Shotgun

by Marie Sexton

  For a while, it looked like I was right about him avoiding me. The evening ticked by, one exam paper at a time. It was nearly nine o’clock when he called.

  “Hello?”

  He was silent for a moment, and in that fatal second, I knew what was coming.

  “Lamar,” he said, and I heard his voice break. I heard the weight of unshed tears behind his words.

  I sank slowly onto the couch, my legs numb. “Don’t do this.”

  “I have to. I can’t keep letting these things happen.”

  “You kissed me. You came inside—”

  “I know!” He sighed. “I’m not saying it’s your fault. I’m just saying it has to stop.”

  “Why?” I could barely choke out the single syllable.

  “Please don’t make this harder. You know why.”

  The hoarseness of his voice matched the horrible lump in my throat. “I’ll do better, Dom. I won’t push you like I did before. I’ll keep my hands to myself. I’ll—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “No matter how careful we say we’ll be, we both know it’ll happen again.”

  “Okay.” I willed my voice to stop shaking. “What exactly does this mean? Spell it out for me.”

  “I can’t see you anymore.”

  “At all?” I asked.

  A moment of silence, and then, so soft I could barely hear him, “At all.”

  My heart clenched. I’d halfway expected it, but why did it have to hurt so much? “You promised,” I said, my throat tight. “You promised you wouldn’t abandon me again.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  The line went dead. I sat in stunned silence until Miss Priss came and meowed at me. She followed me into the kitchen. I poured a healthy dose of bourbon and stood staring at it, wishing it would help. Knowing it wouldn’t.

  I dumped it down the sink and went to bed.

  THE SUN shone deceptively bright in the chill blue sky the next morning. The wind was brisk and brutally cold. I spent the day in a fog, feeling lost yet unsure exactly how to fix it.

  I wanted Dom. I debated calling him. I contemplated going to see him in person. I thought of all the things I could say—that this was a mistake, we belonged together, we could take it slow, we could talk to Naomi together and make sure she was okay with it—but in the end, I did nothing.

  I worked my shift and stumbled home in a daze. I resisted the call of the bourbon and brewed a huge cup of tea instead, and then I sat down to grade, although I could barely concentrate on the words in front of me. When my phone rang, I knocked the entire stack of papers onto the floor in my rush to answer it.

  It had to be Dom. He’d apologize, and I’d promise once again to keep my hands to myself, and everything would be fine.

  Until it wasn’t again.

  “Hello?”

  “Lamar? Thank heaven you answered.”

  It wasn’t Dom’s voice. That was the only thing my brain registered. Disappointment flooded through me. “Excuse me?”

  “I was so afraid you wouldn’t answer. Sweetheart, I need to talk to you.”

  As a child who grew up inland, I’d never understood tides. Nobody had explained to me they were gradual. My first trip to the beach had been on a family vacation when I was seven. I remembered my mother casually pointing to the high tide line, well over our heads, and I’d wondered how she could be so calm when our deaths were clearly at hand. I’d pictured us playing naively in the surf, and then one enormous wave crashing in and burying us beneath it.

  That was how it felt, hearing Jonas’s voice again. As if I’d been distracted by the shell fragments and stranded jellyfish on the shore and hadn’t seen my own doom until it was upon me.

  “Are you there?” he asked.

  “I’m here.”

  I sank back onto the couch, my hands shaking. I’d managed to push him from my mind over the past few weeks, but now it all came back. I remembered all too clearly how good it could feel to be in his arms. I longed for somebody—anybody—to hold me and tell me it would all be okay again.

  “I’ve missed you so much, Lamar.”

  “I’ve missed you too,” I said, but it felt like a half-truth at best.

  “Olivia and I, we’re… we’re not together anymore.”

  I pictured myself on the floor of the sea, bubbles rising slowly from my lips to the surface. Looking up, I could make out the blurry image of Jonas, holding his hand out to me. Offering to pull me to safety. “What?” I asked, not because I hadn’t heard, but because it was so hard to believe.

