Margaret doesn’t say anything.
CYNTHIA
I can barely see you . . . come . . . closer . . .
MARGARET
Cynthia. I hate seeing you like this.
CYNTHIA
It’s okay. I’ll . . . get better . . .
Cynthia leans over and VOMITS.
Margaret CRINGES.
MARGARET
No you won’t.
CYNTHIA
What are you talking about?
Margaret takes a step closer.
MARGARET
I wish I could save you . . . but it’s too late.
Margaret turns her face away and SOBS.
Cynthia struggles to sit up. She reaches for Margaret.
CYNTHIA
It’s okay. It’s just . . . the flu.
Cynthia COLLAPSES back into bed, EXHAUSTED.
MARGARET
It’s not just the flu.
Margaret comes over and sits on the edge of the bed. Cynthia doesn’t move.
MARGARET
I have a confession to make.
Cynthia still doesn’t move.
Margaret LIFTS Cynthia’s hand. She LETS the hand GO. The hand DROPS.
MARGARET
Oh.
Cynthia is DEAD.
MARGARET
You were . . . my only real friend!
Margaret THROWS herself onto the bed.
MARGARET
(sobbing)
I’m so sorry! I killed you! It’s because of my mother! We do this . . . we go around and she marries single men and then we poison them and take their money . . . she’s a black widow . . . she said we had to poison you, too! But you were my friend!
Margaret SOBS.
Margaret STUMBLES out of the room, still SOBBING.
INT. CORNWALL KITCHEN — CONTINUOUS
Margaret STUMBLES into the kitchen, sobbing, thrashing around.
MARGARET
What have I done?!?!
Margaret WAILS, tearing open cabinets, tearing apart the room.
MARGARET
I’ll kill my mother! I’ll kill her!!!
Margaret FINDS the BOTTLE of POISON. It’s a large bottle with a SKULL AND CROSSBONES on the label.
Margaret OPENS the FRIDGE and pulls out a GLASS of ORANGE JUICE.
Margaret adds the ENTIRE BOTTLE of POISON to the ORANGE JUICE.
MARGARET
She made me kill my friend! I’ll kill her!
Suddenly . . .
JUMP SCARE: A figure is standing in the doorway behind Margaret.
Margaret turns and SEES the FIGURE and SCREAMS.
IT’S CYNTHIA STANDING IN THE DOORWAY!!!
Cynthia is a GHOST. She is wearing ALL WHITE, she is VERY PALE, she is wearing HEAVY DARK EYE SHADOW.
Margaret COLLAPSES in FEAR. She nearly DROPS the glass of poisoned orange juice, but Ghost Cynthia catches it.
Ghost Cynthia crouches down, holding Margaret’s head in her lap.
Ghost Cynthia holds the orange juice to Margaret’s lips.
GHOST CYNTHIA
Join me, sister.
Margaret sleepily DRINKS the poisoned orange juice.
Margaret DIES.
A LONG, DRAMATIC DEATH.
Finally, she lies STILL. She is DEAD.
A long beat.
JUMP SCARE: MARGARET STANDS UP!!!
MARGARET IS A GHOST.
Ghost Margaret is wearing ALL WHITE, she is VERY PALE, she is wearing HEAVY DARK EYE SHADOW.
Ghost Margaret STARES at Ghost Cynthia.
MARGARET
Cynthia?
CYNTHIA
Welcome to the land of the dead!
Margaret looks around.
MARGARET
It looks just like our normal house.
CYNTHIA
True. But now that we are dead, we can do whatever we want!
MARGARET
Aren’t you angry that I killed you?
CYNTHIA
I killed you, too.
MARGARET
I guess that’s one thing we’ve got.
CYNTHIA
Just like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”!
The two ghosts LAUGH and HUG.
FADE TO BLACK.
