She was never invited back to sing, and Kate never again attended another pageant.
Gazing at the chrome refrigerator handle, which alternated between darkness and shiny due to the blinking Christmas lights. Kate clenched the serving platter in her sweaty hands, and she remained seated on the linoleum floor with her legs wrapped uncomfortably beneath her. As if mesmerized into a trance, she did not wish to move again.
Kate found it ironic it was at a senior high school Christmas party Vange and Nick messed around for the first time that she knew about, and last night outside the bar was perhaps the last time Evangelica would make love to anyone ever again. It was not long after the infamous holiday party that Kate wrote Vange out of her life for good. Now she wished her stepsister and future husband had never met let alone shared an ongoing infatuation. A small part of her hoped their flirtation would be snuffed out once and for all in a hospital bed, and whatever feelings they shared would die along with Vange, with whom she had made no real effort to keep in touch following high school graduation. Maybe in the back of her mind she always understood what Vange’s intentions were, and Nick had been all too complicit in perverting her hopes and dreams into a trash talk-show nightmare.
When Kate’s mother died approximately a year ago, Vange inconspicuously arrived at the funeral home and slipped Kate the warmest, most sincere hug she could remember receiving. It was that embrace which prodded her into asking Vange to be a member of her bridal party and to sing during the ceremony. The fact they had become stepsisters in the interim was immaterial, but rather it was the hug that convinced Kate to let bygones be bygone.
They had maintained a conspiracy of silence regarding Ed and Shayla’s unexpected union; it was as if they were able to render the marriage nonexistent by merely not mentioning it. Perhaps at Kate’s mother’s funeral, Vange knew more than she let on, but she refrained from telling Kate. It seemed to Kate most of her peers knew more than she did; Chelsea had the brains, Vange was street-smart, but Kate was always in the middle.
Why, Kate wondered, why had their friendship been filled with such a bevy of silent, unutterable understandings; from the time they exchanged looks of horror while comforting Heidi in the locker room, when they danced with wild abandon at the festival proceeding the pageant, whenever Kate looked over and caught Vange looking at Nick, and when they hugged at the funeral home? They never really shared any deep conversations, but rather mere psychic flashes of understanding.
Last night at the gathering at Chelsea’s house, Kate attempted several feeble overtures resembling sisterly-ness, but Vange aloofly avoided her the entire evening. When Vange bowed out early in order to join the guys at the tavern, Kate announced she was retiring for the evening, and Chelsea accompanied the bridesmaids to the bar. Kate regretted not confronting Evangelica because now she could only speculate the reason for Vange’s peculiar standoffish behavior, which she was prone to write off as jealousy.
Sitting on the kitchen floor, Kate felt a slightly cold wet hand rest on her shoulder. She yelped with fright as blood trickled down the front of her dress. The crystal platter she held in her trembling hands fell to the floor, where it made a dull thud and shattered.
Kate spun around and faced two bony kneecaps, which were scuffed and poking out of tattered blue jeans. She covered her mouth as Jack gasped and clutched his side. His bruised purple left eye was swollen shut, and his spliced open lip was bleeding profusely. Saturated with mud, blood, and rain, his clothes were dirty and torn.
“What on earth happened to you?” she cried out.
Holding onto his side, Jack staggered toward her. Kate reached out and grabbed onto him before he hit the floor. She situated him in her arms and placed his battered bruised head against her chest. Rocking him gently, she whispered, “Talk to me, Jack.”
Growing hysterical when it appeared he was losing consciousness, she pleaded, “Jack, tell me who did this to you.”
Jack had not expected to find his sister in Evangelica’s apartment. When Carey Derry shot at his attackers in the cemetery, Jack gladly let the older man carry him back to his car. But while riding alongside Carey Derry, Jack noticed Vange’s apartment lights on, and he insisted he be dropped off there. Her Christmas lights flashed at him like an invitation from beyond, and in his confused state, he fully expected to find Vange puttering around her apartment. But instead, he found Kate sitting on the kitchen floor alone.
He choked up blood, swallowed hard, and asked softly, “What’re you doing here?”
