by Jeff Vrolyks
Chapter 37: Let Not Your Heart Be Doubled
Lying in bed free from comforter, clothing, and regrets, we stared blindly at the ceiling, heavy-breathed, relishing the prolonged silence. Then came the pitter-pattering of pawed footfalls into the adjoining bathroom and the subsequent clank of a wooden toilet seat onto the ceramic rim.
“I’m scared,” Holly said.
“Why?”
“My legs. They won’t stop twitching.”
I squeezed her upper thigh, felt it spasm. I smiled at her. “That’s just your nerves. Give it time. It isn’t hurting, is it?”
“No,” she mused. “I don’t know what it feels like. It’s strange.”
I gazed lazily at the ceiling with a dumb grin. She sat up and kneaded her thighs, scrutinizing them with clinical detachment. After coming to my conclusion, she rolled against me and smiled, eyes an inch apart.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
In a tiny voice she asked what I was thinking about.
“I was contemplating how many hours I’d stand naked in front of the mirror if I were you.”
She bopped me on the nose with a finger. “May I ask you a serious question? We didn’t plan this, so we weren’t exactly responsible,” she said hintingly. “And if you’re wondering what pills I was picking up at the pharmacy, they weren’t the kind that come in packs of twenty-eight. So it appears we have a potential situation on our hands.”
“That wasn’t a question, actually. It was a statement.”
“Okay, let me rephrase it for you.”
“That would be great. Thanks.”
“Are you pro-life or pro-choice?”
“I’m pro-volone. Sorry, that was cheesy. I don’t know what I am. I haven’t given it much thought. I’ll have to claim ignorance on the issue, with my age being the excuse.”
“Yeah, me too, I guess. I wouldn’t blame anyone for doing it, but personally I couldn’t go through with it. But I don’t think we have much to worry about.” She did a little math in her head before saying, “I’m not fertile. Not ovulating, I mean. But it’s kind of close.”
“I don’t know what that even means.” She raised her brow. “I thought fertile was the stuff you put on plants to make them grow.”
“That’s fertilizer, silly.” She flicked me on the cheek.
“I thought fertilizer was sperm. I don’t understand that sort of stuff, but I’ll take your word for it.”
She propped her head up with a hand. “Can we do it again?”
“Are you serious?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because it’s… I’m not going to say something stupid again, I just don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do. Especially if it’s just for me.”
“You were going to say sex. That isn’t what it was, it was love.”
“It was. Is.”
“And as for seconds? It’s for me—like I care about you,” she sneered.
“So then you… so you—”
“Making love to you is amazing. I’ll save you the trouble. I loved it.”
“I knew it wasn’t you. Your boyfriends were the problem. It must feel great to have that monkey off your back. It goes to show that no man has ever treated you properly. Or loved you.”
“I’ll never—”
Holly’s pager beeped from her pants on the floor. Jack and Peaches’ ears perked up. She reached over and extracted it from a pocket. “Hmm. I’m being paged by either Alison or Kloss. It’s the house number. I’ll be right back.”
She dressed and departed, closing the door behind her. She peeked inside Alison’s room: Ali watched TV from the couch.
“Was that you who paged me? At two in the morning?”
Alison smiled with a cordless phone in hand.
Holly crossed her arms. “Can I help you?” she said peevishly.
“Not sure. It sounded like you’ve already been taken care of.”
“What is this? Are you pretending to be jealous or are you trying to be cute?”
“Neither. I’m hungry. I wanted to see if you and Kevin would go with me to get something to eat. I wanted to ask earlier but you guys were busy.”
“Keep bringing it up Ali, I don’t care.”
Alison sat upright. “So?... how was it? Was it like you thought it would be?”
“Better!” She sat beside Alison. “It was perfect.”
* * *
When I came to the conclusion that Holly wasn’t in a hurry to return, I dressed and left the room. I heard the girls from the hallway. I stopped just before the door and eavesdropped.
“—are you going to do about the tour? You’re not going to see him for six weeks?”
“I haven’t thought about that. Damn.”
I tapped the door twice and opened it.
“Hi, Kevin,” Ali said. “You look exhausted.”