PART III
LOST WEEKEND
2008
Nick was parked at one of those backwoods gas stations that haven’t even installed credit card readers on the pumps, it was Thursday, two hours into the drive and he was already bored, so when the CHECK ENGINE light had clicked on, he’d stopped at this gas station to check the oil in his mom’s car, pretending he knew how, saying to himself in his head, See, Lindsey, I’m responsible, but then apparently he didn’t properly latch the bar that holds the hood open, and it lost its grip and slammed down on the fingers of his left hand.
He anticipated the pain before he felt it, a sharp tingling and then a numb ache, and he knew it was going to be bad, and then, Jesus, he felt it, suddenly bad and getting worse, he jumped up and down a little bit, trying to push through the pain to its peak and out the other side, trying to tackle it head-on, because the whole point of this weekend was to build up the discipline to look at pain straight in its ugly face.
Still, his fingers hurt, but it was too early in the drive to start drinking, he’d never make it all the way to Lindsey’s cousin’s cabin if he started drinking now, so instead he grabbed his backpack out of the back seat and pulled out the seventy-dollar bottle of bourbon he’d bought special for this trip and just held it against his left hand to see if the proximity made the pain better, and when it didn’t, he opened the bottle and sniffed, which didn’t really help either, except in the way that pregnant women learn to breathe.
He thought about taking a little sip, just to get his brain to slow down a bit and stop chattering like this, on and on and on, but it really was too early to start drinking, and there were people around, so he tucked the bottle into his backpack, congratulating himself on his discipline, and went inside the gas station and bought a pack of cigarettes and a lighter and a package of cookies and a big waxed paper cup of Mountain Dew as reward for not drinking. He stood just outside the door with the sun in his face, set the soda and the cookies on the lid of a big red trash can, and unwrapped the plastic from the cigarette pack. Using his right hand to flick the lighter, holding the cigarette between his left thumb and pinky (because all his other fingers were still hurting), he lit up and inhaled.
A beefy man with leathery skin walked past and gave Nick a look, like Nick was wearing a clown suit or something, even though he was just wearing jeans and an old Metallica T-shirt. Maybe the man was frowning because of the way Nick was holding his cigarette, or maybe it was because of the way his hair was cut, or maybe it was some essential thing about Nick, the air of a comfortable white suburban middle-class upbringing that Nick would never be able to hide. Nick tried not to let it bother him, what did he care what that redneck thought, all he cared about was how good this cigarette felt and how great this trip was going to be, how great this trip already was. He pretended that his bender had already started, that the journey was the reward, that the drinking he was getting ready to do was just an excuse to be alone in the woods, instead of the other way around, and he switched the cigarette to his right hand and held it with his first two fingers like all good Americans, looking at the road ahead of him, and at the sparse woods beyond the gas station, where old cans and piles of trash were scattered all around. When his cigarette was almost gone he pulled out another and lit it with the first, and it was delicious as he inhaled, but then he rea
lized that if he didn’t stop himself now, he was going to smoke this whole pack of cigarettes in the next half hour, and he was seized by an impulse to be good, to be better, to be strict with himself, and also to be wild: he started throwing cigarettes away, three or four at a time, enjoying the recklessness of it, the discipline and masochism, plus the sheer wastefulness, he really was such an asshole, wasn’t he, Yes, you’re right about that, Lindsey, and this was truly going to be a weekend of nonsense and chaos, a Personal-Pan-Pizza-size performance art piece.
“Hey. Asshole.”
Nick froze, the nearly empty packet of cigarettes in his left hand and four cigarettes in his right, holding the lid of the trash can open and the lit cigarette balanced on his lip, the ash lengthening delicately off the burning end, and Nick looked over his shoulder and saw the beefy man again, walking out of the store, leading with his belly, which was pronounced and firm, and he walked up, his belly uncomfortably close to Nick, and said, “That’s not how you smoke a pack of cigarettes.”
