by McBain, Tim
Her stomach gurgled and that was it. She couldn’t wait any longer. She lifted the cup to her lips and blew over the top before taking a sip.
It was hot as hell, enough to make her whole mouth tingle when she drank, but not quite hot enough that it burned. Just how she liked it.
The moment she really understood how powerful caffeine could be was the day she drank a cup of decaf. Everything about it seemed the same. It looked like regular coffee, smelled like regular coffee. But as soon as it touched her lips, she knew something was off. It didn’t feel right in her mouth. There was an almost electric buzz that was missing with the decaf. Something she’d thought was just part of drinking super hot liquid before.
“Hey Erin.”
“What?”
“What’s creamed corn?”
Erin paused, mug pressed to her bottom lip. It took her a moment to remember that she hadn’t brought the corn out for dinner. She’d grabbed it but put it back. She lowered the coffee.
“What?”
“Creamed corn. I don’t think I’ve ever had it. Is it like cream of wheat?”
“No, it’s like… chopped bits of corn in a goopy sauce.”
Izzy wrinkled her nose.
“Sounds gross.”
“It’s not so bad,” Erin muttered, distracted. “Why did you ask that?”
Izzy shrugged. “Just wondering.”
“It’s just weird because I found a can of creamed corn in the pantry, but I don’t remember where it came from.”
Izzy stopped. Just for a moment. But there was a pause, a slight hesitation.
“That must have been where I saw it, then. In the pantry.”
Was the kid being weird? She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something seemed off.
“You found it a while ago, I think.”
She slurped at the coffee. Or maybe she was just tired.
The sun sank beyond the horizon and the light began to drain from the sky. It was time for their nightly ritual. Izzy got ready for bed, and Erin split wood, carrying in a few extra armloads for overnight.
She found a flat area of ground where the log didn’t wobble, swung the maul over her head, and let the sharpened metal edge fall, striking the wood, splintering it with a cracking sound.
Swing.
Crack.
Swing.
Crack.
She did this over and over again, the rhythm sometimes interrupted when the axe head got stuck in the wood. Then she’d have to stop and put her foot on the log to hold it while she wiggled the maul free.
While she chopped, she worried at the creamed corn enigma like a sore tooth.
She couldn’t get past the idea that the can of corn had been way in the back of the pantry. Maybe Izzy went through the food when she was gone. Maybe she even ate some. That could be why she was being weird about it. Erin couldn’t blame her. Not after the granola bar incident. She’d eaten three bars before she even realized what she was doing. No, she wouldn’t even be angry if Izzy had snuck some food while she was gone.
Erin gathered the wood into a neat stack and carried it into the house. Inside, she locked the door behind her and kicked her boots off. She left half of the wood on the pile inside the door. The rest she dropped next to the fireplace.
She used an oven mitt to open the stove door. The hinges squealed, high-pitched and metallic sounding. Izzy appeared next to her, making grabby hands while Erin loaded in more wood.
“Hold on.”
She closed the little metal door but left the oven mitt on. Pulling a large stone from the top of the stove, she finagled it into an old stretched-out wool sock. She repeated this with a second stone, then handed the bulging socks to Izzy.
“Your bedwarmers, milady.”
Izzy scampered off, leaving Erin to brush her teeth and wash her hands and face in water warmed on the stove.
She thought about the food again. She couldn’t actually imagine Izzy sneaking food when she was gone. Izzy complained now and again about the lack of variety in their diet. Fantasized about the things she missed: pizza, ice cream, French fries. But she didn’t usually complain about being hungry, because Erin made sure she was getting the right amount of calories. And they ate anything interesting they came across almost right away. She really couldn’t picture Izzy diving into a can of pinto beans on her own.
Her eyes slid over to the lump in the bed before she turned out the lantern. The rise and fall of Izzy’s breath shifted the blankets ever so slightly. The kid was already out. She usually was by the time Erin turned out the light.
There hadn’t actually been anything missing from the log, either.
Erin climbed under the covers. Her side of the bed was cold, and it leeched warmth from her. She wriggled around, feeling around for the warm spots left by the stones. There was one down by her feet, still radiating heat. She wiggled her toes as they thawed.
Erin let her eyes fall closed, ready to put the thinking aside until morning. Her mind had just started to quiet when it popped into her head.
Nothing was missing from the log, but there had been something gained.
What if?
No.
That was ridiculous.
She glanced over at Izzy’s form again, still asleep.
Izzy wouldn’t do that. Not after everything that had happened. She knew better. Knew how dangerous that would be. Knew how furious Erin would be.
Didn’t she?
Fiona
Rural West Virginia
151 days after
As soon as the conversation in the car died, the urge to confess gathered in the back of her throat like vomit poised to spray out every which way. She pictured it, the puke cascading out in an arc that reached into the front seat to splatter over Father Dalton and Lorraine. Pink muck the consistency of runny oatmeal draped over their shoulders and pooled in their laps.
Even if the puke was imaginary for the moment, the nausea was very real; a cramp in her middle that demanded satisfaction. It flexed and writhed and bucked along her waist, fishing a hand around inside of her abdomen, trying to wrench the words from deep in her guts.
