by Jenna Rae
Orrin is dead, she told herself. Orrin is dead. Really. But her mind refused to accept this as a possibility. Orrin couldn’t die. He was far too powerful to be killed by a mere car crash. God couldn’t just die, could he?
On the news, they showed a picture of the girl, and she was lovely. She was “burned beyond recognition,” that was what the reporter said. Lola sank onto the edge of the bed, transfixed. She gaped at the image of the beautiful young girl who was beaming at the camera. The sun glinted off her golden hair, and her heavily made-up eyes sparkled. She was the very image of youth and beauty and glamour. Lola instinctively rose when the image of the photo went away, as though she could grab it and bring it back, and in doing so bring back the girl herself. She shook her head, wishing she could change what had happened and knowing that she could not. She retched and ran for the bathroom and was sick.
I should have called the police the first time he hit me. The first time he drugged me. The first time he raped me. I should never have pretended that it was okay to hurt me. He got tired of me, and he found another girl to take my place, and I might as well have killed her myself.
She went into a strange kind of dream world for weeks. All she did was write. She couldn’t have said what day of the week it was, or when she’d last eaten or slept. She just wrote. She finished the first draft of her book before she started getting worried about money. She wasn’t sure what to do. It occurred to her to just go back to the house, but somehow she still couldn’t make herself do that. What if it had all been a trick? What if Orrin was waiting there for her? She knew that this wasn’t a rational fear, but she also knew that there was no way she’d ever go back to that house, not ever.
She called a lawyer, one whose name she found in the battered phone book in the motel’s lobby. They met in his downtown office, a glittering steel and glass showplace full of sharp edges and cold surfaces and ugly sculptures. After a week or so, she got a call from the lawyer. There was some kind of problem with Orrin’s business partner. She hadn’t even known about a business partner.
Orrin didn’t like to share his jar of grape jelly. How could he share a business? It must have been a junior partner, she thought, though she said none of this to the lawyer.
She didn’t like him. He seemed like a giant blond peacock, strutting around and snapping orders at his staff. He looked through her. Talked at her. Ignored her questions and only called her to demand information or paperwork or question her judgment. If she’d had any courage left, she’d have fired him. But she didn’t. There were other lawyers who wanted to talk to her, and the peacock talked to them for her most of the time.
In the daze of the next few weeks, Lola found it hard to concentrate on all the complicated things that were happening. According to her lawyer, the authorities believed that Orrin for some years had been taking money out of his regular accounts, both business and personal, and putting it somewhere else. He and his partner had two sets of books, according to a forensic accountant from some federal agency. She didn’t know what to say.
She read every word she could find about the accident. “Tami Holden,” she whispered, over and over. Why couldn’t I have found a way to leave? If I had, maybe that girl would still be alive. The image of the young beauty danced in Lola’s mind and blocked out everything else. When the lawyers got mad, Tami Holden’s lovely young face crumpled and blackened and turned to ash, and Lola knew that it was her fault. She had been too selfish and too weak.
“I’m sorry,” she said, rubbing the edges of a newspaper photograph of Orrin’s young girlfriend. “I’m so sorry. I should have been the one to die. You should never have been anywhere near him.”
One of the men showed her some pictures of Orrin. He was sitting in a bar, arm around a woman with long red hair.
Lola stared at the photo. “Is that Tami Holden? She looks different.”
The man laughed. His laugh was nasty, dirty, mean, and Lola recoiled and looked at his face. Most of the time, she tried not to look at the angry people, but this man was scary. He was handsome, she supposed, with perfect newscaster’s hair and bright blue eyes, but he had a shark’s smile. He and Orrin would like each other, she thought. After that, she tuned them out and waited for it all to be over.
The lawyer sent her to a therapist, a woman named Lauren. She asked if Lola identified herself as a “battered wife.” Lola shook her head. Later, she formed those words with her mouth, feeling them and wondering what they meant, exactly. She dreamed that night about Tami Holden in a wedding dress, hung from a clothesline and being beaten with a broom handle. Her hair and the big white dress danced when the broom handle hit her middle. Her face crumpled and burst into flames. Lola wrote a letter to Tami Holden’s family, apologizing for her part in their daughter’s death, and her lawyer promised to give it to them. He read the letter, opening it right in front of her and making a copy. She shook her head, not sure what to do. He sent her to the therapist again.
Lauren also asked about Lola’s writing—she had taken to bringing a notebook with her everywhere and writing in it whenever she was stuck waiting at the Laundromat or the lawyer’s office or Lauren’s waiting room. Was she writing a book? Would she try to get it published? Lola didn’t know how to answer that. She wasn’t sure what she was doing from one minute to the next. But the thought stuck with her even after she stopped going to see Lauren. This, because one day the receptionist told her that she was no longer covered under Orrin’s insurance.
She wanted to share her book with other people. Why, she couldn’t have said. She found a website where she could put it online for free, and all she had to do was type it in. The problem was that the Internet service at the motel was very, very slow, and her computer was very, very old. So she could only load it on the website a few hundred words at a time, and that took hours. She knew it was silly. The odds of someone running across her story were very bad, and the odds that anyone would bother to check back and read the thing little bits at a time were even worse. Still, she kept at it, and she imagined some sad, lonely, confused woman out there looking for just this kind of story so that she’d know she wasn’t alone.
