by Sheena Kamal
Angst-filled teenager musings fill about half the pages in the journal. How old-fashioned. Why didn’t she share all of this on social media like the rest of kids her age? I stop at an entry right before one of her runaway attempts—but not the final one.
Called Dad today to say bye, but only got his voice mail. He’s working a lot lately. Won’t be home until late and I just know if he sees me he’ll know. There’s no way in HELL I’m gonna say bye to Lynn. She’s not my mother. I saw those texts on her phone. How could she do that to Dad? To us? She tells me I’m supposed to wait until I’m older to have sex and she’s boning some guy at her office? FUCK HER.
When you’re a child, the stakes are very high. Everything matters; every look, every word has some kind of greater implication to your placement in the world. Bonnie’s primary instinct is for flight—it’s not a bad one. She probably gets that from me. She ran away when she found out she was adopted. She ran away when she found out about Lynn’s affair. And then she ran away one last time to be with her boyfriend.
The diary contains some breathless entries about Tommy and how she felt so alive when she met him, blah, blah, et cetera. Young love and all that. There are two pages devoted to their first time in Bonnie’s room on that eyesore of a bedspread and how much it hurt. From my reading, the second, third, and fourth times were no better but things started to be a little more tolerable by the fifth and sixth and she started to feel more comfortable with it by the seventh and eighth. There was no ninth because Tommy was sent back to live with his mother. The final entry was dated three days before she ran away from home for the last time.
Called Dad again and some woman answered his phone by accident. When he came on, he acted like nothing was wrong but he sounded weird. I asked him who it was and he said it was no one but I know he’s lying. I just know it. The bitch called him babe.
Lynn and Everett. Those bastards. Not one decent, upstanding role model among them. I think about the happy lies in the adoption letters that they submitted. Their drama is what caused her to run away in the first place and this is something that I can’t ever forgive them for. Because she wouldn’t have been on the streets for these people to snatch up if they had done their job properly.
Near the end of the book, after about twenty blank pages, I find a half a page of cursive writing in Bonnie’s hand. The writing here is different from the rest; a hurried, unconscious spewing of thoughts.
I got a reply from that website I signed up for. Not from my real mom. I still don’t know who she is, just that she’s not even looking for me. It’s from this man who says he’s my dad. He wants to meet.
Too late, I hear the soft rustle of clothing behind me and become aware of movement in my periphery. I don’t have time to raise my tire iron before I feel a sharp blow to the back of my head. Everything goes fuzzy. Was this what Brazuca felt when I hit him? I fall forward.
My face presses against the stain on the floor. The blood from my nose mixes in with it, the fresh with the old, and my last thought before everything goes black is that here on this floor is blood spilled from two generations.
7
I wake to the sound of dripping.
Drip.
Like Tommy’s blood on the snow . . .
It’s starting to come back to me. The woods. The snow. The cold.
Driiip.
Like Bonnie’s blood being siphoned out of her . . .
Right. I saw some of it on the floor.
Drrrip.
Like my blood as it falls from my nose to the ground in front of me . . .
Oh, yeah. I fell face-first. This is starting to make sense.
Drippp.
Like rainwater falling from the gutters.
Now I hear the sound of rain on the windows. How could I have missed it? It’s like the mansion is under siege. But the sound of water on windowpanes is good. It means I’m out of the basement. Out of the room that locks from the outside.
I listen carefully and, besides the drops splattering the window, I notice two things. The first is the crackle of a fire. I’m indoors so there must be a fireplace in this room. The second is someone else’s breathing. It’s not close, but it’s not too far away, either.
Someone is in the room with me.
My tire iron is gone and I have a stinging ache at the back of my neck. My limbs feel weighted down, but when I open my eyes I see that there is nothing pressing on me—nothing physical, anyway. No, this weight is strictly psychological, and I’m suffering from acute regret that at the tender age of . . . I can’t remember right now, but it’s too fucking old not to have learned from my past mistakes and let someone sneak up on me.
