On the Edge of Dangerous Things (Dangerous Things Trilogy Book 1)

by snyder-carroll s.

  At home she dug her sneaks out of the closet, put on her only workout outfit, and jogged from her apartment on Concord Avenue to Cadwalder Park. As soon as she got through the gates, she began to run at full speed. She passed the deer pen, the empty subterranean bear cages, the rickety old monkey house. Her chest tightened. Her heart pounded. She was sweating, and her breasts ached from bouncing up and down, but she forced herself to finish out the loop only slowing to a walk out on Stuyvesant Avenue. Her pelvic area throbbed with what she was sure were cramps, and she hugged herself in gratitude for the pain. She’d get her period for sure now. She thought of the robin and smiled to herself as she crossed the railroad tracks and turned up Concord. But by the time she got home, the glorious cramping had stopped.

  In the bathroom she took off her pants and top, and studied the curve of her abdomen in the mirror. It was flat and tight; but when she turned sideways, there was the slightest bulge below her navel. Had it always been there? She wasn’t sure. She ran her hand from her rib cage to her pelvic region. It felt puffy. She took off her bra. Her nipples were dark red and covered with bumps. She cupped them and sighed. They looked and felt exactly the same as the last time she was pregnant.

  How had she let this happen again? She put on her pajamas, sat at the kitchen table to grade some papers, and burst into tears. The awful memory was back.

  How cold she’d been, sitting alone in that dilapidated waiting room in Philadelphia, staring at the filthy, crooked blind, the chipped paint on the frame of the half-opened window, the darkness beyond. She prayed with all her might for God to give her the strength to get up and leave, but she didn’t. Her boyfriend would never talk to her again if she didn’t go through with it. She watched the snow pile up on the sill and blow into the room. It hit the grimy linoleum and melted. The word “forlorn”—a vocabulary word Hester encountered often in literature—popped into her head. It was exactly how she felt.

  Her boyfriend Arty couldn’t come with her. At the last minute, he had something, as he put it, “important to take care of.” They were walking past Holly Bush toward Main Street to catch the 4:30 bus from Glassboro to downtown Philly when he told her.

  A lump rose in Hester’s throat. She thought from the beginning (he’d told her from the beginning) that he’d be with her the whole time.

  “I can’t do this by myself, Arty,” Hester explained.

  “You’ll be fine. You don’t need me there. Lots of girls go through this all by themselves.”

  “I’m not ‘lots of girls.’” She’d fallen a few steps behind him and hurried to catch up. “Arty, please, I don’t really want to do this at all, let alone by myself.”

  They were standing side by side now, looking down the deserted street. Arty was frowning.

  Hester gathered her nerve and blurted out, “You’re the one who wants me to do it.” Her voice was strident, and immediately she regretted how she sounded. After all, Arty, who was a senior, did have a lot on his mind. Tomorrow was the lottery for the draft. All the guys on campus were upset. So she moved closer and whispered, “Please, please, come with me?” She turned and kissed his cheek just as the bus pulled up.

  “I can’t. I just fucking can’t.” Arty rubbed his face where her lips had touched it. “You don’t understand. Look, don’t be such a goddamn big…” He stopped himself and stepped back.

  The doors of the bus opened. Hester stepped up and looked back at him, hoping he’d follow, but he didn’t, and she noticed a hardness in his eyes she hadn’t seen there before.

  Hester wanted to scream at him and call him a bastard or something as she watched his back hunch up in the cold and his head disappear between his raised shoulders as he lowered it against the wind and walked quickly away.

  Every time the bus made a stop, Hester thought about getting off; but she knew Arty would be furious if she didn’t get rid of this baby.

  Sitting in that disgusting waiting room was like being in limbo. The sound of the traffic six stories below coupled with the hissing and banging of the radiator were driving her nuts. She kept one hand in the pocket of her pea coat clenched around a thick wad of small bills that added up to exactly six hundred dollars. She’d never had that much money in her life. Nobody she’d met at Glassboro State College, bordered by cornfields and woebegone trailer parks, had that much money. She knew it was tough for her friends to help her out the way they did. She’d felt guilty even asking, but she was desperate. Arty had only been able to come up with forty dollars so she had to go around begging for the rest. It was humiliating, but she’d done it, and here she was, sitting here hating herself.