Holly told her to shut-up, called her a brat.
“Not as exhausted as I am in pain,” I said. “My arm’s killing me. Do you have Tylenol? I didn’t bring my medicine.”
“I have a bottle of Vicodin in the medicine cabinet,” Alison said. “If you’d like.”
“There’s Excedrin in there, too,” Holly remembered. “In the drawer, I think. Let me look; I could use one myself.”
Ali’s bedroom and bathroom were identical to Holly’s. I entered the bathroom with Holly at my heels. She asked why I was squinting. “Long story. I’d rather not get into it.” She asked if I was avoiding the mirror. “Just get the Excedrin and let’s get out, please.”
She opened the drawer under the granite countertop and found the bottle of aspirin. I hit the light on our way out. We returned to Holly’s bedroom and popped a few aspirin, chatted idly in bed. I was glad she had already forgotten about me squinting at the mirror. I couldn’t stop yawning and Holly admitted to being tired as well. We got under the covers and said goodnight.
Before I fell asleep I heard the slightest snore from her, and whining from one of the wolves. They were sitting before the door, gazes directed at me. Jack bit onto the knob and attempted to twist it open. He wasn’t having any luck, although I couldn’t discount the possibility of it being a teachable moment—Jack informing me of my duty to let him out. Peaches waited patiently with a rubber chew-toy in her mouth, her big bright eyes appealing to my good nature. I cracked the door open: they hurried off. I hoped it was okay that I let them out. They weren’t ordinary pets abiding by a set of rules, so I guessed it was okay. I returned to bed and soon fell asleep, unaware that what I had just done would come to relive one of the most painful memories of my life.
* * *
Pea Willy wrapped his arm around his sleeping wife. Adjusting to a curiously hard mattress was more difficult for him than for Sue Ellen. She could fall asleep at the drop of a hat. What he wouldn’t give for that ability. He raked aside a sheaf of her hair, pecked a kiss at her neck. He squeezed her gently and let go. As he fantasized about playing guitar alongside Kloss at the barbecue, his eyelids grew heavy.
“Listen to me,” Sue Ellen said suddenly and firmly.
Pea Willy opened his eyes. Did she just say that or did I dream it?
“Go to the front of the house and take—”
“Honey,” Pea Willy interrupted, “you’re sleep-talking.”
“—take the gun with you. Go now.”
“Sweetheart, wake up. You’re having a bad dream.”
She hadn’t moved, continued lying on her side facing away from Pea Willy.
“Go now!”
For the sheer volume and unexpectedness of her words, Pea Willy shot out of the bed and fell on his ass. In the ten years of sharing a bed with Sue Ellen, she had never uttered a word in her sleep. Nor had she ever shouted at him. If it wasn’t her distinct voice, he’d be certain it didn’t issue from her. And the damned thing was, she was still asleep! As still as death. He flipped the light on, assumed she’d awaken by it, but didn’t.
“Baby?”
She wasn’t a light sleeper, but was even less of a deep sleeper.
“Sue Ellen?” he said more loudly. He shook her gently by the shoulder. No response. He began panicking. “Sue Ellen!” he shouted. He rolled her onto her back, head lagging behind. Her eyes were open. Open and lifeless. His heart wedged in his throat, knees threatened to buckle. He felt her pulse, heard air wheezing in and out of her nostrils. But her fucking eyes, they were the eyes of a corpse.
Fruitlessly he tried waking her again by shaking and shouting. He needed to do something, but what? “Sue Ellen! Wake up!” He gently slapped her face, then not so gently.
The way he saw it, there were two options. Use Kloss’s phone to call nine-one-one, or take the revolver to the front of the house like Sue Ellen had demanded. The latter option made no sense, but neither did her comatose state. He decided to do both; check the front of the house and then call for help for his wife. He leapt into action and opened the sideboard, snatched the nearly-empty and awfully heavy box of Raisin Bran. He withdrew the gun from it. The bran flakes at the bottom of the box were copper and lead. The sunglass-wearing mascot wasn’t full of shit, there were two scoops inside. He stuffed a handful of bullets in his sweat-pants pocket after loading the revolver.
