by JoAnn Chaney
It’ll never be over.
THIS ISN’T OVER
November 27, 2015
After seven years, nearly everyone has forgotten about Jacky Seever. Except Carrie Simms. She’s spent every day of the last seven years thinking of Seever, of what he did over the days he’d kept her tied and gagged in his garage. Those kinds of things aren’t easy to forget, and sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night, her head aching because she’s had her jaw clenched tight, trying to keep from screaming. A dentist gave her a hunk of plastic to stick in her mouth when she sleeps, like something hockey players wear to keep their teeth from shattering, but she doesn’t need a guard for her teeth, she needs one for her brain, to keep it quiet, to keep from dreaming about Seever. A dream-guard, that’s what she needs. Or a lobotomy. Carrie used to be the kind of girl who talked a lot, laughed loudly, but over the last seven years she’s become mostly silent, a woman who doesn’t want to be noticed. She’s only twenty-six, but her roots are mostly gray already, there are deep lines radiating from the corners of her eyes, and her hand sometimes aches, as if longing for the lost finger.
But she’s alive.
She sometimes thinks back to her life before Seever, or Before Seever, BS, as she likes to think of it, in big capital letters and bolded. She doesn’t remember much of that life, only that she was sometimes hungry and cold, and almost always stoned out of her gourd, and the people surrounding her were a constantly rotating cast of nobodies, people she’d see once and then never again. That was all Before Seever, and she thinks that if she’d never met Seever in that bar, if she hadn’t gone home with him that night, she’d already be dead, from drugs or something, and it would’ve been her own fault, no different from suicide. Seever had meant to kill her, but in those few days she’d spent in his garage, her wrists and ankles tied together, an old rag stuffed into her mouth and sometimes one looped over her eyes, she’d learned an important lesson: She wanted to live. It sounds stupid, it sounds cliché, but those terrible hours spent with Seever made her life that much more precious, and when she finally got out of that garage and ran, her bare feet slapping against the concrete, when she was terrified that she’d look over her shoulder and he’d be there, ready to take a handful of her hair and drag her back into the darkness, those were the most beautiful moments she’d ever experienced. She’s not thankful for Seever and what he did, not really, but maybe she is, just a little.
She’s cleaned up now, no more drugs, no booze. She doesn’t work—her grandfather died the winter before, so she lives off what he left her and student loans, so she goes to school, training to be a vet tech, because she’s always liked animals, they don’t laugh and snicker and stare at the hand that has a stump instead of a pinkie finger, as if it’s the most horrifying thing they’ve ever seen. Animals have never tried to hurt her, not the way Seever did, or the way her uncle used to when she was young. If an animal attacks you, they have a reason, they didn’t do it because they thought it was fun, they didn’t want to see you hurt for no reason at all. Animals don’t laugh when you scream, and they don’t stroke your hair afterward and promise that it’ll all be over soon although it’s a lie. She lives alone, renting a guest cottage behind a bigger house, it’s probably meant to be a garage or a shed but was renovated, the washer and dryer sit in a closet and she can barely get the doors open to throw her clothes in and there’s only a stand-up shower stall in the bathroom, no room for a tub, but she doesn’t care. One day, she thinks, she’ll graduate and get a job, live somewhere better. Maybe she’ll even find some nice guy and go out on dates—or she’ll get a pet. A dog—a dog would bark if someone tried to break in, a dog would be good protection. Or she could get a cat. Probably a cat. She’d wanted to get a cat after she’d moved in, and she asked the owner, an old Korean guy who traveled a lot and liked to play golf, but he’d said no, that he didn’t want a cat pissing on the carpets, her security deposit wouldn’t go that far.
“So you think Seever’s wife knew you were there?” Detective Hoskins had asked, and she’d wanted to have an answer for him, but she wasn’t certain.
