Biting Winds

by Shawna Ireland

  Instead, Dave pulled into a cove, surrounded by sand dunes, and Jessie saw what appeared to be a tent lifted into the air like a kite tethered to a pine tree. Luckily, someone had the sense to tie it down.

  Poor bastards, Jessie thought. Who would want to camp in this windstorm?

  Dave jerked the car to a stop and jumped out, yelling to Jessie.

  “Oh, shit! Jessie! Grab something heavy to put in the tent. We have to weigh it down.”

  Jessie could barely hear him over the furious winds, and sat in the car for a minute feeling both alarmed and curious as to why her groom felt the need to help the campers who had obviously, and for good reason, abandoned their campsite.

  “Damn it, Jessie! Grab something! Our tent is going to rip away!” Dave screamed into the wind.

  Jessie laughed a laugh that was anything but amused. Surely this must be a joke. Did he say this was their tent? Jessie jumped from the car, looking around the campsite for heavy items to weigh the tent, their tent, down before her groom was pulled into the air, left dangling from the tent.

  It was this image that sent Jessie into a fit of laughter. It was her laughter that sent Dave into a fit of anger that Jessie failed to recognize.

  "Please tell me that this is only a layover." Jessie tried to make sense of the slowly revealing reality as the wind whipped her wedding dress tightly on her frame. She looked at her feet, sinking into the sand, making it impossible to take a step. "You realize I saved these heels for after the wedding because I couldn't walk in the sand without sinking, right? I mean, what were you think-"

  “You’re kidding, right?” Dave screamed into Jessie’s face, immediately sobering her laughter. “What? It’s not a fucking five-star hotel for my princess? I busted my ass getting this together for us! This is an investment! Instead of wasting thousands of dollars on a hotel I invested us!” Spit flew into Jessie’s face as Dave screamed the words. “We can use this shit for years, Jessie! I can’t believe you! If I knew you were this fucking uppity, I wouldn’t have bothered to have married you!”

  It took Jessie a minute to realize that she stopped breathing. Her heart was banging out of her chest, ears ringing, head pounding, fists clenched, legs shaking, and blood boiling. How dare he!

  She felt as if she had been punched in the gut as the unfamiliar man stood before her. She was pissed, to say the least. She had never been spoken to like this in her life, and she wouldn’t stand for it now.

  Jessie turned her heels and stomped back to the car, demanding Dave to take her home. Despite Dave’s repeated apologies, Jessie would not budge.

  “Jessie! Please! Don’t you see the potential? The opportunity! The romantic notion? Anything at all?”

  “I see nothing but an out of control child! Take me home, Dave. Now!”

  “Because I brought you camping?”

  “Camping? No, Dave. Camping was an unwelcomed surprise, I'll admit to that. But that has nothing to do with going home. I haven’t even begun to ask what the hell you did with the twenty thousand dollars, or why we aren’t boarding a plane to Fuji. No, you’re taking me home because I don’t know who the hell you are. The Dave I met, in Hawaii, and married barely twelve hours ago, would have never, ever, ever screamed at me the way you just did.” Though angry, Jessie’s words were more calculated through gritted teeth than they were loud. Loud was the echo of the car door, slamming. Jessie roughly locked her seatbelt across her chest, followed by the crossing of her arms. She looked straight ahead, into the darkness, at nothing. Even if it were light, she was sure she couldn't have seen anything but boiling blood through her eyes.

  Dave ran to the passenger side of the car and kneeled down at the window. “Jess! I did this for us. So we could have a longer honeymoon. Even the travel agent agreed that we could stay here at least a month for what it would cost us to stay just three nights in Fiji. That’s what I wanted, babe, a long honeymoon with my amazing wife. You humiliated me with your response. I’m sorry, Jess!”

  “Take me home.”

  “I wanted to be close to my father,” Dave admitted so late into the conversation that he wasn’t surprised that Jessie still didn’t budge.

