ll buy one special for the occasion.”

  Olivia lost the battle with the tears. She held on tight as she buried her face in Izzie’s neck. “I love you, Iz.”

  “I love you, too, Liv,” Izzie whispered and squeezed harder.

  “All right, you two lovebirds, get back to work,” Sam said, then announced to the room, “Mandatory Saturdays until further notice.”

  Everyone groaned except Olivia. She needed the money.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell it to someone who cares.” Sam turned to Stephie. “I need you to spot-check a few pallets for me in Shipping. Here’s the list.”

  He shoved a piece of paper at Stephie then locked himself in his office. Stephie’s face fell as she pushed through the curtain into the Shipping and Receiving area. Olivia’s eyebrows flew up in surprise. What the heck was that all about? There was never an actual list of pallets to check. It was just code for a little slapadapadingdong in the racks.