  “It’s over. We’ve already filed for divorce. Honey, come back. Please, come home. It can be just like you always wanted.”

  “We can really be together?”

  “I swear it. Just the two of us. We’ll find an apartment together in the city. We’ll make up for all the time we’ve lost.”

  I closed my eyes and breathed deep, choking on salt water, trying to sort out what I was feeling. He was offering me everything I’d ever wanted, but I hesitated to reach out and take it.

  “Tell me you’ll come home,” he said when I didn’t answer.

  “I don’t know.” There were tears on my cheeks, although I hadn’t realized I was crying. I brushed them quickly away. “It’s the middle of the semester, and another teacher just left.”

  “That’s not your problem, Lamar.”

  I thought of my students. Would they miss me? I thought of Naomi. “What about Terrence?” I asked.

  “Let me worry about him. Just tell me you’ll come back.”

  “The soonest I could come would be December. When the semester ends.”

  “I can wait. I’ll find us a place. Maybe a little loft near the Design District, or Oak Lawn. Would you like that?”

  A loft, where he’d be waiting for me. After so many months of begging and pleading, he’d finally be mine. Except….

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why’d you decide to leave her now, after all this time? Why not in the summer, before I left?”

  He hesitated. “Lamar—”

  “Did you end it, or did she?”

  “Why are you asking this?”

  “Just answer me. Did you leave her, or was it the other way around?”

  I heard his stifled sigh of frustration. “Why does it matter?”

  It was all the answer I needed. The illusion disappeared. He wasn’t my savior. He was the sea, drowning me beneath his weight. “It matters because it’s the difference between being the one you love most and being the one you’re willing to settle for.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  But it was. I knew it, without having to be told. Deep down in my heart, I’d always known.

  “I’m not leaving Coda,” I said, and even I was surprised at how firm my voice was as I said it. “I have a home here now. And friends. And….” I hesitated. “A new lover.”

  He groaned, a wrenching, animal sound, and I went on, wanting to finally hurt him the way he’d hurt me.

  “I have everything I need here, Jonas. I’m happy here. So do us both a favor, and don’t call me again.”

  I hung up feeling proud. Sad and pathetic and alone, but proud. Yes, I’d lied about having a lover, but only a bit, and given the many lies he’d told me over the years, I wasn’t about to feel guilty about it.

  Meow.

  I looked down at Miss Priss, who was sitting on her haunches, staring up at me. “Should I have said yes and gone back to Dallas?”

  Meow.

  “Is there any point in waiting around here, hoping Dominic changes his mind?”

  Meow.

  “Are all men this fucked up?”

  Meow. She hopped up into my lap and began kneading my thigh with her paws. Prrrrrrrr….

  I scratched her ears, thinking of Jonas. Thinking how everything I thought I’d wanted was maybe never what I’d needed. “We don’t need him, do we?”

  M
eow.

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  I felt good when I went to bed. Right up until my phone rang at 2:13 a.m. My first thought was that it was Dom, calling to apologize, or maybe Jonas, calling to plead his case once more, but one glance at the screen showed me it wasn’t.

  Unidentified Caller.

  I groaned, mentally kicking myself for forgetting to turn off the phone before going to bed. I reached toward my bedside table and practically rolled right over Miss Priss, who gave me an angry “brrr” before bolting down the hall.

  “Hello?”

  As always, there was only silence, and the vague feeling of a threat. But I wasn’t in the mood.

  “Aren’t you tired of this game yet?” I asked. “Isn’t it getting a bit old?”

  Nothing.

  “What’s your beef, anyway? What’d I ever do to you?”

  This time, I heard a slight hitch of breath, almost a hiss. And then, for the first time, the caller spoke.

  “You don’t belong in Coda.” Click.

  I lay there, heart pounding, replaying the five words in my head.

  You don’t belong in Coda.

  Definitely a male voice, and I thought it sounded too low—and therefore too old—to be one of my students.

