by Jeff Vrolyks
Chapter Nine
It was delightfully warm and sunny at the baseball field. The lush green fresh-cut grass looked too perfect to be real, smelled too wonderful to be synthetic. You could hear the satisfying sounds of baseballs thudding into supple leather mitts, wooden bats cracking into balls as men in red jerseys fielded practice pop-flies. Perfect baseball weather it was, on a perfect late spring day. It was the same ballpark Mae had first met Trent, four months ago, when his Roseville Jaguars stomped all over the Sacramento Monarchs. It seemed a lot longer than four months ago; it felt like lifetimes. It was in fact two lives ago: Mae’s mother Rebecca and father David. She recalled how Breuer was with her that evening, if only in her mind, playing cupid by bringing Trent into her life. What a magical evening that had been. The best day of her life, without question. And my-oh-my did it come with severe consequences, both physical and emotional. It was that night she lost her virginity in his Roseville apartment, after she had decided that she wanted to experience love in its fullest extent before the medicine her parents were force-feeding her shut off the lights, turned her into a mind-numbed robot of a girl; in a word, a zombie. She had returned home the next morning with an assortment of concealed bruises blotching her body. Bruises from aggressive love-making. Bruises her mom found and went ape-shit over. That was the beginning of her being grounded for a month; her interludes with Trent then became secretive. It was both a wonderful time and horrific time, as her parents were soon killed by the SacTown Slayer, still at large. ‘Still at large’ could be an epithet for the SacTown Slayer, being how often it is used. Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, SacTown Slayer the Still at Large. The expression ‘still at large’ was dead wrong in this case. Large signifies the world, meaning the killer could be anywhere on the planet. ‘Still at Small’ would be more fitting. The son of a bitch hadn’t killed a single person outside a four mile radius in southwest Sacramento.
For the hundredth time today Mae remembered Breuer. What surprised her wasn’t how often she was thinking about him, but that she was doing so longingly! Who in their right mind would long to reunite with a make-believe friend? It didn’t seem possible that he was all inside her head. Not at first, at least. She had finally and grudgingly come to the conclusion that he was imaginary, after Trent had hammered home that assertion time and time again, and his reasoning was pretty sound. Pretty damned unimpeachable, though she couldn’t recall a single reason at that moment. “Beings like Breuer don’t exist in the real world; they are products of wild imaginations.” That’s a summation of the preamble to his litany of circumstantial evidence against Breuer. Mae supposed she must have one heck of an imagination. She didn’t believe she did, though. She was never much of a dreamer; Mae was grounded in reality.
But how could she account for certain things if Breuer didn’t exist? Some of her shared experiences with Breuer could be explained away, but not all of them. Not nearly enough of them. When she was in the bathroom just seconds away from spitting her medicine hidden under her tongue into the toilet, Breuer had warned that Rebecca was coming to listen at the door, and he was right. She supposed maybe she had just assumed that would be the case, or maybe heard her padding down the hall. If that was the only occurrence it would be a lot easier dismissing Breuer as a figment of her wild imagination.
Then there was Breuer leading her to the baseball field to meet Trent, and he had mentioned him by name. That night she met Trent; Breuer had been right about him. How could she have known it in advance to the encounter? She’d have to be psychic to know that, wouldn’t she? Maybe there was an explanation there somewhere, one that continued to elude her.
Also was the time Breuer employed a plan that led her into being in back of a station wagon as she was being conducted down the interstate by her kidnappers. He had instructed her what to tell her kidnappers to instigate a car accident that would claim their lives while sparing hers. She was all of ten years old! She couldn’t have devised such a fantastic plan as that, a plan that infallibly killed the both of them, and led to reuniting with her biological parents.
She supposed Breuer couldn’t be real. As strong as the argument made for his being real was the one made for his being imagined. The pills her parents had given her—some lithium compound—had put an end to her seeing him. Squashed it like a miserable bug. It was hard to refute the efficiency the medicine had on her ceasing to see Breuer. The pills were for crazies, and when she took them Breuer went away quickly and completely. In a court of law, if such circumstantial evidence was expounded to sensible jurors, Mae judged that many of them would come to their conclusions right then and there, that he was imagined.
Interestingly though, when her folks died and she stopped taking the crazy pills, Breuer didn’t return. She had only taken them for maybe a month, maybe six weeks, but it was long enough to cure her from hallucinating Breuer. He was out of her life now.
