by Heather Levy
Arrow knew if he didn’t make a move now, Sam would be dead. He rammed into his father, who fell backwards over a fallen tree limb, knife still in his hand. Arrow grabbed his dad’s wrist, grunting as he pressed his thumb deep into the veins and corded tendons there as hard as he could, but he couldn’t get the knife loose. They rolled on the ground, his father now on top of him, the knife inches from Arrow’s throat. He looked at his father’s face, the raw determination terrifying. Arrow’s arm was getting tired, the knife drawing closer. Using the last of his strength, he jabbed his knees into his father’s groin, used the second to crawl away. Something bit into his left calf, sending a sick, woozy warmth straight to his head.
He turned and looked up, saw his father standing over him, the knife at his side dripping blood. Arrow looked down at his left leg, saw the long, open gash along the back of his calf, and it didn’t feel like it was a part of him. After the sharp bite of the knife, he felt nothing, no pain. He couldn’t move his leg. His father saw this, but he didn’t move. He stared at Arrow’s leg like he was examining a lame horse and trying to figure out what to do with it.
There was a sound of cracking wood and his father’s eyes widened briefly before he slumped to the ground.
Everything was fading, getting dark around the edges, but Arrow saw Sam, a large tree branch in her hands. She threw the branch and crouched next to him.
“Jesus,” Sam said. “I think he cut something big.”
He wanted to sleep, so he closed his eyes.
Sam slapped his face.
“You have to stay awake.”
He closed his eyes again.
Sam tied something around his leg and then her warm breath was right next to his face.
“Eric, I’m going back to the house to get help. I’ll be right back, okay?”
He said okay, but he didn’t hear himself say it.
“I’ll be right back. You’re going to be okay.” But her voice trembled, and he didn’t believe her.
Chapter 51: Sam, 2009
“What did you and Eric do to Isaac?” Vickie repeated.
Dread rose in Sam, her pulse loud in her ears. She looked over at the dining table across the room, her loaded and ready gun right there in her purse.
“You took him from me.” Vickie raised her gun higher, aimed at Sam’s head. “And you want to pin his murder on me.” The gun was cocked, ready to fire.
There was no time to think. Sam jumped up from the couch and slammed herself into Vickie, her much taller frame knocking the woman back hard onto the wood floor. The gun flew from Vickie’s hand, slid somewhere by the couch. Sam tore to the kitchen table, got the gun from her purse.
BAM!
Sam turned around fast, blindly shooting back.
Vickie dropped her gun and clutched at her left shoulder. Sam rushed to it, kicked it across the room.
She pointed her gun at Vickie. “Sit the fuck down.”
Adrenaline surged through Sam, making her dizzy, as she quickly examined herself. At first, she thought Vickie had missed, but then she saw a dark-red pool form on her lower abdomen. A bizarre thought flickered in her head that her vintage Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt was ruined.
Sam stumbled over to the other end of the couch and fell onto the cushions, holding her stomach. She heard Zeus frantically barking in the backyard as she looked across the room to the kitchen table where her cellphone stared back. She tried to get up. White stabbing pain stopped her, knocked her breath out.
Vickie moaned next to her, her left shoulder bleeding all over the couch. Sam looked down at her stomach again. The blood was pouring out faster.
If she was going to die, she decided she would die with Vickie’s confession, with knowing the truth. She held the gun up as steady as she could.
“How did you kill Isaac?” Sam said. Vickie, holding her left shoulder, didn’t seem to hear, so Sam spoke louder. “How did you do it?”
Vickie temporarily stopped moaning and looked at Sam, some dawning realization etched on her face when she saw Sam had her gun cocked. Vickie shook her head, and Sam reached over with her gun, pressed the barrel into the woman’s left shoulder, deep into the bullet hole. Vickie screeched, horrible and crow-like.
“How?”
Vickie shook her head more as she moaned out, “I—I didn’t kill him!”
Sam pressed the gun harder. “How?”
“I didn’t. He called me from a gas station…said he needed a place to stay.” Vickie kept pausing, and Sam knew she must be in as much pain as she was. “But he had to go back to the house first…for his things...said everyone went to the hospital…so he had to go that night.”
Sam fingered the trigger and her head turned fuzzy.
“He never came,” Vickie said.
“Never came?” Sam let out an incredulous laugh, stopping when pain pierced through to her back.
Vickie sucked in pained breaths in between crying. “I swear it. I even called your house…that night…when he didn’t show up.”
Vickie moaned more.
“I don’t believe you.” Sam felt herself slipping, her body cold and clammy, breaths fast and shallow.
Vickie stared at the gun, avoiding Sam’s eyes. When she finally made eye contact with Sam, her eyes were sudden cold steel, the tears magically gone.
“Jeri answered…and she…she said he went to Les Compton’s place.”
Her mama?
That night at the hospital after the attack, her mom going back to the house for fresh clothes. Grandma Haylin getting a call in Eric’s hospital room, Sam watching as her grandma’s face turned ashen.
