by Mann, Marni
Copyright 2011 Marni Mann
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Cover Design by Greg Simanson
Edited by Rachel Brookhart
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.
Print ISBN 978-1-935961-29-1
EPUB ISBN 978-1-62015-033-7
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2011961145
DEDICATION
To Susan, my light.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
From the conception of my novel to its birth, you've stood by my side, Mom. Your endless support and advice gave this book the love it needed. When I had doubt, you never stopped believing. Dad, I never would have made it here if you hadn't listened to my rants. My P, Nicole Vander Clay, you caught me before I fell. Your words brought me to the place I needed to be. Nina Kesner, your excitement was and always will be a force that drives me to reach further. Jen Howard, I will never be able to thank you for everything you've done. Your guidance and wisdom made this novel shine. Jane Ryder, you always made me smile; your support will never be forgotten. Jody Ruth, my partner-in-crime, your voice kept me going when I thought I couldn't take another step. Melissa Roske, you pushed me to find the right words. Your feedback made them sparkle. Katy Truscott, Kathy Dieringer, Junying Kirk, and Pat Mann, I couldn't have done this without your love and support. To the crew, Erin Burke, Mike Lucido, Katie and Dan Kinnetz, thanks for the inspiration and amusement. Never say never, right? Rachel Brookhart, I appreciate all your hard work and commitment. Greg Simanson, thanks for bringing life to my novel. Krista Basham, thank you for being the best manager I could ever ask for. This journey wouldn't be the same without you, and I'm honored to have you along for the ride. Katherine Sears and Ken Shear, thank you for giving me a chance and for believing in me. Tess Hardwick, you made this all possible and I will be forever grateful. Big hugs, my friend. Codi and Bella, you have my heart. And Brian, my dreams are all possible because of you. Don't ever stop holding my hand. I love you.
The wall that I built
To bind myself in the dim
When the world outside
Pierced through my skin
And the steel breeze
Swept away my dreams
Another day forgotten
For I felt no pain
No noise
Or echoes
Because I was numb
Like a cold body
Frozen in a chained box
These dark walls
Lost dreams
Tainted frames
Were all that I owned
And the days and nights
Looked akin
So I conversed in the mirror
Where nobody could break in
Or soothe my fading soul
-N J
http://www.nithinjacob.com/
CHAPTER ONE
Eric sat behind the wheel of his beat-up '89 Toyota Corolla. His seat was so close to the steering wheel his knees hit the dashboard, and he couldn't see out the rearview mirror. He hadn't complained once about having no legroom or that his back was slumped forward because there was an enormous box of clothes behind his seat. His lips were stuck in a perma-grin, and his eyes were wide and glued to the taillights of the car ahead.
It had taken us almost six hours to reach the border between New Hampshire and Massachusetts when it should have taken less than four. Eric said the rabbit—what he had named his Corolla because the thing wouldn't die, like in those battery commercials— topped out at sixty. I didn't think all the extra weight was healthy for the rabbit either. I could hear the poor thing chugging.
Eric had emptied his entire bedroom and packed it all into the backseat and trunk. A lampshade teetering on top of a pile of clothes kept jabbing into my head, and the corner of his TV rubbed against my elbow. But I didn't complain either.
I hadn't put that much thought into packing. I grabbed some pants from my closet and some dirty shirts that were on my floor. I swiped a few toiletries from the bathroom and crammed it all into two backpacks. The ounce of weed I'd scored the night before went into my purse, and that's all I brought.
No one ever left Bangor; we called it The Hole. There was something about the place that sucked you in and kept you in shackles. If you went away for college, you never came back. If you stayed in-state like Eric and me, you were a Bangor lifer. No matter how much money you tried to save or plans you put together, you'd end up, years later, married to someone you met in high school, with kids, a Labrador, and a Cape Cod house. And then it was too late to leave. You had to escape as a teenager. It was the only way.
Two weeks earlier, Eric and I had been sitting in his car. It was late at night, and we were passing a bowl between us. He went on about his dead-end job at the auto repair shop, never having any money, and the nerve of his parents for charging him rent. My advice had always been the same: I told him to go back to college. He never should have dropped out in the first place. But that night, my advice was different. A month before, I'd dropped out of the University of Maine, halfway through the spring semester of my sophomore year. I'd quit my job at the campus coffee shop too. And since then, I hadn't done much besides sit on my parents’ couch and watch TV all day. I was ready for a change.
