by Jeff Vrolyks
Chapter Eighteen
Tuesdays I had a four o’clock Economics class at Fresno State. Class gets out at five, my last class of the day. I had become quite a habitual person, going to Subway on my way home to get a meatball sub. But today was different. It didn’t register in me that I was breaking my routine; I was in a kind of mind-numbed haze. I didn’t drive home today, I walked. I only live a twenty minute walk from school, but I always drove it—why wouldn’t I? It didn’t compute in me that I was walking, when I should have been driving home my truck that was parked in the lot nearest the Econ building. It was as though my brain and body were two separate entities, my brain being operated by someone other than myself. But my vision, it was my own. I turned down one street, then another. I had no idea where I was going. The sun was low on the horizon, the light bronze.
In the distance was an elementary school. There was a playground being enjoyed by a number of kids, on swings, teeter-totters, monkey bars, jungle gym. I crossed the street to the side that the school was on. It dawned on me that I didn’t have my book-bag. Had I forgotten it in Econ class? I paid no attention as I padded down the sidewalk. The small school was right smack in the middle of a residential neighborhood, houses environing it on every side. I was now close enough to make out the features of the kids who were hanging upside-down on the monkey bars. The only one I cared about was the buttermilk-blonde girl, whose pink tee-shirt had fallen down to her armpits. Her little boy-chest many years away from becoming a woman’s chest. She squealed exuberantly as she swung from her knees, arms dangling down.
I cut over a patch of grass toward the sandy playground area, stopped short of the monkey bars. Brooke saw me and stopped swinging.
“Hey there,” I said.
“Hello,” she said with an upside-down smile.
“Would you come down for a moment?”
“Sure,” she said after a brief hesitation. “Is something wrong?”
“Kind of, yes,” I said without forethought.
Once she left the bars and gained my side, we began distancing ourselves from the playground. Her pink tee-shirt read Susan B Komen foundation. It was a walk-a-thon shirt, advocating for breast cancer awareness. Cute, that a little kid would wear such a thing. I doubt she had any concept of that horrible disease, but still…
“I have some bad news,” I said sadly. “Your mom and dad were in a car accident.”
She gasped, stopped walking. Like a spigot cranked open, her eyes poured out. “No!”
“Yes. I’m sorry to be the one who has to tell you, Brooke. And I’m sorry about what happened in church a few days ago. But this is more important than that. This is about your parents’ health. I’ll take you to them, okay?”
She nodded, put her hands over her eyes and bawled, little legs struggling to match the pace of my longer legs.
“Wh-what happened to them?” she stammered. “Are they all right?”
“I hope so. We have to hurry, though. Hurry before they aren’t all right. Can you walk a little faster for me?”
She began running ahead of me. I told her that running wasn’t necessary, that a fast walk would suffice. We turned at the end of one street, then at the end of the next.
It never occurred to me that I was dreaming, as it rarely does. But I wasn’t dreaming. I was… I don’t know what it was. But it was happening, somehow, in some way. It was happening. I was leading Tinkerbelle along the residential neighborhood, down past Fresno State campus, onto some back roads.
My companion was absolutely bawling. Disconsolate. I ceased trying to calm her down. She insisted on holding my hand. It was tiny in my own, so fragile and weightless.
“We’re almost there,” I said.
“Where is it?” she asked. “I don’t know this place.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” I muttered.
We were at a road with a posted sign reading Not A Through Street. We continued along hand in hand until it dead-ended, where there was a dirt bank sloping gradually down. The sun was partially obscured by the low ridge of a hill. To my left I could see another road a quarter-mile away, and it was a through street, via bridge. Under the bridge was a dry riverbed, which Brooke and I had just entered. We slanted to our left, toward the bridge.
“Here?” she said. “They’re here?”
“Yes, just up ahead. Almost there.”
“Why were they over here?”
“I’m not sure.”
She clutched tighter my hand in hers, began pulling ahead of me in her rush to be with her mom and dad. I picked up my pace to please her. Her hand was getting slippery in mine; nervous sweat I imagine.
Her gaze was far ahead, and because of it she wasn’t watching her footing. She tripped over a rock. Being that she was attached to my hand I prevented her from falling on her face. I suspect if her mind had been in a more pleasant place she’d have thanked me instead of being hardly aware that it happened.