She checked on the computer every day, and there was a place to click on and find out how many people had read the story. When there were more than a hundred people who’d read it, she felt that she’d achieved her goal. She clicked on it one day and thought there’d been a mistake. It said that over a thousand people had read all of the parts she’d uploaded so far!
She danced around the motel room, delighted to know that a thousand people had actually taken the time to read some of her story. There was a place for people to leave comments too, but she avoided clicking on that. What if people said her story was stupid? What if people said she should never write another word? She knew that would be more than she could stand. She kept putting in a few hundred more words every day, and over time, her curiosity got the better of her. It was a month before she clicked on the comments section and started reading. There were a lot of comments, hundreds, and Lola waded through them. She’d decided to skip anything negative, and that saved a lot of time. She could only find a few dozen positive comments, one of them from a woman who said she was an agent and wanted to represent Lola.
It took Lola a week to call her, and then suddenly things were moving very quickly. The agent told her to stop putting the book online for free and publish as an eBook.
“Would anybody really pay to read my book?”
The agent assured her that they would. And she turned out to be right, though not for the reasons Lola would have anticipated. A televangelist had read and gotten angry about her book, and his followers bought copies of the digital book by the thousands. One day the agent called Lola and said that a publisher wanted to offer her a contract. Was she, perhaps, interested in putting out a printed edition? Suddenly, there was money, more than she could have ever imagined, and she was a real author.
Eventually, she moved out of the motel and bough
t a house. She was free for a year after Orrin’s death until one day a stranger followed her. He appeared in front of her house and called her a whore, and he hit her, and she felt like all the changes she’d made were window dressing, and that, underneath, she was still Orrin’s mousy, pathetic, fat, stupid, worthless wife.
She tried to forget about that and spent the day cleaning, doing laundry and paying bills. It was hardly exciting stuff, but it kept her busy until long after dark. She jumped when the phone rang just as she was climbing into bed.
“Hey, Lola.” Del’s voice sounded tired. “You okay?”
Lola murmured her assent.
“Remember, you hear any little noise at all, or just feel like something’s off, call me, right away, okay?”
“I will, Del, and thanks so much. I really appreciate the way you’ve stepped in and helped me. But I’m sure that nothing will happen.”
“Great.” Del sounded unconvinced. “Sure you don’t want me to crash on your couch?”
“No, thanks. Good night.”
“’Night.”
Lola turned off the lamp and sat up in the dark for a moment, listening to the sounds of the house. The cats were curled up at her feet for now, but she knew that soon they’d begin their nightly patrols of each room. If something were wrong, they would be restless, nervous. Everything was fine. The alarm was turned on, and it silently guarded her home. Nonetheless, as on the previous nights, she closed her eyes only to see The Creep’s intense stare.
She’d seen that look, or some version of it, dozens of times before, and it always presaged some horrible nightmare of violence and humiliation. She shivered and burrowed deeper into the blankets she’d piled on the bed. She couldn’t get warm, and she couldn’t erase the image of those eyes from her mind. Hot tears scalded her skin as she gave in and cried herself to sleep.
Chapter Nine
Del hung up and stood looking out her front window at Lola’s house. She felt like there was something dark and sinister creeping around the outside of the place and poking around to find a way in. It was a silly thought, one she wanted to dismiss as nonsense but couldn’t.
She wished suddenly and with great surprise that her daddy were around to advise her, to help her figure out a plan. He’d been smart, once. He’d been “slicker than spit,” according to Nana. He’d have known how to soothe Lola and make her smile. Once upon a time, he’d been able to “read people like picture books and play them like fiddles,” another Nana-ism.
Del smiled, thinking of him, the way he was in the old days. He drove an old Ford pickup, the same one her entire childhood. It was a dinosaur, the kind of truck that could pull a stump out of the ground or jounce with ease down a muddy, potholed dirt road. It was more like a tank than a truck, sturdy and tough and unbreakable. Not like today’s cars—they all looked like plastic toys to Del. That truck was the one thing about her daddy that never changed, and she was surprised by the lump that filled her throat and made her eyes prick. She rubbed at them with rough hands and cleared her throat. It was just a truck, wasn’t it?
He took her hunting, only once and only after months of begging on her part. She hunkered next to him, silent and watchful, not daring to mention her full bladder or to scratch her itching nose. At seven, she would sooner have died than done some foolish thing to earn his disapproval.
She cut her eyes at him and was struck by how relaxed he was. He seemed like a timeless thing, rooted more comfortably in the forest’s damp, cold ground than in town, where he often seemed oversized and restless. Here, shaded by towering trees and overgrown scrub, alert to the small noises of the animals and sniffing with flared nostrils as the wind shifted, he seemed more animal than man. She strove to emulate his stillness, his alertness. She tried to see the forest with all of her senses, the way Daddy had told her to the week before.
“Injun’ blood,” he said. “That’s what makes us good hunters.”
That was how he got Momma to agree to let him take Del.
