by Karina Halle
And I felt safer two seconds later when his hand slid down my back and wrapped around my waist.
I gazed up at him as we walked, like we were on a romantic middle-of-the-night stroll in the waning days of winter. I didn’t know how I felt about him. I felt drunk, that was for sure. I also felt scared, and it wasn’t just about Abby, or about the weird shadows that lurked in the park, or the fact that I would be going home tonight. It was that I knew I didn’t have to go home tonight, and that scared me too. Because the last thing I needed was to get embroiled with another man, especially this man. As charming a gentleman as Maximus was, he was still so tightly woven into the story of me and Dex that I didn’t see how any of this could be a good idea.
And when I started to think that maybe I did like him, like him (as Ada would say), I wondered how much of that was real. And how much of that was because I was scared. And how much of that was because I was lonely. And how much of that was because there was something deep inside me that still craved one final stab of my own revenge. I wasn’t going to pretend I was better than that, that I wasn’t thinking how poetic it would be for me to sleep with Dex’s ex-best friend.
But that was a bit icky. And when Maximus brought me closer to him, I felt all warm and gooey at the strength of his hands and I couldn’t imagine just walking away with nothing happening between us. Lonely, icky, scared…I wanted him and I wanted him badly. I ached for him.
As if picking up on that vibe I was emanating from my lady parts, he stopped at a part of the path that jutted out in a semi-circle, where people would stand on sunny days to take better photographs of the river. I stopped with him and he put his other hand on my side and faced me straight on.
My goodness, he really was a tall guy. The wind off the river whipped up his hair, messing up his Elvis-like do, and it looked colorless in the cold lights of the city. His eyes were still green somehow, like a liquid forest, and they stared down into mine. It wasn’t intense or dramatic or even particularly romantic, but I could see the feverish want in them fighting against his ever-present need to be respectful.
“Are you going to kiss me?” I whispered, my voice catching on a damp gust.
He grinned, that sly, lazy smile that only worked one side of his mouth. “I was thinking about it.”
I might need a ladder, was my last thought before he leaned over and placed his lips on mine.
His lips were slightly rough, but they were large and pillowy and stirred up tickles on my tongue that traveled down to the base of my spine. He put one hand behind my head and held me there, the back of my head feeling very small, and I had the image of a baby bird being cupped between two hands. It was a weird mixture of feeling desire and feeling safe and the longer we made out in that park, his hands never straying from my head or the dent of my side, the safer I felt. Like nothing could touch me except him and as long as I was around him, I would be OK. Dex used to make me feel that way with everything. Except my heart.
I lifted my hands and placed them inside his leather jacket, which was open slightly. I could feel his muscles underneath his silky shirt. He wasn’t rock hard; instead, he looked predestined to carry weight rather than lose it, but his body was still a pillar of strength and the more my tiny coral-painted fingers pushed and prodded against him, the more I felt like nothing could knock him over. He was as rooted as a tree. I wanted to borrow some of that strength, take it from him. Just thinking it made my kisses faster, more frenzied.
Finally he pulled back and moved his hand around to the side of my face. It was warm against my cold cheek that was braised by the chilling wind.
“It’s getting late,” he said, his voice uneven. He cleared his throat.
“It already is late,” I whispered, not wanting to stop.
“And cold,” he said as he pulled my cardigan around me. “You need something warmer than this.”
“You’ll do,” I said. I was surprised at my boldness. Maximus was too.
“I’m pretty hot, I’ll admit that,” he said slyly, then chuckled at himself. “But we need to be inside a warm cab before you get pneumonia.”
He gave me a quick peck on the lips, then took my hand in his and led me back to the path. Now that the makeout session was over, the terrors and shadows that lurked in the back of mind were free to play. I didn’t want to go home. I couldn’t. Abby would be there.
But I couldn’t bring myself to say any of this to him as we cut across the park, the damp grass brushing against the bottoms of my boots, the bums who lurked beneath the trees. I probably would have felt safer snuggling up to the guy who slept under his garbage bags full of beer cans than alone in my room.
We hailed a cab fairly easily once we got to Burnside Street – it was the weekend and downtown Portland was in full swing with people spilling out of hole-in-the-wall bars, music venues with shitty bands, and late-night dives. I wanted the night to keep going. I wanted to line up with the masses at Voodoo Donuts and feel like the city had my back.
But instead we both got in the cab. At least Maximus made sure to drop me off before him, even though he lived way closer to downtown than I did.
As the cab pulled down my familiar street, he asked, “Do you have a big day tomorrow?”
“I was scheduled to work,” I said, feeling a pang of embarrassment, anxiousness. “But who knows what’s going on with that anymore. I guess I’ll just get haunted. Maybe I’ll take up knitting. Baby slippers seem to be pretty popular.”
My voice was shaking slightly at that last bit and I swallowed back my tears. My house loomed in front of us, the cabbie reciting my address.
“Perry,” Maximus said, reaching for my hand. “I know you’re scared. But so far, nothing really bad has happened.”
“What?” I snapped at him. I briefly eyed the cabbie in the rearview mirror and he quickly looked away, none of his business.