She remembered what Detective Eastman said about Isaac’s wounds, the back of his skull smashed in. It didn’t take much force to crack a skull with something like a hammer. She pictured her mom going back to the house, Isaac sneaking in to get his things…his favorite pair of boots. Maybe her mom knew he would come back, or maybe he caught her off guard and she confronted him. Whatever happened happens. She imagined her mom calling Grandma Haylin, getting her to help dispose of Isaac’s body and truck.
Vickie stared at Sam holding up the gun, her other hand holding her abdomen.
This was not how she saw herself dying, bleeding out on her green couch. Red on green, like Christmas lights flashing, her eyes fierce-blinking, trying to keep herself awake.
Somehow, she smelled cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg. Her grandma’s famous gingerbread cookies, how she used to help roll the dough, not too much flour. Ground mustard, the secret ingredient. Not even her mama knew, but she did. She wanted to hug her grandma and touch her silky gunmetal hair. She wanted to make gingerbread cookies with her again, let the spices warm her tongue, but she could only taste copper bubbling up in her mouth.
She tried to swallow, but the muscles in her throat wouldn’t work. She choked and coughed hard. A thousand bright red dots misted her jeans.
A soft rupture of laughter next to her on the couch, then words that coiled cold and deep in her bleeding gut.
“You’re going to pass out soon…when you do, I’m going to take that gun…and finish you.”
Sam tightened her grip on the weapon, her only lifeline.
“Try it.”
She glanced down and saw the large, wet circle of blood on her T-shirt was now up to her chest. She tried to get up from the couch again, but her brain ignored her, made her arm go slack at her side, her hand loose around the gun. She shut her eyes, wanted to shut off the pain leeching her life.
This was it. This was really it.
It wasn’t that bad, but she wanted her dog next to her, licking her hand. She wanted her mama holding her.
She wanted Eric holding her.
She thought of his face, the sadness and hope always etched in his eyes. She wanted to hear his voice and to tell him the things she should’ve told him a million times. She wanted anyone else but Vickie next to her, waiting.
“I’ll
fucking kill you,” Sam whispered, unable to open her eyes again.
She felt the coolness of the gun glide past her fingertips, heard the metal clink-clink as it entered new hands.
Maybe it was enough. Maybe it was enough that she tried to make things right. Maybe it was enough, and Eric would know how much she loved him.
Chapter 52: Eric, 2009
Eric wasn’t surprised when an officer came to his cell and took him into a small interrogation room that evening after Sam visited the jail.
Detective Eastman entered the interrogation room and sat across from him. He studied Eric’s unshaved face, the beginnings of a beard, and the jeans and button-up he’d worn for the last two days. The detective’s expression was unreadable, which only served to make Eric more uncomfortable sitting across from him, hands cuffed and resting on his lap, the meager dinner he ate working its way up into his throat.
“So,” Detective Eastman began, “I guess Miss Mayfair’s been busy doing my job for me.”
Nerves hit Eric hard, and he had hold his breath to keep from throwing up.
“We know she’s been in contact with Miss Lang.” Detective Eastman’s regular Cheshire Cat grin was back. “And surprise, surprise, Miss Lang contacts us today with some revelations.”
Eric’s head was spinning with apprehension. He hoped Sam was right, that Meredith was going to tell the detectives the truth.
“Miss Lang told us an interesting story about the night she ended up in the hospital, the night she almost lost her son.”
Eric held his breath again. He didn’t like the look in the detective’s eyes.
“She certainly presented you as the hero. Maybe you were. But then we know what happened with Miss Mayfair’s pregnancy, don’t we?”
Eric said nothing. He couldn’t move. He felt the rope around his throat. Sam hadn’t meant to, but she put it there.
“Your father and Vickie Lang forcing an abortion on her? I’ve seen and heard a lot in my twenty-seven years doing this work, but that—that’s some evil shit, right there. Might even say a good reason to kill someone. Avenge the person you love and the child you lost.” The detective leaned forward, hands clasped on the table.
Eric looked down at his cuffed hands in his lap, his thumbs digging, digging.
“We know he didn’t go to Mr. Compton’s place. And we know you told the truth about him being alive after the attack. Several people in town saw his truck when he got gas that evening.”
Sweat broke out over Eric’s body, making his shirt cling to his back.
“Mr. Walker, let’s put this to rest right now. I know you want the weight off your shoulders, I know it’s eating at you. No one will blame you for killing him. I certainly don’t.” Detective Eastman kept his eyes on Eric, watching his every reaction. “Tell me what happened in Blanchard. Tell me what you did when your father came back.”
That December day, the air kissed with winter, with the promise of snow at any second. The look on his father’s face when he knew, when he knew everything was ending.
“I—” Eric swallowed, looked down again at those thumbs digging. “I wanted to protect Sam.”
“And what did you do to protect her?” the detective said, his voice soft and soothing.
“I slept with her in her bed…to watch for him.”
“Your father?”
“Yes.”
“And then your father and aunt hurt her, and she lost the baby. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“And that made you angry?”
Angry was too small of a word to describe his feelings after seeing bloody leftovers of what had been his child in the toilet. No words existed for it.
“That made you angry?” the detective repeated.
“Yes.”
“And what did you do after that?”
