by Chris Page
Once he reached his refuge, he didn’t care to silence himself. The door creaked open, and slammed shut. He flipped the light on and the ordered mess came into view. He found his position at the center of it like a captain’s chair at the heart of command. His body went limp for a moment then relaxed into the seat. His arms draped along those of the desk chair, laid into familiar grooves in the worn cushioning. He sighed and spun in place. The wall, with its pictures and yarn, the story of his committed research, occupied his vision. He placed his hands on the desk where his fingertips found the binding of his scrapbook. They dragged along its surface and its sensation warmed his body like a shot. The comparison segued into the next motion.
He withdrew a bottle from the bottom right drawer and placed it atop the desk. A finger remained, awaiting his return.
It was the routine of it, the daily schedule that retained his stability. He could rely on the same ritual, the seat, the book, the liquor, and his work. It was discipline that kept him from collapse. He wouldn’t be found desperate and hungry. Hunger was dealt with in its allotted time throughout the day, as required. Everything was regimented. Even rage, hate, and revenge. Pragmatism was how he could accomplish his mission. Nothing had special significance, everything was calculated. He remained composed, and in the end, he would collapse the construction of his ambitions down around the associated parties to finish it. He was a machine. Its function was destruction.
He felt nothing.
Jake threw back the scotch.
He felt the burn chase after something in his chest, a flutter. It ignited then sank. He clenched his jaw and fist against the pain travelling into the pit of his guts.
He told himself he felt nothing.
24
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The shelves proved difficult to reach, the top ones where the remaining items were kept. Likely there were some ramen packets, rice, or pancake mix. Things that only needed water. She could subsist off these for another two days, then deal with the problem. Maybe three. With how little she ate now, perhaps she could stretch them a week before finding a solution. Her body was streamlined, it amazed her how much could be accomplished when she dedicated herself to a single goal. The body, the mind, life itself could be molded to adhere to a goal, fashioned like tools to attain it. Sacrifice was required, but once the extra weight was shed, it became steadily easier to continue without it. Friends, a full stomach, perfect health weren’t necessary. Survival was the only thing required of her. All for the end goal. All for Benny’s return.
She retrieved a chair from the dining room table and strained to carry it into the kitchen. She leaned against it a moment to catch her breath before lifting a foot onto its seat and hoisting herself up. She managed to get two legs onto the chair so she could peer into the back of the cabinet’s top shelf. She found a hollow space and dust collected on the wood where she expected to find her next several meals.
Carrie sighed. “Shit,” she muttered to herself.
Her leg wobbled to the side. She gripped the shelf, but it slid out of place. Carrie’s body fell backward, her knees buckled against the back of the chair. She fell between the chair and the island, wedged between the two, smashing her tailbone onto the tile floor. Her hand still reached above her, gripping the shelf that caught on the top of the chair and the edge of the countertop. The pain rose above the numb to ache within her buttocks and along the bottom third of her spine. She groaned, but she didn’t cry. Instead, she cursed again silently to herself with a shaky voice. It was less the misstep than the reveal that preceded it. She was out of food.
The ache swelled and rose. The pain crept along her spine to the base of her neck, nestling into the bottom of her skull. She released the board bridging the chair and the countertop to rub the sore place. Her fingers made contact in the center of the back of her neck and gently rubbed up and down in the divet that formed between two tense muscles. Her fingertips depressed further than she expected. She imagined them sinking into weak flesh, grazing the curvature of her skull. She could imagine them slipping into the hole where the spine inserted without fuss. She dropped her hand. She was worn thin, her bony fingers could feel it now.
She groaned and pressed her flat palms against the kitchen floor and managed to return to her feet. She used the back of the chair and the board laid across it to aid her balance, and then to lean for support. She was tired. Yet still, she thought only of her mission. At that moment, its objective required sustenance.
The credit card she had lifted from her husband was maxed out. She discovered this on her last trip to the store where she attempted to purchase three bananas, a pair of apples, and a yogurt and the card was declined. The obnoxious beeping sound that accompanied the message on the cashier’s screen irritated her and she winced against the growing pain instigating a headache. She snapped at the young woman, no older than twenty, insisting there was some mistake, that the system must have failed to reach the bank. The young woman, either new or permanently installed with subservience, acquiesced to Carrie’s demand for a second run, but the result was inevitably the same. She had filled all the credit with small, daily purchases, collected together to exceed the payments made on the debt. That, or Jake had noticed it was gone and stopped paying it to spite her.
The second option only occurred to her as she stared out through the window above the sink and found the lights on in the shed. She hadn’t heard Jake pull into the driveway, nor enter the house, yet he managed to sequester himself in his private space already. The ache that traveled up her spine and stationed itself at the base of her skull reactivated and climbed into it. She winced and her vision narrowed.
