In the Shadow of Revenge

by Patricia Hale

  “Cecily,” Amelia chirped.

  From the look on her face I guessed I’d slipped away for a few minutes too long. I turned back to Hilary. “I’ll do anything for you,” I told her, “but not that.”

  “Can’t disrupt the Barbie Dream House for a trip into the unknown, huh? What the hell happened? You used to be fun.”

  “You think you’re a barrel of fun?” I asked, waving my arm around the room of blank-eyed psychotics. “Your buddies here look like they’re having a fucking ball.”

  Amelia laughed and Hilary’s mouth twitched, fighting a grin.

  I stood up and walked to the window, figuring I should quit while I was ahead. At least it felt like I was ahead for the moment. Sometimes it was all I could do not to walk out for good, but the connection between us ran so deep and so strong it was maternal, and what kind of mother walks out on her kid or vice versa?

  Hilary slouched in her chair and turned her attention to Amelia. “So who’s the man of the hour?”

  Another sore topic. Amelia went through men like most women go through shoes, barely breaking in one before trying on the next, never getting past the blisters to experience that comfortably worn-in feeling.

  Amelia glanced at me and then smiled at Hilary. “Harold Hardwick.”

  Hilary cracked up and I had to laugh too, though I tried not to. I don’t condone Amelia’s cornucopia of one-nighters.

  “No shit? That’s his real name?” Hilary asked.

  “That’s what he told me, but I did see a tan line on his left ring finger. So it might have been wishful thinking.” Amelia laughed and leaned her head back against her chair. “Anyway, he caught a flight back home to Houston this morning, so who cares?”

  “You gotta be careful,” Hilary said. “You don’t know these guys. You could take one home and...you know.”

  “Ya, ya, I know.”

  I sometimes wondered if that was exactly what Amelia was doing, waiting for one of the guys she dragged back to her apartment to rape her so she wouldn’t have to feel guilty anymore.

  “I have to go,” I said, checking my watch.

  “My little abode gettin’ to ya?” Hilary asked.

  “No, but it should be getting to you.”

  “Whatever.”

  That pompous response was a pet peeve of mine and she knew it. “Look,” I said, “if you’d stop feeling so damn sorry for yourself you might have a life instead of dumping a vat of vodka down your throat every couple of months and landing back in here. Your routine’s getting old.”

  “Then help me change it. Open the box.”

  I looked at her, remembering the afternoon we ate ice cream at my kitchen table while my mother took my brother, Jarod, to the hospital to get his head sewn back together. Hilary hadn’t stopped to consider that he was bigger and older or that she might get in trouble. She’d jumped in when I needed her. And she was right. I was comfortable in the Barbie Dream House and scared shitless to rock the status quo.

  “Even if I tried, it wouldn’t happen like it did before,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m not that person anymore.”

  She stood up, her body trembling from anger or detox. “Oh, yes you are,” she said. “You’re exactly the same. You’re as fucked up as I am and you know it.” Her eyes fell to my hand, where a fresh cut from the straight razor reddened the fat of my palm. “A strong wind could blow you right off your high horse and you’d wind up sitting here beside me. We’re not different, but where the likeness ends is that I still remember the ‘no matter what’ kind of friendship we had. And you don’t.”

  “If I pull that board out, anything could happen,” I said. “It could bring him back.”

  “Then we’ll go after him.”

  “Us? What could we do against him? One of us could get killed.”

  In her face was the same confusion I’d seen in the railcar, the same disbelief when she’d lain on her back, her eyes raised to heaven waiting for someone to help her and no one had. “Aren’t I worth the risk?”

  Something inside me broke. I walked to the elevator without looking back.

  Chapter Four

  I’d left a message in Ben’s voicemail on my way to the hospital that I was going to see Hilary. Now I was taking my time driving home, more concerned with Hilary’s accusations than with the argument that lay in wait with Ben. Most of the time I could cope with my past and quiet the little girl who was afraid of being left, the one who used to pee at the mere sight of her brother and who froze that day in the railcar. My life was beige now and I liked it that way. And on those days when I felt myself slipping into childhood fears, the release I found in the ritual got me by. But Hilary’s last comment about being a friend cut deeper than the ones about Ben or clothes or career. My friendship with her and Amelia is what helps me keep the straight edge at bay, at least most of the time, and is my incentive for putting my feet on the floor every morning. If I didn’t have that, the past would catch me.

