by S. L. Naeole
He nodded brusquely, his gaze never leaving my own. “Stacy?” he said softly.
“Yeah?”
“Could you leave now?”
Stacy noticed where his gaze was directed and turned to look at me, the silent question written in her eyes. I nodded and she exhaled slowly, looking back at Robert before shaking her head. “O-kay.”
She gave me a quick hug and waved at Robert before slipping quietly out the door. Robert and I stared at each other until I saw Stacy’s car reverse out of the driveway and her red taillights fade away down the street.
“We need to talk,” Robert and I both said at the same time. The look on his face and the look in mine reflected in his eyes told me that this was going to be more than just a simple talk.
FRAYED
“You first,” I told him, wanting a bit more time to be able to word my apology just right.
“I was planning on doing so anyway,” he insisted. “May I?” He held a hand out and motioned to the empty space on the bed that Stacy had occupied. I nodded and he sat down, carefully maintaining a safe distance between us.
I looked at him expectantly and waited for him to begin speaking. He kept looking at me, but said nothing. Every so often I would look behind him at the clock on my dresser as the minutes ticked by, but I didn’t say anything about the time. I honestly had missed his presence so much, simply sitting here with him was enough. I didn’t need conversation. I didn’t need-
“Grace, I need to show you something.”
I blinked. “What?”
His hand stretched forward to hold mine but before his fingers grazed my skin, he pulled his hand back. “May I?”
I looked down at his hand and blinked once more to adjust my vision. “Is your hand…shaking?”
Robert clenched his hand into a fist and pressed it against the bed, the force causing the bed to dip and the springs to squeal from the pressure.
My hand covered his, the contact meant to be reassuring. Instead, my mind was instantly filled with the unrelenting stream of information that Robert’s mind contained, ever constant and unyielding to the limited capacity of my own. I started to feel the pressure build as each foreign memory began to stretch my mind until all I could see were the tiny pulses of light beneath my lids.
This had happened once before, the first time that Robert and I had consciously held each other’s hand—a platonic gesture meant only to help me—and I had passed out as a result. My nose had bled, my mind felt like it had literally exploded, and Robert had stayed with me throughout it, despite only knowing me for less than a day. This time, however, I hadn’t lost all consciousness and could still feel his hand beneath mine. The other was gently cradling my head that had dipped forward and then to the side as the onslaught of thoughts and visions took over, weighing me down with them.
“Are you alright?”
I opened my eyes slightly to see Robert’s concerned face looking at me from an odd angle; his head was tilted to the side, his torso twisted towards me. I smiled at him and nodded my head.
“Are you sure?”
“Mmm-hmm,” I murmured, just glad for the contact.
He looked at me, studied my face. As soon as he was sure that the dizziness had passed, he helped me to a sitting position. “You let me know when you’re ready for this,” he said as he wiped my forehead with the back of his hand.
“I’m ready.”
“We don’t have to rush this, Grace. Are you sure you’re ready?”
“That depends on what it is that you have to show me. Is this about Erica?”
“No,” he replied.
“Well. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see then, huh?” I remarked.
My hand that was still covering Robert’s lifted off of his as he removed it from the deep indentation that he had created in the mattress. “I’m sorry about the bed,” he commented before taking a hold of my hand and pulling me close. “Don’t move. No matter what you see, do not move,” he instructed before lowering his head to mine.
Our foreheads touched faintly but before I had time to appreciate the cool smoothness of his skin against mine, I was no longer in my room. Instead, I was now watching two people leave the school grounds in a rusty green vehicle. I knew who they were instantly as the mixed feelings flared within me—I was now seeing things from Robert’s point of view and his emotions were now my own, his anger and his hurt two distinct voices inside one cold and lifeless heart within him. As he watched the pair leave, his attention turned to another figure leaving the school.
