Christmas at the McDolen estate was celebrated with a holly wreath on the door, white candles in every window of the sixteen-room house, a small Douglas fir with white lights in the living room with a porcelain nativity scene beneath, and a large blue spruce in the family room. The holly wreath, white candles, Douglas fir and nativity were there because that was the way Donald’s mother had always done it. The citizens of Southampton County expected to see that wreath and those lights as they drove up and down Route 58 on their merry holiday ways. The spruce in the family room was multi-colored, more of jumble than show piece, covered in lights that twinkled and some that didn’t, expensive glass balls, plastic Disney figures, and strands of painted popcorn that Donnie had sewn together when he was four. That was the way Kate had always done it. She was determined to keep something of her own in that blasted house.
It was during this festive season that Kate was introduced to the wealthier citizens of Southampton County. Donald and Kate hosted a “Winter Banquet” to which a select many flocked – Donald’s new business friends, old money who had socialized with the McDolens since the 1920s, assorted local politicians and state legislators. It was pleasant enough, but Kate was tired with it after the first two hours. Cocktails and small talk were interesting for only so long, and soon she found herself wanting to retire to the family room to watch the blinking and unblinking rainbow of lights on the spruce tree and curl up under a blanket. Donnie had already disappeared from the scene in his sport coat and tie, up to his room to listen to his CDs.
Kate and Donald had had elegant parties back in Richmond and Alexandria, but nothing to the scale of this bash. At one given time Kate counted seventy-two guests. There were scads of new names for Kate to remember, family connections to digest, gossip to promise to keep secret, private little Southampton in-jokes she tucked away mentally to ask for an explanation of Donald later on.
As Kate tried to keep attention on a one woman’s rambling, White Shoulders-scented discourse on the history of her father’s tobacco growing endeavors in Southampton, she found her thoughts wandering to Alice and Bill, up in Canada with their pets and their children, in their hippie shirts and hippie beads and myriad causes. For the first time in years, she missed them greatly.
The Southampton School Board superintendent, Stuart Gordonson, arrived a bit late to the McDolen Christmas party; as soon as Donald introduced him to Kate and mentioned her new degree, the man pulled her aside and promised her a job if and when she might ever want one.
“We would be thrilled to have a McDolen on our team,” Mr. Gordonson had grinned beneath his well-trimmed mustache. “What a feather in our cap, eh?” Kate thanked him and said she’d let him know.
When everyone had at last left, somewhere around two-thirty in the morning, and Kate and Donald were stacking punch cups on the kitchen counter for the maid to take care of when she arrived in a few hours, Kate mentioned the job offer to Donald. He’d smiled his vague smile and said, “I only introduced you as a courtesy, don’t be silly. Stuart would have chastised me if I hadn’t. But you aren’t seriously considering teaching, are you? There are plenty of other people in this county for that.”
He’d stepped up to Kate to put his arms around her, but she’d moved back. “What do you mean?”
Donald chuckled, shook his handsome and prematurely graying head, and said, “Honey, I’m glad you finished your degree. I know you’ve worked hard. But you weren’t seriously considering going into education, were you? I mean…honey, Donnie needs you at home. I need you at home. Please don’t make me say things that will sound like an old fashioned chauvinist, but there really is no need for you to teach.”
So it would look bad to you, would it? she thought. Your wife getting minimum pay as a first year teacher, lugging books to and fro, calling parents to set up conferences, wiping other people’s kids snotty noses. Much too comfy with the regular Joes, Donald?
“Well,” Kate said. “I wouldn’t think there would be an opening, anyway. It’s the middle of the year.”
Donald had kissed her forehead. “True, true.” He smiled. “And wasn’t tonight just grand? I’m so glad to be home. It will be good for all of us, settled once and for all.”
Christmas Day galloped in, and with it a spattering of snow, a emerald ring for Kate, and a rifle for Donnie with a big red bow and a promise from Donald that they would go turkey hunting on New Year’s Eve. Donnie, still small for a seventh-grader but solid in shoulder and arm, had gawked at the weapon. Donald had patted his son on the shoulder and said all McDolen boys hunted turkey and game on their land.
