by Stella Rhys
I was in Scotland for God’s sake. My eyes stared out vacantly at the sea of blue before me but my nails clawed desperately at my skin, trying to get rid of every time Hunt had ever touched me, made me the same as my mom. My mind wasn’t relenting. It refused to stop dragging me by the legs through the dirt, the gravel and the filthy memories of Sunstone.
I threw up outside after I saw Trish and Hunt in bed together. Shanna came running. I don’t remember what I did to make her worry so much that she went to get Dean from the management office. I protested weakly for her to stop but eventually, I was on my hands and knees, hovering over my own vomit and too weak to say or do anything. I didn’t move or make a single noise when Dean came along, threw me over his shoulder and took me to where he now spent most of his time. Over the course of my fifteen months there, he’d gone from living one or two nights to almost full-time in the office. Trish said it was because he used the money I brought to spruce up the place real nice and he was having an affair with some girl. She said she didn’t care as long as it kept his hands off of her. Hunt agreed. So did I. He checked on her once a week, I heard a fight every time and after he left, Trish would come to me shaking, brushing back my hair and saying, “It’s okay. He’s gone. He’s crazy but he’s gone.”
But now I wondered about every last thing she and Hunt had ever told me.
Dean dropped me like a ragdoll into the chair across his desk. I heard the sound of him ripping a paper towel off a roll. When he came back to me, he shoved his hand in my hair, held my head up and wiped the bile off my mouth and the collar of my shirt. “What happened.” There was no inflection in his question. I know I took too long to answer because he barked it at me again. My thoughts scrambled back together fast.
“My mom with Hunt.” And her sling wasn’t on. Her shattered elbow was working fine, I realized. It was reaching for the ceiling and plopped back to the mattress with a bounce when she noticed me. It was never broken. And I was an unforgivable idiot. “They were in bed. Together.”
“That ain’t nothing new.”
Still panting, I stared. “I didn’t know.”
“Whole lot you don’t.”
He sat down behind his desk. I finally got the chance to look up and around. I always imagined that inside his office, he had a big screen TV and calendars with fast cars and naked women on them. I imagined nice furniture – nicer, at least – and a permanent group of friends hanging out on the couch drinking beer. But there was none of that. There was his desk, his chair, the one across that I sat on and a torn couch on which a cardboard box rested. It was bursting with multicolored files and papers. His desk was no different. There was no excess and it wasn’t the bachelor’s pad that I imagined. It was a workspace. The telephone rang. He answered it, said something about how he’d have it fixed, and then hung up to return his irritated attention to me.
“I guess you don’t realize I ain’t really with your mom no more.”
My face crinkled. “What are you talking about?”
“Legally, we are together. The church says we’re together. But as far as I’m concerned, Trisha ain’t my wife or my family. Same with Hunt.”
My throat was raw. “Because of the affair?” My every word was a broken rasp.
“I confirmed my decision when I found out about that.” Dean dragged his hand over his face and tugged on his beard. He moved some papers around on his desk and didn’t look at me. His voice was casual, tinged only with annoyance as he proceeded to reveal all the truths that splintered me straight through my stomach. “Your ma’s been after your money since before I met her. She just didn’t talk about it much when we were dating. I didn’t want to hear about it. You weren’t nobody to me. But I didn’t have no choice once your grandma died. Trish was nonstop then. Real excited. She found you online and she looked at all the nice things you had and showed Hunt. He got excited, too. I guess he was seventeen then. He wanted a car real bad and Trisha said he could get a nice one if we got you to send some money.”
I was an even bigger idiot than I thought. The bile rose again in my throat.
“I didn’t like when they started getting it. I didn’t touch the things they bought with it. Not the booze or the toys or the drugs. She was off that shit for awhile but not after she had all that cash in her hands.”
God. I’d been fueling drug habits the whole time. My lips went dry. “Did you ever hurt her?”
He paused. His frown deepened as he looked at me. “I push her when she hits me.”
“Did you threaten her,” I clarified. “Or make her feel like you might hurt her? Or… she said there was… I thought there was a story with…” I tried to remember that article Trish sent me about war veteran Dean Casey whose episode of PTSD had him attacking a man with a bat, leaving him brain dead in the hospital.
“I got a domestic abuse call. We get them here. Cops weren’t coming so I went and he was rabid, foaming at the mouth. Had his girl duct-taped to her chair and came at me with a knife. I took his bat and I started swinging.” Dean drank from his mug. It had Mickey Mouse ears on it. I couldn’t process any of this.
“But – ”
“The news don’t cover us much and the ones that do like to make a certain kind of story. We’re all one kind of people to them here. They don’t care about the truth.”
The million realizations were crushing down on my skull, my shoulders. I grasped at my thoughts. “God, I let them take me here and just…” I couldn’t believe myself. I’d given away the year of my life I’d been looking forward to most. I was going to graduate. Callum and I were together, finally. We never made it official with words but it was enough that we were starting to talk about how to tell Caroline.
