by C.P. Kemabia
“So what’s your point?”
“Why haven’t we seen more of it, the blood? And where’s the rest of the body?”
Both questions went unanswered.
Alvin stirred, “What are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying we best sort out all the facts before the police get involved. Otherwise, when they get here there’ll be too many holes which are only going to get filled with the first explanation that presents itself.”
For a second or two, there was silence. At this juncture, everyone opted to reflect, consciously or unconsciously, on the weighty words Charlie had spoken. And the words inferred a grave consequence which suddenly dawned on Tara.
She said explosively, “You mean they could suspect us?”
V
Carol rigidly turned to face Charlie and flatly said, “Come on, you can’t know a thing like that.”
The insinuation was laughable, she thought. But for form’s sake—and because it wasn’t her style to ridicule others’ prejudices gratuitously, especially a close friend’s—Carol managed to remain outwardly self-possessed. But Charlie looked at her expressly; there was no mistaking that she was hesitating in getting something off her chest.
“My father was arrested once on a murder charge,” Charlie finally said. “It was a long time ago. He was convicted for manslaughter; accused for killing the principal of the middle school he was teaching at. Indeed, there was a lot of circumstantial evidence which pointed to him and one flimsy eyewitness had claimed seeing them quarrel on the school parking lot where the principal’s body had been found. But my father was innocent. And yet the state never gave him a chance. He was found guilty even before they had a case on him. And do you think they bothered hearing his side? No, they put him away for life; that’s what they did. And he only got out, seven years later, because the real culprit—some small-time hoodlum—got nabbed on a different case and was remorseless enough to brag about past felonies, one of which being the killing of a middle school principal for kicks.”
She paused and looked around at her audience. Understandably, their hearts were bleeding on the floor over this first-hand account of injustice. But Charlie wasn’t after their empathy, even though, despite herself, the words had rolled out of her mouth with a strong, heart-moving edge.
Matter-of-factly, she went on: “My father died of pneumonia—a souvenir from prison—shortly after his release. So I’m sure you can appreciate why I feel strongly about covering all the bases of the predicament we’re facing.”
It was to Carol that she had spoken that last bit and Carol replied, “I’m sorry to hear that; I didn’t know.”
Before this revelation, she’d only gathered that Charlie had lost her father some years ago and an uncle of hers was partly financing her academic studies. Now Carol understood where Charlie was coming from and, in that moment, felt even more akin to her despite their different outlooks.
She said, with warmth, “Look, I understand. But listen, Charlie, though what happened to your dad is unfortunate, that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen again. And on the off chance that the police come to suspect any of us, they’ll eventually realize their mistake.”
Tara’s voice hiccupped. She said gravely, “I can’t afford to have that kind of attention on me now.” Many sets of eyes fastened on her, inquisitive, prying for more enlightenment on her last statement.
She indulged them, “Honest, I’ll get the boot at my work. There’s not even a question about that.”
Alvin threw up his hands. “Oh, come on, will you?”
“No, seriously, it’s no joke,” Tara echoed, her body shifting anxiously. “I’ll be way out on a limb if I’m the subject of a police investigation, you know. I’ve got to fit their stand-up-professional-in-the-workplace-criteria-thing or my boss will think I’m there to spirit their computers away. He’s a maniac, but I’ve just started there and I could use the extra paychecks.”
It was no secret that, outside of scarce government loans, the bulk of Tara’s revenues allocated to academic life expenses came from part-timers, though—and Charlie had told her—she threw good money away on pricey fashionable clothing like the classy knee-length cream sweatpants she was wearing right now.
Carol said, leaning forward, “Tara, this is damn serious.”
“Guess what,” Tara replied, leaning forward as well. “I’m dead serious too.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Carol said. “So now not having any faith in the system is going to help with the situation.”
Her voice was tinged with her usual trademark sarcasm.
In response, Tara reciprocated:
“Not everyone has been blessed with a celebrity court judge for a daddy, you know.”
Charlie saw a flush transform Carol’s face. Obviously, she was resenting the implied criticism of her father’s important status. Yes, he was now-and-then featured in many media outlets, and yes, her family name carried a great deal of heft, and the assumption that she, Carol, was having it so easy, as a result, needled her most. Charlie sympathized with her and meant to speak in. But, as usual, Carol was master of herself.
She said, her voice stoic, “Now what does that have to do with anything?”
“Look, maybe you can easily avoid the fallout of all this,” Tara said, “but just think about how it affects the rest of us.”
Jen said abruptly, “Okay, Tara—that’s enough!”
Carol slightly shook her head and displayed her annoyance with a small gesture. She then rolled away to a remote side of the living room. There she sat on a chair, crossed her long legs, and arranged the folds of her dress around her tights. Jen knew to leave her alone. Instead, she intently swiveled to stare at Tara; her eyes stretched, condemning, screaming, What the hell was that?
Tara winced in response, feeling bad for her uncalled insensitivity. Regretfully, she mouthed, “I’m sorry”. And the matter was settled.
