And it would happen. He’d make sure of it.
Chapter 37
SHE
He chuckled then pressed against her, snaking his hands up and down her torso.
“I kept waiting for you to figure it out,” he said, no longer whispering, his country boy patois finally free to have its coming out party. “I mean, once you felt my arms around you, once I kissed you, I thought for sure you’d know. Why did it take you so long?”
It was as if she’d been hit in the face with a cannonball. Joey. Joey who’d murdered Jason. Joey who’d kidnapped her.
Joey who’d raped her.
Joey.
The smell. The fishy, sweaty smell . . . she didn’t realize . . . didn’t remember . . . that’s what he always smelled like.
But, there was something else . . . something else not quite right.
“What did you do?” she whispered, still trying to wiggle away from him.
He rolled off her and the light of his phone illuminated his face. There were a few beeps and overhead light flooded the room, causing her to wince.
He turned to her and smiled, and she had to blink several times, both from adjusting to the light and trying to pick apart the foreign features, trying to shoehorn them into the memory of Joey’s round, jolly cheeks. This man was easily more than a hundred pounds lighter with a bald head and five o’clock scruff. His fingernails, typically rimmed in black manure, the result of his father’s insistence his son work the farm every weekend, an ill-fated attempt to “wed him to the land,” as he liked to say, were now clean and smooth. The new, sunken hollows of his face revealed surprisingly sharp cheekbones, hardly resembling the verging-on-obese boy who’d terrorized her ten years ago.
She couldn’t take her eyes off him, still trying to untangle this knot in front of her. He smiled and watched her.
She cowered against the headboard. “You’re supposed to be in a mental hospital,” she said, tears sliding down her face. “For years. Years and years.”
“What can I say, Nat? Sometimes, things don’t work out like you think.”
She wiped the tears away with her fingers, her nose starting to run. “Okay, okay, so how long have you been out?”
“’bout three years. I just told those doctors what they wanted to hear. Made ’em think I was over you. But I mean, come on . . . a man doesn’t get over a woman like you. They couldn’t understand that. The only good thing about being locked up was that it gave me lots and lots and lots of time to figure things out. I mean, when they got you finger-painting all day, what else you supposed to do?”
Finger. She rubbed her ring finger.
“Where’s my ring, Joey? My engagement ring. And my watch. Where are they?”
“You don’t need them anymore.”
“Please . . . please I’d like them back. Please.”
“Well, they ain’t here no more, so nothing I can do about them anyway. Kiss ’em goodbye, Nat. Kiss ’em goodbye.”
Her heart sank. The silver Movado was the first nice thing she bought herself when she got her promotion. She could live without that. But the ring. . .
She wiped back her tears. She wouldn’t let him see her cry. She’d save that for later.
“You look so different,” she whispered, changing the subject.
“Oh, yeah,” he grinned. “I gave myself what you would call a makeover. Yeah. Got my nose and my teeth fixed.” He stopped and looked at her. “I wanted to make myself look pretty for you. That’s what you like, right? Pretty boys? Of course, I ain’t no bastard, though. And—do you know I lost one hundred and fifty pounds?” he said, puffing his chest out. “You know that’s a whole other person? Tell you the truth, that was the only easy part. I mean, once I decided I was gonna do it. Yeah. After I got back home. Worked out two hours a day. Protein shakes. Just slid right off.” He spread his arms out. “Like a new man, huh, Nat?”
Nat. The grating endearment he’d been calling her since they were kids. She’d been too shy to tell him then how much she hated it, absolutely loathed it. Nat. Just like it sounded. An inconsequential little insect flitting around to annoy people. He thought it was cute. His thing. Their thing.
“Nat, come on. We can play catch-up another time. Right now,” he said, the sweaty greasy leer back on his face, “I want to finish what we started.” He leapt at her, grabbing her arms and forcing her back down on the bed as she whimpered.
“You know, I ain’t never been with another woman? Ever? Yeah. You’re my first, just like it was always supposed to be. And oh, my God, it was better than every fantasy I ever had.” He leaned closer, fondling her again, helping himself to her body like he owned her. “Now, I have forgiven you for not waiting for me like you used to always say you would. You always promised me that I was gonna be your first. Then you had to go and waste it on that Dennis dude. But like I said, I forgive you.”
She slapped him, her hand stinging from the impact. He laughed and cradled his cheek.
“Oh, come on now. What’d you do that for?”
“You make me sick,” she whispered. “I think you’re disgusting.”
“Why?” he laughed.
“For this . . . for—”
“All right, so I didn’t tell you who I was right away. So what? None of that matters now. We’re together again, like we were supposed to be. Before all that other stuff got in the way.”
“How could you do this to me?
“You were mine first. You were always mine. From that—do you remember that dance we went to? I don’t mean the first one we went to. I mean our first formal one. In the eighth grade? Oh, my God, you were so beautiful. You had on that . . . I think it was a . . . blue—no green—dress. A light green dress. Used to be your cousin Missy’s, you said. I know she never looked even half as pretty in it, seeing how fat she was. Though, I guess I shouldn’t talk about somebody being fat, because I was huge, wasn’t I?” he stopped and laughed. “Man, I used to thank the Lord everyday you looked past all that lard I was carrying around and loved me anyway.”
