Walking Through Needles

by Heather Levy

  He looked around the kitchen. “Who?”

  She turned her eyes down between her legs. Her.

  There was a dark, spectral mass—a dense evil—prying something from inside Meredith and more blood poured from her, her face sweaty and white with pain. Then he saw another shadowy mass, much taller and larger, holding Meredith’s arms down.

  Get the gun, Eric.

  The gun. His father’s gun in the closet. He ran down the hallway seeming to go on forever and he found the master bedroom. He opened the closet and a mountain of handguns toppled onto him. Arrow picked one up and quickly realized it was plastic. He picked up another and another—all of them plastic toy guns. His heart pounded in his ears as Meredith’s shrieks started again. He had to get to her. His eyes caught a glint of metal that disappeared into the pile. He dug for it, scraping his hands raw until he secured something cold, heavy, and solid—the real gun. He ran back down the hallway, heavy rain pelting the roof, wind rattling the windows and more thunder, louder, louder, crashing and rumbling from all around him.

  He made it to the kitchen, panting, and aimed the gun for the dark creatures, but they were gone. Meredith was gone too. There was a pool of dark blood on the dining table, some of it smeared into a frown. Vickie was there, her body turned away from him as she rinsed a bloodied sponge out in the sink, her red hair burning in the light.

  She came over to him, holding the sponge.

  “You look just like your daddy.” She grinned. “You’re just like him, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not,” he forced through gritted teeth.

  “You sure love to watch us.” She laughed. “Yes, you certainly do, don’t you?”

  “I don’t.”

  “What would your mother think of you? Her perverted son.”

  “I’m not perverted.”

  “Look what you did.” Vickie pointed to the bloody table. “You killed it.”

  “You did it, you did it! I saw you!”

  “You’re too late.” Vickie moved closer to him. “It’s done and it’s all your fault. Everything’s your fault.”

  Arrow aimed for Vickie’s chest and pulled the trigger—BAM! BAM! She cackled at the bloody holes. She fingered them, her long nails disappearing into the ripped flesh, and laughed more when blood trickled out of her.

  “Just die!” he screamed. “I hate you! I hate you!”

  “Arrow.”

  “I hate you!”

  “Arrow!”

  “I hate you!”

  “Arrow, wake up!”

  He gasped, eyes wide.

  “It’s okay. You were having a dream.”

  Sam.

  His lips paralyzed, Arrow reached for her to see if she was real. She was, and he clutched onto her, feeling as if he were about to be swept away again by his panic.

  “Jesus Christ, you’re okay.” Sam untangled herself from his arms and stood up from his bed. “You almost woke up the whole house. It was just a stupid dream.”

  No, it was a nightmare, only it was real. His failure, the police arriving at Vickie’s place after the missed shots fired…Meredith taken to the hospital and Arrow taken into custody. And the baby dead.

  Sam crept over to his doorway, her figure a blur of shadow bleeding into the dark.

  Panic rose in him again as he remembered the horrible words he had said to her before she ran away, that she should get rid of it.

  “You didn’t do it, did you? I want you to keep her.”

  He wanted to touch her stomach, to feel the bump and know their baby was safe.

  Sam turned around, her shadow figure still.

  “No. I didn’t do it.” He heard her inhale, hold it for a moment, and release. “When we were driving back from Dallas, your dad…he asked me if…I—I told him the baby’s his.”

  Arrow sat up in the bed.

  “Why?”

  “Because he—because I had to.”

  Arrow lay back down on his pillow and closed his eyes tight.

  “Arrow?”

  He swallowed over the lump rising, cutting off his ability to speak again.

  “Eric?”

  He pictured a scene from one of his favorite horror films, the part when the young, pretty girl circles through the dark woods and goes back into the house she had escaped from two scenes prior, the monster not far behind her. Only, this time, she doesn’t come back out.

  Chapter 41: Sam, 1994

  Sam refused to look at her mama. Instead, she played with the tie string of her blue exam gown, waiting for the ultrasound technician to enter the room. She heard her mama pick up another magazine and turn the pages rough enough to rip them.

