Afterburn: A Novel

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Afterburn: A Novel Page 45

by Colin Harrison


  Charlie felt funny. She was a criminal, a brilliant little criminal.

  “So,” finished Christina, “that’s that.”

  He checked the time. It was late, after midnight. He needed to sleep, he knew, but he was enjoying his precipitous plunge into Christina’s identity. She had told him a great deal, but he couldn’t quite connect everything. “But, going back,” he said, “why put the money in the old Mustang anyway? It seems like a vulnerable place.”

  “Oh, that was—” Christina paused. “The car just meant a lot to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She stood up and walked around in his shirt. “You know almost everything else … I guess I can tell you this.”

  “What?”

  She sat in the chair and straightened her legs, feet together like a gymnast. She looked back at him, then looked away.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” he said.

  She dropped her feet to the floor, stared at the blank television. “When I was sixteen, Charlie, this guy followed me from a job I had as a waitress, and he knew which car was mine because he parked his van next to it. He hit me really hard in the mouth and then in the nose. He broke it, in fact.” Her voice held a far remembrance of the moment of terror, a weariness of this long burden. “I was almost unconscious, and he tied me up and started to drive along the highway … It was night. You could hide a van anywhere.”

  Which, from her expression, Charlie understood the man had done.

  “He had me for three or four hours, and it was not so much the rape that was bad—I mean, that was horrible, I’d never had sex before, either—it was he hit me so much. For no reason. I couldn’t resist anymore. I could barely breathe. My nose and face were swollen up. He kept trying to make me say I loved him.”

  “Did you say it?” Charlie asked, sickened by the idea.

  “No.”

  “He kept hitting you?”

  “He said, Say you love me, say you love me. And I’d shake my head and he’d hit me again.”

  “You were a strong kid.” He rubbed his forehead in sadness, picturing Julia as a sixteen-year-old. Long legs, still wore bangs. Chewed gum all the time. You have a daughter and you cry for all the daughters, he thought. She’s telling me this for some reason. “Jesus, I’m sorry,” he finally said.

  “He left me on the highway. He threw me out of the car. He just opened the back door and threw me out. I think he thought I was going to die. I didn’t have any clothes. I didn’t care, I just walked along the road until I came to a little house. I remember standing on the porch ringing the doorbell. With no clothes on. The lady who answered the door was so surprised. But she understood, she was so great. Her husband understood right away and took this big hunting jacket off a peg and put it around me. They did everything. They called the police and my family. I loved them so much, you know, they just got it.”

  “Did they catch the guy?”

  She nodded. “Someone at the restaurant knew who he was. He totally confessed. Or they beat it out of him, I don’t know.”

  “He go to prison?”

  “Six years. I used to worry about what would happen when he got out. It bothered me to think that he was around somewhere. I was anxious a lot of the time. I’d think I was having a heart attack … I was scared, especially when the day came around each year. You always remember the date. Because you’re changed after it. Just different. You have a hard time trusting anything, trusting the universe, if you know what I mean. I was a total virgin before, barely kissed a guy. When I started to see Rick I told him. Turns out the guy was about to be released. The guy was on parole, had to report in. But I was still kind of nervous. He might have tried to call me once. Rick went away for a couple of days, and when he came back, he told me not to worry about the guy. He’d found him in Pennsylvania. I don’t think Rick killed him—that wasn’t like him. But he did something. You have to understand that Rick was a big guy. He scared people. He always wanted to protect me. Sometimes I liked it, sometimes I didn’t. You like knowing you have a friend, right? But it got all messed up. He visited my mother, which I didn’t want him to do, and they talked a lot about the rape, and my mother told him things he wasn’t supposed to know.”

  “Like what?”

  She tucked her feet under her, still looking at the empty television. “The guy made me pregnant. I’d never had sex before, and here I was raped and pregnant. I know this sounds strange … but I wanted to keep the baby. It was like all this painful stuff had happened but I was going to get a baby out of it. It seemed—you have to remember I wasn’t even sixteen, I didn’t know anything—it seemed like maybe, if all this bad stuff had happened, then I was getting this good thing, this baby. It didn’t really matter where it had come from, it was mine. The baby was innocent, the baby didn’t know anything, so why should the baby’s life be destroyed? That’s the way I thought about it. Also, I think the idea of an abortion sounded like more violence, and I just couldn’t deal with that.

