by Payge Galvin
Mick snorted. “No, we tried that for a while, but the patients refused to participate.”
I snickered, thinking of Cynda and trying to picture her up to her knees in manure. “Don’t blame them.”
Mick pressed the bridle into my hand. “This is Pickles. He’s very gentle. And by gentle, I mean old.”
I giggled, wrapping the worn leather loop around my hand. Remember that cartoon version of Sleepy Hollow, when Ichabod Crane gets the grey horse with the droopy back and weird knobbly knees? Well, at least Pickles wasn’t grey.
“He’s a good beginner’s horse,” Mick told me as I stepped into the stirrup. It took a few tries, but I finally managed to sling my leg over Pickles’s back. The difference in height was disorienting for just a second, and I gripped the bridle tight.
Pickles whickered softly, as if he was trying to tell me, “Don’t worry. I got this.”
Mick went over how to hold the bridle (in a gentle, non-death grip) and my stance in the saddle (upright). Through it all, Pickles stood absolutely still, like a big horse statue.
“Now, nudge him with your heel,” Mick commanded.
I took a deep breath and flared my legs out to do that. And I shook my head. “I don’t want to hurt him.”
“You won’t,” Mick assured me with a little smirk on his face, like he fully expected this reaction. “It’s going to take a lot more than your little dainty foot to hurt Pickles here. So just nudge his side so he knows it’s time to move.”
“Ehhh,” I winced as I gave Pickles’s sides the lightest tap. He lurched forward and I squealed pitifully, grabbing hold of the little knob on the front of the saddle. “So this horn thing, is that to keep me from falling off?”
“No, your good sense is what’s supposed to keep you from falling off.”
“That’s not funny!” I called as Pickles ambled out of the stable.
I didn’t even have to lead Pickles into the training pen. I supposed that was because I was the one being trained, not the horse. Leading him around was a little like driving, only with fewer buttons to worry about. Pickles clopped around in a circle, never speeding out of a gentle loping walk, while Mick called out random corrections from the fence.
“Sit up straight, shoulders squared, no arch in your back!” he called. “Keep your hips balanced over your feet and your weight even. And keep your head up. How are you supposed to see what’s coming if you’re looking down?”
“Is that supposed to be some sort of metaphor for life?” I called back.
“No, it’s supposed to keep you from smashing your face on a tree branch!”
“Fair enough.”
Even as my thighs screamed, I kept Pickles trotting around that circle. The afternoon sun beat down on my shoulders, and I could feel the sweat trickling down my back, but I felt good. It was hard to stew over personal trauma when you were eight feet off the ground and leading around an animal that could get spooked by a bee at any time and take off for Mexico.
Mick finally took pity on me after an hour in the pen and let me climb down. He was there to catch me when my sneakers hit the ground and my jellied legs gave way. Pickles didn’t move a muscle. Though this was clearly a common response for new riders, it didn’t make it any less embarrassing to be non-functional from the waist down.
I was going to be walking funny for a week, and not in the fun, well-deserved way.
“Thank you, sweetie,” I said, patting Pickles’s nose as I limped him back into the stables. “I’ll bring you lots of treats next time. You made that very easy on me.”
Before I left for the day, I removed Pickles’s tack and helped Mick brush his coat. By the time Dan returned with the golf cart, I could hardly remember why I’d been so upset that morning.
‡
By nightfall, I remembered.
I was wobbling against the cold metal embalming table in the basement of my parents’ funeral home. I had the operator’s manual for the cremator, frantically flipping through the pages to try to find instructions for the gas valves. Blake had dropped the dead guy across the slab, but I was doing my best not to look at the body. He didn’t look so mean in death. His face was relaxed and untroubled. He just looked like a young guy with bad taste in jackets.
“Come on, come on, we can’t be here too long,” Allie whispered frantically. She was standing by the door “looking out” for anyone who might be coming, even though we were the only people in the building.
