by Rick Hautala
The smoldering glow in Frank’s eyes burned hard as he stared at his son. As John was speaking — yelling at him — Frank’s face, his body, even his nerve-dead left side tighten as dull tingling rushes ran through him. His son’s words hit his ears like the rapid, deafening punch of a jackhammer.
“Tell me exactly what kind of husband you are to Abby,” Frank said. His voice was steely, his mouth a thin, bloodless line. His eyes were rolled upward, and the firelight caught a wicked gleam in the exposed whites of his eyes.
John hadn’t missed his father’s slip of the tongue, calling Julia “Abby.” In the awkward silence that followed, he looked away and stared into the fire, trying to calm down. For a moment, he imagined faces rippling in the glowing bed of coals.
“From what I see,” Frank continued, “ever since you got here …
“I don’t want to hear anything you’ve got to say,” John said, standing up slowly and walking over to the fireplace. He took the poker, opened the screen, and jabbed at the blazing logs.
Frank’s mouth tightened into a grimace as he watched his son.
Although the thoughts were vague in his mind, he couldn’t help but feel both disappointment and sadness — disappointment because he didn’t like what he saw his son had made of his life, and sadness because he knew there wasn’t a damned thing he could say or do to make John change.
Maybe back when John was young —
God knows I tried to raise him right.
— he might have been able to change things …
Maybe the sadness came from knowing he couldn’t go back and do things differently now.
Or maybe, down deep, he realized that even if he could go back, things would probably work out this way, anyway, because of who — and what — they all were.
John looked at his father over his shoulder. The firelight cast one side of John’s face into high relief, and staring at him, Frank had the dizzying sensation of seeing himself when he was younger. He saw his own disappointments and failures written on his son’s face, but as much as he wanted to reach out and connect with him, his next words came out like honed-steel blades.
“‘S far as I can see, you ain’t much of a husband to Julia, and you ain’t no kind of father to Bri.”
John scowled, thinking, Well, at least you got her name right this time.
He frowned, the firelight reflecting wickedly in his eyes.
All his life, he had to put up with slams like that, but Julia was right about one thing. He was no longer the kid in this house. He was an adult, and he didn’t have to put up with shit like this from anyone … not even his father.
“You’re in no position to judge what kind of husband or father I am,” he said. His voice was tense, and it wavered, but he fixed his gaze on his father, letting himself dredge up and really feel all those years of hurt and rage and frustration.
If only there was some way to make you see … to let you feel what I’ve been through.
“You ask me, Bri’s too damned good to be your kid,” Frank said. “And although it saddens me to think the family name’s gonna die with us, I ‘spose it’s as God intends it. I ‘spose it’s the punishment I get for —”
“Did you ever think that maybe your stroke and being left in a frigging wheelchair was part of God’s punishment? Did you?”
John started pacing in front of the fireplace as he watched his father. He paused, picked up the poker in his right hand, and squeezed the handle so hard his fingers began to throb.
If he ever had any desire to communicate with his father before, any need to try to settle things between them — before he dies, he thought with a sudden chill — that desire had passed. Like before — like always! — his father said things that cut too deeply to be forgotten … or forgiven.
Frank’s hands, gripping the wheelchair armrests, began to tremble. As with many things in his life, he regretted some of the things he had said, but John had never showed him proper respect due a parent, and he wasn’t showing it now.
John didn’t believe in God.
Maybe that’s where it all started … or maybe that was simply an outward symptom of something deeper that was wrong with his son.
It didn’t matter, Frank thought, feeling deep, painful bitterness.
It simply didn’t matter.
It was too late for both of them to change.
“I think,” Frank said, his voice so low John could barely hear him above the crackling of the fire, “that having you for a son is pretty near all the punishment God needs to dish out to me.”
“I could say the same about you as a father,” John said, clenching his hands and shaking them in front of his face. The poker, still in his right hand, clanged against the mantel.
“You’ve never been any kind of father to me. All I ever got from you was criticism. Do this my way or else …”
Frank shook his head, trying to slow his racing pulse.
It had always been this way between them from the time John was a baby. He had always been willful —”bullheaded,” his mother used to call him. He and his wife used to say that a certain amount of that would serve him well in life, but in Frank’s eyes, John had never had anything to balance that bullheadedness, had never shown the proper respect to authority to his parents or — especially — to God.
“It’s true,” John wailed. “You never gave me room to breathe. Christ! You were always hounding me about how I had to leave this island. If you hated it here so fucking much, why didn’t you leave?”
“All I ever wanted was what any parent wants,” Frank said. “I wanted you to have a better life than I did.”
“Oh, yeah — right. Know what? I don’t believe you. But … do you want to know something else?” Before Frank could reply, he continued. “I’ll never forgive you for practically forcing me to break up with Abby back in high school.”
“Abby... “ Frank’s voice dropped to a whisper as he tilted his head back and stared up at the ceiling. Something — a vague thought — danced out of his reach, like a shadow that shifts every time you turn and try to see it.