Donnie was thrilled. So was Kate. Up until now, Donald had had little time for Donnie. Now, at last, they could try to recapture the father-son bond.
But the connection was a sharp and double-edged one, when all was said and done. Donald, comfortable now in his element, his territory, had done “what my father did for me.” He let Donnie get by with things Kate would never have allowed on her own. He introduced Donnie to cigars, a “McDolen tradition, Kate, only the best blends, of course.” Then, of course, the McDolen’s favorite beers and wines over dinner and after dinner. Donnie, once more like Kate in his cautious, shy demeanor, began to embrace his McDolen heritage with gusto. Donald’s attention with Donnie was hit and miss, with his work and his own stable of local buddies, but Donnie discovered quickly that the McDolen name had incredible pull in Southampton. He discovered that when he decided something was in style, the other middle school boys followed suit. They could smell the money on him like dogs to a ham bone, and Donnie loved it.
The rifle that first Christmas had been the beginning of the changes in Kate’s son, the beginning of his loss to her. Kate hadn’t known on that first Christmas morning as she’d stood outside the sun room door wiping the cold, wet snow out of her face and laughing as Donnie and Donald had test-fired it against the trunks of the barren trees of the apple orchard, that Donnie wouldn’t be living at home much longer. That her shy child would find power and clout as intoxicating as his father’s fine wines.
She remembered the cold of the snow. The wet pattering on her cheeks and neck. Donald’s shouts, “Yes, that’s right, just a bit higher! Pull!” The crack of the discharge. The splintered apple bark.
She remembered.
There was a loud slam. Kate started. Her head whipped toward the bathroom door and she saw a shadow pass over the surface of the dresser. The girl was back.
Freezing water was pouring from the shower spigot and down Kate’s naked body.
The girl had returned.
Oh, bring her on, Kate thought, her breath picking up again and her arms tightening. She found herself smiling. Let’s have it out.
40
The girl was back. Mistie flinched when the door slammed. She stared as the girl came in, strode between the bed and the T.V. up to the door and back again, then tried to pull the mirror off the wall with a loud grunt. It didn’t come, so the girl pulled a drawer out of the dresser and cracked the glass with it. The splinters of glass in the frame looked like the shiny star in Princess Silverlace’s crown. The girl paced again, her arms crossed and her eyes straight ahead. She looked like somebody had put her in a car and rolled it into a lake. She was messed up.
As she passed the television the fifth time, she drove her fist into the power button. The T.V. winked off. Mistie drew herself up, and scooched up to the head of the bed.
The girl paced some more. Her eyes were ugly. They looked like pit bull eyes. There was a high school boy who lived at the trailer park who had a pit bull with eyes like that. The dog didn’t seem to have any sense except for biting and chopping at everything that went near it on its chain. It seemed more like a machine than a dog.
Then the girl went into the bathroom and the water was turned off.
41
The teacher hadn’t gone anywhere, big surprise. She was standing in the bathtub, shivering like a wet dog, one foot on top of the other, lips tinged blue, hands above
her head and secured with the towel strip. The rod had bent, but was in place. A little bar of paper-wrapped soap had been knocked into the tub and was at the drain hole, gummy and torn. The room wasn’t steamy; the water had gone cold, probably a long time ago. Puddles of water stood on the tile floor.
But there was one disturbing difference. The teacher’s head wasn’t down. Her gaze was steady and cold as the water, locked on Tony.
Tony turned off the spigot, swiped the knife from her ankle and lifted it to the teacher’s throat. Her body stung and throbbed, and she was going to share all the joy she had to share. “Miss me? Oh, I bet you did. I’m sure you wish you could have gone with me on my little adventure.”
“Truth or dare,” said the teacher.
“What?” Tony was incredulous. “What did you say?”
The teacher smiled.
Tony pressed the tip of the blade into the teacher’s abdomen, and pushed until the felt the skin give with a silent little pop. The teacher’s smile tightened into a grimace, but she didn’t repeat what she said.
“Oh, tough now?” Tony scoffed. “Enjoy your bath?”