She gave in just a little, letting it bend her at the waist, the top of her head scraping against the back of the passenger seat on the way down.
Her eyes landed on a crusted spot in the carpet where a piece of gum had gotten mashed into the fibers. Without thinking, she reached for it, pinching the pink wad among the blue, finding it as hard as a bone. It felt like pinching a tooth, a molar that had sprouted from the floor. She retracted her hand right away and dry-heaved, coughing a little to try to disguise the sound from the others.
Her eyes closed, and Doyle flashed in her head, his wet dog eyes, his tuft of hair on top. She saw him as he was during his life, as the man who trudged through the snow to bring her loads of wood in a child’s wagon. Not what he’d become, what he was now in the weeds along the edge of the woods. She saw him in life, not in death. That seemed to help, she thought. Remembering who he was.
She listened to the car tires thudding over the craggy road, the hum of rubber on asphalt broken up by the cracks and grooves and jagged potholes that pocked its surface. Gravity pulled her with each bend in this mountain road. Maybe that was where the nausea came from. Motion sickness. She hadn’t had it in years, but it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence when she was young. It’d been a while since she’d even been in a car. Maybe she was reverting to the old ways, her body obeying some ancient spell, no longer hers to control.
Doyle flashed in her head again, disrupting that thought. Still he looked peaceful, serene, wet eyes blinking in slow motion. She kept waiting for the twisted face to show, the death mask, but it didn’t.
She opened her eyes again, expecting to see a yellow tooth sticking up from the floor, but it wasn’t so. It was just a wad of chewed gum. A pilled up spot from some child’s mistake, probably. The flaw implied a story but left the details to one’s imagination, almost like a scar. These thoughts ca
lmed her as well.
Maybe it wasn’t so bad. She had gotten out. She’d survived.
And maybe Father Dalton could understand what happened if she told him. Maybe he could even help her understand it. He was a kind man, a good man. A smart one, too. You could see in his expression, in his eyes, that he understood people, that he knew them better than they knew themselves. What they wanted, what they feared. He could see it just looking at them, looking through them. Maybe all of this, all of these bad feelings, would go away if she could tell him what happened.
But no. She knew she couldn’t do that. Maybe if it were just the two of them she could tell him, but it wasn’t. It wouldn’t be right, she thought, confessing in front of another, bringing an innocent lady into this mess. She had to carry it herself, perhaps carry it to the grave. That was her burden.
She blinked a few times and sat up. Her head felt light, airy, tingles running back and forth over the surface of her scalp. The world seemed so bright all of a sudden, light flooding the car so much she had to squint her eyes.
Lorraine turned and smiled at her then, a little washed out in the light but still visible, and Fiona smiled back. The light swelled to surround her, and she closed her eyes, only realizing a moment later that she was smiling so hard that her cheeks quivered.
It was a new beginning. It was. She was still here, wasn’t she? That had to mean something.
If God had sent Father Dalton to rescue her, it meant he hadn’t given up on her. Not yet.
Her smile stretched wider, and she could feel all the old cracks in her chapped lips opening to weep red tears of joy.
Decker
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
166 days after
It was daylight again. A New Year, apparently, but his head felt no better. He was still here, though, still breathing. That was something.
Waking up in this house still felt strange most of the time. He’d lived here for a few months now, but he still woke up alarmed to find himself away from his apartment, still spent those first few moments of most every day feeling unsafe in this house, in this room, in this bed. He thought being sick probably heightened the effect.
He tried to swallow, but the flaps of his throat caught against each other, dry pieces of flesh sticking together like a starfish clinging to the side of a boat, his epiglottis unable to obey his command. The few drops of saliva he’d mustered trickled down his wind pipe, warm and burning and strange to the touch in that place where wet didn’t belong. He gagged and coughed, dry wretches tearing at his throat, heat rushing up to flush his face red. The coughing should have brought tears to his eyes, but none came, so they just stung instead, gritty and scratchy as though sand had been flung into them.
When the coughing fit faded, he worked his tongue around his mouth. The insides of his cheeks felt gunked up with dried saliva the consistency of thick snot. His teeth were all rough with built up plaque. Bacteria. Maybe a layer of fungus. They almost felt furry.
All of the signs and symptoms of dehydration thrust themselves at him, made themselves plain. He needed to get up right now, to get water or die trying.
This was it.
He took a few deep breaths, the covers rising and falling with his chest, fluttering a bit at the height of the swell. He realized he wasn’t shaking so much anymore. At least the shivering had stopped, though he knew that could happen for good or bad reasons. You stopped shivering if your body temperature stabilized. Or if you were dying, when those kinds of mechanisms were shutting down.
He tried to steel himself for the struggle he was about to endure, but he didn’t really know how. What did you tell yourself when you were too sick to move? What words could make a difference in the face of that?