  Definitely not Dom.

  Bob Bolen or Troy Fowler? Maybe. But like before, I had no way to prove it.

  “Whatever,” I said out loud.

  I switched the phone to silent and went back to sleep.

  JONAS CALLED three more times over the next week. I never answered, and I deleted his voice mails without listening to them. Occasionally, I wavered. Once or twice, I wondered if I was making the wrong choice. Maybe going back to Jonas would make me happy. Maybe he was right, and it didn’t matter whether his wife had left him or the other way around. But when I stood outside, staring up at the bright, blue sky, feeling the promise of winter in the brisk Colorado wind, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere.

  On Thursday, when my bare toes hit the cold boards of the bedroom floor, I made a decision. That night after school, I went to the store and bought a rug. It was lurid and bright, with outrageous, overlapping geometric designs, and I loved it with a ferocity I couldn’t explain. I stopped at A to Z on my way home. A few teenagers mingled in the parking lot, but being a weeknight, the store was far less busy than it had been during my one previous visit.

  Angelo wasn’t there, but Zach was sitting at the counter working a crossword. I didn’t think it was my imagination that he was pleased to see me. “Hey,” he said, smiling. “Did you come to rent a movie, or can I tempt you with a drink?”

  “I was actually hoping to find some posters.”

  His brow furrowed as he considered it. “What kind of posters?”

  “Any kind.”

  “We don’t sell any, but we have tons of movie posters left from when we were a video store.” He lifted the hinged portion of the counter between us. “Come on back.”

  “Thanks.”

  He took me into their office, which was a study in organized chaos. Teetering stacks of boxes, movie cases, and paperwork covered every surface. He ruffled his dark hair, which was starting to gray at the temples, and glanced around. “Huh. Angelo could probably tell us right where they were. Let me call him.”

  “No, you don’t have to—”

  But he was already dialing.

  “Don’t worry,” he told me two minutes later as we waited for Angelo to arrive. “He’ll love having an excuse to go through them all.”

  “I hate to be a bother. I’m just tired of bare walls.”

  “It’s no bother at all,” he assured me. And then, with a sudden hint of excitement, “Hey, you like red wine?”

  “I guess.”

  “I just got in this great Tempranillo. I’ve been dying to try it. Hang on.”

  Zach and I spent an hour or two sipping wine while Angelo unrolled poster after poster, providing movie commentary as he went. It was fun, and in the end, I went home with nearly a dozen of them, everything from The Lion in Winter to Thor. I put every single one of them up in my bedroom.

  It wasn’t much, but it made the place feel like home.

  Jonas gave up calling by the second week. My stalker, on the other hand, amped his harassment into high gear. Calling in the middle of the night was apparently no longer enough. He called ten or twelve times a day, although thankfully he never left a message. He began texting me at odd hours. The exact wording varied, but the message was basically the same: Leave Colorado. Go home. Go back to Texas. Whoever he was, he didn’t want me in Coda. He even sent an anonymous letter to the principal of the school, claiming I was having a sordid affair with the parent of one of my pupils. It was a half-truth, which may have caused me grief in another setting, but Lily brushed it off.

  “A town this small, anybody you date will be related to somebody,” she said. “I couldn’t care less who you’re sleeping with, as long it’s not a student.”

  Still, it was clear the harassment was escalating. I did my best to watch people wherever I went, like Matt had instructed, looking for faces that appeared too often, but I didn’t notice anything unusual. The one time I saw Troy Fowler in the grocery store, I froze like the proverbial deer in headlights, heart hammering and hands shaking. But when he turned my way, his gaze slid right past me without a hint of recognition. I’d taken his job, but it seemed to me he didn’t know me on sight.

  Either that, or he was a damned good actor.

  I reported each new incident to Matt, including my sighting of Troy, but with the limited resources of a small-town department, it did little good. He was able to tell me the continued calls came from a burner phone somewhere in Coda. The texts came from the same number, and the letter to Lily had been postmarked in Coda.

