One Kick: A Novel

by Chelsea Cain

Kick craned her head around. Mel had lifted his head from his pillow. His eyes were manic. Kick forced a smile.

  Mel sunk back in the bed. “There she is,” he said weakly. “There’s my Beth.”

  Bishop drew the curtain partition open for Kick to pass through.

  “Bishop,” Mel called.

  “Keep walking,” Bishop said from behind her. “Walk straight to the door. Wait for me.”

  Kick moved through the curtain like she was slipping between worlds. On the other side, the TV was tuned to a game show. One of the jumpsuited volunteers pushed a mop across the swimming-pool linoleum. The old black man was still strapped to the bed. He was moving his lips, not making a sound. He and Kick locked eyes.

  “This man you’re asking about,” Mel wheezed, on the other side of the partition. “He’s not like me.” He coughed, and Kick could hear him struggling to catch his breath. “He’s dangerous.”

  She watched the old man’s lips, curling around mysterious syllables, though Kick wasn’t sure he was even making words. Maybe he was reciting a curse.

  “You fucked up her entire life, Mel,” Bishop said. He was straining to keep his voice hushed; Kick could barely hear him. “You think you’re better than this guy because you didn’t kill her?”

  Her friend on the bed looked away. He closed his eyes. Not a curse, Kick realized, a prayer.

  “I’m dying, Bishop,” Mel said.

  “Not soon enough,” Bishop said back.

  Kick heard Bishop’s footsteps leave Mel’s bedside and she pitched herself forward, hurrying across the infirmary to get ahead of him.

  20

  KICK HAD ALREADY DECIDED that she wasn’t going to speak to Bishop until they were outside the prison, and very possibly never again. But as soon as he’d had them buzzed through the infirmary door, back into the cinder-block hallway, Bishop spun her around by the arm.

  “What was that?” he demanded. He turned his head to look up and down the empty institutional corridor. “ ‘Daddy’?” He threaded his hands through his hair. “Jesus Christ, Kick.”

  Kick could barely breathe. The hallway swam around her. Who was he to question her? She had done exactly what he’d asked her to. “I got you what you wanted,” she said. “I didn’t see you rushing to intervene.”

  “We were on camera,” Bishop said.

  She didn’t know what that meant, why it was important. She couldn’t think straight. “You shouldn’t have taken me to see him,” she said. “I have a concussion.” Her skin was hot. Her eyes stung. She wanted out of this place, out of the vest, out of the building, away from all of it. She curled her lip at Bishop, her face burning. “You shouldn’t have made me come here,” she said.

  Bishop exhaled and leaned against the wall. “I know,” he said. His eyes looked pained. “I know.”

  No. He didn’t get to be nice to her now. Kick backed away from him. “Don’t talk to me,” she said.

  “You can’t be alone in here,” Bishop said, stepping after her.

  Kick held up a hand. “I just need a minute,” she said. She had to catch her breath. She had to process. If she didn’t get control, the anger would trigger the anxiety, and then she’d go down the worry maze and . . . She couldn’t concentrate. She looked at her hand, the one she had held Mel’s in. She could still feel his fingers scraping against her scalp. Her eyes were hot with tears. She put her forehead against the cinder-block wall and pressed her skull into the concrete, into the contusion, until the pain started to push everything else out. “Ha!” she said.

  She turned around, scanning the ceiling, squinting at the long rows of fluorescent lights. A security camera seemed to be aimed right at them. She held her arms out, opened her chest, and filled her lungs with air.

  “Ha! Ha! Ha!” Kick said to the camera.

  It had worked at the retreat. It had made her laugh. It had made everyone laugh.

  She was out of breath again. She looked helplessly at Bishop.

  He just stood there. “I need to know the level of your emotional entanglement with him,” he said.

  Kick flapped her arms around. What had he expected? “It’s called acting,” she said. “I grew up making movies, remember?” She was doing what she was supposed to do. “I was being who he wanted me to be. I was playing Beth.”

