Sin With Me (Bad Habit)

by J. T. Geissinger

  I mumble, “Nice to meet you, Satan. You look exactly like I thought you would.”

  The toothpaste smile doesn’t even waver. “Hallucinations are normal, too.”

  From his white coat pocket, he removes an instrument the size and shape of a pen, clicks one end, and proceeds to open my eye with his thumb and forefinger, pulling the lids apart without even so much as a warning. He shines a light directly into my eye.

  I say thickly, “Why does my head hurt? Am I injured? What happened? Where am I?”

  Satisfied by whatever he sees in my right eye, Dr. Chompers moves the light to my left. After a moment, he nods, and then retrieves the uncomfortable-looking plastic chair from next to the small table by the window and sits down next to my bed. He crosses one leg over the other, and looks at me with a serious gaze, his ridiculous smile at odds with the rest of his expression.

  “You’re in Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. You were involved in a car accident on Pacific Coast Highway. You lost control of your car around an unsecured curve and you went over the edge.”

  Flashes of memory hit me like strobe lights. The rain. A white dog. My Lexus in an uncontrolled slide.

  “How am I not dead?”

  He chuckles. “You landed on the beach berm. Right on top, like a cherry on an ice cream float. You ask me, that’s a miracle right there. Yes, ma’am. A real miracle.”

  When I frown at him in obvious confusion, he continues.

  “You know, the Malibu beach berm, the giant sand dune that runs parallel to that stretch of the highway for about a mile? The state trucked in tons of sand and piled it up to protect the road from erosion during the winter storm months until they can do proper reinforcements this summer.”

  I have a fuzzy recollection of pictures in the newspaper of tons of sand dumped over the edge of the highway and scooped into huge piles by earthmovers working on the beach.

  The doctor continues. “You were saved from more serious injury by the airbags, but that’s also what caused the trauma to your head. You have whiplash, a concussion, and had minor bleeding in your brain, along with the swelling—”

  I gasp so loudly the doctor stops speaking, surprised.

  “My father,” I rasp, staring at the blank TV screen, my heart pounding.

  The doctor looks at the television, and then back at me. He clears his throat. “As I said, when you’re coming out of anesthesia, hallucinations are—”

  “No. No, I mean, I remember my father.” Tears gathering in my eyes, I look at the doctor. “And my mother, too.”

  And Brody.

  I whisper, “Oh fuck,” and squeeze my eyes closed in a futile attempt to try to block the memories.

  The doctor stands. After a moment he says, “I understand you suffer from retrograde amnesia from an automobile accident you were involved in years ago.”

  I don’t reply. I’m too busy dealing with the onslaught of memories and the overwhelming emotions suddenly raging through me like wildfire. I’m hot, and cold, and sick, and dizzy, and everything else, all at once.

  Brody. God, Brody. No.

  The doctor says, “I’ll schedule a memory specialist to see you as soon as possible, but in the meantime, I’d like to run through a few simple tests if you’re feeling up to it.”

  Though I’m feeling anything but “up,” I nod silently, putting all my concentration into holding back the tears that threaten to spill from my eyes.

  I have a terrible suspicion if I let them loose now, they’ll never stop coming and I’ll drown.

  I’m kept in the ICU for another two days. My plump, caring nurse—her name turns out to be Cuddleby, how perfect—keeps a vigilant eye on me, ruthlessly refusing to let me wallow in what quickly becomes apparent is a devastating depression by bullying me into eating, talking, and interacting with her, when all I want to do is curl up into a ball and die.

  “Lunch!” she says to me now, sailing into my room with her motherly smile, carrying a tray that holds various dishes covered in plastic wrap.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Her smile turns to a frown. “Going on a hunger strike isn’t going to help anyone, kiddo, least of all you.” Blocking my view of the television, she sits on the edge of my bed and uses the fork to stab a blob of unidentifiable meat smothered in an unappealing lumpy gravy from one of the plates. She holds it out to me.

  “Eat,” she demands.