  The older man who finally came into the waiting room had a body that filled the door frame. His head grew out of his short, thick neck like an oversized upside-down apple. He was bald. His thin, dark eyebrows had a feminine arch to them, as though they had been plucked and penciled in. His nose, which looked ridiculously small on his full face, was ruddy; his bottom lip hung down, revealing a set of pointy lower teeth and whitish gums. He smiled weakly, so Hester smiled back.

  “Randal? Hester Randal? Come into my office and let’s get this over with.” The sound of his voice was so sullen, it wiped the smile off her face.

  “Okay, I mean, yes, sir.” Hester didn’t know what to say. She lowered her head and followed him. Her clogs clomped loudly on the bare floors. Why had she worn the stupid things? She stood behind the man as he took a wrinkled jacket, which looked exactly like a chef’s jacket, from a coat rack and put it on. The office, as he called it, Hester could see, was just his rundown bedroom that doubled as a place where he could conduct his nasty “business.” It smelled faintly of urine and something tangy, like an Italian hoagie. There was a double bed with a rumpled coverlet along one wall and at the foot of it a low dresser with a large console television on top of it. The T.V. was on. The screen was full of nothing but static, but the man stopped to stare at it anyway.

  On the other side of the room near the bathroom door was a narrow table covered with a white sheet, and on top of that a pink towel. The table was outfitted with stirrups fashioned from two-by-fours and what looked like bicycle pedals. Hester had never been to a gynecologist, so she had only a vague sense about how to mount such a contraption. The thought of lying up there at such a vulnerable angle made her sick to her stomach. At the foot of the table was a garbage can.

  The bathroom door was open. A bulb hung from the ceiling. The mirror on the medicine cabinet was webbed with cracks. The sink was coated with soap residue.

  “I’ll take the money now. You do have the money?” The man was still staring at the grainy image on the television. Hester handed him the roll of bills. He counted them carefully, then stuck the wad in his pocket.

  “Take off your coat, pants, and panties. Give them to me. Get up on the table. Lay on your back.” The man’s voice was matter-of-fact. Hester did as she was told. She sat on the table and pulled her T-shirt down and watched as the peace sign on the front elongated into an oval. She covered her naked pubic area with the pink towel. The man watched her and then went into the bathroom. She lay down. The bathroom door was still open and the light bothered her eyes. She shut them.

  She fought with herself not to cry. What good would it do? There was no one there to comfort her. The man didn’t seem to care about much of anything, and if she cried, it might annoy him, and everything might be worse. Hester took a deep breath and exhaled and tried to think only of Arty. Already, she’d forgiven him for not being there.

  “It’s our only way out,” Arty decided quickly on the abortion when Hester told him she missed her period. He was upset and seemed angry with her. It was as though she was confessing a grave sin to someone who had no part in it. She was the one, the only one, responsible for the transgression. She waited for her penance, and he pronounced it. The sinner would have to have the sin ripped out of her.

  “But, Arty, the thought of it makes me sick. Can’t we…” She hoped they could…what? Get marr
ied? She knew it was too soon to say that to him. Something like that had to come from him.

  Hester couldn’t go to her parents. Since she left home for college in late August, her parents called on the pay phone in the dorm hall every Saturday night at eleven o’clock. Had she made curfew? Did she remember about Mass tomorrow?

  “I know you’re a good girl, Hester,” her mother would say, then she’d hand the phone to Hester’s father.

  “Remember, we trust you. You have a big responsibility to set a good example for your sister.” He’d clear his throat and continue, “Say your prayers and stay away from the young men down there. I’m your father and I’m telling you, they are only after one thing. And we didn’t raise you like that.” Hester knew the translation: make sure you don’t lose your virginity.