Eric looked up at Detective Eastman. He just had to say the words: I was going to kill him. I planned it all. It was me, only me, not Sam, just me. And it would stop, this would all stop, the guilt and lies. It would stop, and the truth might send him to prison, but Sam would be okay.
“What did you do to your father, Eric?”
Detective Eastman sounded like a parent tending to a child’s injury and trying to find out how it happened, his voice gentle yet prodding.
“I just…I wanted him to stop hurting her.”
“And how did you make him stop?”
Do it. Say it. He looked down at his hands, his thumbnail bloody, digging, digging.
Blaring static issued from the detective’s waist.
Detective Eastman grumbled into his phone, “What?” A horribly long moment passed before he said, “I’m heading there now.”
The look Detective Eastman gave him—it was like he was watching a train slam into a person and that person was Eric.
Eric’s entire face went numb.
“What happened?” Whatever the detective heard on his phone, Eric knew it was about Sam, he just knew.
A young officer entered the interrogation room, went straight to Eric and lifted him from his seat.
“What happened?” he yelled again, but Detective Eastman was already gone.
Chapter 53: Sam, 1994
Sam tightened her sweater around Arrow’s leg the best that she could, but she already saw blood soak through it. She had to get back to the house fast, had to get to Grandma Haylin, to a phone, call for help.
She stood up and looked down at Arrow again. His eyes were closed, his breathing fast. She turned to run, and Isaac was standing right in front of her, his knife in hand, face pale and eyes piercing her.
“We—we have to get help,” she said, voice wavering. “He’s going to bleed to death if we don’t.”
Isaac glanced down at Arrow and back to Sam. He rubbed the back of his head where Sam had hit him with a tree limb.
“You tried to kill me. Both of you.” His voice was flat yet pained.
She made to run toward the house and Isaac grabbed her arm, swung her around, and she fell to the mattress of dead leaves. He pinned her to the ground, the knife at her throat.
“If he dies, it’s because of you,” he said.
“If he dies, you’ll go to prison. They’ll put you to death. I’ll make sure of it.”
The slap across her face came swift and hard, and Sam tasted metal.
Isaac raised his knife and Sam didn’t think, she grabbed. The blade cut through her glove into her right palm and she screamed, unwilling to open her fist.
“Let go before you cut off your goddamn hand!”
She held on, sure he’d cut her throat open if she released it.
Isaac slapped her with his other hand and she let go of the knife. He pinned both of her hands above her head, his sweat dripping onto her face. She turned her head, searching until she saw Arrow not twenty feet from her. She couldn’t tell if his chest was still moving.
Isaac gasped for his next breath above her. “I would’ve—I would’ve done anything for you.” He scrunched up his face in pain, took a deep breath and shook his head. “And you turn my boy against me?”
His tears looked real, but Sam knew they weren’t.
“You turned him against you,” she said. “You killed your own grandchild.”
Isaac’s face contorted with pain, with the truth—she hoped he felt the wound deep. She hoped nothing could ever reach it to heal it and it’d fester slowly, killing him like he’d killed her baby.
He moaned a deep animal sound as he squeezed her, her arms still pinned, and she thought he would keep squeezing until he popped her open. She felt his wet eyelashes brush her face. He kissed her cheek. He kissed her all over her face and hair as if everything would go back to the way it was if he kissed her enough.
“Why?” he breathed against her neck, his body heavy on her to the point where she could barely catch an inhalation. “Why? Why?”
He took her injured hand and pressed her bleedi
ng palm to his cheek. The salt on his skin set her hand on fire.
“I never wanted this. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
He kissed her lips and she hated herself for the ripple of need that passed through her. She hated herself for having to fight the compulsion to kiss him back.
Isaac pulled back from her, implored her with his eyes.
“I love you.”
Sam didn’t hear his words. All she could hear was what he had hissed into her ear when he had her shoved up against the pine tree, exposing her fresh bruises to Arrow: No one will ever know you like I do. No one else will love you.
But Arrow did know her and her dreams and she knew his, and he would die if she didn’t do something quick.
With every bit of force in her, she rammed her knee into Isaac’s groin. He buckled on top of her, and she rolled out from under him, got to her feet, took a step before Isaac grabbed her ankle and yanked, tripping her back to the ground.
He straddled her again, knife to her throat now, her bleeding hand throbbing, and she screamed as loud as she could.
A thunderous sound came from behind them, and the ground next to Isaac and Sam exploded with dirt and leaves. They both froze.
“Get your goddamn hands off my granddaughter!”
Isaac slowly rose, eyes on Grandma Haylin. She held her hunting rifle high and ready a few feet from him.
“Drop it.”
Isaac ignored Grandma Haylin, held onto his knife, until she fired another shot that kicked up leaves by his feet.
“You get your ass to your truck and you pray you get gone before the police get here. I ever see you again, you’ll learn how good my aim is.”
Isaac looked down at Sam, glanced at her bleeding hand and then looked over to Arrow’s ashen face, his eyes still closed but chest moving a little. When Isaac looked at Sam again, she saw a weight in his eyes heavy enough to drag him back down next to her, but he turned and went into a full run toward the farmhouse.