Pea Willy took the two steps of the RV in one leap and dashed up the driveway. The gun in his hand and the reason Sue Ellen prompted it weren’t on his mind: calling for help was.
Before reaching the wide property gate, he started from the report of multiple gunshots—shotgun type. Beside the gate was a wrought-iron door wedged open with a pet’s rubber chew-toy. Pea Willy thumbed the revolver’s safety off and went through the door, cautiously made his way toward the street.
* * *
I woke with a parched mouth. It took a second to gather where I was. Holly was snoring lightly beside me. I went to the kitchen for a bottle of water. I glanced outside through the French double-doors, and across the yard I saw the pool house and the white RV parked before it. I stopped. The RV was a luminescent rectangle under the moonlight. Bright light shone through the open door; the silhouette of a woman stood in the doorway. Surely it was Sue Ellen, but that’s not whom I perceived it to be at first glance. No, not Sue Ellen, but…
She raised an arm, waved in broad friendly strokes. I scanned the backyard to see whom she directed the wave at; there was nobody I could see. Was it me? Without thought my hand found the handle and opened the door.
I stepped outside and the most bizarre sensation overwhelmed me. A sensation of disbelief, that this wasn’t really happening. I paced forward. I glanced back to the closed door and thought, Did I close the door? I’m pretty sure I did not. I considered I was dreaming. But it wasn’t quite like a dream—my dreams weren’t this vivid—but I don’t know how else to describe it. Surreal. It wasn’t cold out, wasn’t warm, no breeze, no scent, no sound, it just was. The woman in the door stepped inside and out of sight. I jogged the last twenty or thirty feet and jaunted up the two steps of the RV.
I glanced to the back, then to the front. I was expecting to find Mrs. Wheels. And if I had, it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least.
“Looking for someone?” Sue Ellen said amusedly. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see her, but I was. She sat on the bench seat behind the table.
“Have a seat, my darling,” she said kindly. Her voice was soothing, tranquilizing. And it didn’t jibe. Darling. I’ve heard her say darlin’ once or twice, but not darling. I wasn’t alarmed but tranquil, sublime.
I sat opposite her, elbows on the table. As if it were its own entity, my left hand drew invisible doodle marks on the table. “Are you Mrs. Wheels?” The words came from me but it didn’t feel like it. It was as though there were two of me: one sitting before Sue Ellen and the other watching as if it were a movie. Before she could reply I asked if she was an angel.
She giggled as she cupped her hands around my right hand. There was no need to remind her to be careful with my arm: she wouldn’t hurt a fly.
“Sue Ellen, Mrs. Wheels, Lucille Ball, does it really matter?” I found myself shaking my head. “Let me start by apologizing. I’m sorry you are going through this tribulation, Kevin. I know how hard this must be to endure blindly; you have my deepest sympathy. And it will get worse before it gets better. Know this: just because you don’t comprehend something, just because you can’t see the significance of what you do, doesn’t make it any less important.” She squeezed tightly my hand and eased my arm toward her. “I need you to have faith.”
“In what?”
“You’ll know when the time comes.”
My cast slid out of the sling as my arm extended, now fully. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, and, what was more astonishing, what I was feeling: nothing. Impossibly there was no pain. As if she heard my thought, she asked how I was feeling. Her expression was humored.
“Never better,” I replied.
Sue Ellen unraveled one Ace bandage after another. “That’s wonderful. It’s kind of like… an anesthetic for both pain and fear. Novocain for the mind?” She smiled. “That’s why I can tell you that a man and woman are trying to rob you of your beloved Holly this very moment and you won’t flinch.”
I nodded.
With the last of the bandages off, she slid away the splint and tossed it aside. Sweaty, compressed, and with an imprint of the Ace bandage spanning it’s length, my naked arm lay on the table.
“You broke your humerus snowboarding. The splintered ends were beginning to bond when you re-broke it the night of the fire. It began to bond again. It would break my heart even if it ended there, but it doesn’t. Lift your arm for me.”