Nick pulled the four cigarettes away from the can and held them in front of his chest in a closed fist and wondered if this was the start of a fight, he had never been in a fight with a stranger (especially not such a large and leathery stranger), and he felt terrified and wondered if he could give this man one of his pints of cheap whiskey as a peace offering, which would be totally fine, he could stop by another liquor store, and so he smiled at the man with all of his teeth, telegraphing how little of a threat he was, and tucked the four cigarettes back in the pack. “I’m trying to quit,” he said. “So I can’t keep these all, I’m throwing most of them away, but I’m going to keep just one, and I’m going on a trip to the woods, this way I can only have one more.”
The man, squinting at him, asked, “What woods you going to?” and Nick wondered, was there something in the guy’s mouth, was he chewing something?
“Just outside the state park, over yonder in Youngs County,” he said, embarrassed that he had said yonder, worried the man had noticed the affectation, and also worried that he was wrong about his landmarks, because he had only been to this cabin once, with Lindsey, more than a year ago, and he didn’t know which state park it was close to, he just knew the state park was a thing they had talked about visiting.
“Well, you should be careful,” the man said, his eyebrows up, real serious. “There’s killers in the woods.” Then his face changed as he laughed to let Nick in on the joke, a deep laugh that stretched his mouth open wide, and Nick smiled again with all of his nonthreatening teeth and kind of went ha in a way he hoped was noncommittal. The man was shaking his head to himself, laughing at his own joke, as he pulled a cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket and opened it to show Nick the single cigarette left inside, then closed it and held it out, an offering.
“Here, I’ll trade your sins away,” he said. Nick struggled to understand the deal for an embarrassing second but pulled himself together and took the man’s pack with the single cigarette and traded it for his own pack, which was now half-empty (or half-full, depending on the man’s outlook on life). The man said, “I usually don’t smoke Camels, but a little experimentation never hurt anyone,” and then, honest to God, the man winked and kind of raised an eyebrow, and Nick smiled and made a gesture like he was tipping an imaginary hat and then turned and walked quickly back to his mom’s car, trying to commit the line to memory, knowing he would tell this story over beers for years to come, maybe not to Lindsey, but maybe yes to Lindsey, maybe she would laugh if she heard. Oh, Nick, she might say, shaking her head but smiling at his story about the time some redneck propositioned Nick at a gas station in the backwoods that he only in that moment realized was actually one of those gay cruising spots that, for the most part, had been rendered obsolete by the internet. Nick felt the man’s eyes on his back but just kept walking, walked purposefully to his car, keeping his back straight, trying not to look like he was rushing.
When he had opened his cookies and his Mountain Dew and pulled back onto the narrow highway, it was just after noon, so if he drove ten miles an hour over the speed limit, he’d get to the cabin with a couple of hours of daylight left to build a warm fire and a good buzz, but almost immediately he realized the flaw in his plan, which was that he was going to have to drive for three more hours, and it was already boring, and he’d already eaten all of the cookies.
It was deep fall and the trees on the mountains around him were burnished red and orange, but there were just so many of them, it was hard to see them as beautiful, and in fact they mostly just reminded Nick of the background photo on the computer he had used at his mother’s friend’s consulting firm three summers ago, before he was informed that he was no longer an intern there, because of one little nap in the handicap bathroom.
He’d left that morning on an impulse and so had forgotten to bring the cord that turned the car’s tape deck into a CD player, and he had no tapes, and the radio was no good—it was more like a parody of radio, there were only three stations and all of them were broadcasting the same booming voice going on about some character that Nick guessed was biblical but did not recognize (his mom would be so disappointed) and after scrolling through the dials for an eternal half hour Nick reached over and pulled the seventy-dollar bourbon out of his backpack and held it between his legs to remind himself of the reward on its way, then he pulled into the left lane and drove a little faster, eager to get there, then cut the radio off completely and said, out loud, “I’m going to have to face myself at some point,” which was actually one of the main goals of the trip—to see himself clearly, and all of his faults, the way Lindsey had seen him—which was why he was going to the cabin where she had first asked him to stop drinking and why he was going to spend three days there getting good and drunk.
