Inflame Me

by Ryan Michele

  He lands one more blow to my mother then begins to stalk my way. I look around the kitchen for something, anything to use to make him go away. I have no doubt that, if he gets me down to the floor, it’s going to be over for me, for my mother. There’s no way I can fight off his bulk, but I refuse to give up.

  Continuing to scan the room, I move backward as he continues to come toward me.

  “Don’t run. This will be fun. I promise you’ll enjoy it.” His smarmy ass actually licks his lips, and bile comes up my throat, burning the back of it. No way in hell.

  I eye the knives in their tidy, little, wooden block holder on the counter and make my way toward them, keeping one eye on James.

  “Stay away,” I tell him, but it falls on deaf ears. If anything, the words make him happier, like I’m a challenge; and that’s the last thing I want him to think.

  I grab the biggest knife out of the holder, placing it in my left hand and a smaller knife in my right.

  “Aw, you think you’re gonna hurt me with those?” He flat out laughs, but it’s so sinister it sends chills up my spine. “I can disarm you with those in a second,” he gloats. I know he’s right. He’s trained for this. I, however, am not. Hell, I’ve never held a knife to another human being ever. I’m not sure what in the world I’m doing.

  The adrenaline pumps through my veins as I try to steady my shaky hands. If I want me and mother to live through this, I’m going to have to do something, but what?

  My hands tremble as I clutch the knives, knowing they are my only lifeline. “Go away, James. Just leave. Get out of here.” I’m wasting my breath, though part of me hopes he will just leave and go away to some other place, disappear like some miracle from above. Tough luck there.

  “Fuck no. I’m just getting started.” His steps get closer, his fingers turning into fists.

  Without thinking, I throw the smaller knife at him, the blade entering the left side of his chest by his shoulder. He stops, momentarily frozen, as if my throwing the knife at him wasn’t even on his radar.

  “You just threw a knife at me, you little cunt,” he growls, not removing the knife. His furious eyes pierce me, almost knocking me back a step. Oh, God … There’s nothing like pissing off a raging bull.

  I move the other knife to my right hand, needing more control of it. The adrenaline inside, along with my mother’s safety, fuels me.

  With his bulky arms at his side, he comes closer, the menace in his face reminding me of The Hulk. I try not to let the fear show, but I’m pretty sure I’m doing a shitty-ass job of it.

  “Stay away,” I say again with a tremble in my voice. Dammit, go away!

  “You fucking little bitch. You’re just like your mother. After I’m done fucking the shit out of you, I’m going to kill you right in front of her then beat the fuck out of her some more.”

  Burning. I feel like I’m burning. The fear is still there, but fury masks it, pulling me into a red-filled haze. He will not hurt my mother again.

  I point the knife in front of me, directed toward him as I run to the other side of the room. I just have to get my mom up and out of here. It’s possible, right? No. No, it’s not possible. Shit!

  He charges at me, this time at full speed. The knife in his shoulder is not slowing him down a bit, and I’m not quick enough. He grabs my arm holding the knife and presses some part of my arm that is so damn painful I have no choice except to drop the knife and hear it clatter to the tile floor.

  No. No. No.

  He pulls my side up against his body, and I smell the alcohol on his breath, my stomach churning from its potency. He keeps ahold of my arm while punching me twice in the stomach, knocking the wind out of me. If he weren’t holding my arm, I would have collapsed to the floor in a heap.

  “You’re as stupid as she is. Let me show you how I make sure your mother knows her place in this house.”

  I begin to fight and struggle out of his grasp, using my arms to hit, nails to scratch, and legs to kick. Even drunk, he’s got great reflexes and deflects all of them, putting in a couple more slaps and a kick of his own to my shin that bursts with pain.

  “Stop!” my mom’s hoarse voice says from the floor as she tries to pick herself up from it, but she doesn’t make it far and collapses again.

