Chelsea knew better than to question her mother with her speculations because Ginny would merely emit easy laughter and dodge the question with a lazy wave of her hand. Since Chelsea had been away at college for the past five years, she no longer had the ability to monitor her mother’s behavior as closely as she had while back in high school. She wondered what her mother could be thinking – taking a lover who was young enough to be her own son; after all, Ginny already had one boyfriend her own age, the town mortician.
Cautiously approaching the front door, Chelsea wiped the sleepy gunk from her eyes and tied her hair back with a navy night sash. She looked virgin pure, wearing nothing but a linen nightshirt. Sleep never failed to transport her to a peaceful uncorrupted state of bliss. In the midst of slumber, her every obsessive thought dissolved and dissipated. While away, she had often slept for marathon stretches in her dorm rooms dreaming of her safe harbor on Lake Huron. Lately, Portnorth seemed neither protected nor without its share of trouble. But it had more to do with the abundance of problem-plagued people littering her life. She would not venture to guess what catastrophe stood knocking at the entrance to the floral haven of her mother’s home.
She opened the front door to find Nick sitting distressed on the steps of the porch. From beyond the locked screen, a gush of warm humid air rushed past her bare legs. A damp earthy aroma saturated her grateful lungs as she waited for him to notice her presence. As he rose to his feet and faced her, he looked weighted with agitation and worry.
Nick rested his hand on the door handle and stammered, “I-I’m sorry, I wouldn’t have come here unless I were desperate.”
Chelsea backed away and demanded, “What do you want?”
“You got your wish,” Nick said. “Kate found out about Vange and I.”
“You don’t say, that’s nice.”
He ignored her sarcasm. “Have you talked to her at all? I’ve been looking everywhere she could be for hours. I thought maybe you might know where she is.”
Annoyed but oddly satisfied, Chelsea asked, “Did Thad tell her? Even after I let him know outside the hospital I didn’t think it was such a good idea to say something?”
“No, I told her.”
“Oh, I don’t believe that for one second.”
“She overheard me confronting him. What difference does it make? She knows now.” Nick backed off the steps and stood on the pavers leading to the road. “She’s upset, and I’m trying to find her. I’m sorry to inconvenience you!”
Chelsea eyed him moving dejectedly across the lawn, and she was reminded of the horrible Christmas Eve years back – when she watched from her bedroom window as Nick, Thad, and Ben bashed her snowman to pieces in the front yard. Later that same evening, she let Nick in through her bedroom window, like a half-frozen Romeo, and he forced himself on her.
December, 1985
As they approached, their distant singing awoke her in the dead of the night, and their warbling battle cries aroused her sleepy curiosity. She had knelt on the bed and watched as they drunkenly stumbled over snow piles, armed with baseball bats. The trio daringly confronted the snowman she and her father had painstakingly built during one of his rare visits. It was yet another age inappropriate, pathetic attempt at father-daughter bonding, but Chelsea figured if he summoned enough of a sense of duty to want to build a snowman, she might as well not let her seventeen-year-old cynicism get in the way. Besides, who was she to discourage his momentary lapse into paternal nurturing?
As Chelsea held back the curtains and opened the second story window, a gust of icy wind ripped through her old baseball shirt, and their awful singing filled her ears. She perversely imagined her daddy’s precious Frosty, with his coal eyes, wool scarf, bowler hat, and carrot nose was their supreme conquest of the evening. He had to be destroyed at all costs.
The outdoor lights blinked and cast a majestic glow on the ice sculpture, which sat directly in front of the living room picture window. The bat-wielding rogues gathered around the frozen beast, which stood indifferent to its impending demise. Definitely not holy wise men, the trio more resembled sorry looking arctic shepherds. The gifts they carried were Louisville Sluggers. Even in the frigid darkness, she could see they shook with anticipatory trepidation for the air was electric with their teen fueled testosterone, and she could see their breaths hot with excitement.