  “I had tried to go back to school, but people were talking about me, my face was all smashed up. They sent my schoolwork home. I couldn’t really go yet. But my mother kept saying, You have to get rid of this thing, it’s not a baby yet, it’s not anything, and it will slow you down, it will mess up your whole life. There’ll be a better time to have a baby, later. I sort of knew she was right, but I—I couldn’t say I wanted to do it. My father stayed out of it. I think he was ambivalent. My mother got nervous, because some time went by, weeks and weeks. They didn’t know I was pregnant for a long time. I hadn’t gotten my period, but that could have been because of the trauma. Also, sixteen-year-olds are not totally regular yet. So finally my mother took me to the doctor and said it was just for an examination, but as soon as the nurse put this IV in my arm and I looked at their faces, I knew. I fought them. They had to hold me down. They—”

  She stopped. She was not crying. “They were forcing my legs open. It was terrible. I tore out the tube, I bit my mother’s hand. I was wild. When I woke up, it was over. We had a hard time after that. She did what she thought was right, she meant well. I understand that. But it was forced on me, it never got talked about.” Christina went to the window. “My father didn’t know until afterward. My mother tricked him, too. So we went for a lot of drives. I needed somebody to help me, and he said he was going to teach me to drive his Mustang, and he did. We went for a lot of long drives—I mean like two hundred miles—and he’d let me drive and smoke cigarettes, anything I wanted. He understood. He understood I had to work this out. He’d talk to me, he was very understanding. He’d say that I was strong and I’d get past this and I was going to be okay. After a few months, I was allowed to drive the Mustang by myself. It made my mother upset. She wasn’t allowed to drive it. My father knew I would be careful with it and I was. I paid for the gas. The driving calmed me down. I got through like two years that way, and then I was fine. I had sex, real sex I mean, in that car for the first time, and I told my dad, maybe a little defiantly, like, Look what I did. And he was very sweet. He asked, Was the guy gentle? And I said yes. He was treating me like an adult, unlike my mother.

  “So I guess that was why I put the money in the car. I wanted my father to find those boxes and not have to worry. It was stupid, Charlie, it was so incredibly stupid. I loved him so much, you know? I just wanted to—I don’t know, I wanted—”

  “Redemption,” Charlie said, in a voice far from himself. “You wanted redemption.” He was tired now, but he asked, “I don’t understand why you didn’t just head down to Florida as soon as you got out of prison.”

  “Because I don’t want my mother caught in this.” She lit a new cigarette. “I think Tony got me out of prison, Charlie. My sentence wasn’t over yet. I think he did something with the police, paid somebody, and they just released me.”

  “He knows you took the money.”

  She nodded. “I have to assume that.”

  “What does Tony want now, the money or reve
nge?”

  “Probably the money,” she answered.

  “Could you retrieve it and give it back?”

  She didn’t answer him directly but instead went to her purse and pulled out a picture. “This is what they did last week, that first night we were together. This is what was waiting for me when I went home, Charlie.”

  He looked at the Polaroid. A man holding the wet stump of his arm, T-shirt spattered with what looked like blood. “Who is that?”

  “That’s Rick.”

  Leave, he told himself. “Where’s he now?”

  “I don’t know … I doubt they killed him, though.”

  Charlie studied the photograph, then set it aside. I need sleep, he thought. I’ll deal with all this in the morning, figure out what to do next. They were safe in the hotel. He picked up the phone and requested a 6:45 wake-up. She got under the blankets. He rolled onto his side behind her. Ellie’s sleeping alone, he thought sadly. Alone in her sleeping-pill dreams.

  “Been a long time since I spent the night with a man,” Christina murmured. “It’s nice.”

  “You feel safe?” he asked softly.

  She gathered his hand toward herself. “Starting to.”

  AWAKE, RUNNING ON CHINA TIME, light melting in through the window, clock said 6:15. He eased out of bed, wanting to leave now yet afraid to break the spell and rush back into his life. Teknetrix, Ellie. Back felt stiff. Needed the smelly tea. He looked at his feet—bony, chopped up on one side, cadaverous veins. He felt exhausted—sleepy, mouth sour—yet oddly alive. Get yourself into the game, Charlie. He drifted through the room. She looked small and vulnerable in the bed. He turned on the television, hitting the mute button, flashed through thirty channels, saw Dan Marino throw a touchdown pass. Still kind of missed Don Shula. He turned it off and stared at her cigarette butts. Goddammit, Charlie, he told himself, you’re fifty-eight years old, you spent the night with a woman who just got out of prison, who lied to you …

  He noticed the photo of the boyfriend on the table. A big guy standing there holding his wet stump. Frightening. I really should just leave, he thought. Melissa—he meant Christina—was nothing but trouble. She lay there so innocently, dead asleep, hair a mess, a knuckle against her lips. He found her bag and not-so-guiltily looked inside. A brush, some change. A cell phone. He examined the brand and smiled to himself—it probably had Teknetrix components inside. Cosmetics. Pencil. Not much. Same stuff as Ellie, probably. Women were funny about their purses—regarded them as their privates. The menu of a restaurant called the Jim-Jack. A tiny flask of perfume. His own business card, with all his work printed on it, including his cell phone. Her wallet. What was inside? No credit cards, no driver’s license, just a tattered Social Security card. Nothing with her picture on it. How could that be? She’d talked a lot about driving but had no license. Do they take away your license if you go to prison? He doubted it. Nothing in the bag absolutely verified the identity of the woman on the bed.

  Oh shit, he thought. Maybe the Christina name is made up, too. He retrieved her cell phone, clicked it on, and scrolled through its screen of phone numbers, a hundred or more, finding it a very strange group: pharmaceutical companies, German photo agencies, an East Side furniture dealer, a hotel in London he’d never heard of, two women’s names to which “ENEMA OK” was appended—and, all with addresses in lower Manhattan, a plumber, an electrician, a house painter, a plasterer, and a heating oil company. No one named Rick or Tony or Christina or Melissa or any of the other names she’d mentioned. I don’t fucking get it, Charlie thought, putting the phone back in her bag, I’m completely lost here.

