“We need to get out of here,” Heather said, taking Amber’s hand and pulling her towards the door. “Now.”
3.
“How about now?”
Amber shook her phone. She waved it from side to side, searching for the signal that had eluded them since the Shell station. “Still nothing.”
“Take it off of airplane mode.”
“It’s not on airplane mode, Mom, I just don’t have any bars.”
The state of abandonment in the Shell station extended to the south on Highway 49. On either side of the Durango, the empty fields and tobacco sheds gave way to houses that grew closer together as they crossed into the Deep Creek city limits and 49 became Burlington Road. Plenty of cars, none of them in motion. No one raking leaves, no one walking around with leaf blowers. She shivered as a new housing development flashed by on the left just before the high school. The General Electric plant approached on the right and fell behind them.
She glanced in the rearview mirror. The employee parking lot at GE teemed with cars. From the outside, it looked for all the world like business as usual. As long as she ignored the complete absence of traffic on the outer edges of Deep Creek and the dead air on her radio, she could pretend all of this was normal.
Please let him be okay, she silently prayed. She had ignored God for most of her adult life, but He now felt medievally close. Dunked in the water, washed in the blood, she prayed. Please let Mike be okay. I know I said some really mean stuff the other day and I know I thought even meaner stuff but I didn’t mean any of it and all I want in this world is to see him again so PLEASE LET HIM BE OKAY
“What?” Amber asked.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Yes, you did. Your lips are moving.”
Heather swallowed.
“I’m praying,” she said.
She swung off Burlington Road onto Third Street. The outer business district retreated before a neighborhood of grand old Craftsman homes with rambling porches and long roofs that gave no indication of what had happened here. She slowed to a crawl for a better look. She searched for anything out of place—bodies, burned cars, damaged homes, anything to erase this giant question mark.
Beside her, Amber drew a ragged breath as her eyes filled with tears. “Should we stop?” she asked. “Knock on a door or something, see if anybody’s home? I mean, maybe something did happen, but there’s no way they can all be gone, right? Mom?”
Heather wasn’t listening. Outside her window, the two-story homes lining Third Street stared back at her. These houses were older than the others farther out, their construction predating the time when cost efficiency demanded that each home be a carbon copy of its neighbor. The trees had grown here, and now they reached above the rooflines with branches from which they drizzled golden leaves upon neat and well-manicured lawns. The grass had grown nearly invisible with no one to rake the leaves. They covered the grass and the sidewalk and danced now in the street to the music of a light autumn breeze and the choir of desertion.
Just then, something else about the houses caught Heather’s eye. She slowed, and then stopped completely.
Along both sides of Third Street, front doors stood open to the leafy yards. Some stood open all the way, some not so much. But they all stood open. And on the front door of the home nearest where she’d stopped, someone had painted a cross in black spray paint.
It was a man-size cross, the stipes extending from top to bottom and the patibulum spanning the width of the door. The artist had evidently worked in haste, with little care to the symmetry of his creation; he hadn’t painted the cross on his door as much as slashed it there with the brush or spray can. This haphazard appearance lent it a panicked quality that Heather felt crawling in the pit of her stomach.
There were others just like it up and down the street. Although she couldn’t see every door from her vantage point in the Durango’s driver’s seat, she felt certain that most, if not all, of the houses bore similar crosses. Signals, perhaps, from the inhabitants or the government that the same danger that had struck their neighbors had also struck them and that those approaching the door should stop lest they also fall victim to it.
But why a Christian cross?
Heather shuddered. On the other side of the glass, dead leaves scraped along the street and hissed on the inundated sidewalks and lawns. Millions, billions of dead leaves along this street and a hundred thousand others, all lined with houses that stood staring at the remains of the world through empty glass eyes.
“Do you think Daddy’s okay?” Amber asked.
Heather took her foot off the brake and the truck began rolling forward again. “Let’s go home,” she said.
It had been a stupid fight, in hindsight. Not that they argued like a pair of rocket scientists on the best of days—an element of the ridiculous usually found its way into all their conflicts, ensuring that no matter how it started or turned out, she could postgame herself into embarrassment over at least some aspect of it. In this case, she took something relatively minor and ensured that it grew. And while the Asshole Award ultimately went to Mike in this one, she’d done her part. Yes, she had.
He’d found the bank statement—a bank statement, actually, because she’d split the money into three different accounts for FDIC purposes pending a decision on exactly what to do with the almost four hundred thousand dollars that the trust had paid. The statements were supposed to go to her post office box. Apparently, she’d had something on her mind at the time she funded the third account, because the first statement for that one came straight to the house.
“A hundred and fifty grand,” he remarked when she came home from the store on Wednesday, the day before the camping trip. She found him sitting in the kitchen in his jeans and Navy sweatshirt, the envelope open on the table before him beside a plate of peanut butter toast. Although his hard and handsome features had softened with the addition of post-retirement fat, he still wore his blond hair militarily short. He ran his hands over the freshly-cut stubble. “Wow.”
