Chase shook her head and looked over her shoulder. Unsurprisingly, Louisa remained seated, but now she was staring at Chase with the same pleasant expression plastered on her wide face.
Chase gave her plate a quick rinse, put in the dry rack, and then walked over to Louisa.
“Why did you think I was in law enforcement?” she asked, leaning down.
Louisa shrugged and methodically chewed a mouthful of rice.
Chase nodded.
“Okay, I get it. Sure. Communication… it’s a two-way street, right? I’ll tell you what, Louisa, if you want to chat, swing by my dorm after you finish your lunch.”
***
Chase waited patiently in her dorm room for a good hour before giving up.
Louisa wasn’t coming.
The strange lady had correctly pegged her as a liar, and then just left the comment to fester.
What right does she have to call me out for being a liar? We’re all liars here. If we didn’t lie, we wouldn’t be in rehab. We lied to our husbands, our children, our friends, our parents… we lied to them when we said we were going to the store to grab some groceries, only to come back hours later with bloodshot eyes, fresh track marks, and groceries free.
We’re all liars… so what right does Louisa have to call me out on it? And why do I care so much?
For the first time in a long while, Chase’s left arm started to itch. It wasn’t a strong itch, and she easily resisted the urge. The track marks were still there, of course; they had faded over time and unless you were really looking for them, they would be difficult to notice. But Chase noticed. She noticed every one of the small red dots and attributed each of them to a painful part of her life.
They would be with her forever, she knew. No amount of living in the present, as Dr. Matteo instructed, would eliminate the scars of her past.
As Chase paced back and forth inside her dorm, she could feel her blood pressure rising, her frustration and anger swelling.
The only thing was, she really didn’t know why.
Grinding her teeth now, Chase continued to pace.
Yes, she’d lied. She’d lied to Felix, to Brad, to Stitts. She’d literally lied to everyone she’d ever cared about.
Just as Chase was about to lose her temper, a voice from behind her drew her attention.
“I guess you’re wondering why I called you a liar?” Louisa said with a grin as she stepped into Chase’s dorm. “Well, because I lied too.”
Chapter 6
“Mom!” Stitts shouted.
Stitts’s mother, clad only in a sheer nightgown, stood in the middle of the road. Her blond hair was a mess, completing the illusion that she’d just awoken. Behind her, Stitts could see the door of her semi-detached open wide.
Maria Stitts turned and when she saw Jeremy, her face lit up. There was a smudge of lipstick that extended beyond her lips.
“Jeremy!” She exclaimed, throwing her arms wide. “So nice of you to visit.”
The nightgown she wore was adorned with several prominent coffee stains on the front and was so loose-fitting that he could see the outline of her breasts beneath. A light breeze rippled up the street and her nightgown rose a little, revealing the inside of varicose-ridden thighs.
Stitts hurried toward his mother and when he reached her, he wrapped his arms around her protectively and moved towards the house.
“Mom, what happened? Are you okay?”
“Oh, I’m fine, sweetie. Just wanted to get some fresh air.”
Stitts glanced around, noting that while no one as of yet had come out of their homes, many a shutter were spread wide.
“Isn’t it a beautiful day, sweetie?” Maria said as Stitts led her up the steps.
“Just peachy,” he replied. As he reached the door, a tanned woman with short black hair emerged from the adjacent house.
Stitts ushered his mother inside and then hung in the doorway for a moment.
“Belinda?” He asked.
The frightened-looking woman nodded.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but it’s just that… I mean… I didn’t—”
“Thank you,” he replied briskly. Before the woman could ramble on, Stitts hurried inside. “Mom? What’s going on? What happened—”
All of Stitts’s breath was suddenly sucked from his lungs. The house looked as if it had been robbed: the TV, the one that he had bought his mother for her birthday a few years back, was missing from the mantle, all the dresser drawers were pulled out, and even the fucking VCR — who in the hell wants a VCR? — was gone.
In a word, the place looked ransacked.
“What the hell happened?” he gasped.
Maria Stitts took a seat in her leather recliner — that, thankfully, was still there — and then crossed her pale legs. Smirking, she pulled a cigarette out of the side table and lit it.
“Oh, honey, you worry too much. Everything’s fine. Some friends came by, said they wanted to borrow some stuff. They said they’d bring it back.”
Stitts blinked. For a moment, he considered that this was all part of an elaborate prank. After all, the last time he’d seen his mother over the holidays, she’d been fine. Maybe a little more talkative than he was used to, but otherwise normal.
This, on the other hand, was unequivocally not normal.
The lipstick on the cheek, wearing a nightgown in the middle of the street, and the… giving away of her things?
