by Averil Dean
“Look,” he says. “I know this seems—”
“Creepy?” I say, to diffuse the tension. But my flippant attitude has the opposite effect on Jack. He lifts his chin and barks out a laugh.
“Oh, that’s perfect.” He jerks off his glasses and tosses them on the table. “I’m creepy now. I am.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re not fooling anyone, sweetheart, with your sneaking around.” He drops the envelope and stands between me and the door, hands on his hips. “Where do you go when I’m at work? Because you’re sure as hell not at home, finishing that book. Due last month, wasn’t it?”
Heat floods my face. “And what exactly does that have to do with you?”
He stares at me. Raises his arms and lets them fall.
“What does it have to do with me? Jesus fucking Christ. What the fuck are we doing here? What does any of this have to do with me? You’re practically living in my house, doing my laundry, washing the goddamned coffee cups. You’re in my bed, I’m fucking you every night—”
His voice has risen to a thunderous pitch, vibrating hard against my ears.
“You’re on my mind every fucking second of the day. Goddamn. And you want to know what it has to do with me?”
“Hey, I don’t know what you think—”
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? You don’t tell me a goddamned thing. You’ve got me creeping around like some lovesick little schoolboy, because you won’t tell me what the hell is up with you.”
I hold up a hand, palm out. “Please. Don’t act like you were driven to it. Clearly you started collecting this shit long before ‘we’ were anything.”
“Really,” he says. “Remind me again how this started, I’ve forgotten the details. When exactly did ‘we’ become something? Was that before or after I found you in my bedroom?”
I sling my computer bag over one shoulder and push past him to the door.
“Where are you going?”
“Leaving.”
“The hell you are.”
He grabs my bag. I’m holding on, but when my hand slips off the strap, the bag swings out and knocks against a shelf. Two of the ships come crashing down and shatter on the hardwood floor. The sound explodes inside my ears. Shards of glass fly up at me, biting like a swarm of insects across my bare legs.
Jack steps toward me, his boots crunching on the floor, a swift flash of concern on his face. But I am beyond slowing down. I dive for my bag. Jack yanks it aside and flings it across the room. This time an entire shelf comes down, and all the bottles with it. I feel the loss of them immediately, a knifelike pain at the base of my throat. All the beautiful ships, with their tiny masts and decks and cannons, the carefully painted hulls, perfectly knotted ropes—gone.
I am incoherent with rage. My voice deepens to a stuttering growl, tripping over the first word: You, you, you...
He plants his feet, brings me on with both hands fluttering at the ceiling. His expression is so exasperated, so unafraid, that I draw back my whole arm and swing for him like a man, straight from the hip. My fist slams into his jaw and I feel a vicious stab of pain in my knuckles.
His head snaps back and he falls away a step. He gathers himself as if in slow motion. When his eyes return to mine, they are ablaze with fury. Blind, graceless, unswerving. Deadly.
He wants to kill me. He could kill me right now.
Galvanized by fear, I abandon my laptop and spring for the hallway and the front door beyond. But my feet get tangled in the wreckage of the pirate ship. I lose my balance and fall to my knees. Jack grabs for me but I scramble backward, regain my footing and try again to get through the doorway. As I round the corner, he grabs a handful of my hair. He yanks me sideways, half off my feet, and spins me by the shoulder, slams me to the wall across the hallway with one hand flat against my chest.
“You want to start that shit with me?” he says. “Who do you think you’re fucking with?”
I shove him away with both hands.
“Psycho fucking sonofabitch—”
“That’s right. I’m psycho now. I’m creepy.”
I duck my head aside and try to get under his arm and out the door. My heartbeat roars. A white-hot pressure builds behind my eyes.
Jack takes my chin in his hand and forces my face forward. His nose is inches from mine.
“How about you tell me what’s up with you,” he says. “How about you explain why this gets you off.”
