I Am The Lion: A Riveting Psychological Thriller

by Rachelle Lauro

  I rose from my desk, pulled my cardigan tight around me, and went to the patio door. The lion paced his fence. He moved with a slow lithe movement that advertised to his latent strength. But he wasn't the fat, glossy animal that Virginia had promised. He was skinny and still looked malnourished.

  Virginia managed to have some meat delivered every few weeks, but it didn't seem to be improving matters any. She’d had enough time to pamper her pet, now it was my turn.

  I went back to my desk and commenced Operation Fat Feline. Soon enough, I found a wholesale butcher that made home deliveries. Then I researched the astounding daily feeding requirements for one lion.

  One female can gorge on sixty pounds of meat per day, a male can do ninety. On average, our backyard kitten needed to eat twenty pounds of meat per day, which meant that I needed to somehow procure one hundred forty pounds of meat per week. No wonder all the sanctuaries were at capacity.

  Moreover, how much would that cost per month? Had Virginia done any of this math before she "adopted" her lion? I was fairly sure perennially broke Dillon hadn't bothered to pitch in, even though he was always happy to spend Virginia’s money, so I started searching for farm cooperatives that could deliver the meat on a more regular basis than they had managed.

  Finally, I found my guy, placed my order, and frowned when I realized the goods wouldn’t arrive for arrive for another week.

  In the meantime, I could at least rustle up a snack for him. We had a coffin freezer in the garage that Virginia kept filled to capacity. She had a lot of ice cream in there, of course, but she also stockpiled turkeys from post-Thanksgiving sales. Always a sucker for a good deal, she also bought up pork by the half shoulder and roast beef by the poundage.

  I found a wheelbarrow and emptied the coffin freezer of its sale items. Then I wobbled everything outside to the lion enclosure, unwrapped the meat and lobbed each frozen piece over the fence. Four turkeys, three chickens, and umpteen chunks of red meat lay scattered along the fence line. Should be enough to keep his hunger at bay until the real stuff arrives.

  I kept my distance, while he finished off a frozen bird. He still scared me, even though he sat benignly on his haunches, eyeing me.

  He didn’t seem as angry as normal, when Dillon lingers by his cage. I wouldn’t call him a friend and plunge my hand through the fence, but I wouldn’t call him a foe either. He’d tucked away the vicious snarling and clandestine swipes. His ears, normally pinned back, tilted forward in a friendly sort of way. Okay, maybe it was just idle curiosity. But I dared to hope that me might tolerate me, maybe even let me befriend him.

  An imaginary news reporter clutching a microphone sprang to mind. She stood just off to my right, talking to the local news camera man, wind rustling her hair. And tonight on Channel 6, we’re going to meet Eugenia Ward, who triumphantly overcame her fears, to make a new friend. And a very large one at that.

  The lion sat on his haunches, working on a pork shoulder, ignoring me and the reporter.

  "Enjoy," I said to the lion. "My friend."

  The sun slipped behind a dark cloud bank. I shivered and went back inside to build my inaugural fire of the season. I was on my hands and knees, blowing on a wad of newspaper, when my phone rang. Ben.

  "Are you keeping cozy?" he asked.

  "Trying," I replied, glancing over the simmering ashes in my fireplace. "Not doing such a good job though."

  "Uh oh. Is there anything I can do to help?"

  "I could use a good fire. Are you an Eagle Scout?"

  "As a matter of fact, I am."

  I laughed in earnest. "Are you really? Badges and sashes or it never happened."

  "Have I ever lied to you?"

  "Well, I’m not sure, but I can always fire up my polygraph."

  Ben laughed. "You actually have one of those things?”

  "No," I said, smiling. "I thought about getting one once though, but they’re pretty expensive."

  "Then you’ll just have to take my word for it."

  So Ben and I both had been in the Scouts program as kids. I made a mental note to never bring up the topic again. "Okay, I’ll make you a deal. You come over, build me nice roaring hearth fire, and I’ll beg for your forgiveness."

  "I like the begging part, but I have a better idea. Have you ever been parking?"

  I laughed. "Parking, as in necking?" Pretty sure, never.