Fifteen months taken from people I loved, who needed me – and all to live in misery for a lie.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Dean rose halfway out his chair and spat. “You ain’t my family, girl. I got enough problems and you ain’t my business. I didn’t like the sound of you the second they started talking about you. I didn’t want you here. I don’t want your money. You ain’t my kind of people and I don’t have to do shit for you. All you are, girl, is a stranger who turned my wife and son into two monsters. I ain’t never spoke to you or even seen you before I knew I didn’t like you.”
I stared at the broken vinyl siding hanging outside his window like a dangling arm. I almost wanted to laugh through my tears. I was a curse to every family I went to. “You never…” I squinted, recalling everything I thought I knew about Dean. “You never spoke to me before I came here?”
“What did I just say? Do you remember me speaking to you?”
My gaze drifted back to him. I was numb now. “No,” I murmured, realizing it hadn’t been Dean threatening me on the phone that night. It was Hunt. It was him and Trish all along. It was him telling me he would kill me and Caroline with a smile on his face, posing as his father, playing the main role in the fictional story Trish had spent years writing me online. When I thought about it, I realized that I’d heard Dean yell before and it didn’t quite sound like the voice I heard on the phone. On top of that, the man on the phone called me “little girl.” The only person who ever did that was Hunt.
I felt like it was finally happening.
I was breaking completely. I was finally ready to just give up.
But for all the callous things Dean said to me, he did a lot to keep me from just throwing the towel in. I had to leave. He said I did and he said he would help.
So I got it together and we readied things over the course of three days. I emptied what little I had in my bank account and he fixed up the beat up Ford Fiesta he drove before buying his truck. We spoke maybe two words in the time it took. I got his phone number more than a year after meeting him and he texted any vital communication we needed to have, to avoid arousing suspicion. A day after walking in on Trish and Hunt, they were all there again and I wasn’t sure if they remembered seeing me, but they were certainly act
ing different around me. Trish was saccharine sweet. It made me nervous. Hunt didn’t say a word to me at all. That made me even more nervous. I couldn’t imagine that they’d somehow be onto me because I acted as I always did and didn’t even let them see when I was merely texting Dean. But they, Hunt especially, seemed to be harboring some sort of hunch.
“Y’alright?”
It was the first word Hunt spoke to me in three days, since I saw him in bed with my mother. He spoke it not with concern but amusement and, I could’ve sworn, a hint of accusation. I had plans to leave that night once he slept. Maybe I showed my nerves by eating breakfast standing up. Hunt was smirking at me like he knew something and I shook hair in my face because I was afraid I looked pale or green.
“I’m fine. Yourself?”
He watched me eat till I was done with my plate. It had to be a good five minutes. I was sure he was just going to ignore my question at that point but as I washed the dishes, he finally said, “I’m dandy.”
I didn’t leave that night as planned.
Hunt didn’t go to sleep. He sat in the kitchen all night, drinking beer and being loud with a friend, even after I got in my pajamas and under the sheets on the couch. It was aggressive behavior for him. He never did things to deliberately piss me off but I could tell he was on a mission to that night. It had me thoroughly rattled and I considered just running out without a bag packed and booking it to the Fiesta parked outside the management office. Dean said the door was unlocked and the keys were inside. I could technically do it.
But it wouldn’t give me the slightest head start and Hunt’s truck would catch up to me in no time so I just waited, pretending to be asleep every time he ambled out of the kitchen and circled my couch like a shark.
A week went by with Hunt staying sober and up all night in the next room. I was losing hope as fast as I was losing nerve. My every interaction with Hunt during the daytime stripped me of another piece of confidence. I wasn’t sure what advantage I had on him if he wouldn’t stop watching me and most likely knew I had something up my sleeve. He teased me with everything he said. I knew I wasn’t being paranoid. Every word out of his mouth was spoken with a smirk and a threat that was never there before.
“What’chu up to?” he asked one morning as I walked out the kitchen and straight into his chest.
“Huh?”
“What’re you doing today?”
“I don’t have any plans.”
“Oh, I doubt that’s true. You have all sorts of plans,” he leered. When I tried to pass, he blocked my path. Every way I went, he stood in front. “Oh. Oh. Oh.” He grinned wider each time. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, little girl. I won’t let you.”
Only once did Dean text to express any sort of interest in my failure to launch. Tick tock. That was all his message said but it was all I needed to feel the fire again. It might not have been a full sentence but it reminded me that time was everything and I couldn’t afford to lose another minute and give Hunt more traction. So the next day at work, where Trish had suddenly begun visiting me, I took away more cash than usual. In reality, most of it was plucked from the stash from my bank account, but I said I got some nice tips and gave the thick wad to Trish with a smile.
By the next afternoon, she had scored. By night, she and Hunt were zombies.
They were technically awake when I drove away in the beat up Fiesta. I gassed the pedal so hard I smelled rubber but I kept my speed till I was far enough from Sunstone to scream through the roof with what felt like the greatest victory of my life. “Bless your heart,” was what Shanna would say to the fact that I actually thought it was over.
*
Charlotte, Savannah and Daytona Beach.
Those were the three stops in my twenty-month getaway – that bittersweet year-and-a-half before Hunt dragged me by the hair back to Sunstone. He got me there with the threat of death and Trish kept me there with the news of life.