I knock his hand away from my chin. “Or how about we figure out why it gets you off. You got no problem pushing me around—”
“That’s right. I don’t.”
His hand opens flat against my chest, moves up to circle my throat. His fingers clench and release, allowing air and taking it away. Outside, rain sluices down the gutters, dribbles to the sidewalk under the window. Down the street, a dog barks three times, then goes silent. My strangled breath is the only sound in the room.
I reach between us, slide my hand into his shirt pocket and pull out his lighter. With his fingers still tight around my throat, I flick the lighter, raise my arm to shoulder level and hold the flame beneath my wrist.
He frowns. “What the fuck.”
I don’t blink or look away. My eyes remain locked on his face as the flame begins to burn my skin. Pain drives into my wrist, shoots up my arm and down the center of my body like a superheated drill through the top of my head, setting my whole mind afire.
“Stop,” he says.
Ripples of heat rise in the narrow space between us. I watch his face; the oval beads of sweat that spring from his upper lip gather at his hairline and slither into his eyebrows. Pain rages inside my head, a dull roar at the base of my skull. My hand begins to shake.
Jack isn’t watching the flame. His stare is nailed to mine, and in his expression is the depth of our shared perversion, this mutual need to locate the line. His eyebrows knit together as his head tips slowly to one side. A drop of sweat slides off a strand of his hair and lands like a hot coal on my elbow.
“Stop,” he says. “Jesus Christ—”
I purse my lips, blow a slow breath of cool air across his flushed, damp face.
I smile.
He grabs the lighter and throws it sidearm down the hall, spitting my name like a curse.
“You have not come close,” I tell him.
I raise my hands above my head, stretched to the ceiling, waiting. I lift my knee, press it to his groin, pass it back and forth over his erection to prove my point.
He stares at me as though I am a stranger to him, but he’s jerking his own boxers down my thighs, unbuttoning his jeans, lifting me up the wall with his hands around my ass. He pulls me down on top of him and slams his hips against me. The pressure forces a gasp through my teeth.
“How do I get close, then,” he says. He frees one hand and clutches at my hair. “What’s enough for you?”
He pushes my chin aside with his thumb and lowers his mouth to my neck.
“You want me to choke you,” he says, and his teeth graze my skin, “beat you, fuck you up the ass, what is it...”
I open my legs, tilt my hips to accommodate him. I let my eyes drift closed, relieved finally to have relinquished control—or demanded that he take it from me. For a few seconds, a few precious minutes, I am helpless. My body is not mine—it belongs to Jack until he’s through.
He moves his hand down the front of my body, over my breasts. He bites my shoulder, my neck, my lower lip. His incisors are sharp against my tongue.
“What happened to you,” he says into my mouth.
He cups one hand under my thigh, wraps the other around the burn on my arm and pins it to the wall next to our faces. The pain is so intense that it feels as if my body is a lightning
rod, gathering volts of wild, sudden, massive energy. I pull him closer with one leg around his hips. His thrusts get smoother, deeper and I spread my thighs until my clitoris is pressed to his groin. I cry out, clinging to him, arching back for more, and feel his response inside me as he begins to lose control.
“Say it, say yes, say it...”
Tears spring to my eyes and just as quickly I am coming, riding a crest of agonized pleasure, grinding against him, my ankles locked around his waist.
“Yes.” I sigh, and let go.
* * *
Jack carries me to the kitchen, sets me on the counter and brings an ice pack for my wrist. The skin is blistered, furiously red, insulted. Jack slathers it with ointment, lays a square of gauze over the burn and covers it with an enormous Band-Aid. He smooths it down and presses a kiss into my hand.
I lay my forehead in the bend of his neck and draw a long, shuddering sigh.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I’m in my car. The engine is ticking, cooling down, and I’m chain-smoking weed from a glass pipe while I watch people come and go from a club in downtown Seattle. The music thumps softly at my windows, careens into the night air every time the door opens. A neon sign flickers against the rain-streaked side of the bar: Cherries. Next to it is a pair of nubile cherries in a polka-dot bra, flashing on and off, painting my windshield with pink and green light.