  "Well, yeah, that too, if you insist." I blushed bright red. "Kidding . . . I wanted to take you up to Hammonasset Beach State Park. There's a place where you can park and look all the way down the coast. It's really neat."

  "That sounds really neat."

  "Okay, so I'll be over in about an hour?"

  "Oh," I said. "Okay."

  "Is that okay?" he asked. "I don't want to interrupt your writing."

  I glanced over at my dormant computer screen. Today turned out to be another bad day. I'd sat down at nine thirty and procrastinated by reading Daily Mail, which carried me over to YouTube, where I watched videos of guilty dogs and funny horses and lions tackling antelopes, wishing Virginia's beastie was living free on the Serengeti instead of wasting away in my backyard.

  Then I emptied the coffin freezer and paid my yellow friend a visit. Then I went inside. After stockpiling logs next to the fireplace, I built a log tepee like the internets told me to do. Then I tried to light the tepee, which took some screwing around with crumpled newspapers, stubborn logs that preferred to smoke, not burn, followed by an untimely squirt of lighter fluid that nearly took off my eyebrow. So here I was.

  "No, it's good. Good timing. I wasn't doing much anyway."

  "Okay, great! See you in a bit."

  We hung up, and I went upstairs to find an appropriate "parking" outfit, which consisted of some jeans, white sneakers, and a hoodie pullover. Then I went downstairs to eat some cereal, while I waited for my chariot to arrive.

  Hammonasset Beach State Park was a two-mile stretch of windswept shoreline that fronted Long Island Sound. We drove down a long two-lane road, flanked with rugged shrubbery that leaned and swayed in the wind. Beyond the shrubbery, vast marshlands rushed out to the distant roiling sea.

  It was a cold windy day that warranted a hot chocolate and a long campout by my fireplace, but Ben had other things on his mind. And so did I.

  Rhenn and Friends was starting to flag again. As it turned out, Falco didn't have the wing power to get Amy Mathews through a few more installments. But there was something even heavier weighing on my mind: Virginia had started disappearing for days at a time. When she did return home, she seemed disconnected in a way that rose beyond a simple hangover.

  I knew she was out with Dillon, but every wrong step Virginia took, Amy took, and it was only a matter of time before our squeaky clean author persona would burst into the headlines with a stint in rehab. More importantly, I worried about Virginia’s mental health.

  Then there was the growing number of occasions that I’d found documents open on my computer. I’d asked Virginia, but she denied snooping on me. And I didn’t press the matter, not wanting to ruin the good vibes between us lately. But it pissed me off.

  And there was more.

  I wanted to finish book two. I really did. I wanted to keep Virginia safe. But her pressure had the opposite effect on me. Every gentle nudge, every innocent question about my progress, pushed me closer and closer to the bleak land of Writer's Block. Brain had started going on long silent sojourns. And I started to fret.

  The image of the bloody scrawling cut on Virginia’s forearm burned bright in my mind. If I couldn't resurrect Rhenn, if I couldn't weave together a story for book two and three, I felt almost certain that something terrible would happen. But what?

  We drove on further, past bushes and long needle pine trees. The road became more desolate as we drove on. Rain drops fell from the leaden sky.

  We passed a network of foot paths that weaved through sand dunes. There were a few areas to pull over on the side of the road and trek to the wa
ter's edge, but Ben kept on driving. I watched the choppy sea, thinking about Virginia.

  Ben slowed and pulled into an empty parking lot at the very end of the road. Then he turned off the car and turned to me. "Well, here we are. Let the necking commence." He chuckled and ran the back of his finger along my cheek. Then dropped his hand to my shoulder. "You okay? You're really quiet. Even for you."

  I smiled and looked away, unsure what to tell him.

  "C'mon. Let's go get some fresh air," he said.

  The fresh air he had in mind was cutting and raw. We walked down a sandy trail, flanked by swelling sand berms covered with coastal grass and false heather that still sported a few valiant blooms.

  As Ben walked towards the long stretch of storm-blown coastline, the wind whipped the sides of his flannel shirt around his tall, thin frame. Just beyond his solitary figure, Long Island could be seen in the distance, obscured by the steely gray sky.