But it would all end in blood, anyway.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Callum
Ana followed me into my room. I told her to go to her own, she refused and I didn’t give enough of a shit to stop her after that. She came up behind me and slid her hands up the back of my shirt, tracing her fingers down the line of my rigid muscles as I stared at Lake’s open suitcase. Ana circled her arms to my front and undid my belt.
“Don’t look,” she whispered, turning me around, slapping my hands onto her tits. “Don’t think. Just breathe. Relax.” She made me squeeze. “Enjoy me. You deserve it, Callum.” I looked into her eyes but I didn’t see them. She was moaning, rubbing my hands all over her front. She pushed them south. I barely registered it. I’d just remembered something.
Bluebells.
That was the name of Lake’s favorite flower. Fucking bluebells.
I pushed it out of my head when I was a teenager. Deliberately. I thought Lake was being angsty and dramatic for choosing an obsession based on feeling some personal relation to its name. It started when she was seventeen and mirroring my mother’s bouts of depression. That was at least what it looked like to me. My mother called her every synonym for “beautiful” under the sun including “belle,” so when Lake was in her unexplainably shitty moods, she was “my blue belle.” When Lake found out that bluebells were flowers, she grew instantly attached. She was fascinated – loved their color, their shape, the way they stared at the floor. My mother bought them whenever she could but they weren’t easily found in New York. Lake researched it and said that most bluebells in the world existed in the U.K. “Scotland has a bunch.”
My mom did a golf clap. “Our family had a distillery in Scotland. Maybe we’ll go visit and see the bluebells while we’re at it.”
Of all Lake’s interests that she indulged, I thought this one was a contender for the stupidest. It felt to me like she was romanticizing Lake’s tantrums and I was sure Lake didn’t need any more encouragement to pitch those. They drove me insane. I couldn’t understand how she could skip into her room singing and come out a walking path of destruction within five minutes.
Only a decade later did I have the context to understand it. The moods stemmed from contact with her mother. Trish was what withered Lake. She was where Lake went and whatever secret she harbored. At least the start of it. I was sure that woman wasn’t alone in whatever pain Lake still carried. It was too deep, too layered and heavy to have been caused by one person. There had to be others and the madman in my head slowed to a stop when I considered I could soon enough be one of them.
And I couldn’t fucking bear that.
“Ana.” I stopped her hands in place. She looked up with big eyes. I knew the look in my face had changed because she was already starting.
“Don’t. Callum, just don’t. You made the right decision to let go, you did, so don’t you dare – ”
“Stop talking,” I murmured, letting go of her hands. I changed the shirt I’d been wearing all day. She watched me the entire time, protesting like a woman unhinged. She was still going by the time I was out the door.
*
The car ride to the closest field of bluebells was an hour away. I found nothing in the first one.
Nothing again in the next. I’d tracked down, driven to and searched through a field for every year she was gone by the time the day had passed and I was back in literal and figurative darkness.
I knew she could be anywhere at this point. I’d given Lake a head start to disappear for a second time in fucking Europe, for God’s sake. I quietly admired the patience of my taxi driver who willingly sat with me on the sides of roads for minutes to an hour at a time, wondering what the hell to do next.
“I’m sorry,” he finally asked. He had no idea what I was looking for but he said it anyway. “Back to the hotel?”
Yes. I thought it but my body overruled my brain. “No. One more.”
The last field was between a wooded area and a brick cottage. Maybe a restaurant or bed and breakfast. It was almost pitch bl
ack, too dark for me to see. The moon cast a silver light over everything but I didn’t need it to know that my final attempt at finding Lake was also fruitless. The taxi stalled on the side of the empty road, the only light for miles. It beamed ahead at endless nothing.
So I got in after a few minutes and had the driver go on. He went a couple yards before the headlights shone on a silhouette I’d recognize anywhere.
“Stop.”
I stared. My hand smacked flat on the window for a second before I had the door flying open and my feet pacing faster with every step toward the shadow of thick waves tumbling over two perfect knees. They hugged up to her chest the way they always did. I got closer and saw her hair drifting in the breeze like rolling water. The moonlight highlighted the flyaway strands as I stood before her, still as a statue of an angel in some mystical woodland. Something about it reminded me of the first night we’d had together – as a couple or at least something like it. It was the night in her dorm room, before I had taken her virginity. She decorated every inch of it with Christmas lights and looked like a goddess from some other world. I remembered how fucking beautiful she was that night. In every way.
“Lake.”
I knelt as she lifted her head. Her eyes settled on mine but didn’t register me, still somewhere far away. I caught her chin, repeated her name. She didn’t say anything but when I brushed my thumb over her bottom lip, she closed her mouth gently over it, kissing me softly in her daze. Slowly, she came to as I sat in the field of dark with her, our patch of flowers lit by the headlights of the taxi.
“I thought you left me again.”
She shook her head.
“Where did you go?” I knew only the physical answer. She wet her lips, gave no reply. “Lake. I can’t tell you how little she means to me. Ana. I didn’t tell her about you. She was there when I heard you were coming back. I was in shock. I was fucking scared, to be honest. I said things in the heat of the moment and she heard. It could’ve easily been anyone else.”
