Back in my better days, before Mom became too sick for good humor, I’d ask him about shrimps on the barbie, drop bears (they really exist), and if he’d ridden a kangaroo to work lately.
He’d retired the kangaroo, apparently, but not his prescription pad.
After I’d filled the prescription, I sat in the Walgreen’s parking lot and swallowed a pill dry. I didn’t know what to expect, but as I drove away, the chains of anxiety start to loosen. By the time I had arrived home, I felt like I could breathe again. I felt like I could function.
I sat on the toilet, looking at the pill resting on my palm. I realized that if I didn't make a move to get out my comfy coffin, I'd be buried alive. A captive in my own house. A slave to my fears forever.
But anxiety constantly gnawed on my innards, robbing me of any strength to rise up and break free. I stood and went to the medicine cabinet in my bathroom and pulled open the mirrored door. There sat my entire pharmacological collection.
Dr. Miller had first prescribed Xanax, followed by Ambien to help me sleep. Xanax gave me chemical courage to get through the stalker ordeal, even though I felt like I was going a little crazy, back when the shadows moved, and the mangled roses kept appearing on our door step.
Back when I felt like the stalker was everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
So I went on with my daily routine, feeling as if I needed superhuman feats of courage just to shower. I’d read too many murder mysteries, I told myself, as I popped another pill. The ‘dead woman in the shower’ trope took on new meaning. Maybe lots of authors had done their research. Maybe killing women in the shower wasn’t a plot device after all. Maybe it was accurate reporting.
Then came the depression. Prozac helped me "manage the blues." But Prozac made me feel like the walking dead. So Dr. Miller moved me over to Zoloft, explaining that it took time to find the right "balance."
Over the ensuing year, I’d "tried out" Celexa, Effexor, and Paxil. Some made me feel a little more than nothing. Xanax became my go-to girl during all this upheaval. When I started to get that edgy feeling, I’d just pop another one and voilà.
I got up and looked at the vials. "You need to wean yourself off this shit," I told myself. Some days, I cut the pills in half and thought positively, hoping for a powerful placebo effect. But The Edge crept up again, its scraggly fingers making headway into my sense of peacefulness. And down went another pill.
There were six vials in total. Five were mostly empty. The last one, filled with Demerol, was something I touched very sparingly after I had my wisdom tooth removed. Except . . . except now, it was now empty.
I held up the vial to the light and peered inside, hoping the thirty pills would magically reappear. But they didn’t. That old sinking feeling came over me. The same sinking feeling I’d had for months during the stalker’s red rose blitz. Instinctively, I glanced behind me, looking at the shadows, expecting to find the stalker standing there, holding a carelessly dethorned rose.
A voice came to me. Maybe you took took them. Had I?
No. I hadn’t. I was not losing my mind. The pills were missing. Virginia had taken them. It was the only logical answer.
Maybe I should cry, I thought suddenly, putting the vial back. Maybe I should let it all out. That might help. That might help me break these terrible bonds. I thought about those religious zealots, arms up in the air, hysterically babbling in Tongues. Maybe I shouldn’t let it all out.
I really did want to cry, but my soul was as barren as a field recently sprayed with Roundup. Life can’t grow when it’s buried with chemicals. Life is messy. Feelings are messy.
Each vial held pills in varying sizes and colors. Each pill held the promise of a better day. But none of them delivered. I’d been taking pills for well over a year now, and I couldn’t even open the front door.
I recalled Dr. Miller flipping through his colorful pamphlet with big pretty pictures of pills, saying, "Why don’t we try . . ."
But I didn’t want to try anymore. I wanted to do. I wanted to get better. I heard Virginia’s voice. Oh poppet . . . better luck next time!
A swell of anger rose up in my chest. These pills weren’t helping me. They were making me worse! I swept the vials from my cabinet and watched them clatter to the floor. I picked up a vial, wrenched off the tamper-proof lid, and before good reason prevailed, I dumped the pills into the toilet.