Stitts buried his face in his hands for a moment and massaged his temples. Then he pulled free and lit his own cigarette.
“Mom, you’ve been robbed,” he said at last.
Maria laughed then, a high-pitched titter that Stitts had never heard before.
“Oh, don’t be silly. It’s just some nice guys I met online; they’re borrowing some things for a while.”
Stitts ground his teeth.
“Online? Mom… how did you… fuck.”
The smile suddenly slid off Maria’s face.
“Watch your language, Jeremy.”
Stitts’s mind was racing, running through every possible scenario that could explain his mother’s odd behavior. Did she have a stroke? Was she suffering from rapid onset Alzheimer’s? Was she drunk? High?
“Mom?” he asked in a soft voice. “Did you take something?”
“Something? Like—” she wagged a finger. “Like drugs? Oh, Jeremy, I don’t take drugs. You know that. All I—”
A loud knock interrupted the woman. Stitts rested his cigarette on the ashtray and then made his way to the door.
Thinking that it was Belinda again, he pulled it wide, ready to thank the woman for a second time. Only it wasn’t her. Standing on the stoop was a young man with bleach blond hair and acne scars on his cheeks.
Stitts’s eyes narrowed.
“Uh, is Maria still around?”
“Who are you?”
The man’s lower lip curled.
“Who am I? Who the fuck are you? Maria told me to come by and borrow whatever I want.”
Stitts’s blood started to boil.
“You fucking robbed her.”
“I didn’t rob shit. She be givin’ stuff away, I told you dat. And your girlfriend be—”
“Girlfriend?” Stitts snapped. “That’s my mom.”
The kid sucked his teeth.
“Yeah, whatever. I just came to pick up a watch.”
Stitts’s mind was boggled.
“You better get the fuck out of here, right now,” he seethed.
In his periphery, he saw the punk’s hands ball into fists.
“Yeah, what you gonna—”
Stitts lost it; all the stressors of the past few months, starting with what had happened with Chase, then with her incompetent replacements, and now this. Without thinking, he grabbed the kid by the throat with his right hand and squeezed hard. The punk’s eyes bulged and he instantly started to strike Stitts’s arms with his fists. This didn’t last long; he stopped when Stitts pulled his pistol from the holster on th
e inside of his jacket and pressed it against his pale forehead.
“You stay the fuck away from here, you got that?”
The kid wheezed something that Stitts couldn’t make out, not that it would have mattered, anyway. There was nothing that he could say that would stem Stitts’s flow of rage.
“You stay the fuck away!” he shouted, pressing the pistol against his forehead.
“Jeremy! What are you doing? Let go of him!”
His mother’s voice brought him back to reality, and he released the punk. Stitts had pressed his pistol so hard against his forehead, that it left a circular mark directly in the center.
“You fucking crazy, man. You fucking psycho, you know that?” The boy croaked as he stumbled down the steps.
“Get the fuck out of here and never come back!” Stitts shouted after him.
Chapter 7
“What do you mean, you lied?” Chase asked.
Louisa stepped into the dorm room and closed the door gently behind her. Then she turned to face Chase.
“You and I are a lot alike, and it’s not just because we’re both mothers. We’ve been through something, something very similar, if I daresay.”
Chase chewed the inside of her lip, trying to figure out what the hell the woman was talking about without giving any more of her own story away. In the end, it didn’t matter; Louisa did the talking.
“I wasn’t taken for 48 hours, Chase,” she began, taking a seat on the small cot across from Chase. “I was gone for two weeks. Thirty years ago, I was walking home from school when a van pulled up beside me and offered me a ride.”
A lump in Chase’s throat suddenly made it hard to swallow. In fact, the situation was so surreal, that she didn’t really believe it. For a moment, a brief but a tangible period of time, she thought that she was high, that somehow, she had scored some heroin and had injected it.
When she didn’t speak, couldn’t speak, Louisa continued.
“The man in the van asked if I wanted a ride. It was so hot out and—”
Chase’s voice suddenly returned.
“Shut up,” she croaked.
Louisa raised an eyebrow.
“Excuse me?”
Chase aimed a finger directly at the woman’s face and strode forward.
“You shut the fuck up. I don’t know who told you this, I don’t know if it was Dr. Matteo, or Stitts, or someone else, but you stop this right now. I’m warning you.”
Louisa’s calm demeanor suddenly broke and for a second she looked frightened. But then her gaze grew hard again.
“You need to calm down, Chase. I came to you because I think we have something in common. I think that we can help each other—”
Chase was seeing red now. She knew she was about to lose control, to fly off the handle, but she couldn’t help herself. This was a sick, twisted game, one that she had no interest in playing.
“How dare you?” she demanded. “How dare you come into my room and talk this bullshit to me.”