  God, she hated the sound of her father’s voice. She’d lost her virginity before she’d even figured out the layout of the campus, so it was difficult for her to hear him hammering home this dictum about saving herself for marriage and all that. Her father couldn’t begin to understand how deeply in love she was, how it was only human nature to want to give yourself completely to the person you truly loved.

  She’d hang up the receiver seething with anger, then slowly it would subside, and she’d start thinking maybe she should tell her parents about Arty, maybe they would understand. And guilt would begin slithering around inside her. She shouldn’t be doing what she was doing with Arty, and she knew it. And when she was on the brink of resolving to never let Arty touch her again, her heart would start racing, but one day he will be my husband, one day we will be together forever.

  The man coughed and Hester opened her eyes. He came out of the bathroom with two pills in one hand and some sort tool in the other. Hester started sobbing. The contraption looked like a big claw. In a flash she knew she should’ve gone home to her parents—they’d been right all along. Boys were nothing but trouble. Dear God, she was sorry she’d ever met Arthur Kendall.

  “What is that? What are you going to do with it?”

  The man cleared his throat, but said nothing. He moved closer until he stood next to her.

  “No! No! No!”

  “Calm down. Take these.” He sounded impatient.

  Hester was shaking and crying.

  “Lean up and take the pills.” He dropped the pills into her palm. She swallowed them down dry.

  The man lifted the towel off of Hester and moved to the foot of the table. He told her to put her feet in the stirrups and slide toward him. She tried to adjust her legs and feet and wiggle her bottom down toward him, but she wasn’t doing it fast enough so he reached up, grabbed her by her hips, and pulled her buttocks to the end of the table. Hester gagged at his touch. She was weak with dread. He was impatient now. She could sense it. She watched him as he adjusted the claw. He started talking. Or was it singing? Everything began to sound like it was coming from far away. He put his forearms between her knees and tried to force them apart. Hester tried to keep her legs together, tried to say something, tried to keep her eyes open, but they kept closing. She felt awful, then limp, then like dust, and finally like she was being blown away.

  When she awoke, she was in the middle of a dream. A team of surgeons was trying to remove a tumor from inside her head. She had floated out of her body and was up on the ceiling looking down at it. They were leaning over her, and the backs of their white coats and their heads looked like a tightly closed chrysanthemum. She tried to get a glimpse of the tumor, but couldn’t. The doctors began talking, and she drifted back into her body. They congratulated her because they had never seen anything like the strange growth they had just removed. They brought it over to show her. It was a lump of slimy flesh that looked like a fat chicken wing with two small feet, one perfectly shaped, the other so deformed it looked like a hand with two fingers.

  “Why, at first, we thought it was a baby coming out of your skull!” One doctor was smiling at her, and her inclination was to thank him, but before she could, she woke up.

  She was not on the table, but in the bed still naked from the waist down. Something was wedged up into her vagina. Dizzy and sweating, Hester threw off the thin blanket and put both hands between her legs. The bulge of cloth was soaking wet. She pressed on it and the pain was excruciating.

  The man was asleep in a threadbare chair. His head was back, his mouth open. He was snoring loudly. His puffy chins jiggled when he exhaled.

  After several minutes Hester stood up slowly, walked to where her coat hung, got the belt and sanitary napkin she’d wrapped in toilet paper out of the pocket, and went into the bathroom. She closed the door and struggled to put the pad on over the bloody wad of whatever it was that the man had shoved up her. She was in agony as she tried to pull on her panties and jeans. In the mirror the image of her pale face was fragmented by the cracks in the mirror. Her hair was oily-looking and damp. She stared at herself. Her eyes in the glaring light looked like black ticks frozen in amber. Hester went back into the bedroom, grabbed her coat, and left.

  The snow had stopped, but the wind was wicked cold. She stood at the bus stop hugging herself and waiting, for what seemed like forever, for the bus back to campus.

  Finally it came. It was practically empty. She took a window seat near the front. On the Walt Whitman Bridge there was a backup. The bus stopped, moved forward, stopped. Hester grew impatient. She felt horrible, and she wanted to get back before curfew to see Arty. Seeing Arty would make her feel better. It always did.