After the third bowl and a couple shots of some peppermint shit, I said, “If you hate it here so much, then move. I'll go with you.” He sat silent for a minute, then pulled out his wallet and slapped forty bucks on the armrest.
We were almost out of weed, and it was his turn to buy.
“Let's go,” he said.
He was the one driving, so I looked at him to start the car.
“I mean it, let's get the fuck out of here,” he said.
And then he started talking so fast it was like he was rapping along to the Jay-Z song on the radio. I couldn't even get a word in. He was going to pick a city along the east coast and find us a cheap apartment to rent. He would g
ive notice at his job, save the next paycheck, and in two weeks we'd be out.
He showed up at my house the next morning with coffee and bagels, and we ate breakfast on my bed. He was quiet and ate his bagel really slow. I knew Eric too well. We'd been best friends since kindergarten and even dated for a week in the fourth grade. So when he started fumbling with my comforter and acting all antsy, I knew he was getting ready to tell me we couldn't leave until he saved more money.
I was dead wrong.
Under his jacket, he had hidden a bunch of papers. He'd stayed up all night researching different places to live and apartments to rent. He'd wanted to surprise me. And he did.
We were moving to Boston into a studio apartment in Chinatown, and all he needed from me was half the security deposit and a yes. I gave him both.
I didn't know what our apartment looked like. I'd never been to Chinatown before, and I didn't care. We were approaching the Tobin Bridge, and for the first time since I'd moved back in with my parents, I felt free.
At the start of the bridge, my hands grabbed the support bar on the door. Eric's hands were on ten and two, his knuckles white. It was like we were strapped in a cart, riding up to the peak of a rollercoaster. The skyline of Boston was in front of us, and somewhere in the middle of all those tall buildings was the place we were going to call home.
Eric shouted over the music, “We did it, Nicole! We're here!”
All four windows were open, and I leaned my head against the back of the seat. My eyes closed. Wind was rushing through the car, filling it with the smell of smog and fish from the Mystic River.
A clothes hanger was tickling the side of my ear and pulling out strands of my ponytail every time we went over a bump. The metal was cold, and as it touched my hair, it reminded me of my mom's cool hands, brushing the hair out of my face and tucking it behind my ear when she put me to bed as a child.
My hands let go of the bar and I put my arms up in the air, feeling the breeze swish between my fingers. “Hell yeah, we did,” I said.
Our apartment was on the third floor, and we were the only tenants in the building who spoke English. Below us lived the owners of the Chinese restaurant downstairs, and above us were their parents—both sets and a few dogs. Our place was small, about the size of two dorm rooms. The fridge rattled and the oven worked, but the burners didn't. The bathroom was tiny, and the shower never had any hot water.
We were roughing it like we were on a camping trip, but without our parents nagging us to clean up the tent. Our air mattress was a twin, and we wobbled off the edges during the night. It didn't matter if our feet touched or if our arms crossed because we were such good friends. Besides our clothes, Eric's TV and lamp, we had a frying pan, two towels, a fleece blanket, and three pillows. We used the third pillow as a couch. The frying pan cooked eggs and boiled water in the oven, and served as a cereal bowl.
We spent our mornings exploring and getting familiar with the city. Most of the time, we walked everywhere, but it was the middle of summer, so when we needed to cool off, we took the trains. The cars were always full, and finding a seat was rare. We were like clothes being crammed into a hamper. I could feel the other passengers’ eyes scanning my body, and the air exhaled from their noses and mouths would hit my neck and arms. I wasn't claustrophobic; it was the invasion of personal space I didn't like.
On Sunday nights, we hung out with my older brother, Michael. Three years ago, he'd graduated from Yale University and moved to Boston for a finance job. Now, he called himself a hedge fund manager—whatever that meant—and owned a pimped-out condo in the Back Bay, with a doorman and an elevator. He'd buy us beer and pizza, and before we left to go home, he'd hand me a twenty-dollar bill. At first, I told him I didn't need the money, but I took it because he insisted. After a few weeks, I just said thank you and put it straight in my pocket.
By the beginning of the second month, we really did need Michael's money. The cash Eric had saved before we moved and the five hundred my dad had given me the morning we left were almost gone. I had some money in a savings account from when I worked at the coffee shop, but I didn't want to touch that money or tell Eric about it. It was there just in case he got homesick and I needed to cover the full rent.