“I—I’m not sure,” she said. Kate placed the back of her hand over her mouth and shook her head unbelieving. Tears dripped from her dark eyes, and she whispered, “I just wanted to feel close to her, I guess. Like you must.”
He shut his one open eye and nodded painfully. She held onto his hand and yanked at the telephone cord. When the phone fell from its cradle, she dragged it across the soiled kitchen floor.
Kate held him in her arms and breathed the sweet smell of rain, sweat and blood. As she gathered him close, he shook like a disfigured baby in her arms. While dialing the numbers, Kate mopped his stringy blond hair away from his scraped forehead, and she kissed his damp scalp. She sniffled as she felt his hot tears and snot dripping against her neck. Holding onto him tightly, his muddy, blood-soaked clothes stained her off-white dress.
When she pulled his crimson matted T-shirt away from his skin, she noticed the number of self-initiated scars far outnumbered any damage that had been inflicted on him that night. Self-mutilation was a habit he picked up after being released from the hospital after the death of his prom date. Jules was etched across his pallid, pigeon chest as was their mother, grandfather and Vange’s names. His body was log of the dead and departed.
Kate shook her head and said, “You promised you wouldn’t cut yourself anymore. You promised me, Jack.”
He swallowed hard and closed his left eye, which was not swollen shut.
The phone rang and rang, and she noticed the cracked platter beside them and murmured softly, “Oh, Jack, look at what I’ve done.” She pieced the broken shards of glass back together and said, “It was a wedding present from Vange.”
Dialing yet another number, she rubbed his head and said, “I can’t figure it out, Jack. I can’t figure out why, why she’d do this to us? Why would she want to die?”
He coughed and asked hoarsely, “Why would anyone want to live?”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“She was tired and bored, kind of stuck.”
Kate hurled the phone against the wall and cried distraught, “No one’s home to help us, not dad, or Nick, or anyone else, and you need to see a doctor. I’ll take you to the hospital, okay? Can you move at all?”
He nodded, and Kate helped him to his feet. Jack leaned heavily against her, and she wrapped her arm around his back with her hand under his armpit. Careful not to touch any of his bloody lacerations, she gave him a peck on the cheek and supported him down the stairs into the Jeep Wrangler. All the while, she whispered encouraging words and was relatively successful at withholding her own confused sobs.
chapter eighteen
With his hair parted in the middle and held back with two pencils, Ben was hunched over working on the newspaper layout while Thad answered his second phone call in as many minutes. The first interruption was from Kate, whose presence they awaited with a mix of dread and anticipation. Thad was presently humoring a police dispatcher who was divulging the innards of a late breaking scandal.
In the meantime, Ben assembled strips of newspaper columns into rows to the beat of an old Bob Seger tune; one way to tell if you were approaching Portnorth city limits was to employ the radio test, which was to listen for three Seger songs played within the space of a half an hour. Feeling reckless, Ben took a brave drag off of Thad’s cigarette. Coughing, he stubbed out the offensive burning cancer stick that polluted his runner’s lungs. He returned to the newspaper, but he found himself reading more than he was pasting.<
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Ben read about friendly deer wandering up to an elderly lady’s patio and eating carrots from her out stretched hand. She warned, “Hunters, stay away!” Then he scanned the engagement announcements to learn a bleeding heart nurse he had graduated with was marrying an old alcoholic abuser with five kids from a prior union. Although slightly repulsed, he could not help but reading more and more. There was a full-page advertisement for the Potato Festival in a neighboring town. One year he and Vange attended while stoned to trip out on the farm animals. She insisted he take a picture of her cradling a piglet.
He searched the “Happy Ads” for any familiar names and came across, “Lordy, Lordy, I’m only forty, but isn’t it nifty my sis Nyda just turned fifty! Happy 5-0, big sis!” Ben shuddered as he glanced down at his former home economics teacher gazing up at him. She wore geeky glasses and was spotted with acne. She looked as if she was in need of her weekly bath. The skeletal Mrs. Czerwinski had inflicted the public high school with her parochial mentality and accompanying poster of the Pope. She once prophetically informed Ben he would never amount to anything because of his attitude. Taking a swig of Thad’s vodka, he quickly turned the page.