The teacher, eyes locked on Tony’s, nodded slowly. “You bet.”
“Yeah? Well you would enjoy what just happened to me. You smelly cunt, I bet you’d get all wet over what I just went through.”
The teacher’s eyed winced, but then narrowed and held. She said nothing.
Tony put the knife on the back of the toilet, kicked off her boots, then peeled off her jeans. The motions nearly made her sick, the sound of the denim sliding over skin. She clenched her teeth and remembered the laughter and the slobbering and the jabbing. She wanted to have them now in this bathroom with their pants down, she wanted to rip their members apart, just like they had ripped her insides. Tony threw her jeans and panties, crusted and hard with the boys’ cum, into the corner behind the toilet. She stood in just her sweatshirt. “I want you and Baby Doll to see something,” she said. “Kid! Get in here!”
“Why do you want Mistie in here?” asked the teacher.
“I’ll show you when I’m good and ready. Kid, now!”
“Mistie, don’t come in!” said the teacher.
Tony snatched the knife and drew an inch-long slice across the teacher’s stomach. The skin parted smartly. Tony’s seventh grade art teacher Ms. Black once said Tony could even draw a straight line; well, this one was pretty damn straight. The teacher gasped but didn’t cry out. Blood welled, then spilled down to the woman’s crotch in the wake of the sheen of shower water. There may have even been tears welling in the woman’s eyes, but tears and shower water pretty much matched.
“Kid! In here now!” shouted Tony.
“Mistie, no!” said the teacher.
Tony cut her again, a straight line under the first. A pair of red lips now, drooling. “Shut up, bitch. Mistie!”
The woman sounded like a snake now, hissing. “No, Mistie!”
“What’s wrong with you?” snarled Tony. “What’s fucked up your brain while I was gone?”
The teacher tipped her head slowly. “Truth?”
“What?”
“Or dare?”
“Truth? I’m gonna show you truth!” Tony knocked down the toilet lid and sat on it, leaned back and opened her legs. Like those fuckers did, goddamn them, I’d kill ‘em, fuckin’ kill ‘em! “Wanna see some truth? Watch me!”
Tony turned the knife about, and jammed the handle end into her vagina. Her insides exploded, hot and angry. She scraped with the rough steel against the soft tissue walls, digging, tearing to clean away all traces of the rape. Electrical agony inside, sending her heels into the wet floor and her spine arching against the porcelain toilet lid. Dig it out! Dig it out!
Tony turned the knife handle to get a better angle. She dug the space of her womb, her sex, her hands realizing now the urgency of the actions and refusing to let her instincts against destruction to stop them. “I’ll never be a mother!” she snarled, spittle flying. “I never want nothin’ to go here, nothin’ to grow here, fuck it all, it’s weak, it stinks! That’s the truth!”
In the corner of her vision, the teacher staring, her chin resting on the inside of her raised forearm. The stomach streaked red now like the lipstick on Whitey’s sweaty face.
She dug. “Mothers are worthless! My fucking Mam on her sofa, drinking bug-sprayed beer ‘cause she’s too lazy to get her own! Baby Doll’s mom, who hasn’t even put out a report her daughter is missing! Her real mother’s the T.V., you know that? The damn television, you see how she loves that thing? And you, a fucking teacher and mother, you think that’s something great, huh?”
The fireworks in her abdomen, red-hot, white-hot, blue-hot, like moonlight setting fire throughout the gulf of her bones.
“You say you got a kid, a what, daughter, son? Neither, both? What?”
Tears on her face now. Fuck tears, I hate tears, pussy tears! I don’t cry!
“Fuck you, fuck me, fuck ‘em all!”
The knife fell from her hand, clattered on the tile. Tony folded up and over herself, grabbing behind her knees and pushing against the pain. Breathing through locked jaws, she said, “Done now. Done.” Blood was warm between her thighs, black-red, rivulets carving down her legs in patterns Ms. Black would have thought expressive.
The bathroom tilted, and Tony went with it. Ride it out, ride it, squeeze it out, let it run.