I could hear little screaming gurgles as they sunk to the bottom of the bowl. But we can help youuuuu! I could see Dr. Miller gasping in horror. All his precious little pills ending up in the sewer. Before courage failed me, I snatched up the next vial and dumped its contents down the toilet bowl. And down went the rest of my collection.
Tears sprang to my eyes. A part of me revolted. Our pills! What are we going to do! We need those. We need our pills!
I choked back all the chorus of voices, crying out in collective horror. Our pills! Our pills!
But our pills weren’t making me better. They were supposed to help me. They were supposed to be a temporary fix. They turned into a permanent crutch.
And before I knew it, more tears sprang up sharp and cutting, but I wanted them to come. I wanted them to cut me and make me feel alive again. Surrounded by empty vials, I flushed the toilet again just to make sure they were gone.
I sat down on the edge of the bathtub for a good long time, letting the tears come, encouraging them to rise up and wash away my nothingness.
Finally, after the tears died down, I put my hands on my knees and vowed, "Next time you'll open the door." I patted my hands together and said it again. "You will open the door."
My stomach flipped just thinking about it, bringing up an anticipatory swell of nausea. I put my hand on my belly and frowned. Even if I did manage to open the door, would I be able to speak? And if I couldn't quite get the words out of my throat, would FedEx Man laugh at me?
Maybe he'd divert his gaze and smirk just like everyone in school had, thinking of Pewgenia, the Piss Drinker. That might happen, I told myself. That could very well happen.
But I had to try.
CHAPTER SIX
Over the next few days, I spent more dedicated time with Rhenn. A promise is a promise, and I meant to keep my word. I'd killed him. It hadn’t proven to be fatal, luckily, but Rhenn didn’t seem very excited about this interruption in his eternal slumber. He rose, hung a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the crypt entrance, and returned to his coffin, tossing his black cape of his head for good measure.
Funny guy. I’ll check up with him later. Right now, I wanted to work on a manuscript that really excited me. I opened a fresh new page. I had an idea in the back of my mind, something that didn’t involve bloodsuckers.
I wanted to exercise my fingers on a modern remake of Rebecca, which I cleverly renamed "Rebecca," and if things worked out as planned, I could parlay some of my enthusiasm over to Rhenn and Friends, the working title for book two.
Then, something occurred to me: Could I mix the two projects? Could I insert the Second Mrs. de Winter, whom I’d named Amelia, into Rhenn and Friends?
Maybe instead of a sequel, I could write a prequel. We could meet Rhenn Larson and Madeline Storm before they met, back when Madeline and Amelia were frenemies.
Or maybe I could tackle a sequel, by rousing Rhenn somehow, maybe thanks to a love potion, and he could become a very powerful ringleader, while our heroine Madeline starts to fall for her own version of Maximilian de Winter—a mysterious man who lives in a battered castle up the hill.
No, that wouldn't work. Readers were already attached to Rhenn and Madeline just as they knew them to be: a vampire and a human, infatuated from across the species divide, cursed to love one another but never partake of one another.
Virginia's idea niggled in the back of my mind. What if I introduced a new creature into the story, who was also rather fond of Madeline? A werewolf wouldn’t work but, could she love both Cyclops and a vampire?
I sat doodling, leaving the rest
of the details to Brain. Brain, the reliable grey matter between my ears, who solved all of my gaping plot issues. All I had to do was write down the problem and wait for Brain to think of the solution. Brain never let me down. So I was sitting with pen poised in hand, awaiting inspiration, when Virginia knocked on my door.
"Genie, can I come in?"
I looked up. "Sure."
Grateful for the distraction, I put my pen down.
"Hey," she said and sat down on my oversized reading chaise. "How's it going?"
"Oh . . . good. Just working out some details." I looked at her. "Rhenn's being difficult."
"Uh oh. Defibrillator problems?"
I laughed. "Something like that. I think I've got a monster in here that's pretty taken with Madeline. Vampire versus Cyclops. That ought to make the publisher happy."
Virginia turned her mouth down. "As long as it keeps the fans reading."