  Déjà vu. She imagined that’s what her mama was feeling, but it wasn’t her this time, waiting in an exam room with Grandma Haylin perched ready to berate her for her poor decisions. This exam had been her mama’s idea anyway, taking her to what Grandma Haylin called the “lady parts doctor.”

  Sam was the one who had a right to be angry. She still couldn’t believe her mama sent Isaac to pick her up. She knew Aunt Shelley noticed her fear upon seeing Isaac at the door, yet she let her go with him. Sam knew it was her own fault for not telling her aunt about him. She had come close to saying his name when she first arrived at her aunt’s place. Her aunt even asked her if she had been raped, but she didn’t know how to answer. She always imagined rape as something brutal with the victim clearly not wanting sex and screaming no the entire time. Sam had never said no to Isaac. She didn’t even fight him.

  On the long drive back to Blanchard, Sam asked Isaac to stop twice so she could throw up. She knew it wasn’t from being pregnant. It was nerves. She knew something bad would happen with him.

  He had pulled off the highway into a tiny Texas town. He drove up to an old motel and told her to stay inside the truck. Just when she got up enough courage to run somewhere, anywhere to seek help, he was back with a room key.

  The room smelled of mildew. Dust suspended in bands of afternoon light slipped through the broken window blinds and splashed across the peeling nicotine-stained wallpaper—brown and orange flowers against what might’ve been a cream backdrop once upon a time. He told her to undress, which she did. She wasn’t sure what he would do, but every muscle in her tensed.

  She had never seen him fully naked before then, and definitely not in the middle of the day. It was unnerving how quick her body responded to the sight.

  He took her to the firm bed and lay next to her, his leg hairs tickling her. Then he stroked her, tenderly, from her head to her feet, but he touched no part giving her any relief. He didn’t hurt her; no biting, no drawing blood from scratching, no pinching or hitting with a belt. Nothing. No words.

  It was the worst punishment he could inflict.

  He had kept her in that state of need for almost four hours, his restraint amazing her, and then he stopped, got dressed without a word.

  She didn’t ask permission. She ran to the bathroom and locked it. She removed one of her stud earrings, paused, and shoved the fake gold post under her middle fingernail. A dark dot of blood appeared under her nail as she leaned against the bathroom vanity and touched between her legs, pleasure mixing with the pain radiating up her hand.

  They ate in silence at a nearby crappy diner before driving back home.

  The florescent highway lights made Isaac’s face appear jaundiced while he drove.

  “It’s mine,” he had stated after he glanced at her.

  “Yes.” She knew Arrow would be dead with any other answer.

  “We’ll have to take you outta school soon. And get you to a doctor—find a family for it.”

  Adoption? She was sure Isaac would beat the baby out of her or find some other way to get rid of it. He could’ve done anything to her, and no one would know. He could’ve killed her, told her family she ran away during a pit stop, but he didn’t.

  Isaac had reached for her hand, held it the last f
orty minutes to Blanchard.

  “I won’t let anything happen to you,” he told her.

  “Samantha Mayfair?”

  Sam let go of her exam gown, the fabric twisted into a stiff blue point.

  The ultrasound technician introduced herself as she tugged on a pair of gloves, the latex snap-snapping on her wrists. She pushed up Sam’s gown and squeezed a cold gel onto her stomach. Her mama stayed seated near the exam bed at first, but she arose as soon as the technician let Sam hear the heartbeat. One hundred and sixty beats per minute. Her mama clasped her hand, held it to her chest so that Sam heard the thrumming from the baby’s heart monitor and felt her mama’s quickened heartbeat at the same time.

  “Oh,” the technician blurted in delight. “Today’s your birthday?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, happy birthday, Samantha. You’ve got a healthy baby.”