The man was older, slightly portly with a noticeably hurried gait. His hair was disheveled and his brown suit was wrinkled where it had gathered while he sat. Robert watched the man walk across the parking lot towards a dark brown station wagon. The car was unlocked. The man climbed in and turned the key to start the engine. It was a sickly sound, as though the car were pleading with its owner to put it out of its misery, squealing like a wounded animal just before the final blow of mercy was to be dealt.
The car pulled out of its stall and rolled slowly out of the lot, its direction negligent. Robert was moving, too. His vision became foggy yet no less clear, an odd thing I noticed, as he followed the vehicle. Each second that ticked by, each simple increment of time seemed to turn the sky around Robert darker and darker as the car in front of him began to weave in and out of its lane.
Soon the station wagon was barreling down an empty stretch of road, the demand nearly too much for the tired engine to handle as it inched its way up to a terrifying speed. As the car weaved into the oncoming lane, I could make out what appeared to be the front end of a bicycle lying in the middle of the lane ahead.
The driver, however, did not. It happened in a split second. The car hit the bike at such an exaggerated speed, the frame split in two and went flying into the undercarriage. Though I personally knew nothing about the workings of a car, this was not my vision. This was Robert’s, and I instinctually knew that the metal bars that made up the bike were about to do something horrifically disastrous to the rear axle of the station wagon.
With a loud, metallic snap, the remains of the bicycle tore through the rear of the car, the resulting damage causing the car to rise up above the pavement. Physics then took over as the car’s mass forced it into a tailspin. The intense speed combined with the friction from the tires pulling against the asphalt caused the vehicle to jerk up, resulting in the car flipping over for several rotations, eventually coming to a rest on its roof.
Behind it, the road was a veritable battlefield of twisted metal and torn rubber. There were gouges deep within the asphalt with several distinct tracks formed by what would soon be tread-less tires and the remainder of the pipe that protruded now from the underbelly of the completely destroyed vehicle. Glass littered the road, though it looked far different from the type that would belong to a windshield or windows.
Robert approached the car, the fog lifting just slightly, though the darkness never receded. As he drew closer, the sight of blood on the ground was a sign that whoever was in the car had not escaped unscathed. Robert’s hand grabbed a hold of the door where the window should have been, as though he were grabbing a thick book. He lifted his hand and the door peeled off of its hinges smoothly, effortlessly, like removing a slice of cake.
He tossed the door to the side, ignoring the screeching sound it made as it slid several feet away, and peered inside of the cab. He shook his head at what he saw, and I felt myself recoil at the image as I tried to place the somewhat recognizable face that belonged to the man who had been driving. The steering wheel was pressed up against his chest, pinning him to the seat of his now overturned car. His face was a mangled mass of torn skin and blood that sparkled with fragments of the same odd looking glass that lay out in the road behind him.
“Hello, Oliver,” I heard Robert say in a soothing voice.
“Oh good. Someone is here to help me,” the man named Oliver said in a garbled voice. He coughed as blood bubbled
up out of his mouth and nose and landed on the ceiling of the car, mixing in with the sickly sweet liquid that had already pooled there. “I think my cell phone is still in my pocket. Could you call my wife?”
Robert’s hand reached into the car and he gently touched the man’s shoulder. An intense light filled the car in a quick burst of light, and then Robert was outside of the vehicle, the man named Oliver standing beside him, confused and disoriented. “How’d I get out here?” he asked before his eyes picked up on what Robert had already known.
“Hey, that’s me in the car. But I’m right here… Wait—does this mean that I’m…dead?”
Robert shook his head. “No, Oliver. This just means that I’m not interested in having this conversation in the car while it’s leaking gasoline and smelling of cheap vodka and whisky.”
“Hey now, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I wasn’t drinking. See? Perfectly sober,” Oliver argued, demonstrating his point by taking several steps away from Robert and then spinning around on his heel, his balance perfect; the motion smooth.