John paid no attention to what his father was doing as he continued his tirade.
“Oh, you broke us up, all right. Always saying how she wasn’t good enough for me. That if I ended up with her, my life would be ruined. You drove me to —” He caught himself, took a deep, shuddering breath, then went on. “Christ! I couldn’t wait to graduate from high school, but not because I could leave this goddamned island. I wanted to get out of this fucking house. Out from under your shadow. All my life, I never measured up to your standards. I couldn’t even come close.”
With that last word, John cocked his arm back and swung the poker viciously at the mantel. The metal handle bent deeply into the wood. John’s eyes were stinging. His breath came in hard, fitful gasps that burned down to his stomach. All he could think was how easy it would be to go over to him, sitting there helplessly in his wheelchair, and whack him with the poker.
A lifetime of anguish … of feeling inferior would explode in that single, vicious swing that would crush his father’s skull like an eggshell.
Maybe that’s what he wants, John thought, not daring to look at his father because he knew the jolt of hatred he would feel might make him do it.
Maybe he’s so damned tired of living like this he wants me to end it for him.
“You watch what you’re doing there, boy,” Frank shouted angrily. “You’ve got no right to go bashing up my house.”
“You’ve been a bastard!” John wailed.
He swung again and hit the mantel with the poker, feeling the impact numb his arm up to his shoulder.
“Nothing but a mean, rotten, lousy bastard to me all my life!”
For a third time he swatted the mantel, and this time the tip of the poker hit the edge and removed a piece of wood the size of his hand. The iron bar was now bent almost ninety degrees.
I could do it, John thought as his mind was swept away by a flood
of red-hot anger.
I really could kill him … Right here! … Right now!
“You don’t calm yourself,” Frank said, “I’ll call the cops. You ain’t got no right to be stavin’ up my house like this.”
John suddenly caught himself and stopped. He looked at his hand holding the poker, at the veins and tendons standing out in sharp relief, the twitching muscles that he knew with one quick swipe could end his father’s life.
He’s driving me to this, he thought. All my life, he’s been driving me to this.
“Look, son, Let’s admit we never really liked each other,” Frank said, “‘n we never will.”
He released the brake on his wheelchair and gripped the wheel rails.
“We’re gonna both gonna have to learn to live with that. But I’m warnin’ yah —” He pointed his gnarled forefinger at John as if it were a loaded and cocked gun. “You think you can pull horseshit like this in my house and get away with it, you’re dead wrong.”
His piece said, he spun his wheelchair around and rolled across the floor to his bedroom without a backward glance, shutting the door firmly behind him.
With a sudden, gut-deep grunt, John threw the poker to the floor. It clanged like a fire bell. Taking a long, rasping breath, he walked away from the fireplace to the window and looked out. His vision jumped with his pounding pulse. His mind was a torrent of raging thoughts, tangled emotions, and blazing anger as he stared blankly into the night. Beyond the reflection of the firelight in the window, he couldn’t see the starry sky he knew was out there, but he did see something beyond the glass. It emerged from the darkness … a fleeting glimpse of —
His mind went suddenly numb when he registered what it was.
— the outline of a person standing right outside the living room window, close to the house, looking in at him.
“Jesus Christ,” he shouted as he stumbled backwards. Air rushed from his lungs in a painful gasp as he staggered back. When he looked again, the shape was still there.
There is someone out there!
The face close to the window stared him straight in the eyes. And in a flood of panic, he recognized the cold, dead-white face.
This was the same person … the same figure he had seen reflected in the glass late at night … the same person he had seen hanging from the ceiling … the same person he had seen walking up to the house the night of the blizzard … the same person he had seen walking along the side of the road while he was driving home during the storm.
“No,” he said, his voice little more than a whimper. “Impossible!”
The face leered at him, smiling as it locked eyes with him with an icy glance.
As impossible as it was, he was looking at Abby Snow, and she was watching him through the thin pane of glass that separated them.
John backed slowly away from the window, tripping on the rug edge. The room spun crazily around him, throwing him off balance. The skin on the back of his neck prickled, and he thought he could hear low, hollow laughter. His eyes came to rest on the bent poker, and he bent down to pick it up. Holding it in front of him like a sword, he stared at the window.
She’s not out there … She can’t be out there …
Panic raged inside him
Using a shuffling sidestep, he approached the picture window, not knowing if, when he got there, the person — the illusion — would be gone, or if the window would suddenly explode in a shower of razor-sharp shards. He felt foolish holding the bent poker out in front of him, but if there was someone out there —
It can’t be Abby … It can’t possibly be Abby!
— he wanted them to know he didn’t take kindly to Peeping Toms.
With a sudden rush, he charged the window, holding the poker above his head, ready to swing. If someone was out there, they were going to be sorry when he caught them.
But when he looked out the window, there was no one there. Beyond the dim reflection of the fireplace and furniture and his own terror-stricken face, there was nothing but the snow-covered lawn and the black, frozen night. The streetlight cast a veined shadow across the glass from one of the maple trees in the front yard. Relieved. John burst out with laughter.