  I stare at the mystery meat on the end of the fork. “If you can tell me with any kind of certainty what animal that is, I’ll think about eating it. Until then, no thanks.”

  She wiggles the fork up and down at me as if I’m an unruly toddler and she’s trying to bribe me with candy. “C’mon. If you don’t eat, I’ll tell Dr. Gold you were seeing Smurfs and Gremlins all over the room.”

  I glare at her. “That’s blackmail.”

  She smiles sweetly back at me. “Them’s the breaks, kiddo. Eat, or I’ll report that you’re confused and hallucinating, and you’ll have to stay here with me and this gourmet food of ours even longer.”

  I give her some really strong stink eye, but she doesn’t wither a bit. So I take the fork, shove the disgusting piece of meat into my mouth, and chew.

  “I think it’s rat,” I say around a mouthful of stringy awfulness.

  She watches me for a moment, not satisfied until I swallow, and then asks, “Anything new today?”

  With my memory, she means. Since I woke from the anesthesia, memories of my childhood have been coming back in fits and starts, like one of those old crank movie cameras, projecting jittery black-and-white pictures inside my head. According to the memory specialist the hospital assigned me, the new trauma to my brain might have opened old pathways, knocked long-stuck things loose.

  He also floated the idea that my amnesia might have been psychogenic—in other words, caused by stress, not tissue damage—but didn’t float that hypothesis again after he saw the murderous look I gave him.

  “I had a cat named Scooby,” I answer. “A raggedy little orange thing with a raspy meow.”

  I don’t add that I loved that cat with the fierce, blind devotion of a child, and cried when I remembered it had been run over by a car in the street in front of my house when I was eleven.

  Nurse Cuddleby and I sit quietly until she says, “He’s still out there.”

  My heart jolts into high gear. Trying to control the sudden shaking in my hand, I slowly set the fork down on the tray. “Call the police.”

  She sighs. “It’s a public waiting area. He’s not doing anything that would get him in trouble, or disturbing anyone—”

  “He’s disturbing me!”

  We stare at each other. Forgoing another mention of Brody, who, according to her, hasn’t left the hospital waiting room in five days, she moves on to a safer topic.

  “Your other friends are still asking to see you, too. The blonde one with the adorable baby went home for the day, but the other one, the brunette with the gorgeous husband—they’re celebrities, right? Security keeps escorting TMZ off the premises, but there’s reporters crawling all over the parking lot.”

  “Kat,” I say dully.

  “She’s back. She went ballistic when she heard you still can’t see anyone. The rest of the nurses are afraid of her.” She softly laughs. “She’s a little spitfire, that one. Small, but feisty. I’m worried she might break down the ICU doors!”

  I turn my head away and stare out the window. It’s gloomy outside, the sky as flinty as graphite. As cold and lifeless as my soul.

  In a way I’m grateful I’m not allowed to have visitors, because I know as soon as I see the girls’ faces I’ll break down. And I’m not ready to break down just yet. I’ve got something I have to do first. As soon as they let me out of this hospital, I’m going straight to the police station to file a report.

  I happen to know for a fact that in California there isn’t a statute of limitations for murder.

  I say, “Could you please tell her—”<
br />
  “Tell her what?” demands a rough voice from the doorway.

  Barney stands there, almost unrecognizable in a badly wrinkled white dress shirt, with a week’s growth of beard darkening his cheeks and dark circles under his eyes. His shirtsleeves are rolled up, exposing his forearms, which are tattooed with mysterious markings from the inside of both wrists up to his elbows, where the tattoos disappear under his sleeves.

  They’re exactly like the markings Brody has tattooed across his chest.

  Startled, Nurse Cuddleby rises quickly. “You can’t be in here! You need to leave!”

  Barney says, “I’m not leaving until she hears me out.”

  My heart beats so fast I’m having trouble breathing.

  “Security!” calls the nurse.

  I say, “Wait—let him in. It’s all right.”

  She glances at me, examines my face, and then asks, “Is he immediate family?”

  Barney and I lock eyes. Finally, my heart still thumping like mad, I nod.