I’ve been here before. Last week I waited down the street from the gray house and watched Ray Burbank drive away in his long-nosed sedan, then rode behind him on the ferry, across the silent Sound, filtering down from four-lane roads to two, until he pulled into the back of this lot, parked and went inside. This is as far as I’ve gone. Always before tonight, I’ve given up and gone home, knowing nothing more about him than I did to begin with.
But the conversation with Amanda has unsettled me. I feel vaguely in need of reassurance, a refueling of the hatred I have always felt for the man who let my mother die.
I close my eyes, call up my decade-old memories, the sound of my mother crying the night the glass broke and lodged in my foot, that last terrible night when at ten years old I lay dry-eyed and tense, wrapped in the sounds of my mother’s grief. From the next room, for hours after she sent me away, I listened to her sobbing, coughing, the agonized tightness of her breath, like air through a crimped rubber hose. I had pried the glass from my foot earlier, but dug it out of the trash to use it again—the first wavering lines of my lifelong addiction, the only way to get close enough to her pain to understand it. The only way I could think to punish myself for not knowing what to do.
At 1:13 a.m., I heard Ray’s car pull into the driveway. The door opened, closed. Then, nothing. Not my mother’s wheezing, not the sobs or moaning. No yelling or cursing as I’d expected.
Something about the silence unnerved me. I limped to the door and listened, twisting my cotton nightgown around my finger, waiting. Ray began to snore.
I gnawed on my thumbnail. My mom had made it clear that she didn’t want me around. I understood that; it had always been our way to steer clear of each other in times of stress. But maybe she was asleep in her room. Maybe I could sleep, too, knowing it was over. I would pretend I needed to use the bathroom. If everything was okay, I could go back to bed.
I opened the door. The house was filled with a thick silence, through which the soft sounds of Ray’s snores vibrated like a foghorn from a distant vessel. I crept down the hall. Past the couch, where he was sprawled with one arm trailing to the floor, still wearing his shoes, his face repellently slack-mouthed and vacant.
“I hate you,” I whispered.
I passed him, crossed the living room to their bedroom. The door was ajar, so I pushed it and looked inside. My mom was not there. Not in the bathroom, either. The worm of apprehension that had brought me out of my room swelled and wriggled in my throat, deep inside my chest.
Why could I not hear her?
I retraced my steps, then checked the kitchen. The dining room. Nothing.
“Mom?” I said. And, louder, “Mom?”
I decided to go outside and look for her car. That’s when I found her.
She was huddled by the front door, propped in the corner with her knees drawn up to her chest. Her arms hung awkwardly at her sides as though they’d fallen there. One hand lay on the floor, palm up, the fingers curled and gray and locked in place. A deep blue color had settled in her lips to form a halo around her open mouth.
Don’t call an ambulance.
My mother’s long-standing admonition flashed through my mind. Always since Nana died, my mother had warned me in no uncertain terms not to call an ambulance for her.
“We can’t afford it,” she said. “One ambulance ride would bankrupt us. If I have an attack, just bring my inhaler. I’ll be fine.”
I knelt beside her. The muscles of her neck stood out like pillars along the column of her windpipe. Her breath was quick and shallow as a bird’s.
“Mom!” My voice sounded hollow. “Mom...”
Her eyes were open, staring. As I shook her, the careful arrangement of her limbs came undone. She crumpled under my hands and slipped sideways to the floor.
I leaped up and ran to the kitchen drawer where she kept her medications.
But there was nothing there. The drawer was full of junk—Ray’s junk. I put both hands in and pulled the contents out, right to the floor. Her inhaler should have been there, at the front, in a plastic bag. It should have been there, right there, right at the front. Ready to use. It should have been right there.
And it wasn’t.