His hand snaked under the covers, finding its way to the lip of the blanket at his neck, hesitating there for a beat, and then flinging the blankets and sheet away from his body in two quick strokes. The blankets turned over and flopped straight down, folded back over his ankles. The air caught the sheet, though. It ballooned out like a parachute and hung up above him for a long moment, drifting down in slow motion, the bunched edge of the fabric settling over his thighs.
For one second, the breeze of the falling sheet exhilarated him, the cool rush of the air pushing past his chest, over his face. It felt like being on the beach as a kid, a gust of wind rolling off of the water with great force, air and bits of sand blasting his face and torso, trying to push him down. He remembered walking into it, pointy knees slicing into the gale, feet wobbling forward in choppy steps.
The memories washed over him for a moment. And then the cold hit.
The air in the room assailed him, smearing icy fingers over his neck and down into his armpits. Goose bumps prickled over the rest of him, waves of them crawling the length of his torso, firing down each of his legs. His cotton t-shirt offered no protection.
His body looked scrawny, atrophied and unfamiliar, fat and muscle melting away as he lay here for days on end without eating. All that was left was sinew and bone, ropey looking fibers of muscle strung between knobby joints.
He kicked his feet, trying to pull them free of the sheets, the core of his body strangely taut and awkward in every movement. The sheet twisted around his right ankle, holding him. A pang of vertigo overtook him, and for a second he felt like he was hanging upside down by the ankle. He brought his hands up above his head, bracing himself as though the sheet could give and gravity might actually spill him into the wall, but the feeling passed.
The immediate fear seemed to wake him, though, to energize him. He sat up, hands working to free the sheet from his foot. It came loose without much effort, and he turned his gaze to the floor. Walking seemed like too much to ask. He wouldn’t bother trying.
He lowered one hand and then the other to the floor, the rug cool to the touch, the texture of an old towel. He walked his hands out a few steps and took a breath. His arms shook as the weight of the rest of his body shifted off the mattress. He lowered himself, elbows bending in slow motion until he lay belly down on the rug.
The quiver in his arms seemed to spread through the rest of him, all of the muscles in his torso clenching and letting go again, his chest shimmying against the floor.
He lifted his head to look at the door. The yellow rectangle towered over him. It was 10 feet off, but it looked like 10 miles from this vantage point. His eyes ran down the seam where the door met the jamb, that crack of black that would open and let him through if he made it there.
He took a breath and pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. Again, his arms shook with the strain, a strange counterpoint to the shiver rattling his torso. An involuntarily burst of air and spit spurted between his teeth, pushing his lips out of the way with a popping sound.
And sweat slicked his body again. Even in the cold of the unheated room, even in his dehydrated state, the grease seeped from his pores, drenching the collar of his shirt so it clung to him. Being wet made the chill sting that much worse, made the shaking somehow more violent, more miserable, the way the moving air seemed to touch all of the moist places.
He stared at the floor, the dizziness whirling its way into his head. He didn’t focus on it, though. He focused on the rug, looking at the weave of the fabrics in the spaces between his fingers. Beige and brown and black intertwined. His knees tucked under him, and he leaned back to put more of his weight over them, relieving the strain on his arms a bit.
Slow, even breaths entered and exited, and that lightheaded feeling receded. He blinked a few times before daring another peek at the door. It was no closer, physically, but he felt some sense of progress now.
He moved forward.
He crawled three paces before one of his arms wobbled out from under him. He managed to catch himself, but he was tired, cold, exhausted. He lay down on the floor again, ribcage spasming against the line where the rug ended and the bare wood floor began.
Sweat drained across his forehead, beads of moisture taking winding
paths at gravity’s whim. He closed his eyes. He knew there was some risk of losing consciousness in doing so, but he needed to do it, he thought. If he was going to gather himself, he needed to do it.
His cheek rested on the oak planks, cold and hard, and his consciousness focused on that feeling. He let all other thoughts drift further and further back in his mind, let the volume turn all the way down, all else going still but that cold feeling between his jaw and cheek bone.
And out of nowhere a thought percolated up, a nonsensical notion. What if the girl was on the other side of this door? The one from the apartment three doors down across the hall. What if she was here? Dead or alive, he didn’t know, didn’t want to guess. It made no sense, of course, and part of him knew that, but something about the force of the realization was too big to ignore, the force of the picture of her sitting over there, flickering from alive to dead and back again. Like a dream where every conversation is gibberish and yet makes total sense at the same time. You go with it, he thought, because you have no choice.
He opened his eyes, tilting his vision up and away from the floor to look at the wall, and then craning his neck to look at the door.
Beveled panels of wood stared back at him. The doorknob. The keyhole. The yellow paint. He couldn’t help but wonder who looked at all of the colors and chose to paint a door yellow. This was a pale, almost sickly yellow like a sun bleached butternut squash. The décor in the house looked to be last updated in about 1942, especially here in the upstairs. The light fixtures and hallway carpets were almost creepy in their antiquity. For all he knew, maybe yellow doors were big back then.
Air puffed from his nostrils as he lifted himself again, and dust whooshed away from him, little clusters of gray twirling in all directions around him. He looked at door and moved toward it, picturing her on the other side again.