With formal deliberation, Peter cleared his throat. Now that nobody had the floor, he said, with a certain amount of reservation, “Well, hum… I closely listened to you all and what you said and this is just an idea but––I mean, we could just remove the box from here and place it somewhere else. Nobody has to know it was here in the first place, you know…”
It took a moment for everyone to take that in, to let the idea sink in. In the end, they all had the same look of profound dismay on their faces.
It was Simon who spoke first. “Nobody will know except us and whoever did this.”
Alvin added, pertinently, “Plus, moving it to a different location is a sure way to incriminate ourselves.”
In a voice that wasn’t too well assured, Peter said, “Yes, I know; but look, if the box and everything is some kind of message—which to me looks more like it—then we can all agree that the message is completely lost on us. Maybe this whole thing is a mistake, you know, like someone dropping off a package at the wrong address. I mean, who’s to say we even opened that box? I mean, it could be it was found in a dumpster or something, you know what I mean––”
Peter broke off and tried to sum up the torrential reflux of his thoughts into one definitive, flowing statement. He said, “All I’m saying is this doesn’t have to be our problem…”
Jen started. The lack of accountability in Peter’s proposed exit strategy was—for all intents and purposes—the easy way out… She personally found it unsavory though. She had to give him a piece of her mind.
She said, echoing her innermost beliefs, “But it is our problem… We know what’s in the box, we saw it… There’s no ignoring it and just going back to living as if it was never here…We’re involved… And no matter what, we’re still dealing with a person here, who’s probably got friends, family, people who will want to claim whatever’s left of him and give him a proper burial. So he’s not to be treated like something you dispose of when it’s broken.”
Peter replied in a
small, apologizing voice, “Ahem—it was … hum … just a quick idea.”
Simon said, conversationally, “Personally, I don’t think this man had an honest living.”
Tara brusquely looked at him, her eyes scolding. She said, “What do you know about it, did you know the victim?”
“Of course I don’t know him. But people with an honest line of work usually don’t end up losing their head like that.”
Jen said, in a sharp, wry tone.
“And I suppose you’re speaking literally…”
Simon shrugged and slightly changed his position so that he stood sideways to Jen and Tara. All this susceptibility, he couldn’t take it.
Charlie—who hadn’t said a word during this discourse—patted him on the arm and finally spoke: “Honest or dishonest, no one deserves to go out like that.”
Alvin raised his arm in a manner of stark authority.
“At any rate,” he said with impatience, “I think we’re digressing here.”
With a sour and yet righteous gaze right between the eyes, Carol cared to add, “That’s what I’ve been saying.”
At that point, Tara had noiselessly retired to the kitchen, at a slow, heavy pace. Visibly down in the mouth, she said, “If this isn’t a living hell, I don’t know what it is.”
VI
Carol got all worked up all of a sudden. It was in the way she stirred in the chair. She uncrossed her ankles, drew her rump on the forward quarter of the seat and her spine stooped as if she was about to bound.
She said, in an exasperated tone, “I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m getting a little tired of all the pointless blabbering I’m hearing in here. In case you haven’t noticed, somebody’s head is rotting right as we’re talking.”
Alvin approached Jen and advised her to deal with Carol before she became all hysterical.
“She has a point though,” Jen said. She then joined Carol who—her sensible nature kicking back in—was now neatly picking at some wrinkles below the waistline of her cupped body-conscious dress.
Carrying a garbage bag, Tara went from the kitchen to the central table of the living room. Not heeding any regard to the cardboard box, she began clearing the table of all the utensils and pastry leftovers sitting on it. She threw every item into the bag with mad haste.
Picking up on her odd behavior, Dom called to her with concern. “Tara?”
Without interrupting her labor, she said, “No way are any of those things going back into the kitchen. No way in the nine circles of hell…”
She sounded like a religious maniac. And if one didn’t know better, one could think she was the kind who sat alone in her room, reading a bible or something.
But Tara’s anal deportment was probably a belated symptom of shock, Charlie thought. In keeping with some everyday routine, she was simply trying to bring some sense of normality back into the abnormal setting they were all experiencing.
Charlie went over to her and acknowledged her effort. She volunteered to lend a helping hand and Tara relented, like a weary little child obeying quietly the orders of a parent.
“I woke this morning thinking today would be a good day,” Tara said. “You never see it coming when life’s about to go south, do you?”
Charlie looked at her, her lips nervously lapping over one another. She had no answer equivalently profound to say. Instead, she took the garbage bag from Tara’s hands.
“Leave all that to me,” she said with a comforting smile. “I’ll take care of it.”
Tara let go of the garbage bag. After a moment, during which her mind was vertiginously bending, becoming a foreign entity to her own conscious self, she said again, avoiding any eye contact with the cardboard box, “We must have somehow bought ourselves some bad karma to have this small box of damnation enter our lives, don’t you think?”
Once more, Charlie was at a loss for profound words. She shook her head and, leveling her eyes at Tara’s, she said, “Don’t think about it that way. You’re shaken up; why don’t you sit down, okay?”
Head down, her shoulders hunched, Tara plodded away to a couch and sat down as if getting into bed. Dom quickly came to her emotional rescue.