  “He’s not your father,” Bishop said.

  Kick threw up her hands. She didn’t know what the point was in trying to make anyone understand. She wiped some tears onto the shoulder of her orange visitor’s vest and tried to compose herself. “How long does he have?” she asked.

  Bishop sighed. “Weeks,” he said.

  Kick felt her features twist. She lowered her chin so that her hair would fall forward, covering her face. The key was not breathing. If she didn’t breathe, she could keep it all in. She counted to ten in her head and slowly exhaled. Change your thoughts and you change your world.

  “Talk to me about James,” Bishop said.

  Kick cleared her throat and nodded, then lifted her chin and swept her hair behind her ears. James. Where to even start? The corridor was still quiet. She didn’t know how unusual that was—no guards, no prisoners—and she wondered if Bishop had that kind of power, to provide a few minutes of privacy in a maximum-security prison. Kick slumped against the wall. “He’s not my brother,” she said.

  Bishop settled next to her against the wall. “I know he’s not your brother,” he said.

  It was so quiet. How could a prison be so quiet?

  “I know he started turning tricks at truck stops at age twelve and was convicted of stabbing a man to death off I-80 when he was fourteen,” Bishop said. “I know they locked him up in a mental hospital. He was still there when he wrote to you four years ago. He must have meant something to you by then, though, because you used a chunk of your settlement money to get him out. Given that his psychiatric history indicated a textbook pattern of childhood abuse, I suspected that you might have known James when you were kids. But I didn’t know for sure. Until now.”

  She was exhausted. She could feel every bruise on her body, every scrape and nick and sore joint. “He has scars on his wrists,” Kick said. “I always thought he’d tried to kill himself.” She had never suspected the scars were from being bound. If she had, she would have asked, she would have forced the conversation. “We don’t really talk about that stuff,” she added. It was obvious, but she said it anyway: “The bad stuff.”

  “Do you know how James escaped?” Bishop asked.

  “I don’t think he did escape,” Kick said. “I think he just lost value. The guy Klugman sold him to sold him to someone else who sold him to someone else.” From what she could piece together, James had been a part of at least three different “families” after San Diego. “He was used up. No one wanted him. So they let him go.”

  “And Klugman?” Bishop asked.

  “Mel and I spent a few weeks at Mr. Klugman’s house in San Diego,” Kick said. “I never saw him before that, and I never saw him after. He was a creep. And like Mel said, he’s long gone. These people are good at covering their tracks.”

  “There’s no record of James before his first arrest. If he was abducted under a different name, it’s possible he made it through the court system without anyone making the connection. But I’ve studied the missing-children database. I’ve memorized all those faces. I don’t recognize James.”

  Kick’s tears had dried and her face felt tight. “James was never reported missing,” she said. “His mother sold him for drug money. There is no missing-kid photo to memorize. He was never on a milk carton because no one ever looked for him.” She gazed up and down the empty corridor again. “Don’t people have to use this hallway?” she asked.

  “Are we done?” Bishop asked.

  Kick ran her fingers through her hair. She felt a little better. “Let’s go talk to James,” she
said.

  They started to walk, and Bishop glanced back over his shoulder, his eyes directed upward, toward the security camera.

  An instant later the hallway was bustling.

  21

  THE DRIVE HOME WAS taking months. Kick stole frequent glances at Bishop. She rubbed her palms against her thighs until they burned. She had washed her hands before they left the prison, but she could still smell Mel. It clung to her—the stench of raw meat—and underneath it something more familiar, more the smell she remembered. She crossed her arms and tucked her hands under her armpits. Then she snuck another peek at Bishop. He’d been sending and receiving texts for an hour now, his phone on the steering wheel, his eyes bouncing from the road to the screen. Kick uncrossed her arms and dug through her purse for her own phone. Still no reply from James. He was evidently pissed that she hadn’t responded sooner to the fifteen texts he had sent her phone while it was in that prison locker. She sighed and leaned back in her seat and looked over at Bishop.