  Chapter 42: Eric, 2009

  Second-degree murder. Minimum ten years in the state penitentiary. It’s what the Blanchard police hoped to charge Eric with, but the prosecutor was apparently sitting on it. That’s what the state appointed defense attorney had told Eric during their brief meeting.

  Eric sat on the hard lower bunk bed in his jail cell, staring at the stainless steel toilet/sink combination against the wall, his gut rumbling, threatening to release the only meal he’d been offered since his arrest: a bologna sandwich, no cheese or condiments, and a bruised apple. His cellmate, a black man who didn’t look older than nineteen, slid down from the upper bunk. It was impossible for both to be up and moving around at the same time. The man went to the toilet and stared at it, the look on his face a strange mixture of defeat and defiance. Eric looked away when the man pulled down his pants and squatted.

  Eric made three calls early that morning. One was to Sam’s lawyer friend, Dan, who reminded him he wasn’t a criminal defense lawyer and referred him to an attorney Eric knew he couldn’t afford, which meant he was stuck with the state’s attorney. He made his second call to Sam, whose phone went directly to voicemail. The third call he made sucked everything left in him to dial it.

  He had been positive Jeri wouldn’t accept the collect call, but she did, and he spent the first minute thanking her. She had to guess he had no one else to go to other than Sam, but that wasn’t why he called her. He asked Jeri to see him, told her he had some important things to tell her. When she told him to tell her over the phone, he said he wanted to do it in person. Reluctantly, she agreed to drive to Oklahoma City, but she made sure to tell him how difficult it was for her to drive longer distances.

  Jeri arrived at the jail that morning. A detention officer escorted Eric to the visitation room to wait, sat him down facing a thick Plexiglas wall and told him he had fifteen minutes, all of it monitored.

  Eric hadn’t seen Jeri in almost fifteen years. Even now, he couldn’t help but think of Jeri as his stepmom. After his father ran off, Jeri still treated Eric like he was her responsibility, making him get up for school every morning and harping on him to do his daily chores and homework. Over time, though, he noticed a shift in her when she looked at him. It was like she couldn’t stand to see him. Soon after he was released from the hospital, he snuck into the master bedroom when Jeri was at work. He opened the top dresser drawer where his father had kept photos of Eric with his mom and keepsakes Eric had made him when he was little. His heart felt like it dropped out of his body when he saw the drawer completely cleaned out. He looked everywhere and saw she had removed every last trace of his father from the house.

  Eventually, Jeri stopped caring if he did chores or went to school. She also didn’t seem to care when he stopped coming home and started hanging out with the Stewart boys, who were known to drink and get into mischief.

  There was no comfort at the farmhouse, not with Jeri, Grandma Haylin, or with Sam, who had fallen under a depression she wrapped tight around her like a cocoon. He was almost relieved when Jeri placed him into foster care less than three months after his father left. Vickie, his only traceable family member, had been serving time for drug possession. Foster care with strangers wasn’t as bad as he thought it’d be, though. The family he lived with the longest—eight months—was strict and religious, but they had been kind before he turned eighteen and aged out of the system.

  He thought of the letters he had written to Sam, one per week for the first year he was in foster care—all opened and read by Jeri, he was sure, before she got rid of them. Jeri knew his deepest thoughts from those letters, his confessions of loving her daughter, but she didn’t know everything. Eric never wrote about what happened with Sam. He never wrote about his father at all, as if Sam would forget if Eric didn’t mention him.

  Motion caught Eric’s attention; he looked up to see an officer directing Jeri to the stool attached to the wall on the opposite side of the Plexiglas. Besides her ivory complexion, Sam looked nothing like the short, graying blonde across from Eric. Jeri wore an ankle-length, green summer dress with a long-sleeved white cardigan she wrapped tightly across her chest after she sat. She looked shaken, like she’d passed a ghost right before visiting him. Eric pointed to the phone on the wall next to him and Jeri picked up the one on her side.

  “Thank you for coming,” Eric said, unsure of how to start.

  Jeri pursed her lips.