The way she saw it, there were only two possibilities: he truly was an imagined friend, or he was not and willfully left Mae’s life. Breuer loved her with all his heart, he had repeatedly vowed that and she believed him. If that were the case, he wouldn’t abandon her, especially when she needed him the most: following the tragedy of her parents’ murders. Trent was wise beyond his eighteen years, and was certain of Breuer’s non-existence, so she would do good to agree with him, put to rest her many toils over the matter. She thought she had done just that, but that damned phone call this morning.
Her cellphone rang in her purse, pulling her out of deep thought.
She nervously opened her purse, praying it would be anyone other than Private Caller. She was cognizant of how great a coincidence it would be having ruminated over Breuer’s existence one minute and receiving a phone call from him the next. She flipped open her phone and grimaced: it was Private Caller. Before answering she glanced to the field to where Trent was warming up, holding and stretching his hamstrings. His eyes were on Mae in the bleachers. She waved at him with a forced smile and took the phone call.
“Hello?”
“Mae, don’t hang up on me this time.”
She lowered the phone undecidedly before returning it to her ear. It was evident to Trent what was happening with his girlfriend. The crazies were creeping back, he feared. This was no laughing matter, no trifling problem. This was serious shit. His willingness to drive a combined eighteen hours to procure expensive medicine was proof of how much his girlfriend’s sanity meant to him. He erected from his stretch and began jogging toward her.
“Who are you?” She said accusatorily.
“You know who I am. Look, you have to listen to me. Trent isn’t who you think he is. And you have to stop taking—”
She ended the call, dropped the phone into her purse and zipped it. It wasn’t hot enough out to warrant the sweat on her brow, but she felt it. And her mouth was suddenly dry. Her eyes prickled, tears not far off. Trent took the bleachers two steps at a time and stopped just before her, leered down at her.
“Who was that?” He said suspiciously.
“It… it…” She hated lying to him. He always knew when she wasn’t forthcoming, so it was pointless to lie. “It was Breuer,” she said defeatedly. Then amended, “I think it was Breuer. He didn’t say who it was.”
He gestured for the phone. She hung her head, retrieved the phone for him. He checked recent calls and sure enough she had one, just as she had earlier today; it wasn’t imagined. He didn’t know if he should be relieved or dismayed by that. It was good that the medicine was keeping her from imagining Breuer, but it wasn’t good that some asshole motherfucker was intruding in her life. Their lives. What did this prick have to gain by it? And how could he know about Mae’s Breuer? What else might he know? That was a question that soured his stomach and ramped up his heartbeat. Could it be that this caller knew other things?—things he shouldn’t be knowing? Secrets? Only three people knew his greatest secret, that he killed Mae’s parents, and they were himself and Mae’s dead parents.
And like Benjamin Franklin said, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. Or if you prefer, Dead men tell no tales.
The phone rang in Trent’s hand. Private Caller. The call was answered. Before Trent could say a word, a voice preempted him. “You’ll pay for this,” the unknown man said not maliciously but plainly, matter of factly.
“Who are you?” Trent returned.
“Go ahead and feed her one more pill, I dare you. It’ll be your ass, I guaran-damn-tee it.”
Trent’s eyes widened, face burned red. “Never call her again,” Trent threatened, “or you and me are going to have some serious fucking problems.” He spiked the phone down at the aluminum bleachers, shattering it into clusters of plastic and wires. People in the area looked alarmingly at Trent and Mae.
“Trent!” Mae cried and impulsively gathered the parts of her obliterated phone, half of which had fallen to the ground below the bleachers.
“Fuck him,” Trent exclaimed. He snapped his fingers: she looked up at him. His hateful expression halted production of her picking up parts. “If you hear from him again, if he calls your home number or visits you or whatever, you tell me right away. Do you understand me?”
She nodded, recommenced picking up phone parts; why she didn’t know. More to herself than him she said, “But I won’t be able to call you without a phone.”
“You have your retarded uncle’s home phone still. If that guy calls your home-phone, I want you to hang up on him and unplug it. Understood?”
She said yes and wondered what Uncle Matthew might think about that. She had the solitary advantage of Matthew’s inexorable sympathy, that he’d do anything for her just short of allowing her to live with Trent. She figured if she unplugged the home phone and explained to her uncle that she was receiving sexual prank calls, he’d be on board with it, especially being that he used his personal cell primarily.