  “You’re breaking the law,” she said.

  Bishop kept typing.

  “Texting while driving,” Kick said. “There’s a law against it.”

  Bishop’s expression didn’t register a reaction. “I’m an excellent driver. Why don’t you practice some more with your handcuffs?”

  “Just talk on the phone. Put it on hands-free.”

  He shot her a curt smile. “I don’t want you to know what I’m saying,” he said.

  “So I have to die in a car crash so you can keep secrets?”

  Bishop’s eyes flicked down at his phone. “If necessary, yes.”

  Kick didn’t like being ignored. She was the one who was mad at him. He’d taken her there; he’d made her see him. She was the one with the head injury. “You’re not looking at me,” she said.

  Bishop continued to not look at her. “I’m driving,” he said.

  Her phone buzzed. Kick glanced at it to see if it was James. It wasn’t. She gazed out the window at the agricultural fields on either side of the interstate. The crops were subsidized with billboards for mixed martial arts tournaments, cage fighting, and state fairs. The phone continued to buzz in her lap.

  “Your phone’s ringing,” Bishop said between gritted teeth.

  “It’s my sister,” Kick explained. Her head hurt again, a dull pain that gnawed at the back of her neck. “She calls every year on the anniversary. But she doesn’t really want me to pick up.”

  Everyone said she and Marnie had been inseparable when they were little, but Kick couldn’t imagine it. The Marnie she remembered had never liked her. She’d never forgiven Kick for splitting up their parents.

  Kick wondered how long it would take for Mel’s smell to fade from her hands. She had missed his smell at first. They didn’t let her take anything from the house. They didn’t even let her keep her nightgown. It was all evidence. All she had was the Scrabble tile. For a year, she slept with it in her fist. Every morning she’d have to find it in the bedsheets.

  “It was an act,” she said quietly.

  She squeezed her arms together as tightly as she could. Her hands didn’t burn anymore. They were numb.

  “There’s gum in the glove box,” Bishop said. “Chew on a piece before you rub all your skin off.” His eyes moved from the windshield to her hands and then flicked away again.

  Kick lifted her hands from her lap and turned them over. Her palms were raw and red.

  “It will help,” Bishop said. “Peppermint kills everything.”

  22

  JAMES STILL HADN’T RETURNED Kick’s texts, which meant he was deep into programming or, more likely, playing Skyrim. Kick knew he wouldn’t deal well with this, her just showing up with Bishop, all the questions about James’s past. The elevator stopped on the second floor and Kick and Bishop stepped out.

  “I think I should talk to him first,” she said, four pieces of gum wadded in her cheek.

  Bishop’s hood was up so she couldn’t see his face. He didn’t break stride. “No,” he said.

  “He’s fragile,” Kick reminded him.

  Bishop tipped his head slightly so it was angled away from the security camera and glanced back at her. “That’s why I’m letting you be there while I talk to him,” he said.

  Kick worked the gum in her mouth. It was already losing flavor, getting blander with every chew. She’d left the pack in the car.

  “Maybe we should call the police,” she suggested.

  Bishop stopped in front of James’s door and knocked.

  Kick crossed her arms. “It’s not like he knows where the guy is now. It’s not like they keep in touch.”

  “James?” Bishop called through the door.

  They listened. Kick didn’t hear the sound of James’s steps.

  “James?” she called impatiently. “Open the door.”

  She started digging through her purse, through the assortment of weaponry. “I have a key,” she said. “He’s probably at his computer with headphones on.”

  Bishop had pivoted slightly, his attention directed behind them. Kick could feel his body language had shifted, like a dog raising its hackles. “Here it is,” she said, finding the key. They just needed to get inside. Bishop would see. James would be sitting at his computer. She started to turn the key in the lock.

  “Don’t,” Bishop said, putting his hand on her wrist.