“Oh, now the situation is urgent, Allie? Really? Now you’re nervous?” I hissed quietly. “Because you were all cool and collected back at the coffee shop when you volunteered me for body disposal duty!”
“We’re the only ones here,” Blake said. “Why are you whispering?”
“I don’t know. Let’s just get this done.”
I chewed my lip as Blake moved the body onto the sliding metal drawer that led to the unlit furnace’s retort, the brick-lined chamber where the body would burn. I wondered if this would work differently without a coffin surrounding the body. Would that make it harder to clean up? I’d never been this close to the crematory before. I only saw the bodies after they’d been embalmed and placed in their caskets. And even then, my contact was limited. My father insisted that I couldn’t go into this section of the building, and for the first time I was grateful for his rigid ways.
I could smell the blood drying on the man’s skin, like damp pennies, and the cigarette smoke that radiated out from his jacket. He was never going to smoke again. He was never going to drive or watch TV or eat his favorite food. We’d taken that away from him. He’d probably woken up this morning and thought, “Well, just another Saturday night.” Not having any clue that it was his last. Would he have acted differently if he’d known? Would he have skipped the gym? Visited his mom? Would he have been nicer to Sugar and maybe not tried to choke her while dragging her over a coffee counter?
This was so wrong. I could be getting my family into so much trouble. There were all sorts of laws about disposal of bodies and documenting the cremations. If any one of these people broke their pact – hell, if my dad looked too closely at the security system log and asked too many questions, my family could lose their license to run the funeral home. I took a deep breath, on the verge of telling Blake to stop, not to close the oven door, because I couldn’t do this. And then I looked across the room at Allie, slumped against the doorframe, looking sad and tired and so scared. And I just couldn’t stop. I’d already helped move a body from a crime scene and prepped him for burning. There was no going back from that, not without questions that would send Allie to jail for probation violations and a bunch of new more disturbing charges.
Hot helpless tears pricked at my eyes. I felt a warm, solid hand slide over my shoulder and gently squeeze. I looked up and found Blake staring down at me, his eyes full of concern.
“Hey” Blake told me. “It’s going to be OK. We’re going to get through this. Just tell me what to do. We’ll take care of this. We’re all in this together. Right?”
Sniffing, I nodded. “OK. I’m sorry. OK. We just turn that handle all the way to the right. Then hit the big red button.”
Blake nodded and very carefully followed my instructions. We watched the temperature gauge climb to the all-important green “ready” mark that would allow us to open the door and slide the body inside headfirst. I let out a shaky breath as the green button lit up and I grabbed the handle for the furnace door. We had to slide the guy in as quickly as possible to prevent the heat loss that would drag this process out long enough to get us caught.
“Ready?” Blake asked, putting his hands on the end of the sliding drawer to shoulder it inside the furnace.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding even as my hands trembled.
“I can’t watch,” Allie cried. “I can’t. I’m sorry, Violet; I just can’t. I’m going to be out in the hall.”
I gritted my teeth and fought the urge to be angry with Allie. She couldn’t help it. She had a sensitive stomach. She couldn�
��t deal with this sort of thing.
“Wait! Wait!” Allie cried, teetering into the room on her leopard print heels. I smiled, breathing a sigh of relief. She’d come back. She wasn’t going to make me deal with this without her.
“Don’t forget the bags!” she exclaimed and dropped the guy’s empty canvas duffels on the dead guy’s chest like the world’s most messed up casket spray. She grinned, clearly very proud of herself for remembering this little detail. “OK, then!”
And then she tottered back out of the room, clicking and clacking.
I would have laughed if the situation wasn’t so completely fucked up. Blake rolled his eyes as I opened the door. He shoved the body inside with all of his considerable might. I closed the door and latched it, checking my watch. Two hours. We had to wait for two hours for the body to be reduced to ash. What the hell did you talk about while you were waiting for a body to incinerate?