She concealed a flash of irritation behind the grocery bags in her arms. She set them on the counter and began placing the cold items in the refrigerator. She kept her back to him as she said, “That’s part of my grandma’s trust. You’ve known about that.”
“I know. I’m just saying.”
“You’re just saying what?”
“It’s a lot of money.”
“It is.” Her back tensed, as if it ran off the same wire as the rock-solid muscles in her jaw. “And?”
He didn’t reply right away. She felt him back there, staring at her. Thinking, analyzing. Wondering.
Go ahead, she thought. Bring it on. Because there’s an and in there somewhere, right? Always is.
“And nothing,” he said at last. “I was just thinking.”
“Thinking what?”
“I don’t know. I was just thinking maybe we could take a little bit of this and put it down on a truck. Trade the Ford in, put something down, finance the rest. Get something a little newer.”
“What’s wrong with the Ford?”
“It has two hundred thousand miles on it.”
Cold items in the refrigerator. Boxed items in the cabinet above the coffee machine. Canned goods in the pantry. Everything in its place. “The Durango isn’t far behind it.”
“Okay, let me say it another way; my truck has two hundred thousand miles on it and I just spent the last two decades risking my life for my country and this family. That’s what’s wrong with it. Twenty years, not one new vehicle. I don’t think I’m asking for much. I mean, Jesus, Heather, unclench. I think if I stuck a lump of coal up your ass right now, you’d make a damn diamond.”
Her jaw tightened so much her teeth hurt. Red, angry pain enveloped her cheeks and spread upwards into the rest of her skull. Her temples throbbed.
Careful.
But she couldn’t be careful. Not today, not about this. Daylight still burned in the sky over the houses be
yond her window, but this was the middle of the night again and this was just another instance of him waking her up and turning her whichever way he wanted. Doing whatever he wanted, like he always did. Not asking, oh no, because asking implied some level of give-a-shit about her feelings in the matter and when Mike wanted something, she was going to give it to him.
“You’re not sticking anything up my ass,” she said. She spoke with her hands on the counter, back to Mike. Her jaw barely moved. “And we’re not going to just plow into this and blow it all on a truck when there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the one you’ve got. That money is for Amber’s college. Her grad school, if she goes. And after that, just her.”
So that she can be independent. So that she can support herself and never have to rely on another person ever.
“Right. You’re going to spend four hundred grand on her schooling. For our girl that’s frankly getting her ass kicked by community college right now. I think you’ll have just a leeetle bit left over, sugarpie.”
Now she turned. She felt the poison in her eyes, felt her brain and her mouth running free. Thinking of nothing.
That was never good.
“You know what, Mike? Kiss my ass.”
He blinked at her. His eyebrows rose.
“How dare you say the first thing about what I want to do with my grandmother’s money? I don’t think you really want a truck, you just want to see me spend this on something for you because you want to control this just like you want to control everything else!”
He snorted derisively. “Whatever. You’re not going to spend a dime of that on Amber. I know what that money’s for. Oh, yeah.”
“Do you, now?”
“You’re going to leave me. You’ve been waiting on this shit for years. Sitting on your ass while I bust mine, and now that you finally got your mitts on your granny’s dough, it’s bye-bye Mike, smell you later!”
“That is so not true!” she hissed.
“Bullshit! The minute that check came in, you changed. Right away. At first, I was like, goddamn, where’d all that mouth come from? Then I was like goddamn, Heather’s sure got the bitch in her all of a sudden, I wonder what’s going on.”
He smiled, but his eyes didn’t follow his lips. This wasn’t a happy smile. This was a Mike smile, a smartass, oh-I-see-it-now smile.
“But then I figured it out. You know, you’re right, I don’t actually want a new truck. I don’t give a rat’s ass about a new truck any more than you give a rat’s ass about how I feel about anything. I just wanted to see if you’d share. Or if you had plans. And you do.”
She stared at him.
He stared back. “Where’s your phone?” he asked.
“What do you want with my phone?”
“I want to see it. I want to see what you say to him.”
“To who?” she asked.
“To the man you’re obviously stepping out on me with. Is it in your purse? Get it out and unlock it.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. The phone was indeed in her purse and it would have been a simple thing, such a simple thing, to pull it out, put in the passcode and show him. Show him there was no other man, there were no other people, not even friends, because she had nothing, no one other than him. The world’s most pitiful contacts list—she had houseplants with more Facebook friends. Show him, then call him an asshole for even suggesting she was capable of something like that. It would have been easy.
And she could have done it. Just not that day.
“I’m not letting you search my phone.”
“Why? Don’t want me to see you telling him how you’re going to suck his eyeballs out through his dick?”
“He doesn’t like blowjobs!”
Bad, bad joke. Wrong thing to say. Wrong, wrong, wrong thing to say. Before she could speak another word, he leapt from the chair. She retreated until her buttocks pressed against the edge of the counter and she could retreat no farther. Their noses almost touched as he breathed on her face and she smelled the beer he’d consumed while raking leaves earlier. He was only five-ten, but at this distance the six inches difference between them made her feel as if she stood in the shadows of a skyscraper. A tall, angry skyscraper which, considering how quickly this had escalated, had maybe sucked down more than just one little beer.