  Jessie was starting to feel badly about her own fit, but she held firm and demanded to be driven back home. Yes, she felt guilty about her response. Obviously Dave had been worried about his father, and he was thinking about their future. Jessie was acting spoiled, but there was no need for Dave’s tantrum. As angry as she was, Dave’s ability to flash into this unknown monster scared her.

  After an hour, Dave came back to the car and calmly stated, “Jess, look, I was going to take you home, but I can’t find the damn keys. I know I crossed the line, several lines for that matter. But we’re going to have to wait for morning to find the keys in this sand. I can’t do it without the light.”

  With that, Dave headed to the campfire he had built an hour ago while Jessie sat in the car, and downed one beer after another before heading into the tent. In a last ditch effort to woo his bride, Dave set out chocolate covered strawberries and champagne, and lit candles inside the tent, now weighed down with ice chests and Jessie's suitcases intended for Fuji. Dave sat on the floor, cracked open a beer, and waited for his wife, feeling a mixture of anger and hope.

  Jessie resigned herself to the fact that there was no escaping this hell until the morning. She pulled her heels off, dumping the sandy contents onto the interior carpet of the rental car. The car that she thought was going to drive them to an airport. She stepped out of the car, snagging the bottom of her nylons on a jagged rock. She felt the material run up her thigh, creating just that much more exposure between her flesh and the biting wind as it whipped her dress in every possible direction. She stomped back into the campsite, just as she previously exited it, and entered the tent.

  She shook her head when she saw Dave's attempt at romancing her. Any other time she would have been touched. She saw the large air mattress, and headed for it, starting to unzip the wedding dress she expected to be wearing when Dave carried her into the ocean front hotel.

  Whether it was an accident or not, when Jessie kicked his beer over, soaking the seat of his pants, Dave broke for the second time.

  The first flurry of punches was a combination of both left and right hooks to the ears. Jessie fell face first onto the air mattress. Dave grabbed her shirt, flipping her over, so she was facing him. She was too shocked to make a noise or defend herself, even though her brain was prompting her over and over to scream, kick, and block. She merely grunted when he started throwing random punches to her chest, ribs, hips, stomach, and legs.

  “You fucking bitch! You fucking stupid bitch!” Dave repeatedly yelled as he paced the cramped quarters of the tent. “You had to push me, didn’t you? You had to act like a spoiled, fucking brat.”

  He picked up the beer can and threw it at Jessie, hard, spraying her with the remnants of the cold beer before storming out of the tent, cursing under his breath.

  When it was over, Jessie laid on the bed, drifting in and out of consciousness for several hours. Later, Dave lay beside her, snoring softly, peacefully. If she wasn't so dizzy, and scared, she would have gone out to sleep in the car.

  The rising sun prompted Dave to get up and make a pot of coffee, without as much as a glance at his injured wife. It was then that Jessie pulled her knees to her chest and cried, turning and burying her face into the pillow, the same pillow spotted with blood from her ears, now mixed with her salty tears.

  She stood up slowly as the tent spun around her, causing her head to throb. She felt as though she was going to be sick, so she sat back down. It was then that she realized she was still wearing her wedding dress. It was torn. It was bloody. Jessie silently cried out and started ripping the dress off of her, piece by piece until she reached the stronger fabric that she couldn't tear with her bare hands. She pulled the dress off and changed into a clean outfit.

  Jessie had no words for Dave, and she avoided his eye contact as she
climbed out of the tent and made her way to the fire he built, where she dumped the scraps of her dress. She wondered, if a wedding dress was a symbol of the purity of heart, what did a bloody, burning dress symbolized. Dave didn't say a word, probably because that would have entailed the ability to lift his jaw from the sand. She expected that someday she would look back on this moment and feel a sense of satisfaction, but not today. Today she was numb.

  Jessie combed the sand with her feet, followed by a hunt on her hands and knees for what felt like hours, looking for the keys. She finally gave up when she realized that the keys were not meant to be found.

  Chapter 8

  Dave had always been an independent sort of guy. He had to. He was eleven-years-old when his father left his mother for one of the younger, skinnier waitresses at the same bar his mother worked at.