I’m on a hardwood floor next to a roaring fire. I do a quick check and my pants are still on and my stomach is still flat. I let out the breath that I’ve been holding. So this isn’t a repeat of an earlier nightmare, it’s a brand-new one. There’s a man standing at the window across the room. And what a room. You could have teleported it straight from the chalet in the mountains and into this house and no one would have blinked an eye. It’s that lush. The view is that spectacular. I feel like I should have paid admission for this view, but the pain in my body is telling me that I already have.
“There was this slut,” the man says, staring out at the ocean. Dusk hangs in the sky like a magenta cloak with darkness tugging down at the edges. Though I must not have been out for very long, the landscape has completely changed. Waves rise up and hurl themselves against the rocks and rain slashes at the windows, seeming to move sideways. The weather has taken a violent turn and lying there, trying to ignore the pain throbbing just behind my temples, I don’t take this as a good omen. Something is wrong with me, but I can’t figure out if it’s simply a result of being hit on the back of the head, my psychological weight finally taking over, or something else.
The man at the window doesn’t turn around. All I can see is the back of his head. Thick black hair, like a schoolgirl’s dream, and a haircut that cost more than your average schoolgirl would dare charge to her daddy’s credit card. “But God, she had the voice of an angel. A butch, ugly angel. Couldn’t get it out of my head.” Somehow he has sensed that I’m awake. I’m used to slights about my looks, so his words don’t bother me. He hasn’t told me anything that I don’t already know. “Turns out she wasn’t an angel after all. Dropped in the woods like the garbage she was. Rolled up in a purple sheet.”
I blink once, twice, and on the third my head clears just a little more. Just enough to inject some survival instinct back into my body. I glance around the room for weapons. A vase nearby looks like a good choice, but it is too heavy to be hidden behind my back. I push myself to my knees and palm at the wall, hoping for balance. The change of plane blurs my vision and my legs tremble. I squeeze my eyes shut and when I open them again I realize that he’s watching me through the reflection in the glass, like Dao did up in the mountains.
“She was a whore and got what whores deserve. She was supposed to die that night.”
“What did you do to me?” In my mind, these words are shouted from my mouth in righteous indignation. In reality, they are squeezed from my tender throat like rusty water from a damp rag. I taste blood in my mouth and spit it out onto the floor in front of me. Somewhere in there is a tooth. I remember falling on my face, but not losing a tooth . . . in any case, it must have happened. The evidence is in front of me.
Kai Zhang laughs and faces me for the first time. The first thing I notice about him is the scar on his cheek. From what I did that had prompted the beating all those years ago. A loose nail, grasped between my knuckles. In addition to that, there is a healing cut on his forehead, not courtesy of me. And despite these two marks on his face, he is still handsome. “You asked me the same thing back then, do you know?” He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a Baggie with a handful of tiny pills.
I grow still as I realize what has happened. There are no words for the dread that I feel. So the weight isn’t ju
st psychological.
His eyes dance in the firelight. “Yup,” he says, smiling. “You stupid cunt. Coming to my house. Don’t you know what I can do to you? Don’t you remember what I did to you?” He crosses to me and hits me with the back of his hand. I fall back on the ground.
“Try to kill me and fail?” I say through the fresh blood in my mouth.
Some of it falls on the ground at his feet. He puts a finger to a drop and then licks it off. My stomach turns. Thank God there’s nothing in it but vodka and a granola bar.
“Yeah, we’ll see about that.” He pulls me up by the arm. I rake my nails from my free hand across his face and he flings me across the room. My body hits the window and slumps to the ground. My head is pounding. I look down and see that the ankle I’d sprained jumping from the balcony at the library is now twisted completely. He sees this too and grins. “Oooh, my bad. Let me kiss it better for you.”