“I don’t know,” she’d said, and she’d felt Hoskins looking at her closely, trying to figure out if she was lying or not, but she wasn’t, because that was the truth, she didn’t know. She sometimes wondered if she was really alive, or if she was taking part in some virtual reality and her real body was curled up in the fetal position somewhere, floating in a sac of fluid and hooked up to a giant computer, like in that movie, the one she can never remember the title of. Because that’s what her life had been like—one long, never-ending bad movie. She could only hope that she’d wake up at some point and find out that none of it had happened.
She doesn’t have a TV, can’t afford one, so she usually reads a book before bed. A library book, because she can’t afford to buy them, not now. She sometimes falls asleep with the book still open and her bedroom light on, a habit Mr. Cho has been lecturing her about, because he doesn’t like to see her waste electricity, even though she pays her own bill. So she tries to turn off the light before she goes to bed, although she’s not a big fan of the dark, never has been. When she was small the kids were always playing that game Bloody Mary, and once, at a slumber party, the other girls had shoved her into a dark bathroom and there were a few terrifying moments when she couldn’t find the light switch, when she was sure that the big mirror above the sink would light up witchy red and a woman would appear, holding a big knife, her cracked lips spread in a silent scream. It was always dark when her uncle snuck into her room, and Seever had liked to keep a blindfold on her, so she’d never be sure where he’d touch her next, and he’d chuckle when she jumped or shied away. But Mr. Cho doesn’t know all that about her uncle or Seever, and she isn’t going to fill him in; he’s concerned about the electric bill, so she tries to sleep in the dark, because that’s what adults do, she needs to get over it. Her uncle is dead and Seever is locked up in prison and she’s fine, she’s fine, she’s safe and she’s alone and no one can hurt her.
Falling asleep isn’t her issue. It’s staying asleep. There are the nightmares, lots of them, usually about Seever, and sometimes the dreams are replays of her actual memories, but she can’t tell the difference between what’s happened and what she’s imagining, not anymore. Like the memory she has of being blindfolded, of lying on a piece of carpet, although she could plainly feel the cold concrete beneath, and hearing a door whistle open, and she thought it was Seever, that he’d already come back for more even though he’d just left, but maybe it wasn’t him at all, because Seever loved to talk, to hear his own voice, and whoever was there with her that day never said a word. But there was a scent, the faintest whiff of perfume, it made her think of the purple flowers that had grown in bunches beside her mother’s front door, and when she started groaning for help, trying to form words around the cloth taped into her mouth, there was a puff of warm air and the creak of the door again, and the scent was gone, like it had never been there at all.
“You should think about talking to a professional about all of this,” Hoskins had told her after Seever was locked up and sentenced and everyone had dusted off their hands and was finished with the whole thing, and she was supposed to go back to normal like nothing had ever happened. “It might help.”
“I could tell you the same thing,” Carrie said, and Hoskins had actually looked surprised at that, as if he hadn’t realized how bad he looked, how much weight he’d lost.
“A doctor could prescribe you something to help you sleep,” Hoskins had said, and how she’d laughed at that, because she’d been clean for almost a year by that time, no drugs, no booze, no problem, and people never seemed to realize how easy it was to slip back into that shit, that one sleeping pill could lead to a beer before bed, just to relax, and then it would be three beers and a half-dozen pills, and it would be a quick slide from there; she’d been down that path before, but now she was clean and she wanted to stay that way. So she put
s up with the insomnia, deals with it, and now here she is, three in the morning, shivering under her blankets and wide-awake, the stump where her finger had once been throbbing, staring out into the dark bedroom. She was dreaming about Seever again, she thinks, the way he smelled, that cheap cologne he wore, and the rasp of his stubble against her bare shoulder as he’d lain behind her, his arms crossed over her middle, holding her close. He’d take her blindfold off then, so she could see his arm hooked around her stomach, look around and see the big red toolbox standing against one wall, and a big stack of empty vases in another. She’d never been violent, even when she had some drug or another raging through her system, but she thought that if she could get to that toolbox or that pile of glass, she’d have a weapon, she’d cut Seever’s throat without a moment of hesitation, then she’d slice off his lousy dick and cram it in his mouth, give him some payback for everything he’d done, not that that would be enough, not by a long shot. But she never got a chance to even try, not until she escaped, and the only thing she could think about then was getting the hell out of there, not revenge.