  Kick swallowed her gum, startled. She could feel it stuck in her throat. She let go of the key and lowered her hand.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Bishop said. He was still facing the door so she couldn’t see his expression, only his hood and the tip of his nose.

  “You made me swallow my gum,” Kick said.

  Bishop put his hood down and turned to her. There was no smirk anymore. He locked his eyes on hers.

  “I need you to do something for me, okay?” His voice was even and calm. “I need you to stay right here while I go inside the apartment.”

  Kick knew James. He hardly ever answered the door. It’s why she had a key. “He has his headphones on,” Kick said.

  “Please,” Bishop said. “Do this.”

  A flutter of fear moved through Kick’s stomach. She gave a small nod of assent.

  Bishop exhaled slowly, turned the key, and pushed open the door. He lifted his phone to his ear as he went in and mumbled something into it. She thought she heard the word “backup.”

  Bishop had left the door slightly ajar and Kick kept her eyes on the sliver of hallway she could see through the gap. She could feel the pressure of the gum in her throat every time she took a breath. She waited.

  “Well?” she called after a minute. “Is he playing Minecraft or what?”

  No one answered.

  “James?”

  The gum throbbed as her throat constricted. “Bishop?”

  She pushed the door open. James’s recyclables were strewn on the floor. Kick felt around in her purse for the hunting knife. It made a satisfying sound as she unsheathed it. Her fingers wrapped around the rosewood handle. It was a fixed, full-tang stainless steel blade. She had never used it, but the guy who’d sold it to her had told her that it would split through rib cage and bone. She stepped over the threshold, the knife at her hip, her thumb at the hilt. She could hear faint sounds now, movement, coming from the living room. She stopped and switched the knife around so her thumb was at the handle base, holding the knife at shoulder level like she was about to kill someone in a shower. Then she started down the hall.

  23

  KICK HAD TO MAKE her way through a minefield of plastic water bottles and pop cans to get down the hall. She didn’t know how Bishop had managed so soundlessly to avoid them.

  The apartment smelled different. The stale pizza smell, James’s unwashed sweet stink, they were there, but there was another smell, too, something on top of it, some
thing fresh and metallic.

  As she got close to the living room, she thought she could hear someone breathing.

  Kick tightened her grip on the knife and stepped around the wall.

  Somehow she knew to keep her gaze from the floor—maybe by instinct, maybe because some part of her saw what was there and warned the rest of her not to look. Her eyes fixed instead on James’s workstation. She almost believed he’d be there, bent over his keyboard like always. But his blue chair was empty. Instead of displaying their usual coding and games, the monitors were in screen saver mode, rotating through a slide show of affirmations. Large white letters on a black screen read: Anxiety is a normal emotion that I can control.

  She heard Bishop say, “Kick.”

  But Kick refused to look at him, refused to look down. She didn’t want to see. She didn’t want for it to be real. So Kick kept her eyes stubbornly glued to the monitors. The screen saver affirmations scrolled right to left. There are good things about me. I deserve to be happy. Kick could feel a film of sweat between her hand and the handle of the knife. I feel calm. The letters spun away and dissolved out of view.

  She heard James’s voice in her head. I am safe outside. I enjoy meeting new people.

  “He’s still alive,” Bishop said.

  Kick sobbed with relief and let her eyes fall. James lay splayed on his back, surrounded by blood-soaked printouts and notes. Pain twisted like a razor in Kick’s chest. So much blood. She didn’t know a person could bleed that much. James’s entire midsection was red, his yellow shirt not yellow anymore, blood pooled around him. Bishop was kneeling at his side, blood seeping into his jeans, hands slick with red against James’s belly.

  The pain bounced and grew in Kick’s chest. It was hard to breathe.

  Change your thoughts and you change your world.

  She hadn’t paid James’s water bill. It had been in her backpack, blown to smithereens. She hadn’t even told him. She didn’t know why it seemed important right then, but it did.