Cramps, then, hard and insistent, nothing like the cramps she had with her period. She growled, hating the cramps, hating what she had there inside her, hoping it was cleaned out enough now to leave her the hell alone.
The teacher, “What happened while you were gone?”
“Fuck you.”
“Somebody pissed you off, didn’t they? What a constructive way to deal with your anger. I’m impressed.”
“Fuck you!”
Tony sat until the cramps subsided, and the blood had slowed and stopped. Lifting her head from her knees, the room spun, leveled out. She took a breath, and another.
In the bedroom, I Love Lucy had begun. And Lucy, as Tony could have predicted, was whining.
42
It took the whole of I Love Lucy and half of Gomer Pyle before the girl forced herself up from the toilet and pulled her jeans back on. She was hurt. She was bleeding.
Big deal. Kate was hurt and bleeding, too, though hers had nearly stopped.
And all Kate could think was Now, what, bitch?
The girl stumbled three times, trying to put her second leg into the jeans. She leaned against the wall, sucking air through her teeth, her short dark hair glistening with sweat.
Fall against the toilet lid. Crack your skull open. That’ll do it! Bash your own brains out, come on.
With the fourth attempt the leg went in. Unrolling the toilet paper, she tore off a huge wad and jammed it down into her pants crotch, then hobbled out to the bedroom at a tilt. There was the sound of the channel being changed to the evening news.
Bitch.
The girl came back into the bathroom, spit blood into the toilet.
Yeah, now what? Adrenaline or something else with sharp, biting edges was coursing her blood. Her eyes fluttered shut, then open. The bathroom reeled when they were closed, spun when they were open. Not a hell of a big choice there. It felt as if someone had sanded the enamel off the tips of her teeth. She wanted to bite something.
The girl cut the Kate’s towel restraints loose with her knife, then she brought the knife came close to Kate’s eyes. Kate kept her mouth shut though her teeth were on edge, ready to strike.
“Get dressed,” said the girl. “Then come out.”
Kate said nothing. She worked the soaked terry cloth off her wrists and massaged them. Her arm muscles jumped. Her shoulders were stiff and did not come down easily. They complained as she made them obey.
She waited until the girl left before stepping out of the tub. Her clothes, scattered near the trashcan, were soaked. Fuck it, she just couldn’t keep dry clot
hes on this trip. She grabbed a bath towel instead, and wrapped herself in it, folding it across her chest and tucking the edge securely. She draped the wet clothes over the shower rod. There was nothing in the bathroom she could put into her jeans pocket to use to kill the girl. Soap, a tiny bottle of shampoo and conditioner. A little shower cap, packaged in a little shiny box. A fresh shiver coursed her body.
That’s all right, I’ll find something soon. She was caught in a brief and vicious wave of shivers and thought, I’ll never be warm again. I’ll stay cold.
But that’s okay. It’s good to be cold.
The little bitch.
She went into the bedroom.
The girl was standing at a tilt near the door, her fingers clutching the edge of the blue drape. She was likely cramping. Kate wondered how damaged she was. She hoped it was a lot. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to go any farther. “Where are your fucking clothes?” the girl said.
“Wet.”
“Sit down.”
Kate sat beside Mistie. Mistie was tied with pillowcases at her wrists and ankles. The child stared at the blank television screen as if by sheer will she could bring the show back on. The bedspread was crumpled where the girl had flopped back and forth. One pillowcase-less pillow was on the floor.
The girl came up between the beds and slapped Kate across the mouth. Kate’s own hand came up to retaliate, but stopped short as the knife slashed the air inches from her nose. The girl turned it slowly in her hand. It winked in the low-watt bulb overhead. “Who said you could talk to me in the bathroom? Now, I’m gonna tell you what we’re doing next. Tomorrow morning, we’re outa this shit hold called Mobile. We’re finding us a car and we’re driving straight through to Texas. I don’t know what the hell I’ll do with you when I get there, but you can bet your asses I’ll kill you if you give me any trouble between now and then.” She stiffened, groaned, then shook her head as if to clear it. “Get those socks you left in the bathroom. Can’t leave you loose.”
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