Robert’s hand flashed out, his fingers wrapping around Oliver’s throat as he said in that same calm, soothing voice, “You’re lying, Oliver.”
The man held his hands up, his face turning a putrid shade of purple as he relented. “Okay, okay. Yes, I did have a drink. Just one th-” Robert’s grip grew tighter around Oliver’s throat and the man started to cough before managing to gasp out a quick “I drank half a bottle!”
Robert eased his grip on Oliver’s throat, though he still had his fingers laced around his neck in a vise grip that I could eerily feel on around my own. “That’s better. Now, Oliver. We’re going to play a little game called truth or dare. I’ll ask you a question and you’ll tell me the truth or you’ll dare to lie to me again and then we’ll repeat what you’ve just experienced here, only I won’t use my hands.”
“Wh-what will you use?” Oliver stuttered.
Robert’s lips curled back in a menacing growl and gnashed his teeth. Oliver began to shake with fear and understanding and obediently nodded his head.
“I’m glad that we understand each other. Now then, question one, do you know who I am?”
Oliver shook his head, the movement so small and quick, had I been looking with my own eyes I would have missed it entirely. Robert smiled at the man’s answer. “You’re telling the truth. Pity—I was hoping that perhaps you would. I rarely enjoy moments like these, but for you I’ll make an exception.
“Who I am, Oliver, is your road to perdition. Or, I could be your road to salvation. The choice is yours.”
The man’s eyes widened with confusion. “I…I don’t understand.”
Robert pointed to the body that was slowly dying in the car in front of them. “You’re not in that body, Oliver. You’re standing beside me because I have the ability to allow you to live and make right the wrongs you’ve done, or I can allow this scene before you to play out and you’ll die a very painful death that will be but a precursor to what lies in store for you.”
Oliver looked at his lifeless body, obscured by the steering wheel that held him immobile and upside down, and then turned his focus to Robert, whose menacing appearance could be seen in the glassy reflection of Oliver’s eyes. “What do I do? What do I do to make things right?”
“We play the game. Next question, Oliver. What is your worst crime?”
Oliver looked at Robert and then back to the car. His head kept swinging back and forth between the two, obviously deciding which fate was worse. Robert, having stared at the half-moons in his nails while Oliver decided, impatiently snapped his fingers. A slight spark flew out from between them and landed in a stream of liquid, igniting it in a bright blue flash of fire. The flame traveled quickly, hungrily seeking out more fuel as it headed directly towards the station wagon.
“No! Wait!”” Oliver cried out. He lurched forward but Robert held him back with the faintest of grips on his shoulder.
“Will you tell me?”
Oliver nodded his head frantically, his gaze fixed on the flame that streaked ever closer to his body and its would-be metal coffin.
Robert waved an indifferent hand in the air and a gust of chilled wind suffocated the determined blue wave of heat. “Now. Tell me.”
Defeated, Oliver nodded. “I killed a girl.”
Robert’s body jerked at the confession. “You…killed a girl?”
Oliver nodded, his head hung low in shame. “I was on vacation with my wife and kids in Nebraska four years ago. I left them at the hotel to go and get some food from this take-out place we had read about in one of those tourist magazines, you know. I stayed longer than I was planning and had drunk a little too much while there.
“I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t, I swear, but I couldn’t see her on the road—it was dark and I didn’t know where I was—and by the time I realized what had happened, it was too late. I tried to get her some help, but she was already gone. She was so beautiful and young, not much older than my own daughter, and all I could think about was what would happen if I got caught? What would happen to my own little girl? What would happen to my wife? My son? I panicked and I left her there—my family, we left the next day.”
Robert acknowledged this confession grimly, his ire and disgust turning his body cold. “There’s more.”
The man fell to his knees. “Yes, there’s more,” he replied. “I hit another girl a few months ago…here.”
Robert’s body grew ramrod stiff as he listened to the man on the ground begin to retell a story that the two of us were very familiar with.