  Coming up to 6:30. He remembered the Sir Henry Lai phone in the bathroom and went in and closed the door. And turned on the heater. The hum would mask his voice. Sarasota, Florida, she’d said, Anita Welles. He called information down there. There is only an A. Welles listed, said the operator. He wrote the number down. She could’ve made this name up, he thought. I wonder if this number really is her mother’s; maybe Christina is actually Anita. The name’s not so far off. Maybe A. Welles is Christina’s husband, a fact that I would not mind knowing. Allan Welles. Albert Welles. And what might any of this have to do with German photo agencies? Everything she told me could have been false, Charlie decided. I need a baseline reality.

  He picked up the phone again. I have the right to do this, he thought.

  He punched in the Florida number. On the third ring, a woman’s voice croaked, “Hello?”

  “Is this the home of Christina Welles?”

  “I’m her mother,” came the reply.

  “Anita Welles?”

  “Yes. Where is she?”

  “She’s here in New York,” said Charlie, relieved. “She’s fine. I apologize about how early it is.”

  “Oh, I’ve been up an hour, sugar,” said her mother agreeably, as if talking to an old friend. “Had too much coffee already. We might get another hurricane. I’m sick of them. Last one wrecked my garage. This her friend? She’s been trying to reach me. Tell her I’m here, will be here all day, and I want to talk to her.”

  “Sure,” Charlie answered, feeling much better.

  “You’re calling from New York, you say?”

  “I’m a friend.”

  “She’s fine?”

  “She’s asleep right now.”

  The mother was getting curious. “You sound like an older friend.”

  “I suppose I am.” He wanted to get off the phone. “Would you like her to call you at any certain time?”

  “I’ll be here all day. Maybe I should call there, just so I don’t miss her.”

  “Oh.”

  “May I have your number?”

  He stared at the phone. Christina might not want her mother to know where she was. On the other hand, she might be glad. On the third hand, they’d be leaving the room soon anyway.

  “I have a pencil,” said her mother, prompting him.

  He gave her the hotel number. “Ask for Suite 840.”

  “You tell her I can’t wait to talk.”

  Now he stood over Christina for a few minutes, watching her affectionately. He wanted to see her naked again, especially her smooth breasts, but didn’t dare pull away the sheet. The night came back to him. It’d be better for all concerned, he realized, if he just somehow forgot the sex, particularly if he wanted to be able to putter along with Ellie once a week or so, go back to old-people sex. And maybe it was better if Christina did not see him naked in the morning light.

  In the bathroom, again with the door shut, he canceled the wake-up call, then dialed his apartment to see if Ellie had left a message, which she hadn’t. In the game here, Charlie told himself. He showered then, letting the hot water pound him as he soaped and resoaped his crotch. He’d be walking into his apartment building unshaven, he realized, in the same clothes from the day before, but so be it. He toweled off and dressed in the steamy bathroom, and when he finally emerged, he found Christina sitting awake in the bed.

  “You want some breakfast?”

  “Sure,” she said groggily.

  “I let you sleep a little longer.”

  She pulled a pillow toward her. “What time is it?”

  “Almost seven-thirty.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I did a sort of ridiculous, paranoid thing,” he confessed with a smile.

  She rolled over, as if to drift back to sleep. “What?”

  “I called your mother.”

  She frowned. “Say that again?”

  “I called your mother.”

  She looked at him in horror, no longer sleepy. “When?”

  “Maybe an hour ago. I just wanted to check to see if you were who you said you were. She said she might give you a call here.”

  “You gave her this number?”

  “I didn’t think it compromised me much.”

  “You?” She suddenly threw back the covers and looked for her clothes. “You? I can’t believe it.”

 
“What?” he said.

  “That was incredibly stupid,” she cried hatefully, wriggling into her panties and bra. “Who gave you the right? Now they know where I am! God! For someone who makes fucking phone parts, you’re pretty stupid!”

  “Wait, now—” he began, confused and hurt.

  She was shaking, eyes wild. “I have to get out of here.”

  He put his arms around her. “Now, look—”

  “You fucking jerk!” she screamed, breaking loose from him and pulling on her heels. “They’re probably downstairs, waiting!”

  She stuffed her remaining things in her bag and walked straight out the door. He looked around the room quickly, gathered up his watch and wallet and the picture of the boyfriend, since it seemed somehow incriminating, and followed her.

  In the elevator down, she shook her head in fury: “Tony or the cops or somebody has her phone bugged.”

  “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “I didn’t think you would fucking call my mother, Charlie!” The elevator doors opened. Christina stalked quickly toward the hotel entrance, head down. “I can’t believe you did that,” she hissed.

  They exited the hotel on Sixty-first Street, and he was about to suggest they find a place to eat breakfast when she hurried away from him.

 

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