Alvin approached Charlie as she was cleaning the ragtag off the tabletop. There was a veil over his eyes which spelled the cast of a nervous breakdown at first. But up-close enough, one could tell it was just an overall fatigue of the senses which gave that false impression.
“Hmm… I want you to know that I get it,” Alvin said, his fingers reaching to touch Charlie’s forearm. “I really do. I mean, I never knew about what you went through, you know. With having one parent in prison and everything…”
“I never said anything about it,” Charlie said.
Alvin nodded with a sigh. Then looking straight at Charlie he said, in a heartfelt manner, “Look, Carol’s right, you know. We … hum… We’ve stalled enough as it is. And I think we really ought to call this in now.”
Agreeing, Charlie nodded after a moment. She was realizing that a toxic fear, a bizarre apprehension, her long-brewing bad feeling had all mixed up. They had snuck up on her rational mind and resurrected some old memories to the point of overriding her best judgment and risking dragging everyone down.
Alvin kept his hand long enough on Charlie until he saw signs that she was coming around. Then, taking it back, he said, confidently, “You’ll see, it’s going to be all right.”
“Can you do me a favor though?”
“Sure.”
Charlie nodded toward the box. “I think we’d all feel a lot easier if it wasn’t under our nose wherever we look.”
“Okay, I’ll stash it away for now by the laundry room until the police show up.”
Alvin carefully brought his fingers around the rugged edge of the package and picked it up. Some stripes of duct tape crisscrossing it were making a curious motif on the cardboard. He started towards the laundry room and was immediately heckled by Carol.
“What are you doing now?” she asked him.
“Chill out, all right? I’m just diffusing the tension here.”
“Brilliant,” she said, rolling her eyes at him like a spoiled eleven-year-old brat. “This is just brilliant. More fingerprints…”
“Alright, we get it… We get it.”
The wine bottle they’d popped and drank earlier was the last item on the tabletop. Charlie grabbed it and, right as she was about to dump it into the garbage bag, she noticed that the cork was still in the neck. She put the bag down, picked the cork up and contemplated it. Involuntarily, she mildly smiled at Tara’s drawing, remembering the gentle words that had accompanied it... Words which—according to Tara—best described Charlie’s character. Amidst their harrowing drama, this special cork—doubling as a makeshift birthday gift—provided Charlie with a quantum of solace. Its informality was boosting her morale. That’s why she couldn’t help but keep smiling…
Meanwhile, Alvin got to the door to the laundry room; he stood there hesitating, wondering whether to prop the box he was carrying outside the door or inside. After a moment of indecision, he figured outside was best to keep the laundry room clear from any morbid juju latched onto the morbid package. Not that he believed in that kind of stuff. But the girls wouldn’t probably wear anything out of their laundry if the stranger’s head had been in there. He was particularly thinking about Tara.
At that moment, Alvin heard a faint scraping sound. He listened closely; something was scraping at the laundry door from the other side. It sounded like claws, scratching, grating… A low-pitched meowing quickly ensued and bore out Alvin’s deduction. It was Tara’s cat. He realized he hadn’t seen that wild, shaggy animal all morning. How did it get itself locked in there?
Before Alvin could turn the knob, the door suddenly swung open without him even touching it. Before the door completely rotated, the cat blurted out in a flash and quickly moved along. Alvin turned his head back to see a yo
ung, thick-haired man in his mid-twenties standing in the doorway, his clothes and face caked with dried blood… Lots of blood…
Alvin started. “Jesus!”
He tripped backwards and the cardboard box accidently came away from his grip and dropped loudly to the floor. The thud had the others come rushing.
With the cork and the wine bottle in either grip, Charlie hurried along. They were all spooked by what they saw: the blood-covered young man came out of the laundry room, teetering, his legs on the verge of collapsing any second under him. He seemed disoriented, eyes squinted shut, hands shaking. The skin of his face had the pale look of death.
Wide-eyed by a new horror and a new disbelief, everyone’s jaw dropped through lack of words. There was no comprehending where this madness was going.
It was Jen who recovered her voice first. And it burst out of her from a cavernous place:
“My God! Max…!”
IV
Upon seeing Max in such a bloody physical state, the overriding sensation which submerged Charlie was that of a salient panic. She froze, numbed to the chaos that was happening inside her. It was as if a part of her, some sensible stretch of her conscious self, was unwilling to reconcile itself with what was at play before her eyes. She felt her raison d’être slip from grasp as terrible words suddenly flashed across her mind. All that blood… Was she going to lose him too? Was he next in line for kingdom come? To become brother-less after having endured the loss of her father would devastate her beyond any possible recovery; she was certain of that—and sure of her belief that all this mishap wasn’t a nightmare from which she could wake up.
Max cleared the doorway to the laundry room in three or four unsteady steps; then he fell to his knees on to the living room floor.
Charlie’s alertness returned in a painful spasm. Jen jabbed the flats of her hands to her mouth in alarm. Tara asked with a shudder if Max was dying or something.
“Charlie…” Max called, searchingly.