  We walked down the beach, searching for a little shelter. Then we found a small trough between two sand berms and sat down.

  "So do you want to tell me what's wrong?" Ben asked.

  I watched the wind tousle his dark blonde hair, wondering how much I should tell him about Amy Mathews and her persistent pesterer. I hated to open up any more avenues of blackmail, should things go south between Ben and I, but I needed to talk to someone, and he was the only person I knew. Besides, I trusted him.

  I hugged my knees to my chest and watched a boat sail out to sea. "You asked a long time ago what kind of books I write."

  "Mmhm."

  "Well, I write about vampires, like I said, but they’re . . . very popular."

  "Yeah?"

  I turned to him. "I mean, really popular."

  He looked at me.

  "You know that Amy Mathews book?"

  "Yes."

  "That's me. I mean, I used a pen name, but I wrote that book."

  He continued to look at me, his spidery nebula prisms bright and yellow, standing against the deep blue field of his eyes. He blinked. "That's you?"

  "Well, us technically. I mean, Amy Mathews doesn't actually exist. Virginia and I make up Amy Mathews. She's the face, and I'm the brain." This was starting to sound like some freak show, and it was coming out all wrong. But I had never explained this to anyone before. "Amy is kind of a Franken-author," I concluded.

  For once, he didn't have anything to say.

  I smiled awkwardly. "Surprise?"

  "Holy shit," he muttered, looking away.

  "Yeah . . ." Then the conversation well and truly derailed. Would he dump me? I wondered. Would he be intimidated by my success? A mere FedEx delivery man dating a literary phenomenon?

  I watched him, while he stared out at the ocean, hoping that things wouldn't change between us. Then he turned to me. "Dinner is on you next time!"

  And we both laughed.

  Suddenly, I wanted to tell him about my modern remake of Rebecca, my hopes to retire Amy and write using my real name, without the bolstering guidance of Virginia, but my inner secrets stuck in my throat, lodged there with fear of what he might think of me. That was a conversation for another time, I concluded. Maybe another lifetime.

  "Sure," I said. "Where do you want to go?"

  "Benihana?" he asked with a hopeful smile.

  "Sounds like fun. I've never been there before."

  "Genie," he teased. "You really should get out more."

  "I get out enough," I lied. I didn't get out at all.

  Sensing the change in my voice, he moved close to me and wrapped his arm around my stiffened shoulders, pulling me into his warm embrace. "Hey," he said softly. "I was just kidding."

  I could feel my cheeks growing warm despite the cold wind. Me and my awful sense of humor. "Sorry," I murmured.

  "I meant I was kidding about Benihana. That place is really expensive."

  "Is it?"

  He looked at me and laughed in earnest. "Yes, I think you really should get out more!"

  "Well I don't know!" I cried, and laughed despite myself. "How much is it anyway?"

  "I don't know."

  "Look who should get out more," I said, throwing a handful of sand over his shoes.

  He started dusting off the pile. "At least fifty dollars per person, I guess. I've only been there once. My parents took me when I graduated college."

  "Your parents sound really nice," I said, thinking about what it would have been like to have two active adult participants in my life. Both Virginia and I were proud of each other for coming out so well. We ought to be proud of ourselves, there wasn't any else available to provide that service.

  "Yeah, my parents are really nice. They’re still married, can you believe it?"

  "Wow."

  "What about your parents? Are they still together?"

  "Not exactly," I said, regretting my benign complement about his parents. I should have known it was the perfect lead in to ask about mine, which so far I'd studiously avoided.

  "Divorced, huh?" Then he added, as if to make me feel better, "That’s pretty common."

  And now I found myself in the trough of another rogue wave, staring up the steep watery wall of confessions. I'd been able to make it up and over the last topic of Amy Mathews, but here I could tell that this rushing wall would capsize me.

  I could feel it: the rush of emotions as I thought about Mom, my hugely beloved Mumsy.

  "My mom—she passed away," I said, holding my breath as the wave dragged me under. "And my dad kind of . . . checked out when they divorced."