  She looks back at Barney and gives him a narrow-eyed once-over, obviously not believing we’re related, but unable to throw him out since I’ve said we are.

  “I’ll be right outside. You have ten minutes.” She moves past him quickly, skirting him as she goes through the doorway, and then waits by the nurse’s station in the hallway. She keeps her eye on Barney as he walks slowly into the room.

  He stops at the end of my bed and stares at me.

  I bite out, “You don’t have ten minutes, you have sixty seconds, so make it count.”

  With a faint smile he says, “Can’t tell you how relieved I am to see you, Angelface. You look like shit.”

  “You look worse. The clock is ticking.”

  He chuffs out a hard breath, drags a hand over his head, and then begins to talk, his voice rough as if he’s swallowed a handful of gravel.

  “Brody was twenty-two when he joined the band, right out of college. At first I thought he was just another shallow pretty rich kid, went to school on daddy’s dime, had more money and pussy than he knew what to do with.”

  My face reddens. Barney continues without blinking an eye.

  “But he was more serious than that. He worked hard, he was more dedicated to making good music than anybody else, he had his priorities straight.” Barney’s voice gets lower. “But there was a dark side. One he kept under control most of the time, but that came out without fail every year, on the same day.”

  I swallow and fold my shaking arms across my chest.

  “After three disastrous St. Patrick’s Days in a row—we’re talking drunken rages, picking fights with guys twice his size and getting his ass beaten bad, waking up in jail kind of disastrous—I forced him to tell me why. The story he told me—”

  “Are you asking me to feel sorry for him?” I interrupt, sickened. “Did he tell you my father was almost decapitated? That his body and my mother’s body were so badly burned the authorities couldn’t identify them for days? That I crawled for half a mile to find help while my parents’ ashes rained down on me?”

  Barney inhales a slow breath, and then says quietly, “Brody wasn’t driving the car that killed your parents, Grace. His father was driving the car. His father who was shitfaced drunk.”

  Shock hits me in a cold, hard slap. I stare at Barney, speechless, feeling sick straight down to the marrow of my bones.

  His steps heavy, Barney slowly walks around the edge of the bed. He pulls up the ugly plastic chair, lowers himself into it, and sighs.

  “He was a local politician in Kansas, a real son of a bitch from what I understand, getting ready to run for senate. He and Brody were in town for Brody’s audition at the UCLA music school. His father left him at the audition, got drunk at a local bar, and then got behind the wheel. After . . . he forced Brody to leave the scene. There were no other eyewitnesses.”

  Barney’s dark eyes shine like he has a fever. His gaze drills into mine. “Brody pulled you out of the car before it exploded. He saved your life, Grace. Do you remember that?”

  I can’t think. I can’t speak. I can barely breathe. I make a small sound of horror in the back of my throat.

  Barney runs a hand over his hair, sighing again. “After a few days back home, he couldn’t stand the guilt that he’d allowed his father to drag him away from the wreck. He went to the Topeka police and told them what had happened. But because his father was who he was, and he and the chief went way back, and his father made a statement that his son had been getting into drugs lately, the police brushed it off as a ‘family dispute.’ They didn’t even investigate Brody’s claim.”

  Brody wasn’t driving. Brody’s father was drunk. Brody went to the police, but they didn’t believe him.

  Brody’s father killed my parents.

  I can’t process it. Any of it. My stomach twists and rolls. I break out in a cold sweat, my palms and underarms clammy. “But . . . their car. There would have been physical evidence—”

  “Yeah, there would’ve been. If they hadn’t been driving a rental car from a company owned by a good buddy of Brody’s dad. A guy he was in the army with. A guy who, once Mr. Scott was elected into congress, got a very lucrative contract to be the exclusive rental car provider for all the state government’s business in Kansas. The rental car they were driving that night got fixed and repainted lickety-split, and Brody got such a severe beating from his father for going to the police that he couldn’t get out of bed for days. Those beatings continued until the day Brody fought back and broke his father’s jaw. Then he went away to college and they never spoke again.”