I kick out with my other leg as he reaches me, but there’s nothing to brace against and my foot just taps his thigh, no stronger than a butterfly kiss. He pushes it out of the way, grabs my bad ankle, and twists it even more. The pain is unbelievable, but I don’t cry out because I know that’s what he wants. I don’t remember much from that night fifteen years ago, but I know that you can’t beat someone to within an inch of her life without enjoying it. The one good thing the pain does is focus me.
“Where’s Daddy?” I say, through gritted teeth.
He shrugs. “Asleep. Dead. Who cares?”
“You go to all this trouble to take the girl, to get her blood for him, and you don’t care?”
He stares at me for a long moment . . . and then laughs. He looks down at my foot. “I wonder if I snap it from both directions, if it’ll just come right off.”
“You have too much time on your hands.”
“You sound like my father. Well, until the stroke, and then he didn’t really sound like much of anything at all. He used to be so strong, but now . . . He can’t walk. He can’t talk. He just sits there like a baby.”
“Where is she?”
“Who knows? Who cares? None of this was my idea in the first place.”
I blink up at him and try to clear my vision.
He’s not lying.
“I’m sick and tired of this whole damn thing,” he continues, with a grimace. “My own wife made me get her. How messed up is that? And it was so easy to get her to come with me—just like it was with you.”
“You drugged me.”
“You’re a drunk. I almost didn’t even have to.”
I flinch. It’s too close to Lorelei’s point of view for me to not react.
But he doesn’t notice. “What were we talking about? Oh, yeah. That little bitch. She was looking for me—can you believe that? Found her on one of those underground chat sites for adoptees. She said she was going away for a few days to see her boyfriend anyway so she’d come meet me before. And then you know what she did?”
He twists the ankle a little harder.
There is so much pain I think I’m going to faint. “What?”
“She hugged me.” He laughs. “Just got right in the car after that. Didn’t have to give her anything. Just said I want her to meet her mom, too, and she couldn’t wait to go with me. Oh, man.” Now he’s laughing so hard that he wipes a tear from the corner of his eye. “I think I need a drink.”
He goes to the liquor cabinet. There’s not a lot about the time I was enlisted that I value; my stay was far too short for it to have made a lasting impression. The one thing that sticks with me is that there is so much a body can still accomplish under stress. The body is far more resilient than you’d think. My ankle is shot and my limbs feel heavy, but I’m conscious, so I must have some time until the drugs take full effect. I run my hands over my ankle, but I can barely touch it without feeling like I’m being stabbed by an ice pick. The lace on my boot has come undone. I pull it free while his back is still turned. “What happened to her?”
He pours two snifters of brandy. “After I told her we were going to meet you, I bought her some hot chocolate, put a little something in it, and bam. She was out like a light while we got her over here to do the tests. Did you know the results take a couple weeks?” I did not know that. Huh. You learn something new every day. “Found that out the hard way. Kept her sedated while we sent her blood off but the little bitch got away before all the results came back. They blame me but, like I said, it wasn’t my idea.” He takes a gulp of his brandy and moves toward me with the other glass.
I stare at the cut on his forehead and smile. “So she kicked your ass.” And then I say, just to piss him off, “From what I remember, it’s not that hard to do.”
His expression darkens and he flings the glass into the wall. It doesn’t shatter, though, just bounces off it and onto the floor. The most he has accomplished with this move is to wash the floor with very expensive brandy. I laugh. “Do you always fuck everything up?”
He pulls me up by the collar so I’m face-to-face with him and kisses me, forcing his tongue into my mouth. His hot, brandy-sweetened breath clouds my face. I can feel his adrenaline, his excitement. It’s now or never. The lace is still bunched in my hand, so I knee him in the crotch. Not very hard, but enough to get him to take a step back to protect himself. I go with him, though, and use the weight of my body to drive him to the floor. I don’t care how I land, just that he is now off balance and I’m no longer standing on a broken ankle. His hands are around my throat and my lace is around his neck, crossed in front. He squeezes while I pull on either ends of the lace. It’s a weak attempt, but it’s all I have. The desire to release the lace and claw away his hands is strong, but he has the strength advantage and is not drugged so if I meet him on those terms, I might as well just give up. His face turns red to match mine as blood flow and oxygen are restricted. He gives me a little shake, upsetting the delicate balance, and my hands falter. There is a dark spot in my right eye that’s growing darker by the second and I can feel my consciousness going. I pull my hands from his throat and do the thing that feels right, pressing my thumbs into his eyeballs. He screams and slaps me away, but at least now my airway is free. We lie there on the floor, gasping.