The riverbed began to bend to our right. We continued straight, though, to where the crest of the embankment and bridge met. To where I once teased Marie Elbrick that she was just a dumb kid, incapable of doing adult things.
We breasted the embankment of dirt and rocks. Brooke was becoming concerned, and not for her parents this time. This seemed like the last place on earth her mom and dad would have had an accident.
“Are you sure they’re here?” she asked skeptically.
“Yeah-yeah,” I said curtly. “Less talking, more walking.”
I stopped under the bridge, where it was ten degrees cooler and a whole lot darker. The bridge was never used these days. It was built to access an oil lease just a short ways down that road, but those wells had long been dried up and shut-in, deserted.
Tinkerbelle stopped a couple steps ahead of me, looked back with worried eyes, a furrowed brow. She asked why I stopped.
“This is the spot,” I said and knelt down. “I’m sure of it. I’d bet my life on it.”
“What are you talking about? This is the spot my mom and dad got hurt?” A tear rolled down her cheek. “Please tell me where they are, I’m scared!”
“Marie lost her virginity right here.”
“What’s a virginity?”
I scooped up a handful of dirt and let it drizzle through my coned fist. “I wonder if her blood is still in the dirt, stained for eternity.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Good.”
She swallowed. “Good?”
I nodded. “You should be scared. There’s about to be some fresh blood on this dirt.”
Her eyes were wide and confused. “Whose blood? Where’s my mom and dad? Please tell me! Tell me, Paul! Tell me, tell me, tell me!”
A loud and long honk behind me snapped me into awareness, into reality. I was in my Toyota Tacoma, at a stop sign leaving Fresno State campus. I was drenched in cold sweat. The stick-shift in my hand was slippery under my clammy palm. I pulled onto the road leading away from school. The annoyed motorist behind me zipped around me, flipping me off as he went.
“What on earth…” I breathed. The sun was ripe, an hour away from setting. I wondered how long I had been idling at that stop sign. Had I fallen asleep? Admittedly I hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep since a couple days ago, before Trouble nestled deep inside my brain like a tumor and had since been festering and eating cancerously away. Knowing I probably wouldn’t see Abbey again didn’t help my peace of mind. I was filled with dread that what I had just experienced wasn’t a dream but a premonition. I tried to dismiss it, wholeheartedly I did. It was absurd, I was no psychic, had never experienced a premonition. I motored along the road, autonomously made all the correct turns leading to my apartment a few miles from the university.
My heart ached for Tinkerbelle. What I imagined didn’t happen, but that didn’t lessen my unease. Had the impatient driver behind me not honked, what might I have witnessed in the following minutes? Tinkerbelle getting beaten by fists, fists that were my own? That would be
one way to add her blood to the dirt, yes. Hopefully that would be the avenue that her blood came to be on the dirt. But I didn’t think it would be. Just as Marie bled on that dirt in a whole nother fashion.
I shuddered, skin broke out in goose bumps.
“What’s happening to me?”
I withdrew the cellphone from my pocket in a half-frenzy, tapped icons and words and finally a name: Sven and Juliann Stanwick. I pressed Call.
It rang seemingly a hundred times. I didn’t think they’d answer. My breath held as I expected voicemail to answer. And what might that mean? Nothing. But it would mean more than nothing. It would be kindling for morbid thoughts, such as the Stanwick’s were occupied dealing with a crisis, one that I could make a sporting good guess at.
“Aaron,” a man answered. “What a nice surprise.”
I turned onto the street of my residence. “Sven. Good afternoon.” I was shooting for calm, but wasn’t so sure. “Or evening.”
“Still afternoon for another half-hour. How are you doing, friend?”
“Hanging in there. Driving home from class.”
“Class? You go to college?”
“Yeah, Fresno State.”
“Woot! Go Bulldogs!”
“Yes, go Bulldogs,” I said distractedly. “Listen, do you know where Brooke is?”
“Uh…” He moved the phone away from his mouth. I heard him ask his wife where Brooke was. Juliann said she was playing across the street at the playground. My heart was at a gallop. “She’s playing,” Sven said. “Why? What’s up?”
“Oh man,” I muttered. “Oh man.”
“Aaron…? You’re worrying me, buddy. What’s wrong?”