  There. I'd revealed my pedigree. I was a mongrel child, unwanted by one half, and loved by the other half in spirit only.

  "I'm so sorry," he said with real sympathy. "Can I ask what happened?"

  I pulled in a quivering breath and shrugged. "Cancer. Of the lungs." Tears stung my eyes. My chin puckered. "She didn't even smoke." I was drowning.

  A shaft of sunlight broke through the storm clouds, washing our small section of the beach in warm, brilliant light that spangled on my ring, making the little ruby sparkle a little.

  "She was such a beautiful person," I said, touching my ring. "She didn't deserve it . . ." I told him about the divorce, shying away from our homeless stint, instead mentioning the love of books that she'd instilled in me.

  I told him about how it had started. She’d developed a cough that she dismissed as walking pneumonia. But as the months wore on and winter slipped into spring, her cough got worse. One morning, she’d coughed up a little blood. "Just sore lungs," she’d said to me with a weak smile. Then came the headaches. The shortness of breath. The stints in bed. The lack of energy. And the final confirmation of what I had feared all along.

  Off she went to a specialist after specialist, who all suggested chemotherapy. So I ferried Mom to the "chemo station" twice a week for months on end. I had assembled the bills and organized them in a three-ring binder, working up the courage to call the bill collectors and work out payment terms. Toward the end, when Mom was too weak to get out of bed, I had sat up with her late at night, reading books to her just as she had read to us.

  He listened, watching me, his eyes filled with sympathy and understanding, which emboldened me to tell him more. So I shared things about myself that I never had never shared with anyone else before.

  I went on with stories of Mom, about how much she sacrificed just to buy me a Brownies costume, stopping just short of the Monica Schaffer ordeal, trying not to cry, but doing it anyway. I told him that she was the reason why I started to write in the first place. She helped me write the book, correcting my bad grammar, helping me with plot holes, and explaining the intricacies of the English language that I’d somehow missed in school. All the while, he played with the fringe of my torn jeans, listening.

  The sun slipped behind a cloud bank. Cutting wind shifted and blew in from the side. And then, I ran out of things to say. Embarrassed, I kept my gaze down, staring at the shifting grains of sand that blew across my shoes.

&nb
sp; "I'm so sorry," he said softly. Then he drew me close.

  "It's okay," I said, rubbing my nose.

  We sat together in silence for a while.

  "I’m here for you," Ben said. "You know that right?"

  "Thank you," I murmured, and put my head on his shoulder. We looked out at the sea and watched mushy waves crash on the beach for a while. Then he picked up a twig and started drawing lines in the sand. "So where do you come up with all your ideas?"

  "Sometimes I get stuck. I won't lie. But I have a little assistant called Brain. He sort of unsticks things for me."

  Ben looked at me, his wind-mussed curls falling over his eyes. And suddenly, I realized this is someone who might be able to offer me some advice. Someone who might be able to understand, possibly even, help me. And before I knew it, I opened my mouth.

  "To be honest, I've really been wanting to give up Amy Mathews. I don't want to write about the undead anymore. I want to write under my own name. I want to write about life."

  "Then you should do it," he replied, simple as that.

  "Well, it's not really that simple."

  He looked over at me. "Why not?"

  I sighed. "Because there's a lot of money involved. There's a lot of people relying on Amy. Virginia especially."

  "What does Virginia have to do with anything?" he asked. "I mean, besides lending her personality to the whole outfit."

  "Well, it's her job. She does the interviews, the tours, handles the agent, the contracts, negotiations, marketing, social media . . . I just write the books. If I retire Amy, Virginia will be out of a job. She's Amy Mathews now, and will forever be."

  I traced out lines in the sand with a twig. "What should I do?" I asked, looking at him.

  He met my gaze and shrugged. "I think you should follow your heart."

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  We walked back to his Mustang in silence, holding hands. Ben got in, reached over, and pulled up the door lock, quaintly located on top of the door panel. I jumped in, rubbing my hands together. "Let's go put those Eagle Scout skills to use," I said.

  "Only if you beg," he said, smiling, as he dug the keys out of his front pocket. "A promise is a promise." He put the key into the ignition and twisted.