A couple months prior, both Ben and Nick had awoken Chelsea in the middle of the night to tell her they were both madly in love with her. She and Nick had been seeing one another secretly ever since, but she made him promise to keep their romance on the down low because he and Kate had recently broken up for the umpteenth time. Although Chelsea wished to spare Kate’s feelings, Nick seemed intent on mauling her in front of his ex-girlfriend and her best friend at lunch. His logic escaped her, as did Kate’s feelings of betrayal.
From the bedroom window, Chelsea watched Thad standing off to one side. Lame dreariness seeped from his pores as he slowly counted away the eternal seconds. For some unknown reason, battering Frosty to bits did not hold the same appeal for him as it did for Nick and Ben. Chelsea thought perhaps he was too drunk, or too sober, or too lacking in testicular fortitude. The blinking Christmas lights made his eyes cross dizzily, and he jammed his hands in his pockets with his bat hanging limply to one side.
Nick, on the other hand, stood fully erect, and his unflinching eyes teemed with perverse Neanderthal glee as they reflected the gleam of the flashing lights. With each crushing blow delivered to the snowman, beads of perspiration soared off his forehead, and Chelsea imagined the sweat pouring down his muscular chest and thighs. She shivered as he hammered away at her father’s creation.
Like a blast from the local quarry, Nick’s pent-up schoolboy aggression and frustrated sexual energy were an explosive mix. Chelsea’s hand slipped beneath her ratty nightshirt. After dabbing them with creamy wetness, her fingers made tiny spirals around her hard nipples. The chilly night air and her own probing hand sent shivers down her spine.
Nick pushed Ben out of his way for more swinging room, but Frosty’s frozen head would not budge. The illuminated snowman stood tall and defiant despite Nick’s fervent efforts to reduce it to mush. Nick was the most intelligent person Chelsea knew apart from herself, but he was also the laziest. She imagined his Epicurean desires amounted to becoming a man of the world; to drink lots of beer, travel lots of places, and make love to lots of girls, and yet make a small difference before croaking as an old man with no regrets. With every blow, he beat back all the inferior nobodies defacing his existence, and perhaps he even reserved a few blows to beat back the little nobody who dwelt deep within himself.
Without warning, the porch light flickered on, and a bright glow instantaneously saturated the dimly blinking Christmas lights. Wearing a fuzzy bathrobe and carrying a shotgun, Ginny Norris stormed out the front door.
“You mother fuckers,” she screamed out into the darkness of night.
Just then, Frosty’s mutilated head gave way and rolled off with muffled plop. From fright Nick’s grasp on the bat loosened and the Louisville Slugger soared from his sweaty grip. The bat crashed through the picture window and landed in the middle of Ginny’s delicately decorated front room. The explosion of shattering glass was nearly as deafening as the subsequent terrified screech and proceeding gunshot.
Chelsea scurried off her bed and ran through the house with her ears ringing. As she joined her mother on the porch, all the lights in the entire neighborhood switched on. The empty street looked as if suddenly blessed by the star of Bethlehem. Ginny Norris scampered off the porch, tripped on slippery steps, and fell backwards on the ice. Sprawled on the slick walkway, she waved the imposing-looking weapon, which had pummeled their eardrums with an excruciating bang.
Waving her smoking gun animatedly, Ms. Norris yelled, “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Thad fell to his knees and vomited a half-gallon of black Russians into the pristine snow. Ben winced,
and a wet spot emerged in the middle of his jeans. Prepared to watch them all die one by one, Chelsea remained frozen on the porch. It was Nick who finally helped Ginny to her feet, and, in his all-American Boy Scout fashion, he dislodged the gun from her clenched fingers. Calm and collected, he coaxed their way into the house, where they drank hot cocoa spiked with Bailey’s Irish Cream. After patching the window with garbage bags and duct tape, Nick promised the vandals would pay for the damage and perform reconstructive surgery on Frosty in the morning.
Later, after dropping off his cohorts in crime, Nick returned to the sight of the carnage and climbed through Chelsea’s bedroom window. They kissed and made out until he became insistent they go all the way. Chelsea wrestled her way out from under him and walloped him alongside the head with her complete works of Shakespeare. When he finally passed out, she left him alone to sleep on the floor, only to be awoken hours later as he bore down on top of her. Taken by surprise, she was too drunk with sleep to resist him physically and let him have his way with her.