  “Fuck you, Mearna. Your daughter needs to be taught that she shouldn’t put her nose in other people’s business, let alone put a fucking knife in me.” His next punch is a doozy, knocking me hard to the tile floor as he fully lets go of me. This one was to the chest, right between my breasts, and I feel like I can’t breathe. At all.

  I gasp, trying to suck in air as he leaves me on the floor, heading toward my mother.

  “Guess I need to shut you up first before I fuck your daughter,” He barks at her.

  With all the strength I can muster, I scan the floor, looking for the knife. It couldn’t have gone far. With James’s back to me, I hold in all the grunts of pain, being as quiet as I can. I find it on the other side of the kitchen island. Gripping it with all my might, I rise to my shaky feet, still remaining quiet, letting the anger give me strength.

  “Bitch!” he yells, sending a shattering blow to my mother.

  On instinct alone and as quickly as my messed up body will take me, I make my way over to his back. My brain shuts down, and all I hear is my mother’s cries. Holding the knife with both hands, I raise it high and begin to plunge it into his back. He screams in pain, and I get two more jabs in and out of his flesh before he turns around.

  I step back as he lunges toward me. Then I stick the knife out, and it pierces his chest.

  “You bitch.” This time, he gurgles the words.

  I pull up on the knife that is inside his body with a strength I didn’t know I had in me as he falls to his knees. I keep pulling as blood coats my hands. I must have hit his heart or some major blood supply because the white tile around us instantly becomes red.

  James makes one last attempt to grab my feet, but I pull the knife out of his body and jump to the side, my body screaming at me the entire time.

  He falls to the floor in a loud thud while my heart pounds, and my blood stained hands shake. What did I just do?

  “Tanner!” my mom says from the floor, lying there in the fetal position, snapping me out of my new discovery.

  I watch James to see if his chest rises and falls, and when it doesn’t, I slowly make my way over to him.

  “I’ve gotta make sure this is done,” I tell her in a blank voice that I’ve never used before. It’s as if I’m a different person, allowing her to take over my body for the moment. It’s like the me I’ve known my whole life decided to leave my body.

  “Let’s just go. Let’s get out of here,” she says in haste. “I don’t want him hurting you, Tanner,” she pleads, bringing me slightly back from the fog, but not much.

  “Mom, if he’s still alive, he’s going to come after us. If he’s dead …” I trail off, knowing then the cops would be after us, and it would be one giant cluster-fuck that I don’t know how to fix. First things first—keep us safe.

  I walk over to James, the knife still clenched in my hand, and make my way to his face. His cold, brown eyes stare back at me, unmoving. I don’t want to touch him, but I have no choice. I put my hand under his nose to check his breathing, and nothing happens. I place two fingers on his wrist and check for a pulse, or I try to since I’ve never had to do this before and have only seen doctors and nurses do it. I move my fingers around a couple of times, but I don’t feel anything.

  He’s dead. And I killed him.

  AS I WIPE THE blood off of my mother, the tub turns pink. I wanted to do this in the shower, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold her up on my own for that long. My entire body aches from James’s blows, and I feel like I’m a robot doing what needs to be done then moving to the next step, whatever in the hell that is.

  I wash her hair then help her out, wrapping a towel tightly around her frail body. Every part of her has some t
ype of welt or bruise that will only get worse in the next couple of days.

  I brought her back to my small apartment, wanting to get cleaned up. She protested, saying we needed to go to a hotel and do it there, but I didn’t listen. I was in too much of a fog after taking James’s life. I still am.

  Mom goes into my bedroom where I help her put clothes on, careful not to hurt her even more. I need to take her to the emergency room, but I just killed a cop, a well-respected one at that. If I take her, I’ll be arrested for his murder, and I can’t risk that.

  As my mother lies down, I try to figure out what in the hell I’m going to do. The rational part of me says that what I did was self-defense, but no one will believe me.