  Forced to leave by humiliation, his mother, Ruth, took a job at a smaller bar closer to home so if there were an emergency, she could get home to her children quickly. Well, that’s the story she told her boss and the neighbors who gave her flack about leaving her children home alone all night. It was a different story behind closed doors.

  “Your daddy pays me shit in child support!” she complained almost every night. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to put the entire check in my gas tank to drive across town to support his little ingrates.”

  “I have homework,” Dave would respond in his normal monotone voice.

  “I’m sitting here trying to tell you about my day at work, and you can’t even give me five fucking minutes? Go then. Go do your homework but remember that when you want something from me.”

  “I’m sorry Mom. I thought you were done.” Dave still wouldn’t make eye contact. The truth be told, he knew she could go on and on for hours about his father and the new girlfriend. He didn't want to hear it. He didn't want to imagine the explicit details that his mother suggested were the only reason his father was with her. He didn't want to hear the details of the diseases she hoped his father got, and the disgusting symptoms that she vividly described about parts of his anatomy that made Dave want to puke. He didn't want to hear how many years his mother cleaned his father’s dirty underwear, or how many men she turned down to be with him.

  “I’m done now that you let me know you were done listening.”

  “No, it was just a misunderstanding! Go ahead,” Dave pleaded with his mother, not wanting to hear another word from her, but well aware that his night was going to suck from here on out as she pretended to have her feelings hurt in her passive-aggressive, narcissistic way.

  “Get out of my face.” She waved him off.

  Dave was responsible for his little brother, Dylan, and sister, Daisy, while Ruth was working. Dave realized early on that being responsible didn’t just mean keeping them safe. It also meant cleaning up their messes, following the routine his mother put in place, and making sure everything was just as she liked it when she came home.

  Ruth usually stumbled into the house between three and four in the morning, and she usually wasn’t alone. Even at his young age, Dave knew she was trying to prove a point that men still wanted her even though she wasn’t a young, pretty blonde.

  Dave didn’t mind when Ruth brought company over. Usually it meant that the horny men would try to impress Ruth by pulling out dollar bills for the kids, or Ruth would completely ignore Dave in exchange for her desired attention. And the noises that came out of her room didn't even bother him anymore. The voices, and squeaking of mattress springs were nothing compared to the wrath of Ruth when she was feeling rejected. Those nights were hell.

  “Get up!” she would yell into the room Dave shared with his siblings. “I wanna talk to you boy!”

  Dave learned that pretending to sleep added to her rage, so he didn’t try that anymore.

  “Yes ma’am?” Dave asked in a timid voice, though inside he screamed how much he hated her.

  “Look at you,” she slurred. “Looking more like your daddy every single fucking day.”

  “Sorry.” Dave hung his head in shame, trying to flatten his hair as if that would help.

  “Yeah, sorry like your daddy. Bet you wanna be just like him."

  "No ma'am, I don't."

  "Fucking liar already. See. Already following in his footsteps. Now lookie here,” she pointed at a Tupperware dish he stacked in the strainer. “What did I tell you would happen if I found another dirty dish in the strainer?”

  “It’s not dirty, Ma! It had spaghetti sauce in it and it just stains the cuts in it!” Dave knew that pleading didn't help. She wanted a dirty dish, and she would have found one, even if that meant dirtying it herself.

  “You don’t think I know the difference between dirty and stained, boy?” she threw the bowl at Dave’s gut.

  Ruth began taking every dish, pot, and pan from every cupboard, and every utensil from every drawer and started piling them on the kitchen counters.

  “Wash every last dish, Dave, and don’t let me find a single spot on any of them or you will do it again. When you’re done putting them away you can go back to bed,” she snarled.

  “Yes ma’am.” Dave tried hard to swallow the tears back.

  “And make sure they’re dry. I don’t need no fucking roaches.” The dishtowel she threw hit him in the back of the head, stinging his ear as it whipped around the side.