  Not exactly breaking news.

  “Even Miami Vice didn’t have to deal with cell phones,” I told Matt. He didn’t laugh. I knew he was frustrated by his inability to stop the harassment, but I couldn’t hold it against him. I began leaving my phone on mute at all times. I wondered why I even bothered to carry it around. The one person I wanted to hear from had clearly left me behind.

  Halloween came and went. I missed Dominic like crazy, but I let him be. As much as I wanted him, I wasn’t going to be the one to break the silence. That had to come from him. I watched Naomi closely, hoping for some kind of clue as to what was going on, but I never dared ask outright. The closest I came was the day she showed up in my classroom with her cascade of black hair dyed vivid blue.

  “It looks good,” I told her.

  “Thanks, Mr. Franklin,” she said, proudly flipping her head so her long blue locks swayed back and forth. “I like it.”

  “What’d your dad say?”

  “He totally freaked.”

  I had a feeling her definition of “totally freaked” was far different from mine. I couldn’t imagine Dominic doing much more than complaining about her poor judgment. “At least now it matches your eyebrows.”

  “I know, right? You should tell him he’s seriously overreacting. I bet he’d listen to you.”

  I was sure she was wrong, but I didn’t bother to correct her.

  There was no party on Leila’s last day. I hated seeing my one and only friend at the school leave without a bit of fanfare, but she hadn’t been at the school long enough to inspire true camaraderie with our fellow teachers. It occurred to me that my departure would have been just as uneventful, had I chosen to go back to Jonas. At the end of the day, I simply hugged her good-bye.

  And that was it.

  I checked my phone on the way to the car, more out of habit than anything else. I was surprised to find no missed calls at all. No texts, either. For the first time in ages, my stalker hadn’t contacted me even once. It felt like whatever punishment I’d been suffering the last few weeks had been rescinded, at least in part. I arrived home in a good mood.

  It ended the minute I opened the front door.

  My stalker
hadn’t bothered calling because he’d been busy inside my house.

  Every dish I owned lay in pieces on the kitchen floor. The contents of the coat closet littered the room. My curtains and couch looked as if they’d been assaulted with a gigantic knife. My small flat screen TV had been torn off the wall and thrown to the floor. Unpacked boxes had been upended. Mountains of books turned my hallway into an obstacle course.

  “Miss Priss!” I called as I made my way toward the bedroom. My heart pounded. The mess was bad enough, but if he’d hurt my cat….

  Meow.

  It came from the guest bedroom, which was an utter disaster. Most of my unpacked belongings had been stacked in boxes in the small space. It seemed every one had been ripped open and dumped onto the floor, then stomped on for good measure. Piles of books, papers, and pictures littered the floor.

  Meow.

  I stepped over broken CDs and their shattered jewel cases. Caught a glimpse of Jonas’s face as I maneuvered through the mess—a selfie we’d once taken in my apartment. He was still smiling. My half of the picture had been torn away and ripped into tiny pieces.

  Meow.

  “Miss Priss?”

  Meow.

  My high-school yearbooks lay gutted on the floor, the pages strewn like oversized confetti on the far side of the room. I finally found Miss Priss hiding in the corner, cowering behind the ironing board, which had been knocked on its side.

  “Miss Priss, are you okay?” I scooped her up in my arms. A cursory glance revealed no sign of injury.

  Meow.

  “I know.”

  I carried her down the hall to my bedroom, which looked exactly as I expected. My clothes had been dumped and scattered all over the room. Empty drawers lay everywhere. My brand new movie posters had been torn from the walls, leaving behind a few tattered squares, still hanging from their scotch tape. I was stupidly pleased to find the rug next to my bed intact.

  I pulled out my cell phone, browsed my contacts, and hit Matt’s number. “This ought to make his day,” I said to Miss Priss.

  Matt, I noticed, didn’t bother with stupid niceties like “hello” when he answered the phone. “Lamar,” he said. “What’s going on?”