“I’ve been having nightmares about what happened, about that girl that I killed. I didn’t even know her name. I never looked it up on the internet or anything—I didn’t want to get to know her, see her family, her pictures—but her face kept haunting me every time I closed my eyes.
“It became so bad that the only way I could get her out of my head was to drown her out. I started to drink more often; I couldn’t function without it; I couldn’t work, couldn’t do anything unless I could no longer feel my legs or my hands.
“I was at a friend’s house one morning—he was having problems at work, too—and we just sat around the house and drank can after can, bottle after bottle of whatever it was we could find. I saw the time and knew that I had to get going; my wife had made reservations for dinner with her parents and I had promised that I wouldn’t be late this time.
“I was fine driving, I swear. I could have made it home without a problem. But then I saw her again, the girl I had run over four years earlier, riding her bicycle, and I thought…I thought that if I could catch up to her and talk to her, get her to forgive me, she’d let me go, she’d let me go to sleep. I thought I was putting my hand on the horn. I swear. I didn’t know that I wasn’t pressing the horn with my hand. I didn’t know that I was pressing the gas pedal with my foot until I heard the bike beneath the car.
“I stopped. I did, I stopped the car and got out. I ran over to her, the girl, and I saw her—only it wasn’t her, it wasn’t the girl. I didn’t know that first girl, but this one…I knew her, I recognized her face. I couldn’t believe that I had done it again, and to someone I knew on top of that. I didn’t know what to do…and then she started to speak, and I panicked again. I left her there. I left her on the road and I went home.
“I promised from then on that I’d never touch another drop if she lived. I swore to myself and anyone who was listening that I’d never drink another drop of alcohol if she made it. But I knew that she wasn’t. I knew that she was going to die just like the last one because she looked worse. There was so much blood this time, not like the other one. She was bleeding everywhere, I had crushed her and her bike together. Oh, God.”
Oliver threw his hands onto the ground and began to gag and heave. Robert stood there and watched him in stony silence, his frigid demeanor doing nothing to calm the ill man before him. Finally, he bent down and grabbed him by the nape of his
neck and yanked him upwards. “You’re not going to throw anything up. You’re not in your body, remember? And even if you were, you already emptied your gut of everything in it the minute you crashed so I suggest you quit with the theatrics and get on with it.
“Now-” he released Oliver and watched him as he crumpled back to the ground with a soft thud “-finish your confession.”
The man bobbed his head sickly and did as he was ordered. “I stayed up all night waiting for the news to say something about what happened. The Sunday paper had a small story about it, but it was the Monday paper that said that she had survived with minor injuries—minor injuries! I kept following the story in case she didn’t make it after all, but she was fine. I kept to my end of the deal. I was good, I kept off the bottle.
“Then I started to worry about her telling the police about me. I kept thinking what if she saw me? What if she recognized me? The dreams started to come again, only this time I saw two faces instead of just one.
“I had to see for myself if she was okay, I had to know that she was fine, and so I did. She was more than fine. She was different, like everything had suddenly been fixed in her life while mine was falling apart. But then she looked at me, and for a second I thought she’d start telling everyone that I was the one, that I was the one that hit her. But she looked away. Like everyone else, she just looked away.
“That was too much for me. Two faces, one with no name, the other with a name and a history. I couldn’t sleep again, I couldn’t eat, couldn’t do anything but fight with the nightmares. And so I found a bottle of gin that I had hidden away in the basement. It felt like I’d found liquid peace. I closed my eyes and their faces were gone. I couldn’t put the bottle down after that. There was no way. I’d be a complete mess if I did, you have to believe me!”
Oliver stood up on his knees and clutched at Robert’s shirt. “Please, please tell me you’ll forgive me. Please.”
Robert pushed the man away and took several steps back. He was shaking, the black anger turning his vision to a deep, blood red as it blocked out everything else that was good. “Tell me her name,” he hissed at the man. “Say her name.”