Through the glass front of the crematory, I watched bright blue flames immediately sprang up around the body. I wanted to clamp my eyes shut, to protect my brain from the horrors of what was happening just a few feet away from my face. But I forced myself to watch. I was in this mess. I had to make sure it was done right. If the body wasn’t cremated all the way, if “chunks” were left behind or a piece of medical equipment like an artificial hip fell out into the furnace, my father would notice and report the problem to the police.
I watched as the soles of his boots melted, dripping into a puddle on the sliding tray like Salvador Dali’s crayons. Before my eyes, they shifted into leopard print high-heels, Allie’s leopard print high heels, being devoured by flames. I was burning my best friend.
“No!” I yelled, pounding my fists against the glass.
“Violet!” Allie screamed from inside the furnace, her feet kicking frantically against the glass. “HELP ME!!”
“Allie! NO!” I shouted, bolting up from the bed, beating at the mattress with my fists. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it at the back of my throat. I clutched at my chest, gasping, trying to force air into my lungs. Panting, I collapsed back against my pillow.
It was 2 a.m., and I was soaked in sweat, like I’d tried to run a marathon through Phoenix in July. My hair was practically dripping. And thanks to the center’s super-efficient air-conditioning, I was now freezing. Sitting up, I winced as my skin stuck to my damp pillow.
I couldn’t seem to get warm. It was so real, seeing Allie’s feet flopping helplessly against the glass as the flames swallowed her. I felt like calling my parents to make sure Allie was OK. But considering that they hadn’t so much as sent a postcard since I’d arrived, I doubted they wanted to hear from me until I was “fixed.”
I raked my fingers through my wet hair. I couldn’t sleep like this. I was genuinely gross.
I slid out of bed, careful not to wake Cynda, who was sleeping the sleep of the recently methadoned. I gathered my shower stuff and a change of clothes as quietly as I could in the dark and crept out of the room.
The hallway lights were dim, but not completely dark. The nurse who usually sat at the desk for our floor was nowhere to be seen. I hoped she was taking a snack break or something, because I couldn’t imagine a more boring job than babysitting a bunch of addicts while they slept.
I plodded into the Turkish bath-themed ladies room, the slap of my flip-flops echoing against the turquoise and bronze tile. The showers were open to the circular bathing chamber, divided into four arch-shaped sections. Each arch had its own copper rainfall shower head and several wall-mounted sprayers. But it also afforded little to no privacy, as the wall facing the inside of the room was clear glass from the waist up. To keep everybody honest, I supposed, about track marks or cutting or any number of messed up behaviors that could be spotted and reported without the indignity of a cavity search.
The first time I saw it, I wanted to joke about it being a carwash for people, but I figured that wasn’t appropriate.
There was enough light from the dimmed nightlights to shower by, not to mention the light of the full moon streaming from the skylights, so I didn’t bother with the switch. No reason to alert the nurse to my non-sanctioned showering. I cranked the rainfall shower to “lobster red” and blessed the fancy water heater that allowed for instantly hot water. I shivered, stripping out of my sweat soaked clothes and into the steamy shower stall. The heat of the water against my skin was absolute bliss.
The rehab supplied better soaps and lotions in the complicated wall-mounted dispensers than I’d brought with me. And considering what Allie was paying for my stint in this place, I didn’t feel guilty about using as much of it as possible. I poured an ample amount of shower gel onto my bath puff and worked it into a rich lather. I let the bubbles slide over my skin, a white tea citrus blend that was soothing. I raised my face to the shower head, letting water beat against my face and drown out the noise of my own thoughts.
I felt safe here in this warm little orange-scented steam cocoon. It felt real, the opposite of the scary memories and imagined friend-immolating. I wanted to stay here forever.