She can’t stop shaking. The dream was so real that she can still smell Seever, along with something else, and she realizes it’s the smell of her own sweat. It’s hard to believe that she’d sweat so much when her room is so cold, and she starts to sit up, thinking the furnace must be broken, that she’ll have to bother Mr. Cho while he’s out on his golfing trip in Phoenix, and an arm slips around her neck, pulling her back down into the pillow so fast she doesn’t have a chance to scream.
“Don’t worry, I’ll make this last,” a voice says, stubble brushing against her earlobe, his cologne so strong that she’s practically choking on it. It’s Seever, she thinks, and she tries to fight him but he’s got the upper hand; she was surprised and not ready, but really, hasn’t she been expecting this all along? Seever’s not in prison at all, he’s here with her, in her bed, he’s going to finish what he started, and this is not a dream.
MOVE ON
December 1, 2015
If this were a movie, you’d know time has passed because the words would be printed right there on the bottom of the screen for you to read: ix years later. And this scene would open up over the city of Denver—the camera would sweep over downtown, taking in the strangely curved glass walls of the Wells Fargo building and the golden dome of the Capitol, and the snakelike curve of I-25 as it unfolds north and south. And the mountains, always the mountains, huge hills of purple and blue on the western horizon, their caps dusted with snow. We would see all this and dive down with dizzying speed, toward Colfax Avenue, where most of the city’s porno shops and the massage parlors are located, where there’s always graffiti and loud music, and if you know enough, if you’re desperate enough, you may know where to park your car and honk so the hookers’ll come out and show their faces, among other things. On Colfax, not far from the rush of the interstate, is a coffee shop, plunked right down in the corner of a Walmart parking lot like an accident, way out where the donation bins and the RVs sit, where the piles of papers are stacked for recycling, and on windy days it’s a hot-ass mess, a hurricane of smeary newsprint and words. The coffee shop looks like a refrigerator box thrown on its side, like a playhouse for a kid, but it’s a real, legitimate business where a customer can pull their car right up along the side and watch through a window as their coffee is being made. The coffee is overpriced and tastes like shit, and there aren’t many choices. No pastries or granola or protein packs. Nothing like that. Just coffee.
But what the place lacks in options, it makes up for in other ways. The employees, mainly. They’re all women—girls, really—and they work their shifts in bikinis. Sometimes lingerie. It’s part of the concept, to satisfy the customer. Get some coffee, get an eyeful. Like a Happy Meal for adult men.
Det. Paul Hoskins is a regular customer.
“Same as usual, honey?” Trixie says, leaning out the window. She speaks with a Southern accent, but Hoskins knows it’s a put-on, nonsense she’s picked up from TV, because she occasionally slips right back into the flat, toneless drawl most people seem to have these days. She’s wearing a hot-pink bra and a black thong. Her tits look ready to tumble right out into the open, and he can see the beginning of a pimple in her cleavage, red and irritated.
“Yeah.” The girls all know he’s a cop; they say it makes them feel safe to have him come through every morning. His coffee is always on the house.
Trixie hands Hoskins a steaming foam cup—she must’ve seen him coming, got his drink ready. Large coffee, straight black. Loren always used to give him shit for drinking it like that, called him a real man and asked him how much hair he had on his chest and then dumped three packets of sugar and a dollop of cream into his.
“Thanks,” he says. “Slow morning?”
“It’ll pick up,” Trixie says.
“You got any big plans for the weekend?”
“Not really.” There’s a sketch on the side of the foam cup, a cartoon mug with long, sexy legs sprouting from the bottom and big, juicy lips around the midsection. That’s their logo—a cup of coffee that looks ready and more than willing to give a blowjob. Hoskins sometimes wondered if any horny teenage boys jacked off to that logo. “Hey, I brought in some doughnuts this morning. You want one?”