In spite himself, Ben found the Republican-slanted Portnorth Porthole a compelling read. Each week it quietly chronicled the lives of his friends and neighbors. The century of back issues read like a hometown scrapbook. If he never turned on a television or opened a daily paper, life would appear positively Rockwellian, with no S&L scandals, murders, Iran Contra, muggings, Bush, or crumbling former Soviet Union to speak of. Portnorth’s crime scene amounted to B&Es, kids getting pulled over with weed in their cars, domestic abuse and drunk driving.
“There’s a crisis brewing at police headquarters,” Thad said as he hung up the phone and rubbed his sore ear. “Deputy Czerwinski was caught with his pants down in a cop car.”
“Again? What a pig,” Ben said, rolling waxy paste between his fingers. “Isn’t this his second offense?”
“You bet, and the last time it was in the marina patrol boat,” Thad said laughing. “Someone reported him earlier tonight for messing around with that Amazon police woman down by the river. They were trapped in the backseat.”
“Will he get fired this time?”
Thad lit a cigarette. “My guess, he’ll be suspended with pay, same as before. Compensation for his dead daughter.”
“You know what, you’re a heartless bastard,” Ben said, and he stepped back in order to admire his creative newspaper page. “People mourn in all different ways.”
“Don’t quit your day job.”
Thad began dismantling Ben’s artful work. “I wonder if Czerwinski will slap on the back brace he wears for sympathy.”
“Hey, remember the time he pulled us over on Main Street? We were all drunk off our asses,” Ben reminisced as he propped himself up on a cluttered desk.
“Thank god it was an election year. That’s when I puked all over that leather coat Nick gave you,” Thad said.
Ben refilled their glasses. “He just gave us a warning and let us drive home. Another close encounter with the long arm of the law.”
As he came across the Happy Ad picture of their home economics teacher, Thad commented, “Nyda-the-Living-Dead.” He fixed her picture upright as Ben had purposefully placed it upside down.
“At what age does it become pathetic to hate and resent all authority?”
Plaster dust drifted from the ceiling and sprinkled them with white dustiness. It was if a person had caught on fire and was rolling across the floor above them – Stop, drop, and roll! As they had once been instructed by Deputy Czerwinski, a member of the VFD.
“Shit, Seth Poole and Tristana-Nanette, or whatever the hell her name is, are really going at it, like freaking rabbits or something,” Ben said, amazed to be dusted in plaster. “This is so depressing, Thad. Do you always work in the middle of the night, with other people screwing over your head?”
Frantic pounding exploded downstairs, and they exchanged wide-eyed looks of alarm.
“That must be Kate,” Ben said, sitting upright.
“Go let her in.”
“You. What if she’s having a nervous breakdown?” Ben asked uneasily. “You didn’t see her when she was flipping out earlier. It was like she was having a seizure.”
“Just go let her up.”
“She’s your cousin, she came here to see you.”
Thad cast him a look of annoyance. “I don’t have time for this.”
“Me neither, it’s way past my bedtime.”
“Just tell her everything will work out fine. Comfort her a little.”
Hesitantly, Ben descended the stairs, and he found Kate leaning outside the front door with her fists pressed against the glass. She looked like hell, not only was her dress stained with mud, blood and wine, but her hair hung limply in tangles. He approached her with cautious curiosity. She appeared aggravated and on edge. It was as if divorce papers were pending before the nuptial vows were even spoken.
Ben opened the large glass door, and Kate rushed in to anchor herself against his affable familiarity. Unsuspectingly, she had been unmoored to brave a sea of turbulence, and he was the nearest lighthouse to navigate her to still waters.
“Thad’s upstairs,” Ben said. With her hand wrapped in his own, he led the way to the steps. Looking back at her soiled dress, he asked concerned, “What happened to you?”
“Oh, Benny,” Kate said as if in physical pain. “I can’t begin to tell you what a mess everything is.”