Chapter 8
Cameron didn’t mind hall duty. There was something sort of soothing about walking around the clean, airy building while it was quiet, knowing that the people that he was trying to help were resting. The administration didn’t have security concerns, really. But if someone was having a bad night, the staff needed to hear them. Cam knew what it was like, to not be able to sleep because your body ached so badly you would gladly pay any amount of money for a raging case of the flu. He would want someone to be there for him when the shakes hit.
He knew that some people thought his work seemed somewhat silly, that anybody could “recover” in a place with its own facialist. But the trappings at New Beginnings were just there to convince people that they were in control, that were choosing to stay at the recovery center, even if it was just for the food and luxuries.
The truth was an addict could recover just as easily at a rec room at the YMCA, but New Beginnings had worked for him. When he’d been on the verge of self-destructing, the staff had pulled him back from the brink. The spa, as indulgent as it seemed, had helped him feel like he was restoring his body from the damage the booze had done over the years. Riding through the hills had helped him gain some perspective when it felt like his brain would melt down from all of the regrets and guilt. And Cinnamon Roll Saturday certainly hadn’t hurt his morale.
Cam believed in the program. He believed in what the combination of therapy and creature comforts could do for addicts.
He stopped outside the ladies’ room and cocked his ear toward the door, hearing the sound of a shower running. He frowned. It was way past curfew, and there was a reason the center insisted on the patients showering during certain hours. Patients going through DT sweats always thought a shower would make them feel better, and they were always wrong. If anything, it lowered their body temperature and made them more likely to pass out while naked on hard surfaces. And that was a recipe for disaster.
“Hello?” he called through the door. “It’s past curfew. Are you OK? You need to get back to your room.”
No answer.
“Do you need help?” he called.
No answer.
Cam grabbed his phone out of his pocket, just in case he needed to call in for some sort of medical emergency, and stepped into the bathroom.
Holy hell, Violet was naked.
It didn’t matter that the lights were off. He could see every drop of water sluicing down her skin under the light streaming through the skylight. Her arms were raised over her head to shampoo, creating a long, bluish-white silhouette. She turned toward him, bringing full breasts into view. They were fucking perfect, high and round and tipped with tight pink nipples. She looked like some Greek nymph statue come to life, glowing under the light of the desert moon that poured in the windows.
Her dark eyes went wide and her wide, rosy mouth dropped into an astonished “O” shape.
&nb
sp; Cam wanted to touch her so badly that his hands ached with it. Every single cell in his body urged him forward to stand under that water with her to push her against the tile and explore every part of her with his mouth. He wanted to run his tongue from the hollow of her throat, between her breasts, all the way to her belly button. He wanted to feel her hands sneaking their way under his clothes.
He stepped towards her, and Violet took a step back. And that was enough to snap him out of the shocked haze that had rolled over his judgment like a fog bank.
“I-I heard the water running. I knocked. I thought maybe someone was sick--” he stuttered. “It’s past curfew. You need to get back to your room.”
Violet nodded mutely, still too dazed to move toward the towels.
It was then that Cam noticed that her dark brown eyes looked red rimmed. She’d been crying.
Cam frowned. What was happening with this girl? Funny and self-deprecating one minute, sharp and angry the next, and now, he just wanted to give her a hug. Which, given her naked state, was really the wrong plan.
“Violet, are you all right?”
Her head moved imperceptibly left, then twitched right. She bit her lip, and shook her head more emphatically. “No,” she whispered. “I’m not.”
He asked, “What do you need?”
She cleared her throat and jutted her chin toward the ceramic warmer near the sinks. “A towel.”
“Oh,” Cam spun around, flustered. He opened the towel warmer as Violet shut off the water. “Right.”
He tossed the towel to her and backed away. And he realized he was still staring at her, so he turned to face the wall. “Um, I’m just going to… yeah, OK. Goodnight.”
Cam rushed out of the ladies room, nearly smacking into the glass partition that separated the showers from the toilets. He stumbled into the hallway, panting and pale, leaning back against the wall for support as he prayed for the raging hard-on to go away before someone came by and found him like this.
What the hell had just happened?