He doesn’t think Trixie’s her real name—what kind of parent would do that to their kid?—but he’s never asked. It gives the girls a sense of security to give out a fake name, although it’s a false sense, especially in this day and age, when anyone can find out anything. But he understands. Telling a little lie to make life easier.
“What do you got?”
“Couple powdered sugar. One—oh, two glazed. Something with filling. Looks like raspberry.”
He’d found out about this place from a woman he’d dated, Vicki, or something like that, he can’t even remember her name, who’d read about it online and then went into one of her rants—she said that’s what the world was coming to, people would get their rocks off anyplace they could, even if it was their morning coffee. But Vicki was also the kind of woman who wished she could live back in the 1950s and wear an apron, and thought most men were perverts, any woman with a good body and a low-cut shirt was a whore. She had opinions, she had a big mouth, but she was mostly insecure. Insecure and needy, and he’d put up with it, not for any good reason but mostly because she kept coming back. He couldn’t even remember how they’d started dating, or where he’d first met her. She’d finally broken up with him, went through his bathroom cabinets and dresser drawers and packed up everything she’d left behind over the six months of their relationship, shouting that she was through with his shit, that he was a bastard who’d never be able to hang on to a woman, that he’d never find anyone better than her. He’d heard it all before. She dumped him because he was damaged, because being with him was like dating a robot, but he figured it was really because of the coffee cup he’d forgotten to throw away, Vicki had seen it and known he’d been going to that place, and if there was one thing she wouldn’t put up with, it was a boyfriend who liked to stare at half-naked women while they poured his coffee. So Vicki had left, but she still sometimes texted him, wanting to check in, she’d say, and he knew he could get her back, if he wanted.
He didn’t.
“Are you offering me a doughnut because I’m a cop?” he asks.
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that,” Trixie says, the smile dropping right off her face. There’re two scratches on her shoulder, deep ones. Could be from a cat, although they don’t look it. “I thought you might like one.”
He reaches through the window and touches her arm. It’s cold outside, and Trixie’s arms are studded with goose bumps. She looks unsure for a moment, and right below the uncertainty hovers another emotion: fear. He’s seen it plenty of times over the years, usually on women who get treated like punching bags by the men in their lives.
“I was kidding,” he says. “Sorry, bad joke. I’ll take the raspbe
rry one, if you don’t mind.”
She smiles again, but it’s weak. He’d like to ask her out, to take her to dinner and maybe go to bed with her, to trace a finger down the length of her naked spine. But it’s not a good time to ask, it seems like it’s never the right time, but especially not when she looks like this, like he punched her in the belly, quickly, the ol’ one-two, knocked all the air from her lungs and left her green.
“Have a good day,” she says, handing him the doughnut wrapped in a napkin. When she leans over, he sees the tattoo on her hip, above the lacy waistband of her panties. Five-by-five, he thinks it says, that old way of saying that everything was all good, but he’s not positive, it’s blurred and sloppy, the ink gone purplish and soft.
“Thanks. See you in the morning?”
“Nah, I’ve got the day off.”
“Okay.”
He pulls into traffic, turns right, toward downtown. It’s still early, the sun’s barely out, but his cell phone is already ringing. He grabs it out of the cup holder where he leaves it, glances at the screen. It’s Loren. He doesn’t answer. They’re not partners anymore, it’s been nearly two years since their split, but Loren still calls him plenty. To shoot the shit, Loren says, but that’s a joke, because when did Loren ever just want to chat? Never, that’s the answer. No, Loren calls because he likes to remind Hoskins of what he used to have, what is now out of his reach. Or maybe he phones because he doesn’t have a partner anymore, there’s no one he can talk to these days. Loren’s been burning through partners left and right since Hoskins left, no one has ever been able to stand working with Loren and that hasn’t changed, something that Hoskins finds strangely comforting.