“You think that’s funny? Saying that to me?”
“No! Calm down, Mike! Jesus, if I was cheating on you do you think I’d leave the evidence on my phone? Or say something like that?”
Without taking his eyes off hers, he reached behind her into her purse and pulled out the phone. He removed one of her hands from the edge of the counter and pressed the phone into it.
“Unlock it,” he said. “Unlock it and show me.”
Unlock it and show him. Or this could get really bad.
“No,” she said.
Something dark and crazy flashed in his eyes, and her body tensed for the impact sure to come. But he didn’t hit her. Instead, he snatched the phone back and laid it on the counter. Then he made a fist and drove it into the cabinet beside her head. He did it again. And again.
She flinched with each punch.
That could have been your face.
He drew back to punch the cabinet again. She moved sideways and realized then that he’d punched straight through the thin wood. He reached forward and swept her purse, the sugar bowl and the toaster off the counter with one angry thrust. Blood from his right hand smeared across the laminate top in a sticky arc. The sugar bowl struck the floor and shattered. She flinched again.
“Mike, stop!”
But oh, no. He wasn’t going to stop. No sir, no ma’am, that was a big fat negative, because she’d wound up a funnel cloud, a human tornado, and no tornado could ever be happy until it tore through at least one trailer park and fucked up a whole lot of people’s shit. Mike grabbed the coffeemaker and spiked it on the floor. Everything on every countertop, the tabletop, swept away. Pulverizing glass, shattering ceramic; the breadbox jerked from its comfortable little position beside the sink and dashed to splinters beside the poor coffee machine.
“Mike…”
But he didn’t hear her. His normally handsome face was a twisted rictus of rage. Eyes wide, lips pulled back from his teeth in an animalistic snarl, he raised a chair over his head and hurled it at the wall. It bounced back and struck him, so he picked it up and hurled it again. The effort strained something in his back, though, and he cried out in pain. The chair fell to the ground. He fell to his knees.
“Ohhh fuck! My back!”
Normally, she would have run to him, helped him up. This situation, though, could not coexist on the same plane of understanding with any form of the word normal. She stared at the minefield of shattered glass and broken dishes between them and let her eyes crawl up the baseboard to the holes where the chair legs had stabbed through the drywall.
“Mom?”
She whirled around. Amber, fresh from her afternoon jog around the neighborhood, stood aghast in the doorway between the kitchen and the hall that led into the foyer. Her mouth hung open.
“Go upstairs.”
“What…”
“I said go upstairs! Now!”
Amber turned and fled.
Heather felt like doing the same but couldn’t; this mess was hers. Her eyes centered on a piece of Mike’s peanut butter toast, stuck to the wall. She watched it hang for a moment and then slowly peel away until it fell and hit the floor with a plop, leaving behind only its peanutty ghost on the wall. The sight was so overblown, so ridiculous, that she almost burst into gales of insane laughter. But at the same time, she’d never felt less like laughing.
“My fucking back,” he groaned.
She bent down and retrieved her phone, which had found its way to the floor in the melee but had survived miraculously unharmed. She punched in the passcode and then walked over to Mike, her sneakers crunching over broken glass and dishes. She laid it down beside him.
/>
“I’ve been playing Candy Crush,” she said quietly. “Amber got me hooked on it. I’m on level 145. Go ahead, look.”
He glanced at the phone. He tried to move, but whatever pulled muscle had ended his tantrum evidently decided he wouldn’t be going anywhere just yet and so he remained in place on his knees. He sucked in air through his clenched teeth and closed his eyes.
“Look through all my text messages. Look through my email. There’s nothing there. I have no friends, Mike, none. Look.”
“I’m sorry,” he moaned. “I don’t know what came over me, I really don’t. I don’t know what the fuck just happened. God, my back!”
“Leave the phone on the counter when you’re done. Then clean up.”
“I will, baby. Just as soon as this goes away.”
She folded her arms and stared down at him. With his demons exorcised—for the moment, anyway—all his menace had vanished and left him looking pitiful, almost silly. She experienced the sudden and powerful urge to help him, get him up off the floor and guide him to the sofa in the living room. Because clearly he was himself again. She could…
No. Not again.
“Amber and I are going camping without you,” she said. “And I think we’ll be leaving this afternoon instead of tomorrow.”
“Okay. I know. I’m an asshole. I’m a real asshole. Jesus, Heather, I don’t know what’s wrong with me!”
“And when we come back…”
She trailed off. She didn’t know if she could finish the sentence.
But she didn’t know if she couldn’t, either.
“I’d like you to be gone,” she finished. “Find someplace else to stay. Anywhere but here.”
He began to cry. The sound stabbed her in the stomach and made a hole there through which drained all but the thinnest traces of her resolve. Recognizing what was happening, she stepped back again, and then turned for the doorway. But his voice reached out with a surprisingly steady hand then and grabbed her.
The Last Days of October Page 2