“Abby is taking it slow. Knocking and slippers, painting your nails.”
“And taking over my body!”
I could sense the cabbie was looking back at me again, wondering who the hell these weirdos in his cab were.
Maximus lowered his voice. “We don’t know yet if it’s connected, remember? I don’t think it is. In fact, I know it’s not. You’re still you, Perry. One hundred percent.”
“Oh, well, if you’re so smart, why don’t you tell me what else it could be?”
He gave me a small smile, immune to my anger. “I don’t know. I know you don’t like to hear that it could all be in your head-”
I gasped at that. Appalled.
“But,” he continued, “you’ve been through a lot. So I would at least consider it, if I were you. I’m going to come over in the next few days and we’re going to figure this out and start from there. One thing at a time. Abby won’t be a problem, you’ll see.”
I wondered when he had gone from Ghost Whisperer to Ghost Buster, but I had no choice but to believe him. He was the only person who had experience in this, and the only person who took me seriously. Maybe not entirely seriously, but enough. And he was a good kisser.
He leaned forward and hugged me and that cinnamon smell engulfed me again. Then he said, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I would have stayed all night in that cab if I could, but I reluctantly got out. To his credit, he kept the cab waiting outside until I had unlocked my front door, then it sped away into the night.
I tiptoed up to my room, trying to ignore the darkness of the sleeping house, and made it to bed. The slippers on the floor were gone. The pamphlet was back on the table. I don’t know why I was so against having it all be inside my head. That would actually be glorious. Maybe there never were any slippers. And if there were no slippers, there was nothing to fear.
It didn’t explain a lot of other things, though, but before I could even indulge those possibilities, the evening of wine and tequila folded over me like a breaking wave and I was down for the count.
CHAPTER NINE
“Wake up, slee
py head,” Ada’s chipper voice cut into my dreams. My dreams where I was falling and falling through a red inferno, giant wood bugs crawling up the side of my mind.
I groaned and tried not to move as the events from last night snapped into place. I knew I was hungover as shit and if I opened my eyes and moved a muscle, I was going to pay for it dearly.
“Go away,” I slurred, unable to say anything more.
“It’s a beautiful day outside,” she responded, ignoring me. I could hear her walking over to the window and opening it. “Ahhh, smell that air. Spring is on its way.”
Why was she so chipper? Usually Ada was a goddess of grump in the mornings.
I felt her sit down on the bed and I bobbed up and down on the mattress. I moaned again and threw my arm over my face. The air coming in did smell cool and inviting but it wasn’t enough to clear the cobwebs.
“What did you do last night? You stink.”
I ignored her and attempted to go back to sleep, feeling my brain getting sucked into the dark weightlessness. Before I could, she grabbed my arm and lifted it up, forcing the light into my face. I winced.
“I said go away,” I repeated, dragging out the words into a whine.
“Do you have to work today?”
Pause.
“Fuck.” I totally forgot about that.
I opened my eyes carefully as the stabs of light entered. It really was a beautiful day out, but all I could see at that moment was blankness, like I was standing in the middle of the sun.
Then I saw Ada on my bed, holding my phone out, like she knew exactly what was going on. She was wearing a kelly green dress and her hair was tied into a knot at the very top of her head. She looked like a clear-eyed forest nymph. I felt a pang of envy.
I took the phone, muttering “thanks,” and dialed the shop’s number. I didn’t have enough time to get scared or nervous because Shay snapped it up on the first ring.
“Don’t worry about it, Perry,” she explained to me after I apologized profusely for not being there. “We’ve just taken you off the schedule until you get better. You just rest up and sort yourself out.”
I hung up the phone feeling worse rather than better. I hadn’t been let go or fired but this was all too familiar. This was how I almost lost my last job (before, you know, I screwed myself over on purpose). My employers had been worrying about me because I was seeing Old Roddy in my bedroom. Now it was different ghost, same problem. Was this doomed to repeat itself throughout my whole life? Was I never, ever going to escape the dead? I wished I knew what they really wanted with me.
“It’s because you’re one of them,” Ada said.
I jumped at her voice, forgetting not only that she was in the same room as me but sitting next to me, a foot away.
“Pardon me?” I asked her as my heart quickened.
She rolled her eyes. “I said you’re one of them. I asked why your slacker coffee shop was so understanding and I answered it’s because you’re one of them. You’re a slacker. They need your kind there. I’m just talking to myself really, since you don’t ever seem to hear a word I’m saying. Ever.”
That wasn’t true. Not entirely.
“How was last night?” I asked, gingerly sitting up in my bed. I rubbed at my temples as the room spun. I think someone had replaced my mattress with a water bed.
“Do you actually care to know?” she asked snidely.
I peered at her with one eye. It hurt less than with two. “Yes, don’t be so emo.”
I could tell she was going to come up with a retort about me being emo, but she swallowed it. It was always a matter of who called the other one that first.
“OK, if you care to know, we broke up.”
I managed to open the other eye so I could study her face better. Her chin was lifted defiantly. She looked confident. “Are you OK?”
She nodded. “Never felt better.”
“So you know you did the right thing, then. How did he take it?”