Lindsey’s cousin had bought the cabin years earlier with the intention of fixing it up into a nice rental vacation home, but then never did (the cousin apparently rarely followed through on plans), and so the cabin was never actually renovated but merely in a state of constant repair, fighting the entropy of the forest, and Nick and Lindsey had laughed so hard, when they’d stayed here for her birthday, the weekend she’d asked that he spend just three days with her not drinking, they kept finding tools hidden in strange places, like the power saw stored on a pile of towels in the bathroom. So Nick didn’t think it would be a problem for him to head up there now, the cabin wasn’t even that nice, and even if he wasn’t technically invited, he knew for a fact that nobody ever used it from November to February, it wasn’t winterized, so Nick’s bender wasn’t going to hurt anybody. On a whim he unscrewed the cap of the seventy-dollar bourbon, checked in his rearview, and when there were no police, just some indifferent trucks, he took a quick pull, just to see what it felt like to drink expensively on the highway. Nobody was surprised when it felt pretty good, or when he took another, deeper pull.
Thus fortified, time passed easier. Nick thought about the nature of inevitability. He looked at the bottle. He had drained it down by about an inch. He thought about how it was probably enough for now. He took one last swallow. He had a
It was
Nick snapped back to himself. Realized he’d zoned out for a minute. He slapped his face. Took another sip just to balance things out. Kept driving.
A little later, he needed coffee, stopped at a Waffle House. Drank two cups, used the bathroom. Splashed water on his face. In the parking lot he did a couple of half-assed push-ups. Got up and the asphalt had left pockmarks on his hands. He brushed his hands off on his jeans. Felt a little better, pulled up the map on his phone. Walked around the parking lot until he got a signal. Saw that he had missed the small, unmarked road that led from Route 237 to the cabin and felt a little worse. He’d gone twenty miles too far. Went back into the Waffle House for another coffee, then hit the road again, watching more closely this time. He kept the bourbon in his backpack but still missed the exit, stopped to pee at a gas station, he
aded back the other direction. On the third pass he felt sobriety creeping up on him, annoyingly, but he did the thing where you delay pleasure, like that test they do with kids and marshmallows, and drove thirty miles an hour until he finally found the turnoff, saw the blue metal mailbox he remembered from years earlier, the landmark Lindsey had looked for when she was navigating them up here. It was leaning over so far it was almost horizontal, like an old drunk. There was an hour to go until dark, the sky high above still light gray but the evening dark starting to unfold from under the trees. He took a deep, satisfying pull to celebrate. Then put the fancy bourbon away, further proof of his discipline. Replaced it with a pint of the cheap stuff.
The house was fifteen miles off the highway. The first stretch of road snaked through what could loosely be called a neighborhood. The dirt road was so potholed, so lined with trailers and cinder blocks and barking dogs and other signs of rural poverty that he almost turned back. He didn’t remember it being this depressing. Then he entered a stretch where the houses were set back in the woods, and bigger, their windows dark. Vacation cabins, used when the season was warm. Then the houses stopped, and he drove alone through the woods.
The feeling of adventure helped him relax, along with the booze. The sun had set now but the light was still even and gray. He kept his headlights off, enjoying the dusk. It drained the color out of the woods around him.
Then he came around a bend and saw three men standing on the side of the road.
They had just crossed the road. Hearing Nick’s car, they’d stopped, and turned, and now they were standing still, watching him approach. Then one of the guys lifted a flashlight and pointed it at Nick’s windshield. It wasn’t that dark out so he wasn’t blinded, but he was offended. He flashed his high beams back. Worried he was going to have to get out of the car. Didn’t want to talk. Thought about the guy from the gas station. Had already dodged one fight today. Didn’t want to fight these guys either. Was relieved when they turned, continued on their invisible path into the woods.
True Story Page 9