"Bram Stoker's Dracula was published 1897 and it's still in print. Vampire stories never die. How's that for a pun?"
She shrugged. "Pretty good." Then she ran her fingernail along the upholstery wale. "You think you can hit that deadline? It's pretty tight."
I looked up at her. We hadn't discussed the new terms of the contract in great detail since FedEx Man dropped the package and I’d binned all my pills. Clearly, there'd been a mistake about the deadline that Virginia was supposed to sort out with her mobster alternative persona. "You said it was a mistake, and you'd fix it."
She puckered her mouth in a great approximation of shame and defeat, brow wrinkled with concern. "Yeah, they can't change it, Genie. They want these books rolled out on a schedule so readers won't forget about us and move onto something else.
"So . . ."
"So . . . this is the schedule."
I stood and paced the room. "Six months?! Write a full length novel in six months? That's ninety thousand words! Pretty sure my fingers will fall off at that rate!"
"No need to be so dramatic. You just have to sit down and hit your word count every day,"—that abashed look came over her again—"like, every single day."
"I'm not a dairy cow, Virginia. It takes time to sort out these plot holes and to find the story. And—and I'm not sure which direction to go with Rhenn and Friends. I don't even know if he has any friends these days. I killed them all, remember?"
Virginia crossed her legs and bit her nail. "Can you tell Brain to hurry up? It's kind of important. David says that after the book came out, a slew of copycats started writing the same story and the market is starting to get saturated with species-crossed vampire love stories."
"Can't our readers satisfy themselves with some fan fiction in the meantime? There's some good stuff out there. Nice . . . colorful stuff." My mouth twisted with suppressed humor.
The graphic novelists came out in force after publication of After The End. Equipped with Photoshop and a ripe, enflamed imagination, they created volume after volume of blood-splattered love affairs gone very wrong.
"Yeah, that's the thing. David wants us to ride the wave. He's afraid we're going to miss it."
"Agent Smith?" I grumbled. David Smith could well-nigh be considered one of the most powerful agents in the industry, achieving astonishing mind melds between publishers and authors. He was a fast talking hustler, laser-focused, and he bore an uncanny similarity to his namesake: twin widow's peaks, dark hair brushed back, large forehead, and wide-set eyes that didn't miss a thing.
Virginia ran her hands through her badly streaked hair. "Okay, listen. Just go back to basics. Follow the outline. Just sit down and figure out the plot layers and sub plots. Then start to flesh out the beats and tropes. Make sure you add some high and low moments, you know, dark night of the soul, fun and games, all that stuff."
She rattled on a little while longer about various story mechanics, while I grew more worried. Writing a publishable novel in six months requires military precision. I wasn't a recipe follower. I wasn't even an outliner.
I'm what's known as a "pantser," a type of writer that sits down at the blank screen computer with only a vague idea on where the story will go, thus leaving me the helpless conduit of happy or unhappy surprises.
With such a tight deadline, my preferred wandering style of writing a book would need some sort of turbo-fueled injection to get me to The End.
Moreover, I suffered from stage fright following my astounding success of After The End. As a debut author, whom no one has heard of, failure was expected. In fact, I had planned on it. But now that the book had climbed such dizzying heights, I was expected to send the next installment even higher. And I wasn't sure I could.
There was something else too, simmering just under the surface; I wanted to write under my own name. I wanted to become Eugenia Ward.
"Can you just wait to sign the contract?" I asked. "I need to get my head around a few things." Like improving my words per minute.
"All right," she said. "But don’t wait too long, okay?"
"Sure—hey," I said, just as an afterthought, as she rose to leave. "I flushed all my pills."
"Really?" She raised her eyebrows in amazement.
"Yeah, it’s a brave new world for me now. And you too. No more sneaking my Demerol." I smiled.
She looked almost offended. "I didn’t steal your pills."
Of course she’d say that. Who wants to be caught red-handed with their fingers in the pill jar?
I scoffed. "Of course you did, Jinny. They didn’t just walk away. I found the vial empty."