Carrie took a breath. The thought of needing to eat gave way to the visceral experience of hunger hollowing out her stomach. She let go of her anger as she stared into the yellow light illuminating the shed’s dusty window panes. She couldn’t see past them inside, couldn’t discern the machinations of her husband’s grief. The pain in her stomach subsided, the hunger left her numb again. With a distance between them, she could almost perceive him, the man she cohabitated with. He was gruff and stony, but crumbling and bleeding out. The imposition of his separation, by his hand, seemed almost well-intentioned, as though to spare her his aggression. What he didn’t understand was that she could see how weak it made him, how it visited its consequences upon him rather than her. Though, perhaps it was mutual in some respects. Early on, Jake disregarded the ideal of their marriage, a managed home, a loving pair, or, at bare minimum, a family unit in harmony. Instead of drawing from these, they became kindling for his fire, rather than the warmth itself, as Carrie treated them.
She supposed she withdrew from him for the same reason he did; their griefs were distinct and incompatible. She thought about tears, but unlike the hunger that traveled from her mind into her belly, the sadness of their separation failed to traverse the numb barrier. Instead, her mind turned over to the next important step.
Carrie walked out of the kitchen towards the back door.
25
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Jake’s nose angled downward, pulling his neck forward, hunching his whole body over his desk as his wide eyes read over the details of an article covering the Burrell acquisition of lands surrounding Willow Brook’s westside forest. Suspiciously, or rather, as suspected, Aaron’s name was absent. Instead, there was John, father, Victor, brother, even Peter, grandfather, names associated with the patriarchal management of the family business. But no Aaron. Nothing of the wayward son working on his own, whether amassing his own small fortunes by way of his insistent and smarmy persona at Trinity Mortgage, or in his insidious efforts to undermine his kin with his concupiscent knife.
The door rattled. Jake twisted his head to the side, pulling on some tight muscles in his neck. He shouted out in pain.
“Are you alright?” The voice was small, meager. He cupped his neck while turning towards the door with a grimace. She was breaking the unspoken contract forged in the wak
e of their failed intimacy. He couldn’t imagine she had any interest bridging the gap. There was little use in that, no reconciliation would reverse the deleterious effect of the preceding months. Their capacity to console one another was perhaps the very first loss, after that of their son. She had come for something specific, and logistical. If he could give it, she would be gone.
“The door isn’t locked.”
It rattled again.
“It’s stuck,” her little voice replied, seeping through the cracks in the wood of the entrance.
Jake turned his head back and forth to loosen the muscle, plugging his fingertips into it. “Put your shoulder into it.”
“Would you just open the damn door, Jake?” When he didn’t immediately respond, absorbed by the task of rubbing out the neck muscle, she spoke again, “This damn door is stuck, Jake!”
“Alright!” he shouted back.
He rose slowly and shuffled his socks over the concrete floor towards the door to twist the knob and yank it back. The door’s wood boards shivered and made a cartoonish noise that dissipated while Carrie stepped into the shed without so much as a look. The unceremonious intrusion annoyed him, but the mental image of her scowling upon entry was reason enough to prefer it.
Jake returned to his chair, disinclined to remain standing. Carrie seemed not to mind, not reacting to his slumped posture in the chair with offense, not reacting to him at all. Her eyes failed to connect with his, instead wandering about the space. Not taking it in, but rather just moving around in a tired, disinterested fashion. It made her feel distant, an unexpected outcome of her intrusion. Between the presence of another in his private space, the interruption, and her apathy, Jake found himself perturbed at his own bemusement. He needed her to go. “What do you need?” he snapped.
Again, she failed to react with offense, instead responding flatly, “We need money.”
“Money,” Jake growled in repetition. “What do you mean we need money?” he asked, though its consideration had been far from his thoughts for weeks, left discarded on the path alongside nutrition, sleep, leisure. Money was among the unimportant, a distraction from the purpose of his investigation, which lately he’d begun to think of as justice. Justice wasn’t subjective, and despite its often incorrect conflation with righteousness, had nothing to do with prevailing good. It was about cosmic scoring. A balanced ledger. A finished narrative. A—
“We need money to buy food, Jake,” she replied. “The kitchen is empty. What have you been eating you haven’t noticed?”
Jake looked around the room at the assorted wrappings of candy bars and fast food takeout. At first, it was to answer the question for himself. Then he made his gesture emphatic and finished by lifting his gaze to Carrie as if illustrating his answer. He accompanied it with a lift and fall of his hand to his knee, clapping it against his jeans.
Carrie finally met his gaze. Her sunken eyes lowered in disbelief. He imagined her arms crossing before her chest and her hip popping to the side. Instead, her arms dangled, her body limp like a zombie’s. “Your card is maxed out.”
Jake narrowed his eyes and leaned forward. “What do you mean my card is maxed out—”
“Your card doesn’t have any room left,” she answered. Jake leaned back in his chair, observing Carrie under a new light. It wasn’t the weight that disappeared to expose her bones, nor her readily apparent exhaustion, but the audacity, the directness of her approach. For a moment, he saw the woman he had bickered with in his past life. “I took your card because you neglected to deposit grocery funds into the joint account, I didn’t have enough money for them, and apparently you’ve stopped paying the new charges on your credit card, so here we are, with empty cabinets.” Her arms made little motions outward, as if to suggest the intent to swing back and clap against her thighs, but instead swayed almost lifelessly in place. Still, he heard their intention all the same.