  My flight instinct is pumping hard, wanting to escape from the mess that my life just turned into. I get into the shower and wash all of James’s blood off, the swirling of pink going down the drain into nothingness. My body aches, but I can’t focus on that. I have a few bruises, but nothing I can’t cover with clothes. However, my face will take a lot of makeup to cover the bruises beginning to form, and I’m not sure how I’ll fix the split lip.

  It won’t take long for the police to find James once he doesn’t show up for work, and when they do, it will be hell.

  I shake my head, letting the water flow down me as if to absolve me of my sins. I took another human’s life. Sure, he was a worthless piece of shit, and I’m not sorry he’s dead; I just can’t believe I had it in me to do it. If you would have asked me if I did, I would have said hell no, but I proved tonight that, when push comes to shove, I can.

  Before leaving my mother’s house, she ordered me to get the knives and even the wood block where she stored them to bring them with us. Why? I didn’t ask. I just did as she said. I turned all the lights off in the house then put my mother and her things in my car. I didn’t turn on the headlights until I was pretty far down the road and didn’t see anyone around.

  My hands trembled the entire way home, and my mother was eerily quiet. Even in the tub, she was. I’m sure she’s thinking right along with me. What do we do now?

  I turn off the shower and pull myself together, throwing some sweats on and an old hoodie. I put the towel on top of my head, wrapping it around my hair before I enter the bedroom where Mom is lying down with a miserable expression on her face. Can she be sad that I killed him? No, surely not. The look on her face is concerning, though.

  “Mom?” I question, nearing the bed and sitting down next to her. “Do you want me to take you to the ER?”

  Her head rises, and she gives me a slight smile. “No, baby girl. We can’t do that. You and I both know this was self-defense, but the guys at the station are not going to think that way.” Her confirming my thoughts makes a rock form in the pit of my stomach, weighing me down. “He’s head of the good-ol’-boys club, and they aren’t going to let this slide even with this kind of defense.”

  I feel sick. I can’t go to jail … to prison.

  “What are we going to do?” I whisper, not having a clue where to even start. I don’t have any friends who could get us out of this or help us. I only have a couple from work, but they wouldn’t know the first thing about what to do next.

  I lean back on the bed and stare at the popcorn ceiling, the softness doing nothing for the nerves racking my body.

  “We are going to see your father.”

  My head snaps to hers, and I instantly feel woozy. Don’t move so fast, Tanner. I blink my eyes, trying to clear the dizziness. My mother never talks about my father, never told me who he is, never says a word about him, ever. In my twenty-three years of existence, I’ve asked about him maybe four times, and each time, I was met with, “You don’t need to worry about that.” Our relationship is close, almost like sisters instead of mother and daughter, so I knew she was doing it for a reason, but I never questioned her. For her to say we are going to see him is more than a shocker. I’m surprised my heart didn’t stop for a few seconds. Then again, maybe it did, and I didn’t register it.

  “What?” I ask, my words coming out a bit snippier than intended.

  She sighs. “I’m afraid he may be the only one who can help us out here, but we need to go quickly before James’s shift comes up in two days, and they notice him missing.”

  Confusion sets in. How can my father fix this mess?

  “How would he know what to do and who is he, Mom?”

  “I’ll explain on the way. Pack some bags with whatever you will need for a while and anything that you absolutely won’t want left behind.” She can’t be serious. We are going to go on the run?

  “You’re scaring the shit out of me. Are you saying that we won’t be coming back?”

  “Baby, I don’t know what is going to happen. Right now, even with my battered head, I’m trying to come up with ways to protect both of us. Your father is the only option I see right now. We need to get on the road. Now.” Her eyes widen in the mom way that tells me she’s dead serious.

  “Okay, but you will explain all of this, Mom,” I concede without backing down. She will tell me.

  “I will. You also need to put the clothes we were both wearing and the knives in plastic bags and bring them with us.” How the hell would she know to do that?

  “Mom, you are really creeping me out here,” I tell her, getting up and throwing clothes in a bag. Am I on some episode of CSI or something?

  “Tanner, I’m not even getting started.”