"But you just said you flushed all of your pills. Maybe you just flushed them and didn’t realize it until afterwards."
It was the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man conversation again. The same one we’d had throughout the entire stalker ordeal, whereby I’d try to tell Virginia that someone lurked in the shadows, and she’d ask if I’d actually seen him. No, I hadn’t actually seen him, which only added to the vague uneasy feeling that maybe I was going a little crazy. But I wasn’t crazy. The stalker was real. My pills were missing. And Casper the Friendly Ghost hadn’t taken them.
"No," I said. "I didn’t realize it after the fact. The pills were gone before I emptied everything."
"I can’t believe you’re accusing me of theft!"
I put my forehead in my hands. My head hurt. "Virginia, it’s not that big of a deal. I was just making a little joke about it. I don’t care if you took them. I’m just saying they’re all gone now."
"Well, maybe you took them. You certainly don’t have problem popping pills."
I looked up at her, a little surprised and hurt. "I had a problem popping pills. Not remembering which ones."
She held my gaze for one long hostile second.
I looked away. "Okay, you didn’t take the pills."
"That’s right because I can’t take Demerol. Remember?"
My stomach dropped. Was that Demerol? I’d forgotten. Back in California, Virginia’s issues that had landed her on a therapist’s couch with three other teenaged miscreants, listening (or not listening) to the counsellor drone on about being juvenile.
"I'm not a juvenile," she’d fumed after yet another bad session. "I'm eighteen years old."
"I think he was talking about your behavior," I'd told her, much to her disinterest. The therapy lessons fell by the wayside due to the dual reasons of not helping Virginia and the mounting costs.
Then she’d overdosed. The doctor suggested a blood test just to be thorough, which led to the unwelcome diagnosis of a substance-induced mood disorder. We found out that her Demerol adventure had caused chemical changes in her brain, which triggered her new problem. And if she took anymore, there would be more damage. After that, she swore she’d never take another one.
She shot me one last triumphant glare, and left the room. I looked away, puzzled. Had the pills just walked away?
My mind flashed irrationally to the stalker. Goosebumps rushed over my arms as I thought about him in my bathroom, emptying the vial. But that was pure fiction. He
was currently rotting in a jail cell somewhere in upstate New York, picking up bars of soap. I wish.
But that still left the obvious question. If Virginia hadn’t taken them, who had?
CHAPTER SEVEN
After the stalker ordeal finally ended, Virginia and I bought this sprawling ranch style home just outside of Glenhaven, where stores were family owned and nary a chain store could be found until one reached the freeway onramp.
We’re about five miles outside of town, close enough to suit Virginia's needs, and far enough away to meet my requirements. I wanted a maximum security compound where I could garden and write, without fear of a stalker getting close. Here, I had found it.
The house was a deceased estate sale. The owner had passed away peaceably in the home, which room I wasn't quite sure I wanted to know. It had green shag carpeting with a network well-worn paths running from room to room. There was a thick odor of cigarette smoke and incontinence that we struggled to fix.
The appliances and lighting fixtures formed a charming time capsule of yesteryear, some of which we ended up keeping. The kitchen linoleum was yellowed and peeling. The bathrooms sported cracked pink tiles from a bygone era.
The lawn had been wrestled away from by the encroaching forest like a game of Hungry Hippo, the fringes ragged with knee-high saplings. The concrete walkways were cracked and buckling. The roof looked like it needed some sort of urgent attention.
But I didn't care about any of that. I saw a sprawling soon-to-be white-washed ranch home steeped in charming historical details. We put in a generous offer to beat out our competition, complete with some nice as-is clauses, and forty-two days later we closed on our dream home.
Virginia managed the contractors with the same mobster attitude that she'd used with our agent. And only after six months, and a lot of elbow grease, we'd transformed the property into our own private wonderland.
With cold logic, one could say that the previous owner had died in the house, a storyline that could bring goose bumps to anybody’s arms. But death is a natural part of life.
I Am The Lion: A Riveting Psychological Thriller Page 3