Evangelica was the only person Chelsea ever told about how she lost her virginity on Christmas Eve of her senior year of high school. Vange laughed mirthlessly at Chelsea, who asked if it were possible that Nick had date raped her and whether or not she should tell Kate. Ignorantly, Vange informed that if he did not orgasm it was not actually rape, and even more ignorantly Chelsea believed her. After all what did they know, they were just teenagers playing grown up games. Without any regard to her feelings, Vange haughtily informed Chelsea that letting him through the window had made it consensual, or else she was a cock tease. Vange told Chelsea she practically had sex with Nick earlier the same evening at a holiday party and she could care less if Kate ever found out.
Nick never called her throughout the duration of the winter break, and a few months after school started back up, he resumed his faithless spot alongside his ex-girlfriend.
Chelsea stepped from the safety of her mother’s living room and found herself outside. Wondering what exactly was expected of her, she called out his name, and Nick halted in the middle of the lawn. With his hands stuffed in his pockets and his head held high, he mustered as much dignity as any sopping wet person could project. His stance was uncompromising as he patiently awaited her gleeful response to his own private hell.
“Nick, wait!”
“So you can gloat?”
“No, asshole, so I can help you look for her.” Chelsea explained, “As a favor to Kate. I don’t want to spend a sleepless night wondering if she’s safe or not.”
Nick remained standing alongside the curb, and Chelsea retreated in the house. A few moments later, she pulled up alongside him in her old Malibu and opened the passenger door. Nick slipped silently beside her, and he noticed she now wore track pants, but she was still braless under her linen nightshirt.
Taking the dry University of Michigan T-shirt she held out for him, he thanked her. Removing his soaked jacket and wet chambray shirt, he noticed luggage and boxes filled the backseat, “Going on vacation?”
“Something like that.”
“I really do appreciate this.”
“Don’t. I’m not doing it for you.”
“Regardless,” Nick said, naked from the waist up. His hairless chest was not as defined as she remembered, but then again everything she had once known for sure was now blurred around the edges. Everybody and everything had gone to seed. “I don’t know what I’d be doing right now if it weren’t for you.”
Full of hostile animosity, Chelsea demanded, “Don’t you ever get sick and tired of telling people exactly what you think they want to hear?”
“What?”
“Do you have to be everyone’s best friend at all times?”
“What’s your problem now?” Nick snapped defensively. “I was merely thanking you.”
“Make me barf, don’t feel obligated.”
“You think I have an ulterior motive? My intentions were honorable, believe me.”
“I wonder, at the bottom of all your good intentions, do you even have a personality at all?” she asked, shaking her head. “It’s so fake.”
“At least people don’t find me fake and abrasive,” he said to the window, scanning the streets.
The car stopped under Portnorth’s one traffic light at the intersection next to the newspaper building. “You pitiful bastard, if Kate has any sense at all, she’ll leave you at the altar.”
“I’d never agreed to this if I’d known you were going to be a total bitch about it,” Nick said as he pulled on the dry, too tight T-shirt. “Let’s hurry up and find Kate, so I don’t have to sit here and suffer through any more of your sanctimonious bullshit.”
“Oh, please,” she erupted, “spare me!”
Chelsea drove her car through the blinking red light and pulled over to the side of the road. “Get out if you want. Go find her by yourself. I’m sick of pretending I care what happens to either one of you. You should’ve called one of your idiotic frat brothers to drive you all over God’s creation looking for your runaway bride.”
“I don’t believe you. You have serious issues, have you ever considered seeing a psychiatrist?”
She put the car in park next to the newspaper building and smacked her palms against the steering wheel. “Oh yeah, I’m the one who’s crazy. I can’t believe Vange would consider killing herself over the likes of you. What a waste.”
“More kind words,” he observed. She was like a bottomless pit of nastiness.