Louisa held her hands up defensively.
“It’s not bullshit, it’s the truth. All that other crap that you said about your son dying and I said about being lost 48 hours, those were the lies. This is the God damn truth. I was taken by a man in a van, a huge man, and I was held for nearly 2 weeks before I managed to escape. And you want to know what else? I wasn’t alone. There were other girls there too, girls my age. I could’ve saved them, Chase, but instead I ran. And every single day of my life, I—”
Chase punched the woman. She punched the woman directly in the nose. It was a satisfying blow, although, given her posture above Louisa, it lacked the impact she’d intended. Regardless, there was an audible crack followed by a gush of blood from both nostrils. Louisa flew backward and her head landed on the pillow. She was stunned, but recovered quickly and avoided Chase’s next punch.
Louisa was the much bigger woman, but she lacked Chase’s training. When she went to grab Chase’s arm, Chase managed to slip from her grip and punched her in the side.
“How dare you!” she screamed. “How fucking—” Chase stopped yelling when someone grabbed her arm. She turned around, intending to land a blow with her other hand before she realized that it was Nurse Whitfield.
“Chase! Stop it!”
Chase looked from Louisa with her bloodied nose and rage-filled eyes, to Nurse Whitfield who looked genuinely terrified.
More shouts and footsteps echoed down the hall, and Chase knew what was going to happen next. She’d seen it once before when Randy had gone off the deep end and smashed her TV. They’d given her an injection of some sort that put her to sleep for the better part of 24 hours.
The last thing that Chase wanted to do, no matter how much anger and hatred she harbored toward Luisa at that moment, was to sleep and dream.
She let go of Louisa’s arm and stepped back.
“I was trying to help you,” Louisa exclaimed, her voice considerably more nasal now that her nose had been broken. “I thought we could help each other.”
Chase, still seething, pointed a finger at her forehead.
“You can’t help me.”
“Calm down,” Nurse Whitfield ordered. “Everyone, just calm down. Louisa, make a stop at the nursing station and then head back to your room. Chase, you sit down and regain control of yourself.”
Two large orderlies suddenly appeared in the doorway of Chase’s dorm with Dr. Matteo in tow. Chase’s eyes flicked to the large syringe clutched in one of the orderly’s hands.
“What’s going on here?” Dr. Matteo demanded.
Louisa’s and Chase’s eyes met. Louisa looked away first.
“Nothing,” Louisa snapped. “I instigated it.”
Dr. Matteo gave her a once over as she walked by, his expression slack. When the woman was gone, Chase felt her blood pressure return to normal.
“Chase, are you okay?” Dr. Matteo asked.
The only thing Chase could do was offer a weak nod.
“I don’t know what the hell just happened, but I’ll get to the bottom of it. But first, you’ve got visitors.”
Chase recoiled.
“Visitors? I don’t think—”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea either,” Dr. Matteo said, lips pursed. “But I thought we were making progress.”
Chase ignored the comment.
“Is it Stitts? Is it Jeremy?”
Dr. Matteo shook his head slowly.
“No,” he said. “It’s two people who are supposed to be dead.”
Chapter 8
Stitts’s hands were shaking so badly that he could barely bring the cigarette to his lips without fumbling with it.
He couldn’t help but think he’d let his mother down. The first thing he had done after the altercation at the door was call his father. After briefly explaining the symptoms, the lipstick, the confusion, his father’s diagnosis had been immediate.
“You mother’s had a stroke.”
With tears in his eyes, Stitts watched as his mother was loaded onto the gurney by the paramedics and then slid into the back of the ambulance. He wanted to be in there with her, of course, but they wouldn’t allow it. Instead, he followed in his own car, smoking cigarette after cigarette, wondering how he’d lost his cool. Sure, he was under a lot of stress, but to put a gun to a kid’s head? He was beginning to think that Director Hampton was right, that he needed to see the doctor again.
The ambulance arrived at the hospital less than ten minutes later and Stitts parked out front. He followed the paramedics inside and realized that they must have given his mother a sedative, as she was now calm and relaxed and smiling up at him from the gurney.
His father had been right, of course; his father was always right. After a CT scan, the neurologist confirmed that his mother had had a stroke.
“Is she going to be okay?” Stitts asked with a tremor in his voice.
The neurologist, a beefy fellow who smelled of onions, took a deep breath before answering.
/> “It’s difficult to tell so soon. She’s had an ischemic stroke due to a blood clot. We have her on blood thinners and they seem to be breaking up the clot. So far, we don’t think that surgery is going to be necessary. We’ll know more over the next forty-eight hours. Right now, she’s sedated to keep her blood pressure low.”
Drawing Dead Page 3