Eric started bouncing at a club downtown. I called the private elementary school by our apartment when I saw their ad for a long-term substitute teaching position. Elementary education, my major in college, was all I ever wanted to do. But without a degree, they wouldn't hire me. Luckily, Eric's paychecks would cover our rent and electric bill, and Michael's weekly donations bought our tuna and noodles.
I needed to look for other jobs besides teaching, but I didn't like riding the train without Eric or walking to and from the station by myself. Especially since the homeless man at the corner had harassed me. It had happened late at night, when I was walking to the train to visit Eric at work. The man came up behind me, wrapped his arms around my chest and cupped my boobs. I screamed, and his fingers squeezed my nipples. I tried to wiggle out of his grip, but couldn't. He was too strong and so much bigger than me. A woman ran over and hit him over the head with her purse, knocking him to the ground. After the boob incident, Eric said he'd get me a job at the club once a cocktail waitress position opened up. But until then, he'd support us.
On the nights Eric worked, loneliness would transform into paranoia, and every creak in the ceiling made me jump. For eight straight hours, I'd smoke weed and pace the room, checking the door every few minutes to make sure it was locked. So instead of being by myself, I'd hang with my neighbors at the Chinese restaurant downstairs who would liquor me up with scorpion bowls. When I was drunk, sleep came quickly, but it was always interrupted by nightmares. The nightmares had started when I'd moved back into my parents’ house, and the same dream replayed in my head every night. The dreams seemed so real, I was scared to close my eyes again.
One night, I smoked a few bowls before I went to bed. I normally never mixed smoking and heavy drinking, but I was just so tired. All I wanted was a full eight hours of sleep. My screams woke me up. My body was shaking and I was sweating. The blanket underneath me was wet. I sat up, crossed my legs and wrapped my arms around my stomach, swaying back and forth. That was when I felt the pool of water under me. Even during college when I drank myself sick, I had never peed the bed.
I didn't want Eric to know about my accident, so I put the blanket in the shower and poured shampoo all over it. The pee had soaked through the blanket and into the velvet pillow top of the air mattress. I wiped the bed as best as I could and sprayed it with his cologne.
When Eric got home, I was in the bathroom, crouched between the toilet and sink.
“You okay?” he asked. He rocked me with one arm and lit a joint with his other.
I shook my head. “My dream, it felt so real,” I said and hit the joint.
This nightmare was different than the one I usually had. I'd woken up in the woods on top of a mound of snow, and there was a burning and stabbing pain between my legs.
He looked over at the shower and at the sopping blanket covered in shampoo bubbles. “Did you get sick?”
I took another hit and turned my head, blowing the smoke into the shower. At some point, I shrugged my shoulders.
He helped me out of the bathroom and piled all our clothes on the floor.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He took our pillows and put them at the top of the pile. “Making the bed,” he said.
We sat on our new bed, and he lit a second joint since I'd sucked down the first. When it was smoked to the roach clip, we lay back and passed out.
In the morning, he called his manager and asked to be assigned to the door so I could go to work with him. He thought he could cure my nightmares by spending every minute with me and being next to me when I went to bed. It didn't help, but I did start going to work with him. With my book of word searches and his CD player, I'd park myself on a bench by the front of the club.
/> Jimmy, the owner of the club, asked Eric if he'd work a security gig for a Fourth of July bash at his house in Cape Cod. He offered Eric a hotel room and five hundred bucks for the night. I still didn't have a job—no waitressing spots had opened up yet—and we really needed the money. Eric said he'd do it, and that afternoon he took me to Goodwill and bought me a dress for the party. Jimmy told him not to bring any friends or a date, but somehow Eric would get me in.
The morning of the party, we filled the rabbit with gas and set off for the Cape. We hit so much traffic we had to drive straight to Jimmy's so Eric wouldn't be late for the pre-party meeting. He changed in the car, and after I dropped him off, I drove to the hotel. The room was in Eric's name, but I told the front desk clerk I was Eric's wife and he gave me a key.
I had three hours to get ready for the party so I filled the big Jacuzzi tub and soaked, letting the jets massage me. I washed my hair with the little bottles of shampoo and conditioner and lathered up with shower gel that smelled like honey. I felt like I was at a spa.