I abandoned the drawer and scrambled around the corner to where her purse was hanging from the back of a dining room chair. I jerked it down and turned it over, spilling the contents over the chipped plastic tabletop.
“Come on,” I muttered. Feverish tears flooded my eyes and clouded my vision. I swiped at them impatiently, looking with disbelief at the items on the table: lipstick, keys, old receipts, powder, nail clippers, checkbook... I put my hand into the bag, all the side pockets. Nothing.
I backed away. The light seemed to fade from the edges of the room.
“Ray,” I said. I went to him, shook him hard with my fists balled up around the front of his shirt. “Wake up! Ray—Ray—”
He opened his eyes, smacked his lips. His breath rushed up at me, a nauseating stench of cigarettes and an acrid, medicinal smell I couldn’t place. Hatred rose in my chest.
“My mom’s inhaler, where is it, hurry—”
He stared at me with no expression on his face. Not worry, not terror, not even anger at being awakened. Nothing.
I screamed at him, my voice sharp as glass in the quiet room. “Where is my mom’s inhaler!”
He blinked.
I ran to the phone and dialed 9-1-1.
But even as I hovered over my mother with the phone in my hand and the voice on the line calling, Hello, hello, I knew she was already gone. I knew it from Schultzie. From Nana.
My mother’s face was a cold blue husk, dry and empty. Not a face anymore, not a person, not my mother.
All the blood seemed to slide from the center of my body outward, pooling in my feet and the tips of my fingers. My limbs were ropes, with heavy stones at the ends where my feet and hands used to be. Everything seemed far away, at the end of a dark tunnel, and my mind was a pinpoint of light rushing through.
From a distance came a high-pitched scream. A siren. Feet and legs trampling, a commotion, a bag, a bed with wheels that squeaked. Voices and hands, my feet moving, numb.
And Ray, upright at last, still and silent. Our eyes met for the last time over the body of my mother.
The lights are flashing now behind my eyelids, pink and green. When I sit up and look around, I see the parking lot is almost full. A truck pulls up next to me, and
two young women spill out and scamper through the rain toward the flashing sign.
I hit the pipe until I’m numb, let the weed lift me from the car and carry me into a small crowd of night-dressed couples at the front door. I show my ID to the guy at the door and allow myself to be shuffled inside.
The music strikes my ears like a freight train bearing down, all whistle and weight. I am momentarily disoriented by the crowd and shrieking laughter, the flashing strobe lights and the damp musk of closely packed bodies. I grit my teeth and try to find a bubble of peace inside my buzz as I set off for the bar.
The bartender is a young blonde in a pink leather bustier. She points at me.
“Seven and seven,” I say, because it’s the only cocktail I know.
There is no sign of Ray. But this is a big place. I take my drink upstairs, walking with as much purpose as I can muster, as if I have friends to meet. I look straight ahead, avoiding eye contact. At the top of the stairs, I see a free corner against the rail, and scurry to claim it.
Now I feel better. Safer. Backed to the wall, hip to the rail, with a drink in hand, carefully expressionless as I look out over the throng of dancers on the floor below. I see a man who looks like Jack, passing through the front door, and feel a pang of longing.
If Jack were here, he would take all this in hand. He would know what to do, how to find Ray, how to solve this unsolvable problem. But I’ve been lying to Jack since we met, and it’s too late to turn back now. Nana would expect me to finish what I started, and I’m very close.
“Hey, are you here alone?”
The voice at my shoulder jars me back to the present. My drink sloshes inside the glass and drips over the rail. A man is beside me. He’s short and wide, a brick of a man, with mottled cheeks and a blond brush mustache.
“No,” I tell him, collecting myself. His breath smells like stale beer and I turn slightly aside.
“Really? Where are your friends?”
“Lost them.” My voice is nearly inaudible over the music.
He leans back, as if I’ve told a whopper, his mouth a comedy of disbelief.