“I-I can’t see! You fucking cunt!”
My hands grope the floor, looking for balance, and brush the glass he threw against the wall, the one that refused to shatter. And then I feel something inside me open up and take flight. With all the strength left in my body, I smash the snifter against the floor. A single shard breaks off into my right hand, piercing the skin. The shard is slippery with blood, but that doesn’t matter much as I crawl to where he is on his hands and knees, feeling for the wall. My foot drags behind me and my breath comes in harsh gasps. I’m making too much noise, but he’s beyond caring. His eyes are a bloody mess.
“Where is she?”
He screams in pain. “I don’t know!”
I grasp the shard, even though I can feel it slicing through my hand, and let the pain focus me. I take a handful of his beautiful hair in my hand and wrench his head up to face me. His hands reach for my throat again but I’m ready for him this time and use the force of my weight as I press into him to drive the shard into his jugular.
“The sheet was red,” I say to him now, because this is the kind of thing that one shouldn’t forget. I want it to be the last thing he remembers. The woman that he wrapped up and left for dead, her shroud was a red sheet ripped from his bed. The blood from her body, my body, darkened it in spots to a crimson so deep it was almost black. I don’t want him to leave this world without knowing the color of that sheet. His blood spurts out, mixing with mine from the cut on my hand, as he opens his mouth to scream. No sound comes out and I watch with heavy-lidded eyes as the life seeps out of him, his mouth forming a grotesque O, shaped around a sound that never comes. I fall heavily on top of his body and black out for a moment.
And then the sound returns to my ears. I crawl to the wall, using it to get to my fe
et. All I think about now is the girl. I have slain one of her dragons, but the job isn’t finished. And he knew where she is; I heard it in his lie. Using the wall for balance, leaving behind smears of bloody handprints, I focus on reaching the door. Lightheaded and dizzy, I see the sideboard with the brandy nearby, and I can’t resist taking a swig, washing the taste of his brutal kiss from my mouth.
Hands on the wall again.
The door looms just ahead.
And then something jolts me awake. Something that makes no sense. A high-pitched cry coming from the floor, from a small plastic radio lying there. I blink at it for seconds, minutes, who knows how long. The cry becomes more insistent. In here, in this room spattered with blood on the floor and smeared on the walls, where a dead man lies, this sound is incongruous.
Down the hall I go, peering into doorways, flipping light switches and leaving behind bloodstains on every surface I touch because what does it matter, I’m running against the clock. Against chemistry, biology, and my own damaged anatomy.
I hear the sound again.
The last door at the end of the hallway leads to a large bedroom where the old man sits in his wheelchair next to a bassinet. And then all of a sudden it makes sense. All of this, it wasn’t for the old man who loves this place, who built this house and put in it all the things that reflected his passion. The old man who put in motion plans to divest from mining in the region. The old man who was shut in this house that he loved so much after he’d had a stroke.
It was for Bonnie’s little brother.
That’s who she’s a match for. Not her grandfather. Not Ray Zhang. And in a sudden moment of clarity, Kai’s words come back to me. His own wife made him do this. For their baby.
I slump against the wall, feeling dizzy, and stare at the old man. He stares right back. Both of us are completely helpless in the face of the baby’s cries. The photograph that Mike Starling had clipped showed a strong man, a proud one, too. But time has taken its toll. In his eyes there is only pity, but I have no idea who it’s for. His face blurs in front of me and no matter how much I blink, all I see is red.