“It’s her heritage,” he said, and Momma laughed. She grabbed Del’s face with one bony hand and pointed at Daddy with the other.
“Yeah,” she muttered, her eyes bright with either anger or humor—Del wasn’t sure which, “honey, I surely can tell. Yessir, that Injun’ blood shows up real nice in them nice blond curls and pretty blue eyes she got from her daddy.”
Once upon a time, Daddy would have laughed at that and grabbed Momma up in a swinging hug, and they’d have kissed until Del looked away in embarrassment. But now he narrowed his eyes in that new way he had, and Momma flounced away with a nervous laugh before he could get good and mad.
But that was far away from the forest, where Daddy seemed like his old self again. Del realized that she could think about that and still keep aware of the little sounds around her. A small thing, squirrel or mouse or rabbit, hesitated in its path some twenty feet behind her, and she could all but see its wide eyes and trembling chest as it tried to assess the danger. The wind shifted again, and that drove the little thing back into its hidey-hole.
Del would not have believed that she could sense such a thing before that moment. She felt as if she had learned about a third arm or second head inside herself. She eyed the rifle Daddy had given her for her birthday, and for a moment felt only a child’s delight in its newness and specialness.
But the gun was heavy on her legs, and she was afraid. What if she messed up? What if she missed? What if she got the hiccups or something? But these feelings faded, and she slowly drifted outside herself and into some quieter place where she was not a girl or a person or seven years old, but an animal that belonged here and was a part of the world. She was legs and arms and eyes and belly and mouth. That was all. And the rifle, only moments before a strange and wondrous foreign thing, was as naturally a part of her as a cat’s claws or a dog’s nose. She was only distantly aware that she’d managed to forget her bladder and her cold feet and the way her shirt was too tight across her shoulders.
That awareness faded away, and she was again attuned to the life stirring around her. Some large things, deer or something like deer, pranced lightly down by the river. One, then two, then maybe four eased down in near silence to drink. She didn’t actually hear these sounds as much as feel them. There was a smoke smell coming from far away. The farmhouse a few miles down the road had a woodstove. She wasn’t sure how she knew that. There was something important out there somewhere in the gathering fog, and she strained to find the quiet inside her that would let her figure out what the important thing was. Finally it clicked—something big was hunting, and it was near.
She felt more than heard a large snake slither toward the river, and she peered up at her daddy. He nodded, as though he could read her mind, and she felt connected to him by a million invisible lines grown through the air and the scrub and the animals and the trees and the fine mist that left tiny, sparkling droplets glistening on the tops of everything. She could almost imagine the weight of the drops of mist on the million lines that ran between her and Daddy. It didn’t weaken them, though. Somehow, it made them more real.
She smelled that there would be more rain soon, but not until dark, and the big thing that hunted nearby wanted to feed before that happened. She looked at her daddy to see if he sensed that, too. He didn’t look at her but nodded again, a barely perceptible dip of his chin that she mimicked unconsciously. Had the snake been the menace she’d sensed? She doubted it. The other predator was bigger and more dangerous and somewhere nearby, and she flashed her eyes at Daddy, but he cut his eyes past her and to the right. Her hands tightened on the rifle at the way his nostrils flared and eyes went hard.
She turned to look with him and sensed something—she couldn’t name it, except that it was dangerous and big—making its stealthy move down the hill and toward the river and what she thought might be deer. She held her breath as the hunting thing glided down, down, not even slowing to look at them. Then it was too far down for them to sense, and she looked
a question at Daddy, but he was tense and still and ignoring her. There was a sound and then a small splash, and she understood that the thing had missed its prey and was moving across the river toward something else now. The deer had taken flight in the moment before the splash, and they were long gone already. She let out breath she hadn’t even realized she was holding.
She smiled at Daddy, and he smiled back for a second and then winked at her. You and me, the wink said, we’re special.
Even now, decades later, she felt a child’s thrill at that wink. He would have been able to sit on her front steps and sense whether there was danger afoot over at Lola’s.
She felt foolish, all of a sudden. She hadn’t been able to rely on him for squat in decades. And she’d known better than to look to him or anyone else for help or for anything since she was, what, eight or ten? She was acting like a big baby, wishing for her daddy. She snorted at her own foolishness.
Lola’s face, filled with shame and fear and pain, flashed into her mind, and she tried to shake it away. If she’d been thinking about how the deer felt, she’d have been too distracted to see the mountain lion, or whatever it had been. It was more important to focus on the predator than the prey, hadn’t Daddy taught her that? She needed to regain her focus.
“Where are you?” she whispered, as she leaned forward on her chair and peered into the darkness. She wasn’t sure if she was asking her daddy or the bad guy.
Chapter Ten
Lola had bad dreams again that night and gave up on sleep long before dawn. She decided to do some writing as a distraction, and it wasn’t until the loud protests of the cats alerted her to the lateness of the hour that she stopped working, and she was surprised to note that it was nearly eight. The sun had come up without her noticing it. There was a lot she should do, she knew that, but she smiled, feeling suddenly reckless. I’ll go shopping, she decided, and felt a small thrill of guilt and glee at the indulgence of it. Orrin felt that vanity was unbecoming.