“Please, Joey,” Natalie said, her voice splintering. “Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“This. All of this. Jason, kidnapping me—”
“Kid—? You think I’m kidnapping you? No, Nat, baby, you got it all wrong. No see, what I’m doing is setting things back the way they’re supposed to be, see. Yeah. You just forgot is all. Got distracted. But I’m going to remind you. Make you remember everything about the life we had, the life we were supposed to have. The life we’re gonna have. Finally.”
“You’re—” she stopped herself. She was going to say “crazy,” but that might set him off. He likely thought he was perfectly sane. She needed to figure out what she was dealing with. “Joey, you have to let me go, please. This isn’t right, and you know it.”
“Oh, no. Everything is right about this. Now come on, Nat. Why you looking at me like you’re scared or something? You know I would never hurt you.”
“You’ve been hurting me ever since you killed Jason, every time you forced—you hurt me that night,” she said, her voice trembling, the memories flooding back, pulling her down into their vortex. “And Dennis—”
“He had it coming! Another pretty-boy bastard. What—what is it with you and these pretty-boy bastards, huh? You was never like this before. It was me letting you—you know what? It doesn’t matter now, because I have taken you away from all of that and you can get back to being you. My sweet little Nat.”
“You’re sick,” she whispered, not caring what he did. “Sick and disgusting and delusional. You can’t keep me here. You can’t. Whatever fantasy you have—”
“Is coming true. Every last one,” he said as he lunged for her.
She yelped as he smashed her against the bed, his lips, arms, and hands everywhere. Extracting a pound of flesh for what he felt he was owed.
“Please stop, please, just—”
“I’ll never stop, Natalie. Never. You
belong to me,” he whispered, the all-too-frequent scratch of his zipper banging against her ears, the scrape of denim against her leg happening all over again.
“The only boy who had ever noticed her.”
Joey Green.
The boy who had alternately ruined her life and been the catalyst for her finding her true self.
She: Natalie Scott, the lanky, meek little orphan with coke-bottle glasses, black acne scars, and a mop of crinkly black hair perpetually bunched inside a thick, red rubber band.
He: The plump, earnest boy who used to eat lunch with her in elementary school when no one else would, took her to the eighth grade dance, and had declared his undying love by ninth grade orientation. The only boy who had ever noticed her. The quiet boy who everyone thought was strange and who they paid no mind to, much like her. The boy who asked her to go steady right after picture day their sophomore year. The boy with the shy smile who would always order her a cheeseburger at McDonalds with no pickles because he knew she didn’t like them. The boy who taught her to drive on Braxton’s dusty back roads in his blue pickup truck. The boy who liked tinkering with machines instead of hauling manure on his family’s tree farm. The sweet, devoted boy who, over the slice of apple pie they split at IHOP after their senior prom, told her his one dream in life was to marry her, buy them a nice little house, and fill it with as many children as its seams would allow.
And she allowed herself to be swept away by that dream. His beaming adoration and near-daily affirmations of undying loyalty and commitment had momentarily squashed her childhood fantasies of fleeing Braxton, her dreams of Amanda Woodward domination falling away like the wispy seeds of a dandelion. She doodled his name in her notebook, fantasized what their children would look like. Those daydreams had been a salve to the daily nightmare of her raging alcoholic uncle and sadistic bitch of an aunt. If being his wife would provide flight from that life, she would take it with a huge smile on her face.
She couldn’t really pinpoint the exact moment the glitter began to peel away from that utopia for her and her long-buried desires for escape began to simmer inside her. The first pangs of regret probably began to pluck at her when glossy college catalogs brimming with smiling coeds and imposing old architecture began to land in her mailbox. Coupled with her guidance counselor’s gushing over her SAT scores, Natalie began to let those childhood visions of flight seep back into her brain. She didn’t think she stood a chance of getting past the gate of the Ivy League. It was only to silence her guidance counselor’s incessant and annoying chirping that she applied to Brown, Cornell, Penn, and Dartmouth. Without her counselor knowing, she’d also thrown her hat in at Fayetteville, knowing admittance would be easy and comforted by the fact that Joey would be close by.
And then the acceptances started to roll in, followed by eager offers of full scholarships. It was the first time Natalie allowed herself the pinprick of excitement, Braxton’s sad little general stores and gossipy matrons rapidly moving from her periphery to her rear view. When she first told him she wanted to go away for school, he was upset, his roadmap for their future forced to take a detour. She continued to work on convincing him they could do this, that there was a great big world out there for them. Why not explore it? He would do his two years at community college, then move to Rhode Island to be with her. They would marry and once she graduated, they could go anywhere and do anything.
He reluctantly agreed, and it wasn’t long before the beginning of the end began to loom large over the two of them. She could feel the cracks in earnest then, felt the shift between them and, more importantly, within her.
And that’s when the real problems started.
Chapter 38
SHE
She vomited in the shower, not able to make it to the toilet in time.