  Only when he was sure she was not coming back in, Dave let his silent tears splash into the soapy dishwater, suddenly realizing why his father left his mother as he washed every dish in the house for the third time this month.

  Ruth liked to make jokes at Dave’s expense. When her friends came over she made Dave serve them, giving him different chores to do in front of them. When the ice cream man drove by she would have Dave run to stop him, and only buy Daisy and Dylan and ice cream, making Dave watch them eat it.

  When Dave let the garbage get too full she would dump the entire bag of garbage on Dave’s bed, allowing the coffee grinds and raw meat scraps to seep into his bed until he came home from school.

  The bedroom he shared with Daisy and Dylan was small and cluttered, and hard to keep clean. Dave would come home from school to find everything in the bedroom heaped in a pile on the bedroom floor, every stitch of clothing from the dressers and closet, every toy, every book, every stitch of linen from the beds.

  “Don’t come out until you have it cleaned up. Not even for dinner!” Ruth closed the bedroom door behind her.

  More than once Dave would fall asleep while he cried and cursed into the heap of mixed belongings. As he got older, he just methodically puteverything back in its proper place, practically emotionless.

  During the rare event that Dave had friends come home after school, his mother would sit with his friends as if they were there to see her. She enjoyed making fun of Dave, and forced him to clean and referred to Dave as Cinderella. He could tell that his friends only laughed because they were uncomfortable, and they would never come over with a second invitation. That is if Dave would be dumb enough to invite them again.

  Dave stopped inviting friends over, and after having to decline his friends invitations to their houses so many times because of his responsibilities with Daisy and Dylan, the offers stopped. So, while his friends hung out at the malls, drive-in, and parties he was home getting Daisy and Dylan off and on the school bus, helping with their chores and homework, cooking meals, bathing the kids, and getting them to bed.

  Dave hated his mother. It took every ounce of intelligence and energy not to spit in her face when she made him sit on the couch listening to her cry about her life. It took every bit of willpower not laugh in her face when she cried in bed at night.

  “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” he would scream over and over and over into his pillow, willing God if He did exist, to stop him from attacking his mother. Even though, at sixteen-years-old, he was much bigger than her, her emotional supremacy overpowered his physical strength.

  The day he turned eighteen Dave moved out of
his mother’s house, wracked with the guilt of leaving Daisy and Dylan behind, but unable to guarantee his mother’s safety if he stayed. Not wanting to face the consequences as an adult, Dave stayed as far away from Ruth as possible. When he did see her on rare occasions, like the kid’s birthdays, or holidays, Ruth was dismissive of Dave and treated him like an uninvited guest. If you hadn't been told, you would have never guessed that Dave was Ruth's eldest son.

  Thirteen years later, and on the first afternoon of his honeymoon, Dave vowed that he would not let another woman make a laughing stock out of him again. Sure, he felt like shit for what happened to Jessie last night, and never intended to allow himself to get that angry again, but he would be damned before he lived another eighteen years with a woman who made a fool out of him. It didn't matter who that woman was, mother, sister, or wife.

  It was better for both of their sake that Jessie learn that lesson early on before she got any bright ideas.

  Chapter 9

  Despite living walking distance from some of the best beaches in Los Angeles, Jessie never learned to surf. Usually, the days she spent at the beaches found her with her nose stuffed in a nursing book, studying intently for her nursing degree, and after she had secured the degree, she continued studying for her continuing education units.

  On the days she felt less studious, she would accept the unending initiations to play Frisbee, badminton, volleyball, and hang at the late night bonfires until the tide crept close enough to lap the fire pits, unless the beach patrol beat it to them.

  “Come on Jessie! You have to try it,” Dave urged her as he fastened the Velcro from his surf board to his ankle. “You’re from Los Angeles, for crying out loud. Isn't it a pre-requisite to know how to surf to live there?”

  “Technically,” Jess corrected Dave, “I’m from Sacramento. Home of the Sacramento River. You can't surf on white water rapids, though many have tried.”