She giggled, then broke into a huge grin. “He had the nerve to throw it in my face of how long he had waited and now he wasn’t ever going to get any.”
“What a fucking douchecanoe,” I said, wanting to punch Layton’s lights out.
“Total fucking douchecanoe,” she reinstated. “That’s how I totally knew I made the right choice. He was so angry, his face went all, like, red and he was babbling crap and telling me I’ll never be anything...”
I let out an angry laugh. “That’s rich, coming from some dillhole whose biggest accomplishment will be to get his head crushed in by some lame college football team.”
“If he’s lucky,” she said, tracing her finger along the pattern on my quilt. “But then I told him it must burn to be dumped by someone like me then. And then I left. Well, I gave him the finger. And then I left.”
Even though it hurt my head to do so, I leaned forward and gave Ada a quick hug.
“I’m proud of you,” I blurted out, feeling strangely emotional.
She snorted. “That’s cuz you’re lame.” But I could tell it made her happy, as lame as I was.
“Hey, listen - ”
I was interrupted by a piercing, terrible scream from downstairs.
Our mother’s scream.
Our eyes met for a brief, horrifying instant and we both leaped out of bed as fast as we could. I was only in a long t-shirt but it didn’t matter. I had never heard my mother scream like that before and I prayed that we weren’t going to run down the stairs and find her dead on the floor.
We scampered down the stairs two at a time, with Ada calling “Mom!”
“Girls!” she yelled back, sounding calmer, which relieved me. Her voice was coming from my father’s study.
We hustled our way over there. The door was open and my mother was standing in the middle of the room, a stack of papers at her feet, plumes of dust rising up from them and catching in the sunlight that was coming through the opened blinds.
Her back was to us, her limbs frozen in front of her, like she was still holding onto the papers. Her attention was on the walls so that’s where my attention went too.
I gasped. One hand flew to my mouth while Ada grasped the other.
My dad’s study had been destroyed. The walls had huge tears in them like someone took an axe and just started hacking at it randomly. The edges of the tears were dripped with red and with the same color someone had painted pentagrams all over the walls, even the ceiling. Some were as small as your hand, others were the size of a tire. The decorative crucifixes he had displayed were all upside down. That sight chilled me more than anything else. It chilled me so bad that a violent shiver shuddered through me and I nearly lost my balance. I reached out for the edge of the door and hung on.
Ada and my mom took no notice of me. How could they with what they were looking at. Even all the paintings of popes and religious figures that my dad had framed as artwork were disfigured, their eyes carved out so they only had black, inhuman holes.
“Who would do this?” my mother asked in a half-whisper.
Ada shook her head softly.
Only I had an idea of who could have done it, but I wasn’t stupid enough to say it. My parents wouldn’t have believed it was Abby in a million years. But they would believe I was nuts, somehow put the blame on me, and lock me away somewhere.
As if she heard me think that, Ada turned her head to look at me as I leaned against the door for support, trying to keep my hungover eyes focused.
She gave me a strange look, like she was trying to figure something out about me. Like something about me was making her think. I had a feeling I knew what it was too.
I raised my brow and twitched my head ever so slightly. She frowned and then looked back at the room and at mom.
I know she was thinking that maybe I had done it in my sleep. Maybe I had forgone the nail polish last night and decided to raid Home Depot, picking up cans of red paint before going to town on all of my father’s religious stuff.
I
looked down at my hands. There were no signs of paint on them. There weren’t any on my feet or anywhere else either. I doubt I would have been able to clean myself up so well. The thought made me feel better. What stores would even be open at three in the morning? Walgreens didn’t have paint. I wondered if setting up my own security camera there would be a good idea, though, just so I could stop being a scapegoat.
“We should call the police,” I said, my voice sounding thick.
My mom nodded slowly. It was obvious she was in shock. We all were.
“Where’s dad?” I asked.
“Church,” Ada said, as if she didn’t quite believe her answer.
I straightened up and walked into the room. Hangover or not, someone needed to take charge of this situation and my mother and Ada were too stupefied to do anything.
“Listen, I think we need to call the cops now. Then when they’re done we can clean it. I don’t want dad coming home to see any of this.”
“But who would do such a thing?” my mom repeated. Her accent got thicker when she was upset and in that instance she sounded an awful lot like Creepy Clown Lady. A weird, blurry feeling settled over my brain, as if thinking was suddenly hard, like I had layers to get through.
“You call them,” Ada said, snapping me out of it and gesturing to the phone in the study. She grabbed my mom by the arm and began to lead her out of the room.
I blinked hard to wake myself up, then picked up the phone and called it in.
After I was done, with the police promising they’d send their nearest squad car over, and placed the phone back in the receiver, two shrieks resonated from the kitchen.
What now? I thought as I raced around the desk and ran down the hall, my bare feet slapping against the hardwood floor.
My mother and Ada were on the other side of the island, staring at the sink. I quickly made my way over to them and froze in my tracks when I realized what they were really looking at.
The wide cupboards beneath the industrial-sized sink were shut and leaking red fluid out of the bottoms and corners. It seeped out in sickly rivulets until it congealed in a crimson puddle on the floor.