She sat huddled against the back of the tub, letting the water cascade over the red rawness of her skin, watching the waste swirl down the drain.
Hours. He locked himself around her for hours. Every time he would roll off her, she thought he would drift into some sort of sated sleep. She had visions of reaching into his pocket for the cell phone, dialing her way to freedom. He seemed not to need sleep, though. Every time she would muster up the courage to start snaking her hand toward his pockets, he was swarming all over her yet again, sending her scurrying for the corner.
Finally, he rolled out of bed, punching some numbers into the phone to open the door, telling her he’d be back in a few hours. Numb, she limped into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and sat on the bathtub ledge, just listening to the steady roar of the water. Eventually, she peeled off her clothes and began the task of cleaning herself up, of getting him off her skin, out of her mouth, extracting him from her hair, from her most private of parts. Body puffs and loofahs were inferior weapons, though. She poured a handful of soap into her palm and scrubbed herself with her fingernails, eventually tearing a tiny, bloody hole in the papery skin of her chest.
She’d never get clean enough. She’d never be able to strip his smell from her skin. It would continue to ooze from her pores.
Sniffing and starting to shiver, Natalie finished her shower and dressed. She sat on the bed, drew her knees to her chest and cried.
• • •
For the second time in what she thought was as many days, Natalie bolted upright in bed, sweaty, disheveled and disoriented.
She took several deep breaths to try and calm down so she could think. She thought she heard a faint beep and gasped, thinking Joey was coming back in. She waited a few moments, her body coiled tight and ready to bolt for the false safety of the bathroom if she needed to.
She got out of bed and began to pace, trying to make sense out of the senseless. She walked past the window next to the bed a few times, eyeing it with sly hope yet knowing there was nothing it would yield that could help her.
“I can’t stay here. I can’t let him come back in. I can’t let him come back,” she murmured to herself as she ran her hand across the glass, searching for any irregularities—cracks, holes, ridges—anything she could exploit.
Nothing.
She placed her palm against the window, her mind racing. She ran to the bathroom, grabbing the heavy plastic bottles of shampoo and body wash. Maybe if she gave them enough force, she could shatter the glass. She weighed the shampoo and body wash in each hand, determining the shampoo to be heavier. She slammed the hard plastic cap against the pane, but it merely bounced back, like rubber. She frowned and tried again, harder this time, with more heft and determination. Over and over she slammed the bottle against the window despite her knowledge that it wasn’t cool, smooth glass she was battling with but hard, shatterproof plastic sitting inside the window frame. It would no more splinter than the light fixture in the bathroom. She threw the shampoo bottle on the bed as she let her eyes span the room, hoping something would miraculously present itself to her, like a little leprechaun with an ax or a fairy godmother with the keys to all the doors, a careless wave of her wand granting her escape.
She was out of bed again, her hands persistent now as they hunted the walls, windows, closet, and bathroom—every crevice, every surface of the room—desperate to find something, anything that would get her out of here.
She flopped back down on the bed, sweaty, exhausted, and frustrated. She started to lie down when she shot up like when those cartoon characters stepped on hoes or rakes.
An idea.
She ran to the vanity and stared down at the slender black comb before picking it up and turning it over in her hands several times. She played with the teeth before bending them to see if they would snap out. She almost started to cry when indeed they gave way and one by one, she was able to turn and twist them out of the flimsy backing, the discarded nubs of plastic trickling to the floor. She was able to pull almost half of them out when she realized she would need to break off the big anchor tooth to try and make it a point. Natalie continued to push and pull at the stubborn plastic. She grabbed the shampoo
bottle and ran into the bathroom. Holding the edge of the comb over the sink, she took the cap end of the shampoo bottle and gave it a big thwack!
“Come on, baby, come on,” she murmured as she reared back and leveled the bottle against the comb again.
On her third try, the big tooth snapped off and slapped the wall where a mirror normally would have been. Natalie laughed with relief, holding the makeshift weapon to her chest, letting her finger run over the ragged edge. She pulled it back to examine her work. It wasn’t a fine point, of course, but the jagged tip just might do the trick. If she could jam it into Joey with enough force, in just the right spot. . .
Did she have it in her to kill a man? Another human being? Jason’s bloody, ashen face flashed in front of her before floating away and being replaced with Joey’s. Her nose flooded with his scent, her ears pounded with his grunts, her skin burned beneath his fingertips.
She could do it.
She would do it.
“For the first time since he’d known her, she sounded happy.”
Everything about her was different.
New clothes. New hair. Contact lenses. She even talked different.
He knew the minute he got off the bus in Providence for the long Thanksgiving weekend. Her awkward hug and stiff kiss sent tremors through his heart.
He was losing her.
He knew before that, though. Every time they talked on the phone, an excitement he’d never heard before bubbled in her voice. He could feel her stretching away from him, could see the fraying thread, the fibers pulled to their tightest point, mere seconds from snapping. Going on and on about “Dina this” and “‘this class that” and “we went to Boston this weekend and I can’t wait to show it to you when you get here.” For the first time since he’d known her, she sounded happy.
Every Breath You Take Page 13
