by Ronald Malfi
As it turned out, sleep did find her, but it came in fits and starts. Images from earlier that evening bled together to form a grotesque diorama of flickering motion pictures. Several times she awoke, believing she was still making love to Tom Schuler—she could actually feel his calloused hands running sloppily over her body, could actually smell the alcohol on his breath and the cologne he wore. Other times, she relived the accident on Full Hill Road, only this time with the slow motion of a frame-by-frame analysis—the darkened roadway, the swerve of headlights cutting through the night, the sudden, bright image of a small, frail figure darting out from the darkened shoulder into the bright glare of the car’s headlights. She’d jerked the wheel and spun the car around in real life…yet in her dreams she continued to plow forward, running the child down. Sometimes she felt the car rumble over the child’s body. Other times, the child was thrown up over the hood, slamming against the windshield, blackening Maggie’s world.
At one point she awoke, her throat sore from possibly crying out in her sleep, and a film of sweat coated her flesh. From the partially open window she thought she heard movement out in the bushes. She got up and checked but could see nothing. There were black clouds stretched across the moon and the fields were like pits of tar yawning all the way out to the foothills of the mountains. Terrified, she closed the window and got back into bed.
Evan got home around six thirty in the morning, lumbering through the semidarkness of the house in his careless, noisy way. She feigned sleep when he crawled into bed beside her without showering or even brushing his teeth.
At ten in the morning, after a night of fitful sleep laden with nightmares, Maggie got up, leaving her husband snoring in bed, dreaming the dreams of the blissfully ignorant. Outside, the sky was overcast. Clouds the color of gunmetal hung low to the ground, and a soupy mist collected in the valley between the mountains. Had they owned a garage, Maggie would have salted the Pontiac away within it, and perhaps her anxiety would have been a little lower. But they did not have a garage and the Pontiac was parked around back. She’d possessed the foresight to park backward in the dirt turnabout, the rear of the vehicle facing the house. Looking at it now from the bank of living room windows, Maggie wondered how she was going to explain the accident to her husband. It was only a matter of time before he discovered it.
Evan had slept until four or so in the evening before staggering from the bedroom in search of something to eat. Maggie was pretending to read a Heather Graham novel in the kitchen when he came in. She looked up and smiled at him, overly friendly. Evan didn’t seem to notice.
“How was work?”
He grunted and went immediately to the refrigerator. He was wearing pajama bottoms and a sleeveless undershirt, his muscular, tattooed arms exposed. At forty five, Evan looked like he could have been a decade younger.
“Let me fix you something to eat.”
“Up to you,” he said, moving to the coffee pot on the counter. He touched the pot and frowned when he found that it was cold.
“I can make a new pot,” she offered.
“I’ll just heat it in the microwave.” He filled a mug, put it in the microwave, and punched the buttons with the knuckle of his index finger. The appliance hummed to life as an orange light blossomed behind the tempered glass door.
She attempted to engage him several times in casual conversation. Finally, drinking his coffee while leaning against the kitchen counter, Evan Quedentock laughed.
“What? What’s so funny?”
“Being so nice to me all of a sudden. Makes a guy worry.”
“I’m always nice to you.”
He snorted. “Yeah. Sure you are.”
At some point during the rest of the evening, she fell back into her normal state of complacency. Evan busied himself in the basement while she prepared dinner and did a load of wash. The incident on Full Hill Road could have been nothing more than a waking nightmare, a bad dream. The same as what had happened with Tom Schuler—their rendezvous at Crossroads and the clumsy, wild, drunken sex at his house on the edge of town. Yes. All of it—a dream.
It wasn’t until she received a text message from Tom Schuler that the reality of it all came rushing back to her. She was unemployed, had been since the bank shut down eight months ago. She relied solely on Evan to take care of her. What if he found out about Tom and kicked her out of the house? Where could she go? She tried to imagine herself moving in with Tom on the outskirts of town, but the concept was so foreign and preposterous that she couldn’t do it.
She took her cell phone into the bathroom and read the text.
Had gud time last nite. More pls!
She shuddered, feeling disgusted. She quickly deleted the text then considered flushing the damn thing down the toilet.
Don’t be stupid.
She thought, More pls!
“Maggie!”
The bathroom door shook at the booming of Evan’s voice. A second later, she heard the back door slam.
“Maggie! Get out here!”
Oh, Christ…
“Just a minute,” she called back. Bending down and opening the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink, she wedged her cell phone beneath two towels. Then she stood and caught her reflection in the mirror.
What have you done, you selfish bitch? What have you done?
“Goddamn it, Maggie! Come here!”
He was standing in the entranceway of the living room in work boots and a backward baseball cap. He had a checkered flannel shirt on over his ribbed undershirt. As he stood there he tugged off a pair of work gloves. He had just come in from outside.
“Yeah?” she said, deliberately pausing several feet away from him. He’d struck her on a number of occasions and she had developed a sense about such things. She didn’t want to get close.
“What the hell happened to the goddamn car?”
Stupidly, she said, “What car?”