I lifted my arm. Below the break, roughly midway between shoulder and elbow, my arm slanted down to the table as if I had an additional joint. The splintered tip of the humerus was pushing up at the skin, threatening to tear through it. It looked painful.
“Broken for a third time,” she said ruefully, “in the coming days.” She shook her head. “So unfortunate.”
After a thoughtful moment, she leaned forward and spoke softly. “Against my better judgment, for the sake of abating your confusion, I will tell you something that I need not and should not relate to you.” She confided, “You were supposed to meet Holly at Heavenly Valley, not CVS. Your broken arm was the idea of a certain somebody.” A sidelong grin. “The one you’ve mistaken me for. You see, it was a solution, the broken arm. It put you two back on the right path.” I didn’t see how that was supposed to abate my confusion. It aggravated it. “Imagine the entire history of mankind—past, present, and future—in a book composed of billions of autobiographies of its inhabitants. Your story, just like everyone else’s and everyone there will ever be, has already been written.” She squeezed my hand. “And Kevin, your broken arm and the incident at CVS weren’t written in it, weren’t supposed to happen. They were addendums, if you will. If you knew the extent of what had to happen and what did happen for things to be the way they are now, you would lose your mind. People were written into existence solely to prevent your child from being born.
“Leading up to this day, this very special day, all alterations to this figurative ‘book’ have been made in defiance by the hand of the damned, with the exception of your broken arm—that was us. When the time comes, and I assure you the time is coming, those responsible for this will pay dearly. They—” she stopped. “I’m saying much more than is acceptable. Forgive me for discontinuing.”
“Why do you care about us? Why me? Why her?”
“You are not to know why you, why her.”
“Does this happen to everyone?”
She smiled, gazed at my hand in hers, shook her head. “It is extraordinarily uncommon that this is happening. There are consequences for doing these things, dire consequences that deter them from intervening. Trespassing, if you will.”
Meditatively she said, “Let’s see,” and raised a hand; retracted one finger at a time as she muttered names so softly I couldn’t deci
pher them. After four fingers and thumb on her left hand, she then retracted the ring finger on her right hand and stopped.
We met eyes. “Six?” I asked.
She wiggled the pinky finger. “You and Holly.”
“Only the seventh time? Seventh in your lifetime? Or ever?”
“There is no difference between the two.”
“What do you mean—”
“Kevin, no more.” Before I could get a word in edgewise she shushed me. She clasped a hand on the forearm of my broken arm and asked me to close my eyes. “It’s time,” she said. I obeyed. Sue Ellen’s ensuing words had a hypnotic effect on me: I began drifting away. “Tell Holly this for me,” she said.
I woke to the sound of gunfire outside and sat bolt upright in bed, as did Holly. We looked at each other and then dashed out of the room.
Was that a dream? I wondered as I ran down the hallway. It had to have been. But it was so real. So damned real! My right arm jostled around in the sling; the sling and cast I distinctly remembered Sue Ellen removing seemingly seconds ago.
Holly reached the front door along with Mike and Alison, Kloss shortly behind. She unlocked and opened it. Pea Willy was striding toward us from the property gate. He was slack-jawed and wide-eyed, a warm gun clutched in hand.
Chapter 38
Kloss and I carried the bodies of Jack and Peaches to the garage and placed them in a vacant corner. Pea Willy and Alison tried to keep Holly out of the garage to no avail. She collapsed beside them, sobbing hysterically. Between Holly’s torrents of anguished moans was the undirected question, How did they get outside? I might have responded, They are wolves, they belong outside, but did not. If nothing had happened to Jack and Peaches, she wouldn’t have cared that I let them out. But with tragedy comes the inclination to point the finger of blame. It’s human nature, and done so to suffer anger instead of sorrow—a more endurable emotion. The finger of blame wasn’t yet pointed at me. And even though I was telling myself that I did no wrong, how could I deny that they would have been safe had I not opened the door? But I had only opened the bedroom door; how they got outside from that point I didn’t know—the sliding back door, perhaps. Pea Willy, the only one intimately involved in the incident, remained quiet. Suspiciously quiet. When his name entered the mix in Holly’s rantings, he excused himself. Kloss went after him.