Is that what it was all this time … the shadow from a tree?
Loud, crazy laughter filled the living room. He dropped the poker to the floor.
No Peeping Tom … and certainly no Abby Snow! Just the streetlight, throwing a tree shadow onto the picture window.
John realized he must have been half crazy and had imagined seeing Abby’s face.
He had to have because one thing he was sure of was, no matter how much Randy Chadwick or anyone else around town speculated, he knew for certain that Abby Snow was dead.
He had seen her body.
PART THREE
Atropos — the Cutting Fate
And now how abhorred in my imagination it is!
My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that
I have kissed I know not how oft.
— Shakespeare
Justice foreshadowing the event shall come, in her hands a just victory. Yes, she will come, my child, in vengeance and soon!
— Sophocles
SEVENTEEN
Wish List
I
In the two weeks before Christmas, there were times when Julia felt like she was living in a Norman Rockwell painting. The temperature stayed in the teens — and lower at night — and several light dustings of snow, never more than an inch or two at a time, kept the ground sparkling white. Even some of the more tedious holiday chores ahead, such as sending Christmas cards and untangling strings of outdoor lights, were less tiring. If back in October when they had first moved in, the house had seemed old and dingy, now that she and John had finished with the necessary “paint ‘n’ paper,” it was positively homey in an old-fashioned way in spite of the tensions that still existed, especially between John and his father.
Julia was thankful that Bri, at least, had finally started making friends at school. She spent almost every afternoon with Kristin, either at one of the other’s house. Several of the local kids had shoveled off a large area of Larson’s Pond, and Bri went skating there on weekends. What Julia was happiest about, though, was that Bri had stopped her lonely walks out on Indian Point. She had never liked the idea of that, and she certainly didn’t have a good feeling about that girl Audrey that Bri had met out there. Kristin and she seemed to be developing a true friendship.
Things with John, on the other hand, were not going as well.
Julia had started inviting Ellie Chadwick up to the house once or twice a week for coffee and conversation, but she certainly didn’t feel close enough to Ellie to tell her about her problems and concerns with John.
Most of them centered around how he still was not relating well to his father. If anything, their relationship had deteriorated, and Julia found herself wondering what might have caused it. As far as she was concerned, she got along fine with Frank — even now, with the colder weather and him at home more because he couldn’t visitfriends down at the wharf. Although Bri was doing more things with Kristin and had less time to spend at home, she still found time to have a few games of checkers with her grandfather. Both of them had pierced Frank’s gruff exterior.
But John ... well, his relationship with his father was a problem, which made things doubly difficult for Julia.
The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced her problems with John weren’t solely because of tensions with his father. Ever since October, John had been steadily building a wall around himself, at least at home. From what little he told her about his work, it seemed as though things were going along fine there. It was a different story when he got home in the evening. If he wasn’t sullen and quiet, he was grumpy and sometimes outright hostile, snapping at the slightest irritation and swearing about minor things. She tried to mention — offhandedly and usually jokingly — that she still wanted to get pregnant; but whenever she did, John wo
uld glower at her.
Wanting to get pregnant was one thing she was willing to talk about with Ellie.
“If I was you,” Ellie said one bright morning as they sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee, ‘I’d stop using birth control and not tell him. You get preggo, and then —” She shrugged. “He has to adjust, like it or not.”
Julia shook her head.
“I don’t know. I don’t operate that way. John and I have always been honest with each other.”
Julia could tell by her wry expression that Ellie didn’t have to say aloud what she was thinking — Come on ... totally honest? …As if …
“That’s how I got Randy in the first place,” Ellie said, smirking into her coffee cup.
‘You got pregnant?”
“Back in high school, the idea of birth control was limited either to not doing it or the guys using rubbers —”
Julia’s chuckle interrupted her. “It’s getting that way again, what with AIDS. If Reagan didn’t bring us all the way back to the fifties, AIDS will.”
“What’s next? Huge tail fins on cars?”
They both laughed heartily.
“But I was saying — the last thing Randy wanted was a wife and kid right after high school, but I knew if he went off to college, I’d lose him.”
“You got pregnant on purpose?”
Ellie shrugged innocently.
“I used my ‘womanly wiles. I figured — you know one of the classic lies — Guys say ‘I’ll only put it in a little way?’ Well, one night — actually, now that I think about it, we were on a double date with John and Abby — I decided to let him go all the way, figuring if I got pregnant, he’d marry me and not go off to college.”
Although Julia chuckled along with Ellie, she also was wondering how anybody could do such a thing to someone they supposedly loved ... Let yourself get pregnant in order to hang on to them and ruin their chances to go to college and get ahead. All in all, it was a testament to their love that, like other couples she knew who had gotten married straight out of high school, they hadn’t gotten divorced. If anything, they seemed happy together, and they had two healthy kids.