“The fucking Pontiac, genius.”
“Oh.” She blinked repeatedly. “Oh.” She felt like a record player stuck in a groove.
“You hit something with the goddamn car?”
“Me?” Oh, she was digging in deep now…
“No, the goddamn Muffin Man. Of course you. Who else?”
At that moment, she made the decision to lie to him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t do anything to the car.”
Evan chewed at his lower lip as he examined his wife across the room. He had the work gloves in one fist now, the fingertips protruding like the stubby tentacles of some undersea creature.
He hooked a finger at her. “Come take a look,” he said, turning and stomping out the door.
Timidly, Maggie followed. In bare feet, she descended the patio steps and crossed the overgrown lawn to the dirt turnabout. The VW and the Pontiac sat side by side. Evan marched around to the front of the Pontiac, tugging his work gloves back on. He eyed her from beneath a downturned brow. Something about his gaze reminded Maggie of the gorillas she’d seen in the Baltimore Zoo when she was just a young girl.
“Take a look at this,” he growled.
She went around the car and paused in front of it, a few feet away from Evan. Experience told her his hands could be quick and close a distance of several feet in a matter of a millisecond. She would take no chances.
“There,” he said, pointing to the crumpled grille. “And there,” he added, his index finger gliding up to address the sizable dent in the hood of the car. “You telling me you didn’t hit nothing?”
“I didn’t hit anything,” she said, looking at the car and not at him.
“I know what a car looks like when it hits something.”
“I didn’t hit anything,” she repeated, glancing up at him. “I swear.”
He stared at her. She found she couldn’t look away. In an instant she became convinced that he could read her thoughts, every single one of them, just by looking into her eyes. Frightened, she blinked and looked back at the car.
“So you’re saying you have no fucking idea what happened here,” he said, not phrasing it as a question.
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“So…what? Someone came back here and smashed up my car?”
“Evan, I don’t know. Maybe.”
Evan Quedentock took a few steps around the car, looking for any imperfections he might have missed. He bent down and looked at one of the car’s tires. When he stood, reappearing above the car’s hood, he had an expression of deep contemplation on his face.
Fleetingly, Maggie considered leaving town this evening after he left for the night shift. Stupid. Where would I go?
(gud time last nite)
“What’s the name of that kid I smacked around at Crossroads two weeks ago? The one who was staring at your tits?”
“Shit, Evan. I don’t remember.”
“Goddamn punk kid.” He peeled his cap off his head and ran one gloved hand along the bristles of his hair. “Codger, ain’t it? Ricky Codger.”
Maggie knew damn well it had been Ricky Codger. But she found herself incapable of speaking now.
“If that little motherfucker did this,” Evan said, his voice trailing off. All too clearly Maggie could hear the bitter aggression in her husband’s tone.
Maggie tried to speak but her voice cracked.
“Spit it out,” her husband barked.
“You don’t know it was him.”
“Who else would it be?” He scratched his chin. “You hear any noise around the house last night? In the yard?”
Her mind slipped backward to the previous night. She recalled the horrible nightmares. She recalled waking to noises in the yard—how had Evan known?—and getting up, shutting the bedroom window.
“Yes.”
Evan’s eyebrows arched. “Yeah?”
Maggie blinked. She caught a whiff of Tom Schuler in her nose. “I mean, yeah, I thought I heard something last night. It was loud. I looked outside but couldn’t see anything. I just shut the bedroom window then went back to bed.”
Evan had begun nodding midway through her little monologue. “Okay,” he breathed. “Yeah, okay. Okay.”
She didn’t like the look in her husband’s eyes.
Later that night, after Maggie had showered and dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a loose-fitting T-shirt, Evan had departed for work in the VW. His instruction to his wife upon leaving was to keep an eye on the car. If she heard any noise tonight, or caught a glimpse of something out of the ordinary, she was to call him on his cell immediately. She agreed that she would.
At eleven that night she was sitting in the living room with her Heather Graham novel open yet unread on her lap, the TV across the room on but with the volume turned down low.
He’s going to do something bad, she thought. He’ll either go to the police and find out the truth or go straight to Ricky Codger and drive a fist into the kid’s face. Either way, no good will come of this.
Why hadn’t she just told him she’d hit a deer out on Full Hill Road?
You know why, said a sly little voice at the back of her head. Because he would have called the police to confirm the story and, when he found out you were out there at midnight, he’d start questioning you. He’d find out about you and Tom and what you were doing out there and then you’d be in a world of hurt.
She could have told him the story without admitting that the police had gotten involved. She could have said she’d gone out shopping in Cumberland and that the accident had happened earlier in the day, on her way back into town. Goddamn it, why hadn’t she just said that to him instead of lying?
He knows, she thought. She’d known all along. He knows I’m lying.
Again, she wondered where she’d go if Evan kicked her to the curb. She tried to imagine herself moving in with Tom Schuler; not only did she find the prospect implausible, but she found it wholly unappealing as well. Tom was not good looking, Tom was not polite or chivalrous, Tom did not make a lot of money and did not treat his girlfriends very well. What would it be like living with messy Tom Schuler?