As if Trent was reading her thoughts, he then said, “In fact, I want you to unplug the phone when you get home. If this stalker freak asshole can find your cell number, he can find your home number. Make some shit up to your uncle, he’ll believe you.”
Cautiously she said, “But how will we communicate?”
“You’ll be living with me.”
“Trent,” she said exasperatedly, “I told you that he won’t allow it, and I don’t have a choice: I’m a minor.”
“I’ll have a talk with him, don’t worry about that. I’ll get him to see things my way. Our way. What time does he get home from work?”
“If he doesn’t work overtime he gets home around three P.M. or so.”
“Today’s no good then. He works nights on weekdays, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Here’s what we’re going to do. Tomorrow after my classes I’ll come over and pick you up—you get home from school at what, 3:20? 3:30? Yeah, Matthew will be at work. Have your stuff packed. I’m driving you to my place.”
“Trent, I—”
“Don’t interrupt me. I’ll take you to my place and you’ll live with me from now on. I’ll have a talk with Matthew tomorrow night when he gets home from work, because he’ll be expecting you to be there. What time does he get home?”
“Around two A.M., give or take.”
“Okay. If for some reason I can’t talk Matthew into it, I’ll drive you back. Okay?”
She liked that. It was going to be the case, she had no doubt. “All right.”
“But that shouldn’t be the case,” he said and leaned forward to kiss Mae on the lips, smiled measuredly at her. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’ll take care of everything. I always do. Sit back and enjoy the game. I expect to hear you cheering for me.”
“I love you,” she said automatically.
Trent turned and descended two steps before stopping suddenly with an idea. It was a great one, one that he should have had earlier. If he was right, it would explain everything. Oftentimes the most simplest answer is the correct answer, and in this case it might be just that. Over his shoulder he said, “Do you write a journal or diary or something?”
“Yes. Why?”
He turned to face her, the gears in his head turning; eyes alight with ideas and understanding. “Where is it?” he asked.
She reflected, at first in the recent days, then having to go further back.
Impatient, Trent asked another question, a more critical one. “Could anyone have read it?”
“I haven’t made an entry since I moved to Uncle Matthew’s,” she replied. “It’s in a box in my room, I think. And I don’t know who’d want to read it, but I suppose my uncle could have, if he really wanted to. Why do you ask?”
He looked disappointedly at her. It was a look he often gave her before calling her retarded. “What do you think? Come on, think about it,” he said querulously. “Someone knows about your imaginary friend, is pretending to be him, right?” The ‘Feed her one more pill, I dare you’ part, well that could have been an idea born from reading her diary. She did most likely put an entry in there whining about being force-fed crazy pills by her distrusting parents. Who knows what else she put in that damned thing. Maybe she had suspected Trent was slipping her pills and included that in the diary. It wouldn’t surprise him. No more diary entries for Mae. That’s a fine new rule, one he should have implemented the day he met her. Their affairs were nobody’s fucking business but their own. And ink is just so… concrete, so permanent. It isn’t malleable like spoken words, like promises, like lies. The tongue beguiles while the hand signs its fate. Write nothing, say everything.
Trent imagined himself keeping a journal. What a laughable notion. How dangerous would that be? A one-hundred page book of evidence begging to be exhibit A in any number of trials. They’d burn him alive at the stake and the journal pages would fuel the fire.
It occurred to Mae that Trent was probably right about this diary thing. She couldn’t fathom anyone desiring to read it, though, let alone actually committing the act, that most vile molestation of her privacy. She wasn’t even a hundred-percent sure it was in the box she figured it to be in. She had moved hastily and shortly after her parent’s violent murders: what and where she packed things wasn’t on her mind; it wasn’t even a blip on the radar. And since then she has had zero ambitions of continuing her entries. It did make sense though, Trent’s allegory. And it would be helpful to her contention of being sane. The phone calls were indeed real, after all. And the caller didn’t sound like Breuer, though she couldn’t be certain. Maybe the caller was a man who read her diary, like Trent said.
“Hun, would you mind if I activated my old cellphone?” Mae asked. “I can see if Verizon will give me a new phone number, if you prefer.”
“I suppose. It would kind of suck not being able to get a hold of you whenever I want. We’ll talk later,” Trent said and left.