“In case you haven’t caught on, Carrie, I’ve been rather busy lately, with work, taking it home so that our income remains sufficient, since your little daytime office job doesn’t cut it. If you need something from me, you need to communicate that, I can’t be the one to bring home the money and keep house, now, can I?”
She tipped her forehead towards him and attempted to squint, but instead her eyes fluttered, then widened, probably struggling to focus. She swayed, then steadied. Carrie sighed. “I just need you to cooperate, Jacob.” He felt his frame sink into the chair, his tailbone inching towards the edge. He could look down at his body, nearly all of it parallel with the floor, and perceive the stains in his clothing, the bulging gut rising over his belt. What little he’d eaten had all been trash, and with the calories in the whiskey, and the beer, he’d grown slightly pudgy in his midsection, stringy in his limbs. Now, feeling the constraint of his belt digging into the underside of his paunch, he couldn’t ignore it. He redirected his attention to Carrie, standing before him, his opposite in that respect. Her gaunt body left ripples of extra fabric in her shirt and pants, all of it hanging loose off of her. Her hair had thinned, her eyes sunk, her skin grown dry and flaky, peppering her scalp with dandruff. They were unhealthy.
Yet, Jake observed the way they behaved, for the first time in a long time, mimicked a couple. A sardonic thought occurred, that in a perverse way, Carrie finally received what she so desired for months after their son disappeared. Shame it came so late, seemingly after she’d abandoned her pursuit of it. Despite the mundanity of a conversation about money within a marriage, lurking underneath was rot.
Jake looked at her and laughed. He couldn’t carry on this discussion, not when they were barely people. It was too bizarre, unnatural, surreal. Instead, he figured, they ought to be eating away at one another’s carcasses, the way they looked. Undead, lumbering through existence with singular drives. Vengeance, for him. For her...for her, what? He’d forgotten. His laughter slowly dwindled, and at its tail, a coughing fit seized his lungs and pained his chest. Carrie weathered the laughter, and when it finished, Jake perceived a sick gratification on her face as his face grew red and his chest burned.
He settled, resting his head against the lower portion of the chair’s back. He looked up into Carrie’s expression, a righteous indignation. Then it stumbled to the fore, emerging from the back of his thoughts like a bit of mucus from the back of his throat. “I know you were abducted.”
Carrie heard the words spill from his wet lips, watched him throw them at her. Somewhere in her mind was the calculation of its egregiousness, the weight of its transgression. The incident that changed the course of her life from age eight onward still sullied her core with its residue, in ways even she couldn’t understand. There were things she did understand about it. Her parents, a counselor, other family members labelled it trauma. It meant nothing to her then, content to return to childhood and leave the episode behind. It was later, when its fermented memory drifted back into her life that she started to unpack it. She couldn’t hold Jake’s hand for the better part of the first year of their dating. When her aversion drew attention to itself, she managed to take up the practice in lieu of exposing what had happened to her. Jake’s hand was smaller, anyway, his skin smoother, less clammy. She was proud of herself, and for that bit of progress concluded she did not need to revisit the “trauma,” she had successfully trounced it. Yet, it had remained, staking territory in her subconscious and festering. She didn’t like to think about it, but with the spiteful reference from her husband, was forced to look. In a rare and sudden appraisal, she admitted “trauma” had a part in how she imbued the forest with a spiritual charge.
But it had, all its own, something more than trees. She knew this. “Trauma” was psychological erosion in the wake of something harmful visited upon you. It was loss. Carrie had gained, from her childhood experience in the woods arose a connection. It was evolving, and what it had been became something different now, but Carrie knew it was real. It didn’t serve her to explain it to others, same as it hadn’t help
ed stewing on its accompanying fears which she let flitter off into the recesses of her mind. Carrie could sort the baggage of her past and take with her what benefitted, leaving what didn’t. She didn’t need anyone’s help to manage that. Least of all the opinions of a man who would wield it against her, invoking it to undermine her. She looked into Jake’s smug expression, not yet tainted with the guilt of his tasteless maneuver. Carrie didn’t care. She thought to herself, when this was over, there would be a question of reconciliation, and she would graciously absolve him, and her mercy alone would be enough to shame him. He would know he’d been the weaker of the two during Benny’s absence, and with their son’s return, a recognition of her strength in this time would inspire newfound respect. Right now, while they were still in the midst of the struggle, she gave him a pass. Through sheer force of determination, she would drag them both through this.
“Is that all you’re going to say?” she asked him.
His smugness spoiled into an embarrassed resentment, sagging his face into wrinkles.
“I need money,” she redirected. “We need to fill our cabinets.”
His eyes dragged down and seemed almost to close until his body shifted and his hand reached into his back pocket to retrieve his wallet. With a groan, he slipped it out and settled back onto the lifted buttock, sighing as he chose a card. He plucked it from the leather fold and passed it to Carrie who snatched it and stuffed it into her pocket.