  My head pounds. I close my eyes and squeeze my forehead with both hands, trying desperately to make sense of what Barney is telling me.

  But I can’t. No one could ever make sense of a thing like this.

  “As soon as he moved to L.A., he tried to find you. All he had was a name from the newspaper, an article he cut out and kept in his wallet.” Barney pulls his own wallet from his back pocket, opens it, and removes a folded up piece of newsprint. He offers it to me.

  I take it, my fingers shaking so badly I almost can’t hold it straight.

  Couple Killed in Hit-and-Run Identified

  Authorities have released the names of the husband and wife who lost their lives in a tragic hit-and-run accident on St. Patrick’s Day. Robert and Elizabeth Van der Pool were driving on Beverly Glen Road in Brentwood at approximately six o’clock in the evening when their car was struck by another vehicle from behind. The impact caused the Van der Pool’s Honda to veer off the road into a shallow gully, where it overturned and collided with a telephone pole.

  In a community alert, police say they are still looking for the other car, which most likely has significant damage to its front end. The driver fled the scene and remains at large.

  The Van der Pools are survived by their daughter, Diana, who is recovering from injuries sustained in the accident.

  My parents’ deaths occupy a three-inch-long section of newspaper, unaccompanied by a picture.

  A section of newspaper Brody has been carrying in his wallet for thirteen years.

  The article grows blurry as tears well in my eyes. “How do I know this is true? How do I know it wasn’t him who was driving? That he made his innocence up, pinned this whole thing on his dead father, and sent you in here with more lies?”

  Barney shakes his head. “He told me this four years ago, Grace, long before your lives intersected again. He asked me back then if I could help him try to find Diana Van der Pool, so he could tell her how sorry he was, how much he hated himself for what he saw as his cowardice, how he would do anything he could to help make her life better. But I didn’t have any more luck finding Diana Van der Pool than he did. She was long gone. Vanished from the face of the earth, as if she’d been abducted by aliens.”

  His voice softens. “And now we know why.”

  I’m hyperventilating. My mind can’t stick to any one thought, and spins wildly from memory to memo
ry as pain crashes over me in waves. I want to scream, and break something, and run somewhere, anywhere, as fast as I can, but all I can do is sit in my hospital bed and stare at Barney as the last pieces of my composure come crumbling down.

  I never used to believe in things like Fate or Destiny. I prided myself on my cool, rational mind. But now I think all that rigid control I cultivated so diligently and exercised over my life for so many years was nothing more than castles built in the sand. An illusion, ephemeral as a breath of air.

  Fate has had its hands on my steering wheel all along.

  My life literally collided with Brody’s thirteen years ago, and though I’ve done everything in my power to forget my past existed, Fate has been determined to bring us back together ever since.

  Now the only choice before me is whether to continue the fight, or surrender.

  My voice as ragged as the beating of my heart, I say, “Your tattoos—Brody has the same thing across his chest, above the angel’s wings.”

  Barney looks down at his forearms, and then glances back up at me. “He got them the same night he told me that story, after he asked me what mine meant.”

  “What do they mean?”

  His face clouds. He doesn’t speak for a long time. Then he murmurs, “It’s in Arabic, and not something I’ll ever speak aloud again. Brody’s tattoo is in Arabic, too, but it says something different.”

  My heart in my throat, I ask, “What does his say?”

  “You should ask him.”

  “I’m asking you, Barney. Tell me what it says.”

  Slowly, Barney stands. He gazes down at me with an unreadable expression. Finally, just when I think he won’t speak again, he does.

  “‘Unforgiven.’”

  That takes my breath away.

  Are you sorry for what you did? Then I forgive you, I’d told Brody, completely ignorant of what I’d been forgiving.

  My face crumples. I start to sob, loud, violent sobs that shudder my body and echo through the room. I lean over, put my face into my hands, and give in to them. Barney rests a comforting hand on my shoulder, and then Nurse Cuddleby barges into the room with a shout.