“I uh… I don’t know how to say this.” I didn’t want to scare him needlessly. Any parents would freak the hell out with some near-stranger predicting their kid’s abduction. But I needed them to have the same sense of urgency I was operating under. “I uh…”
“Aaron,” Sven said sternly, “tell me what’s wrong!” I heard Juliann’s panicked voice in the background. She was wondering the same thing as her husband.
“I’m probably wrong about it,” I said as a preamble to the bad news.
“Tell me! Tell me, Aaron, come on!”
His loud pissed-off tone accelerated my panic. “I had a kind of… premonition, I guess you could say. But I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“That you’re calling me sounding the way you do suggests that you don’t feel it’s nothing. Would you please just tell me already?”
“Damnit, Aaron, what’s the matter!” Juliann shouted just inches from her husband’s phone.
“She’s going to fall off the monkey bars and get hurt, break bones,” I lied. It was a useful lie, as it would send them to the school playground immediately.
“He thinks she’s going to fall off the monkey bars and break something,” Sven relayed to his wife.
I heard the front door slam shut seconds later.
“She’s on her way,” Sven said to me. “Thank you very much, Aaron, from the bottom of my heart.”
“Don’t thank me. I didn’t do anything.”
“Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t. But that you were compelled to warn us, that tells me that you feel her getting hurt is a possibility. Even a remote chance of that happening is alarming to me. To us.”
“I agree. That’s exactly why I called.” I exhaled deeply, knowing I did the right thing.
“And I’m not a premonition kind of guy, but I put stock in a pastor telling me he had a vision of something.”
“I’m not a pastor. Not yet, at least.”
“You will be. And you’re something not far from a pastor. God, I don’t know what I’d do if my little sweetheart broke her…” He choked back a sob. “Broke her neck or something.”
“I don’t even want to think about it,” I said.
I could hear the emotion in his voice when he said, “You are a wonderful guy, Aaron. A blessing.”
“Would you mind if I stayed on the phone for a little while? I’d like to know that she’s all right. I’m sure it was nothing, but I won’t be able to rest until I know for sure.”
As if Juliann had guessed that was the case, that her husband and I were on the phone until we got word back from Brooke’s state of hopefully-great health, she returned only a couple minutes after I had heard the front door slam shut.
“Oh thank God,” Sven said.
I took a deep relieved breath. “Yes. Thank God.”
“Hi, Daddy!” I heard Tinkerbelle exclaim. “I’m not hurt, I’m fine!”
“Yes you are, sweetheart. We’re sorry for making you come home.”
“The little rascal was hanging upside-down on the monkey bars,” Juliann said to Sven. “I could just picture her falling and getting hurt.”
“It’s okay, I never fall,” the kiddo said in her defense. “I can’t play on them anymore?”
“Not today, pumpkin. Go get ready for supper.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Aaron, thanks again for the call,” Sven said, and in his tone was utmost gratitude. Probably unfounded gratitude, as it was only a silly vision I had. I guess it was a dream after all.
“I’m sorry for disturbing you all,” I said. “I haven’t been sleeping well lately, so I guess my imagination got a little carried away.”
“That’s beside the point,” Sven said. “You care enough for our daughter that you’d call us when you’re worried for her. You don’t know how much that means to me.”
Juliann took the phone from her husband and said to me, “Really, Aaron, Sven is right. That was awfully thoughtful of you. You really care about her, don’t you?”
“Care about her?” I said thickly. “I love her, Juliann. I really do.”
I couldn’t see her tears, but I sensed them. “Well she loves you, too.”
“I’ll let you guys go.”
“Are you still on for dinner Friday night?” Juliann asked. “We won’t take no for an answer, so you might as well say yes.”
“I’ll be there. See you then. Should I bring anything?”
“Heavens no.”
I said bye and ended the call. I had been parked in my designated spot for minutes, my Tacoma idling. I went inside my apartment, crashed on the couch and began weeping. Weeping from the immense emotion of it all. It didn’t matter that it was all inside my head, the experience was just as nerve wracking, just as intense.
“Lord, my savior,” I said from the couch, looking up at the ceiling. “Thank you for keeping your most precious creation safe. I owe you everything. If I could be selfish for just a moment, please don’t put me through that again. That dream or whatever it was. I’m not strong enough to endure them. Amen.”