Slouching forward into him, Kate was dead weight he guided toward the glowing light at the end of the stairwell. She lacked the energy or will to ascend the rickety steps, and her legs buckled beneath her. She collapsed, and Ben knelt down before her to take both her hands into his own.
Sitting at the bottom of the stairs, Kate mustered all the strength she could in order to stifle the glassy tears brimming in her smudged eyelids. She thought about Jack and the way he had held onto her before leaving him at the hospital. She wondered, had it been to comfort, or to be comforted, and did it matter? She was not sure of anything anymore. It was foolish for her to come here thinking someone would have the answers to her questions; besides, her search was not so much for an answer at all, but rather to obtain a comforting shred of doubt.
Pulling her hair away from her face with both hands, Kate whispered his name and shook her head as if all forms of communication were futile. The haze she had been wandering in for the past few hours dispersed and things came clearly into focus on the brightly lit stairway. The dam broke, and all the half-truths she had been trying to suppress flooded her consciousness. The squalid waters of deception were muddied by withheld half-truths and misinformation, but it no longer polluted the innards of her brain. She could see clearly now.
Kate looked directly into Ben’s guilty almond eyes, and she asked, “Did you know?”
As he looked away form her, every sordid tidbit she suspected to be true was immediately confirmed. “Who all knew, Ben – everyone?”
Kate pulled her hand free from his, and she recoiled away in horror as she clamored halfway up the stairs. Thad hovered above them, and Kate felt as if she was a maimed animal trapped within a pickle of deceit. Her face wildly reflected disbelief and revulsion; she turned back and forth, looking to and from the benign, ineffectual strangers who held her captive for so long with their half-hearted lies.
“Katie,” Ben pleaded, grasping the gravity of the situation for the first time.
“You knew? You both knew at the bonfire this afternoon at Nick’s house. You knew and said nothing?” she asked incredulously, letting her purse drop on a step. “Did Chelsea know?”
Struck dumb by their affirmative silence, she backed against the wall. She kept her eyes shut as waves of tension crashed against the hulls of her mind.
“We didn’t want to hurt you,” Ben said.
“We didn’t know if you could handle it,” Thad added.
; “Hurt me? Handle it?” Kate cried. “What do you think I am, a child? My God, this is my future – my life! You were content to sit back and watch me walk blindly into a sham of a marriage – that’s what I’m finding hard to handle here. That’s what hurts.”
“Nick loves you, Kate,” Thad said. “We’re sorry.”
“Honestly, we’re so sorry,” Ben added.
“No, I’m the one who’s sorry here. I’m sorry I ever thought I had a friend in either one of you,” Kate said. She attempted to yank her purse off the steps, but it was caught on a rusty nail. She tugged until the strap ripped, and she was sent toppling downward. Unexpectedly, she landed at the bottom of the stairs in Ben’s outstretched arms.
She struggled to free herself of his grasp and said, “Let me go.” He held onto her tighter until she screamed loudly, “Let go of me, asshole!”
Flailing wildly, she felt him tighten his grip around her. Thad charged downwards toward them and placed a hand firmly on her shoulder. When Kate opened her eyes, she found herself staring directly into Ben’s dark eyes. His long eyelashes batted with regret, and his eyes were filled with concern. She wanted to implode with contempt, but instead she brushed her lips against his trembling mouth, which felt like what she imagined a girl’s mouth to feel like. His lips were soft and tender as she crushed her mouth against him again and again until he became passively receptive of her tongue’s forced entry.
Altogether unsure what to think, Thad backed up the stairs in complete shock.
Chelsea stumbled groggily out of bed and wound her way through the dark kitchen until she reached the door, where a late night visitor was knocking furiously. She had only momentarily drifted soundly asleep, after spending an exorbitant amount of time wondering whether or not her mother and Benjamin Dooley were lovers. Every observation drew her to that conclusion. Why else would they have been caught alone together in the walk-in cooler looking out of breath and guilty with desire? Moreover, at the hospital, when she confronted him with her suspicions, he pulled away and insisted they leave,
Trying the Knot Page 27