  For two years Ben and I have shared a sweet little second-floor, one-bedroom on the Portland waterfront. Our relationship is firm and it’d be rock solid if he’d stop suggesting marriage and just let things be. I’m not ready to give up my girls for a man. The truth is, I learned young that boys weren’t to be trusted. And for that, men have earned themselves a back seat in my life. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to make room for one up front.

  Ben’s never fully understood my debt to Hilary. So he can’t understand why I jump every time she hits the floor. But Ben’s from a two-parent, white-collar home that sits on a bluff overlooking Casco Bay. Rape is something he discussed while reading Native Son in English Lit. Now, he’s a corporate lawyer, which is to say he’s lacking in the emotions department, but that works for me. I’ve walked an emotional tightrope for most of my life. Superficial is my refuge. Ben requires nothing more than a good bottle of wine, pleasant conversation and missionary position. Hilary and Amelia call him my Ken doll behind his back, but they understand my reasons. Life’s hard. Ben’s easy.

  He was leaning into the refrigerator when I opened the door, his hand hovering between a T-bone steak and chicken breasts. I dropped my briefcase onto the granite countertop and scratched Stitch on the top of his head. Every night for the first two weeks after we’d moved into the apartment, the cat had been waiting for me at the door when I got home from work. No one in the building knew who he belonged to, so he’d moved in with us. I had a hunch he’d lived here before. Probably abandoned by the last tenants.

  “Steak,” I said.

  “Who said I was cooking? I’m looking for a beer, but I guess we’re out.”

  “I could’ve picked some up.”

  “That’d mean you’d have had to call.”

  “Don’t start,” I warned. I wasn’t up for his why can’t you spend your time with me instead of them. “When Hilary’s back on her feet, who comes first won’t be an issue,” I said, hoping to make light of what I suspected would eventually destroy us.

  “And when exactly do you expect that to happen?”

  “When she stops anesthetizing herself.”

  “Right.”

  He pulled a black leather coat from the back of the kitchen chair and I caught myself before asking if it was new. He didn’t have to answer to me about his spending habits and he had the bank account to support them. But the Armani suit and leather coat brought back Hilary’s dig. Ben’s attire reflected who he was. My attire reflected who I was trying to be.

  “I’m going out for beer,” he said, but then hesitated and turned back. “Cecily, what about when we have children? Will your friends still take priority?”

  “You’re getting a little ahead of yourself, aren’t you? We’re a long way from that.”

  “Only because you’
re holding us up.”

  “Ben, it’s not just Hilary. I’m a green attorney. I need some years under my belt before I take maternity leave. You’ve been with your practice for eight years, you’re established. Give me time to do the same.”

  “I don’t think the problem is Hilary or your work.” He buttoned his coat and stuffed his hands into the pockets with enough force to challenge the stitching. “You can’t make a commitment to me because you’re still tethered to one you made years ago. You’re as stuck in the past as Hilary.” He shook his head and dropped his eyes to the floor. “At some point you’ve got to leave it behind or you’ll spend the rest of your life as a nine-year-old, a lonely nine-year-old.”

  “I’m a lawyer for God’s sake, I’ve grown up enough to accomplish that.”

  He raised his eyes to mine. “On the outside, but inside you’re still...”

  “Jesus, Ben, make up your mind. Am I a child or a wife? Half the time you want to take care of me and the other half you’re telling me to grow up. And where’s it written that marriage and kids automatically make one an adult?”

  “It’s a start.”

  “I’m taking a shower,” I said and left the kitchen.

  The back door closed behind him.