More and more, California looked like an attractive getaway plan. She could not wait for the wedding to be over with, simply for the fact that she would never have to see any of them ever again. She sighed exhausted, and said, “Just get out, Nick. You don’t want to be in this car anymore than I want you in it.”
Pointing to a lone vehicle in the supermarket parking lot, Nick said, “There’s the Jeep.”
Nick bolted from the car and jogged across the pavement hoping for a sort of clue as to Kate’s whereabouts. Chelsea turned off the Malibu ignition and joined him in the barren lot. The hood of the Jeep reflected a portion of the large illuminated sign that spelled out Foodliner in red letters. Whenever Chelsea saw the sign, she always repeated to herself one of Thad’s more unforgettable mantras, “What the fuck is a Foodliner anyway?”
Nick inspected the empty vehicle as if he would find Kate sitting behind the wheel mindlessly gazing up at the Foodliner sign. While he hopelessly scanned the area, Chelsea suggested, “Maybe she walked down to the beach.”
“What would she be doing there?”
“I don’t know, maybe she’d rather take a long walk off a short pier rather than marry you.”
Nick glanced up at the three-story newspaper building. It was the oldest and tallest structure in town, and a blinking haze glowed from the large attic windows. He walked toward the main entrance of the Portnorth Porthole.
Chelsea remained behind soaking up the desolation emanating from her wet surroundings. She had not yet left the city limits, but she was already feeling nostalgic for her lakeside hometown, which was more hell than hamlet these days. Hopeful, she could not help but think at twenty-three years old, she was at the end of something along with the rest of them. Morning in America had been a wildly successful political slogan of her youth, and the market-tested optimism was drummed into her head at the end of what was considered a national malaise. But morning had lingered too long and lasted all day, and an unremarkable dusk slipped away into an indistinguishable nighttime. Her youth had been spent clinging to false promises of a better tomorrow ornamented with snarky irony parading as wisdom.
Boiling inside of her was a reduction of rage and disappointment, voiceless and forgotten like a mute offspring tucked away in an attic. She hoped that tomorrow, the day of the wedding was rainy as well; moreover, she hoped for an Indian summer flood to rinse away everything and everyone littering her near perfect existence.
Inside the newspaper building, Thad hovered halfway do
wn the stairs debating what he should do. Furious knocking created a disturbance at the front entrance while Kate melded herself into Ben. Her fingers dug their way into his shoulders and throat as she smashed herself against him. Ben inhaled all of her wet hungry mouth into his own while her nails blazed searing trails over his chest. She writhed against his body and clutched onto his long black hair and smothered his face against her small breasts.
Ceaseless hammering echoed in her aching head, and she automatically assumed it was the mounting pressure beating mercilessly against her brain ever since Evangelica landed in a comatose state.
Kate wrapped both her legs around his middle and pulled his face to her chest, with his shocked mouth between her breasts. The frantic banging only grew louder and more intense. In the frenzied moment, Ben struggled to place her feet down on the floor. But she was equally intent on wrapping herself around him as she muffled his protests with her Pez-like mouth.
From the corner of his eye, Ben watched Nick pounding away on the front door. With overwhelming rage, his face contorted with violence as he beat his fist against the glass door. Kate struggled to remove Ben’s shirt, which was caught on the silvery chair around his neck while the glass door rattled so loudly it threatened to shake from its hinges if it did not first smash to bits. Growing unsteady, Ben strained to support Kate on his aching thighs as she wriggled against him full of a desire possessed by revenge. They fell onto the floor in a dizzy whirl-spin.
Kneeling across Ben’s middle, Kate remained seemingly oblivious to the situation imploding around her as she grappled to free him from the confines of his T-shirt, which read “T2: Judgment Day” across the front. With the stairs finally unobstructed, Thad bounded downwards and whizzed past them in the direction of the battered door. Tangled up in his shirt, Ben blindly felt an ominous shock of fresh air against his bare abdomen as Nick’s bellow of inhuman rage echoed throughout the room.
Trying the Knot Page 28