  Arthur Kendall was one of the first people Hester met when she arrived on campus for orientation. He saw her sitting alone in the lounge, introduced himself, and invited her to the Trailer, an old Airstream, he explained, parked behind the place he rented in town. Hester liked his long sandy-colored hair, bell bottoms, the fact that he was older. She felt flattered, and curious.

  The Trailer was pretty dirty, but it had a groovy atmosphere. Arty and the guys he lived with ran an extension cord to it from the house, screwed a black light into the ceiling, taped day glow posters over the windows, and threw an old mattress on the floor. It was a hangout, a place to smoke weed. Arty turned Hester on, and it wasn’t long before she was a regular at the Trailer. But there were always so many people around, so getting high was about all they ever did for the first few weeks.

  On his birthday, though, they were alone. That night the black light made everything magical for Hester. The whites of her boyfriend’s eyes and his teeth shone like milk glass. As soon as they were high, Arty leaned over and kissed Hester. He pulled her hair back and licked her neck and kissed it. Hester, not being experienced, did the same to him. Their hair, the color of the top side of a deer’s tail, was so identical they looked like twins kissing.

  She felt his long fingers first. He slipped one hand down the back of her jeans and touched her between her cheeks. This made her squirm away from him so he stopped and began massaging her breasts through her blouse. He kept his mouth on her neck until he moved his hands down to her jeans and unbuttoned them. He maneuvered Hester onto her back, pulled her pants off. Before she had time to say a word, he was on top of her, then in her, and all she could feel at first was pain, unbearable, then bearable, then something that wasn’t pain but was nearly impossible for her to describe.

  When it was over, Arty told Hester he was shocked by all the blood and a little worried that the guys would be pissed about the old mattress being ruined. Why hadn’t she told him she was a virgin? But she had, he probably hadn’t heard her.

  The worst of the damage was already done, according to Arty, so he lit a joint, and they smoked it, and then they had sex until he came two more times. Hester wasn’t sure she came at all. But when Arty asked, she said she did because she thought that was what he wanted to hear. He told her she was the best birthday gift he ever got.

  That was September 14.

  Now it was November 29. Hester counted out the time on her fingers. It was less than ten weeks and that made her feel only sl
ightly better. The baby would’ve been very small. How small? She wasn’t sure, but she was hoping it was small enough not to have felt anything.

  Two weeks ago her belly seemed to swell up overnight and none of her pants fit. Arty gave her a pair of his to wear while he was figuring out where she could go to take care of the problem. She had them on now and rubbed her hands on the soft, worn denim. She tried to think about Arty but was having difficulty picturing him. His face, his hands, even his penis were nothing but a blur. She couldn’t picture what he looked like up close while they were making out, how his tongue tasted, how his lips felt on her neck, how he sounded when he laughed. Hester pressed the side of her head against the bus window and tried like hell to visualize the object of her undying love and affection, but all she conjured up was a clear image of that garbage can in that dirty room and, lying cold and dead in the bottom of it, her tiny naked baby.

  One time when Hester was around eight years old, right after her sister was born, she was watching her mother nurse the infant—her mother was big on breast-feeding. She even started a club for it. There were more than a few people, though, who thought Mrs. Randal was disgusting. Hester overheard them say bad things about her mother and wished she would just stop doing it. But she didn’t. So this one day, when Hester was staring at her, her mother reached around Hester’s waist and pulled her close. Hester saw how tightly the infant’s lips latched onto her mother’s breast. The sound of the sucking was loud, the smell of the milk sweet and overwhelming. Hester felt the urge to suck on her mother’s breast too and almost asked if she could, but instead reached down and touched her sister’s hand. The tiny, almost translucent fingers wrapped around Hester’s pinky more firmly than seemed possible.

  The bus was still stuck in the traffic on the Walt Whitman Bridge, and Hester was floating in and out of the past. She saw her baby sister’s fingers in her mind’s eye, remembered the warmth and strength of that touch.