  I stood under the running water and shut my eyes, trying not to hate Ben or Hilary for throwing the truth in my face. But Ben didn’t understand my guilt. And Hilary didn’t know the extent of my anxiety when it came to the board. All through my childhood, my mother had threatened that I’d let loose evils I couldn’t control if I so much as dabbled in Grandma Hattie’s ways. And it wasn’t her anger that had made me view the board with trepidation. It was the fear in her eyes. I’d defied her and used it anyway and now I sometimes wondered if she’d been right. Like Hilary said at the hospital, I’m as fucked up as she is.

  It’s why I still perform the ritual and promise myself that my friends will never leave me. It’s why I press the straight edge into my flesh and punish myself for not having saved Hilary that day and for not being able to save Amelia now from the inevitable, given the plethora of men she taunts. The reality is I can dress up and deliver a closing argument in the courtroom and I look good, damn good, but don’t peel away the layers ’cause it isn’t pretty. Underneath is the daughter my father didn’t want, the child my mother feared, the sister my brother tormented and an adult terrified of being left. So I hide now behind law books and my Jones New York suits and fool them all.

  Like everyone else I chalk up my baggage to a less than ideal childhood. And I feel some justification with that choice, because it’s not just me. Jarod has been a screw-up since he was a kid. And not your average adolescent troublemaker like a throwing a baseball through the neighbor’s window, but juvenile delinquent trouble, like stealing from the high school locker room and beating the crap out of the mentally challenged kid down the street. Even our neighbors glanced Jarod’s way any time a dog or cat went missing, but nobody ever had the guts to call him on it. And the kid down the street wasn’t the only one he beat up either. I was known to take a punch now and then too and the threat of more to come if I told on him. Not that my mother would have done anything, at least not if grounding Jarod would cause her to miss a prayer group or morning Mass. She was oblivious to anyone not wearing a crown of thorns.

  Hilary was the only person who’d ever confronted Jarod on my behalf. He was babysitting one summer day while my mother was at work and had tied me to the tree in our backyard for water balloon target practice, his version of water boarding. Every time one smacked and burst against my skin a red welt logged the hit. I’d lost track of how long he’d had me tied there, most of the morning I think. My clothes hung off me sodden, my head, his bull’s eye, pounded. I started thinking about the Ouija board as I swayed against the tree, wondering if Hilary was right, but if I did have powers then why couldn’t I will these ropes off me? She’d know what to do and she wouldn’t just stand there, afraid. An image of Hilary swirled through my head and I whispered her name, silently calling to her over and over. I felt myself sliding away, fading in and out of awareness and then Jarod yelled and I looked up, startled back into the moment. His hand was pressed against his wavy, black curls. Blood seeped through his fingers and down his arm.

  “Get the fuck away from her,” Hilary screamed. She had a wooden shovel that she’d taken out of our garage and was holding it in front of her like a rifle.

  “If you ever touch her again, I’ll fucking kill you.” She’d learned a lot of cuss words from her father and passed them along to Amelia and me. “And don’t think I won’t.”

  “You’re dead,” Jarod said to her. He walked slowly toward the house, but kept his eyes on her.

  “You don’t scare me,” she called after him, still holding the shovel and meeting his gaze until he’d gone inside and closed the door.

  Jarod called my mother at Saint Joseph’s church, where she worked as a secretary, and she came home and took him to the hospital for stitches. He told her he’d slipped in the shower. Over a bowl of Chocolate Marshmallow Swirl, Hilary said she’d heard me calling her. Heard me all the way from my house to hers. I’d told her she was crazy. What I didn’t tell her was that I’d had the same headache I always got when we played with the Ouija board, like a vise squeezing my head so tight I think my brain will burst. She was swirling through my head and I was whispering her name and then she was standing in front of me. I didn’t tell her that because that was the kind of stuff I kept to myself even though I knew she knew, but that was the last time my brother ever touched me and I owe her for that.

  I lifted my face into the streaming water heavy with her accusation that I was no longer a “no matter what” kind of friend. But fear of where the board could take us and what it might reveal had kept it buried in my trunk for the past eighteen years. It had already shown me things I didn’t want to see—like why my father had left us and where he was now. Things no child should have to know when imagination is kinder than truth and so I’d put the board away. If I pulled it out now the world I’d so carefully constructed would begin to crumble as soon as my fingertips touched the planchette.