  “Have you spoken with Sam?” He still hadn’t heard from her, and he couldn’t see her ignoring the message he left for her saying he was under custody.

  “She hasn’t answered her phone,” she said. “I’ve tried all morning.”

  A trickle of fear went through him. “You try her work?”

  “Of course. Several times.”

  “I’ve tried to call her too.”

  Jeri widened her eyes at him.

  “Why did you want me to come here, Eric? To help you?”

  Eric looked down at his hands, at his thumb kneading the other, his knee bouncing.

  “No.”

  He knew she couldn’t help him. No one could help him.

  Jeri looked at the phone in her hand as if a bug had crawled out of it.

  “Then why?”

  Eric pulled himself up, holding Jeri’s gaze.

  “You know I didn’t do this. I should have killed him a thousand times to protect Sam, but I didn’t.”

  Jeri stared at him, her arms relaxing a little from holding her sweater closed. He saw the painful-looking swollen knots that were her fingers now from her lupus, and he wanted to reach through the Plexiglas to button her sweater for her.

  “Is that what you wanted to tell me? That you didn’t kill him?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then what?”

  Eric’s mouth was too dry. His eyes weren’t, and he held them open until he was sure he wouldn’t lose it in front of Jeri.

  “I wanted to say I’m sorry for not telling you what he was doing to Sam, for not stopping him.”

  Jeri just sat there, lips tight.

  “And I’m sorry I wasn’t the one who killed him.”

  Jeri’s mouth went slack for a moment before she tightened up again.

  “Sam wasn’t the only one,” Jeri said, her eyes avoiding him.

  Meredith wasn’t the first, and Eric knew Sam wouldn’t have been the last. They had been his father’s favorites, though, maybe because they were smart and strong-willed. His father used to say it was a lot more fun breaking in a wild horse than one that gave in at the first tug.

  “No, she wasn’t the only one.”

  “And you could’ve stopped it.” Jeri looked him in the eyes, her resentment shooting into him, reigniting his own.

  “You could’ve stopped him too.” He watched the pain shadow across her face. “I saw him abuse her while you were asleep in the next room.”

  Jeri put the phone down, her face pale. After a minute, she gathered herself and held up the phone again.

  “I was a kid, Jeri. Yes, I should’ve said someth
ing, but you had to know something was happening. After the hospital, after she went to Dallas.”

  Jeri slowly shook her head. Then she buckled in her seat, the phone in her lap. Her crying echoed through Eric’s receiver. He wanted to hold her, to tell her there was nothing they could do now.

  Jeri pulled herself together and took up the phone again.

  “My sister…Shelley told me something was off when he got Sam. She said…” Jeri paused, collecting herself. “She said Sam didn’t want to leave with him.”

  Her voice broke off on the last words, and Eric’s heart was an iron weight in his chest. He never knew what happened when his father picked Sam up in Dallas, but he knew whatever happened wasn’t good. He thought about when she was in the hospital, the rip his father made in her flesh, and he was glad he didn’t have much food in his stomach.

  The hospital had failed Sam, and Jeri failed her too. So many people failed her, not just Eric.

  He thought of everything he had told police those years ago, about Meredith and his father, and a realization hit him: people had failed Eric too.

  The officer hovering at the end of the visitation room walked over to them, warned Eric they only had a few minutes left. Jeri wiped tears from her face with her cardigan’s sleeve.

  “The baby—it was yours?”

  Eric nodded, unable to say it aloud.

  “I’m glad,” she said with a sad smile.

  He wasn’t sure what else to say to her. There was too much he wanted to say, but he knew everything was being recorded.

  “I know you didn’t kill him, Eric.”

  Hearing her say it lifted some of the weight from his chest, but not all of it.

  “Why did you send me to foster care?” he asked.

  She twisted her cardigan sleeve, the same habit he noticed in Sam.

  “You look too much like him.”

  Disappointment fell over him at being right. She had changed the course of his life all because she didn’t want to look at him.

  “Why did you throw away his things?”