This reminded her that her cell phone was wedged between two towels in the bathroom. She retrieved it to find two more messages, both from Tom.
The first: doin ok?
The second: cum over tonite pls.
For several long seconds she considered what to do with those texts. In the end, she deleted them without responding. If she ignored him would he go away?
Cum over tonite pls.
Back in the living room, she turned on the floodlights that lit up the backyard. The Pontiac sat there in the middle of the turnabout like a dark secret. The windows were open, letting in a cool autumn breeze that smelled of firewood and cinders. It chilled her bones.
In her hand, her cell phone rang, startling her. She looked at the number and found that it belonged to Tom.
Don’t answer it, said that same sly voice.
“Hello, Tom,” she said, bringing the phone to her ear. What was the matter with her? Was she bent on a path of self-destruction?
“Hey, doll. You doin’ okay?”
“No, Tom. I’m not. I messed up the car leaving your place last night and Evan’s asking questions.”
“Shit. What’d you do?”
I think I hit a kid, she almost said. Instead, she uttered, “I’m not sure. I might have struck a deer or something. Either way, the car’s all fucked up.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I didn’t know what happened.”
“Okay, cool.”
“No, Tom. It’s not cool.”
“He’s already gone, right?”
She closed her eyes. The cold air came through the open windows and washed over her tired body.
“Maggie? Hon?”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes still closed. “He just left.”
“Did you get my texts?”
“What do you want, Tom?”
“I want you to come over again tonight.”
“I can’t.”
“Don’t be like that, Maggie.”
“I’m not being like anything. Evan’s too suspicious. I have to lay low.”
“Evan’s at work. What will he know?”
He’s supposed to be your goddamn friend, you asshole, she wanted to shout at him. But on the heels of that, she thought, He’s also supposed to be my goddamn husband.
Something pale and quick darted across the backyard. Maggie felt her blood freeze.
“Mags?” said Tom. “You there?”
The curtains billowed out in the wind. She leaned closer to one window and, squinting, peered out into the darkness.
“Hey, Maggie, come on. What’s the problem, doll?”
A figure moved along the perimeter of the property. She could see the whiteness of its flesh—it appeared naked—and the quick, jerky, animalistic way it moved. The figure scaled the perimeter of the yard then ditched into a bay of shadows beneath a weeping willow tree. The wind blew hard, rustling the tentacular branches of the willow tree and stirring up little tornados of dead leaves in the yard.
“You mad at me, Mags?”
“Tom, I have to go.”
“Come on, doll. Don’t be—”
She hung up the phone and dropped the cell onto the sofa. Leaning forward, she tried to see into the shadows beneath the willow tree but she was too far away to make anything out. For one stupid moment, she was living in an alternate universe where all her lies were truths and the things Evan had told her to watch out for were real. She imagined the shape to be the Codger kid, slinking like a vampire in the darkness of the yard, intent on smashing the shit out of Evan’s Pontiac, just like how Evan had smashed the shit out of Codger that night at Crossroads. The kid had been drunk and flirty and had been staring at Maggie’s chest all night. Evan had grabbed the kid around the collar, dragged him out into the parking lot, and kicked his ass. Not that the Codger boy didn’t have it coming—the kid was a complete degenerate who had served time up in Je
ssup for robbery and assault.
But then reality washed back to her and she knew Ricky Codger hadn’t had anything to do with the damage to Evan’s car.
Maggie went out onto the patio. The town had been wracked by storms recently, and downtown had flooded and lost power; the sky still threatened its wrath, the clouds trembling with thunder, and she could almost taste electricity in the air. The wind bullied the branches of the distant willow tree. The overlong grass undulated like the surface of the sea.
“Come out!” she shouted across the yard toward the willow tree. For all she could tell, the figure had already vanished. “I see you!”
Thunder rumbled directly overhead. She thought she could make out the shape of a person behind the waving branches of the willow tree.
A cold dread overtook her.
Evan kept a shotgun in the basement, bracketed to a lacquered plaque on the wall. There were shells in a cardboard box in the bottom drawer of his workbench. She’d never fired it before and wondered now if she’d know how. Would she even be able to load it?
There’s no one out there, she attempted to tell herself. This is just my guilt and my fear messing with my head.
The whitish figure darted out from beneath the tree and scurried across the yard. It hid behind the Pontiac, the figure itself vanishing but its shadow lengthening along the dirt turnabout in the cast of floodlights. Terrified, Maggie watched the shadow retreat along the ground until it disappeared completely behind the car.
She turned and hurried back into the house, shutting and locking the door behind her. Then she went to the bank of windows over the living room couch, shutting each one and locking it, then drawing the curtains. She was breathing heavily, her heart paining her as it slammed against the wall of her chest. For whatever reason, she thought now of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song that had been on the Pontiac’s radio after leaving Tom’s place last night—John Fogerty crooning about something that had fallen out of the sky and into some farmer’s field.