  I toweled off, wrapped up in a peach-colored kimono, a gift from Ben, and stepped into the kitchen not sure of the mood. A candle was burning in the center of the table giving off a subtle vanilla aroma. A crystal goblet of Merlot sat at each setting. I didn’t deserve him.

  “Hey,” he said stepping in from the patio, a steak sizzling on the grill outside. “I decided on wine instead of beer.”

  I came from behind as he set a tomato on the cutting board and wrapped my arms around his waist. “I’m sorry,” I whispered into his neck.

  He twisted around to face me and tucked a strand of wet hair behind my ear. “Me too.”

  Child or woman, either way his desire to spend his life with me was based in love. How could I argue with that?

  “I’m here for the duration,” he said. “You know that, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Then let’s eat, I need my strength.”

  I jabbed him in the ribs, a feeble attempt at retaliation, and at the same time kissed his cheek. Ben had made more headway than anyone into my life, but I still couldn’t give him what he wanted. I wasn’t marriage material, too many bags to check. He was athletic, professional and fairy-tale handsome and wanted nothing more than to be his maiden’s Lancelot as long as we both kept our armor in place. But at some point I knew mine would slip and he wouldn’t like what was underneath. In the beginning I thought I’d won the lottery with Ben, but as time went on I knew I’d never cash the check.

  The steak was perfect, the wine even better and we managed to not only salvage the evening but turn it around, letting go of the future and focusing on the moment at hand. The scenario was becoming commonplace and I wondered how many more times we would come full circle before one of us j
umped off at the halfway point.

  But tonight we kept it simple: food, wine and silk sheets, and when Ben’s breathing became the rhythmic sound of sleep I slipped from beneath the comforter. Hilary was right. It was time and I owed her. The Ouija board was in the trunk at the foot of my bed amidst wool blankets and boxes of memorabilia that housed everything from birthday cards and ticket stubs to my high school diploma. The lid groaned when I tilted it back on its hinges, and I cursed myself for not having taken it out earlier. Ben turned over and stretched one arm across my side of the bed. I sat perfectly still until satisfied that he was asleep, and then sifted through a pile of sweaters. Fishing in the darkness, my fingers touched the box. A rush of adrenaline left me clammy. If I wanted revenge I had to set the stage and if Newton’s Law held true, so be it. After all, what did any of us have that we couldn’t lose?

  I carried the cardboard box into the living room and opened one end. The board and planchette slid onto the coffee table. Stitch lifted his head from the couch and watched. In the darkness I lit two candles then settled on the floor, my elbows resting on the edge of the table. I looked at the board and thought of my mother, wondering if she was awake and if, in some corner of her own ritualistic brain, she knew what I was doing. I wondered too if the energy I was about to release would awaken Grandma Hattie’s spirit. As much as the three of us were different, we were also the same, addicted to ritual and powers greater than our own. I often questioned what kept the women in my family from placing our trust in each other instead of in the unknown; maybe it was just plain safer.

  As a child I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge that I had this ability, it felt too big and frightening. If the board wanted to give me tidbits of trivia, like answers to a math problem, I could accept that, but coming to it for life-changing answers alluded to a power that I was more fearful of than grateful for. Only once before had I ever needed an answer so badly that I went to the board and asked—I had to know where my father had gone. The night I’d asked, I’d had a dream, or maybe vision is more accurate. I’d seen him sitting at a table in a house that wasn’t ours. There were two children at the table and a woman in a yellow dress. They were eating chicken and mashed potatoes and they were all smiling at each other, especially my father and the woman. I thought they were friends until I noticed pictures on the wall showing all of them together like family portraits. I realized then that my father had a whole other family, a white one. Not like ours that was a blend of black and white together because my mother’s mother was black and her daddy was white. My dad had chosen the family that he liked best, the white one like himself. I never told my mother. The information was too hurtful and nothing any of us needed to know. I’d have been better off not knowing and still imagining that he missed us as much as I missed him. I vowed I would never use the board in that way again...but never say never.