  WITH THE GPS set to Sumner, Georgia, we’ve been driving for the past five hours, and I’m getting seriously tired. My eyes keep drooping, and I have to pinch myself to stay awake. My mother fell asleep almost as soon as she got in the car. I gave her some of my left-over Vicodin from when I got my wisdom teeth pulled before we left, and it wiped her out. Since I wanted her to rest, I haven’t bothered her, but with the little machine telling me that we will be there in about an hour, I need answers. I need to know what I’m getting myself into.

  “Mom.” I gently tug on her hair, not really knowing where I can touch her that won’t cause her too much pain. She stirs in the seat, her groggy eyes opening slowly.

  “What?” her voice comes out hoarse and crackly.

  “We’ll be in Sumner in about an hour, and I need to know what’s going on before we get there.” I keep my eyes on the road ahead of me. The sun rose a while ago, and my sunglasses shield the brightness. I desperately need coffee and a bathroom almost as badly.

  “I never wanted you to know him,” she says on an exhale. “He’s not a very standup man.”

  “And James was?” I say in a clipped tone, a bit too harshly, but come on here.

  “Point taken, but your father is different.”

  When she pauses for too long, I look at her. “Keep going. We’ve only got an hour.”

  “Your father is Cameron Wagner. He’s part of a motorcycle club called Ravage. Let me start from the beginning.” I nod. “I met him when I was very young. He was much older than me, and I fell hard for him. He was just joining the club at the time, and I didn’t know much about it. I thought it was like a riding club because he was always riding his Harley everywhere. I loved being on the back of that thing.” She pauses for a second, seeming to be caught in her memories.

  “For about a year, we lived together while he was joining, and I stood by him every step of the way. Long story short, I found out that he was into some really bad things. I called him on it; he told me it was none of my business; and we split up. He joined the club; I took off. Once I got settled, I found out I was pregnant. I never told him.”

  There is so much more I want to know, so much more to this story than she’s saying.

  “You say you lived together for a year, and the only reason you split was because of this club?” I ask, piecing the puzzle together.

  “That man had my heart and soul,” she whispers so softly I don’t think she wants me to hear her, but I do.

  My heart clenches for her. “You loved him.”

 
Her head turns to me, and a soft smile comes to her lips. “Yes. I loved him very much. It killed me to leave him. If it weren’t for you, I probably wouldn’t be around anymore.”

  My breath seizes in my lungs. Did she really just say what I think she said?

  “Mom, you’re saying you were going to kill yourself?” The words get lodged in my throat and come out very croaky, but I somehow manage to get them out just as fear almost pulls me under.

  She stares out at the open road, lost in thought briefly. “At the time, I was young and naïve about the world. I saw good and bad, nothing in between. When I learned one night that what he was doing was on the bad side of the coin, I thought I had to leave. I didn’t want to, but in my gut, I had to.”

  “What did you see?” I’m a bit sacred of the answer, yet I’m too curious not to ask.

  “That doesn’t matter.” She shakes her head, wiping the thought away. “I did. He never followed me, so I knew he never felt the same way about me as I did him.” My heart breaks for my mother. “Once I found out I was pregnant, I picked myself up off the floor and got myself together.”

  “And you never contacted him about me?” I can’t help feeling a little hurt that I know nothing of the man who is my father. I have never had to want for anything, but it still would have been nice to at least know him.

  “No. He lives a different lifestyle than you or me. You’ll see. It’s not like what you know now.”

  “You act like he’s in some kind of cult or something, Mom.” I mean, seriously.

  “Tanner, in your father’s world, women have their place, and men have theirs. Some women can hack it, but I didn’t stick around long enough to try …” Her words dangle off.

  “But you wish you had,” I finish her sentence, watching as a tear rolls down her cheek.

  “I wonder what my life would have been like had I stayed. Would I be happy now instead of”—she looks down at her broken, battered body—“this?”

  “Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry.” Even if I am upset with her about not telling me about my father, I can’t help having my heart break right alongside her.