“A lot.”
I dipped my fingers in the water, watching the droplets drip down when I lifted my hand. They rippled the lake’s surface. I repeated the action and thought of Eric’s blowtorch scar.
“He did that to you? Your stepfather?” Thom indicated my leg.
“Yeah.” I didn’t feel like reliving it could possibly help. I gave him a little more anyway. “He worked on it for nearly twelve years, almost the entire time I knew him.”
Either Thom got lost thinking about this torture, or he felt he’d pushed enough, because he let the subject go for the moment.
I stood and prepared for the swim to shore, watching the barracudas dart out from the protection of the float, only to hurry back in under it.
Thom got to his feet, grimly determined to keep his face neutral and his thoughts obscured. There was something else on his mind. I silently applauded the effort to keep himself together, but I realized it would break soon. Not wanting it to happen at camp, I said, “Change of plans,” and sat back down. I dangled my legs in the water. Small fish I couldn’t identify nibbled at my skin. Their tiny mouths tickled.
Thom sat back down next to me. I watched a couple of tears drop from his face and into the water. The ripples from them ran together, reminding me of Eric’s scar even more.
“Can I tell you something?” he asked.
“Anything.”
“I saw when our dad used the blowtorch on Eric. He didn’t cry or move or scream. Eric just sat there, like nothing was happening. Dad made me watch. He made Matt watch, too. Dad had been beating me, and Eric took the truck keys and totaled the thing against a tree. Dad instantly forgot about punishing me, and he beat the shit out of Eric.” Thom scratched at his leg. “Eric tells us we should talk about stuff, but he’s never talked about that. Not once.”
“He doesn’t remember,” I told Thom after a minute. “He blocked out every bit of that punishment.”
Thom mulled this over. “Huh. And we thought he’d been holding out on us.”
“He showed the scar to me,” I said. “He didn’t know what it was from. I told him.”
“How did you know? What it was from?”
I didn’t answer. He knew, though. No answer was answer enough, especially since I’d said too much again.
Thom couldn’t quite meet my eye. “Do you remember? Yours?”
I dropped into the water, barely making a splash.
“Yes,” I said, starting back to the land.
When we’d gotten to shore, Thom had walked away from the lake with his face as neutral as possible. Thom’s extra-neutral face always concerned me. I knew he was shutting people out when he displayed it; something still bothered him deeply. I decided it would be wise to follow him.
The woods opened to a small, old cemetery. Dark mountains pitched upward above the blackened trees beyond the clearing. Fruit trees pressed against the cemetery’s ornate wrought-iron fence. Elaborately carved headstones dotted the ground, parts of their white marble stained blue-green from their nameplates’ copper being exposed to the elements. Old grave markers were covered with intricate designs and flowery poetic remembrances for the lives lived by the dust beneath.
Thom was holding onto a rotter by the neck. He hadn’t pulled out a weapon. He considered it: a lone, thin rotter woman, in a beautiful gathered sleeveless gown. The deep burgundy-black silk of its corset top was embroidered. The rotter’s raven tresses hung to its waist and blew around, swirling with velvet and satin and lace ribbons in the wind.
I spoke. “Gothy.”
Thom didn’t look away from the rotter. He still hadn’t moved to finish it off. He held it there, his hand at its throat. It snap-snapped at him, its mouth moving uselessly in the air.
“Thom,” I finally said.
He looked at the ground, back at the rotter woman.
I approached them and took hold of the rotter by its hair, winding the dark locks around my hand and pulling the thing from his grasp. He didn’t resist.
I stabbed the rotter’s brainstem and dragged the body away, out into the blackened part of the forest. Then I returned to Thom. We sat on a couple of grave markers and I sang to him. I gave him a few minutes, but he wasn’t up for additional Telling Of.
There came another stretch of time when I had to be alone. That’s the note I left on our chalkboard by my initial, too: “ALONE.”
I hid under the lean-to. Again.
The guys let me be this time.
I was caught up in remembering things I didn’t want to remember. I couldn’t make the remembering stop.
Methuselah was my stepfather’s favorite possession. I was probably five when it fell across my shoulders for the first time. I don’t really remember that, aside from his first clumsy lash. It’s become part of the Pit’s sludge. I do remember when he used it on my brother, Adam, for the first time. Adam had been even younger than I, three or four. He squealed and screamed and then passed out.
This was a revelation to me. I hadn’t known people could do that—pass out from pain. The thought of it consumed me, sloshing around my innards as if I had drunk too much water. I thought, just maybe, it might happen to me.
But it didn’t. Every time my stepfather pulled out the bullwhip, or any other implement, my consciousness refused to fade. Learning I was doomed to suffer, awake, for every beating? It was a disappointment.
I learned to stop hoping for anything.
I learned life is disappointment.
And then, in my mind, I was back in the coop again. We’d spend hours, sometimes days, locked in that dark, cramped box for the slightest infraction. Today, I’d dropped an egg.
“Ungrateful wretch,” hissed my stepfather. “Need to teach you a lesson.”
I pretzeled myself into the wooden container.
“You think about what you’ve done.” He shut the hatch and slid the first lock closed, then the second. A chain rattled, a padlock clicked. He’d be back in a day or two.
The hours stretched languidly into the darkness.
I remembered my siblings, too. The different things done to them. The noises those nasty weapons made on their hides, and the noises they’d made in response. The Begats barged into my brain and played on a loop. And I stared at the columns of light in the wood above my face again. I thought more of my siblings, and of the others who were brought in as “special guests” to suffer through the Programs.
When I emerged from hiding, no one was around. I was glad not to have to talk. I let my silence grow. I’d pulled back into my shell a bit.
Eric finally badgered me into a Telling Of. We condensed numerous Tellings Of into a single session. I told him about the Programs, my stepfather’s tainted water, and bits I remembered of my home life. I wasn’t sure whether he was sorry for asking. We spent the night mutely sitting in the sorrowful back corner of the lean-to.
veryone from camp was lunching around the lake. I chewed my food, trying not to notice how bland it tasted. Just fuel.
Jeff walked up and stood before me. “I want to talk to you.”
I tried to keep my face serene. A talk from Jeff was guaranteed to be tedious. He took a novel’s length to tell a short story.
Several people looked up from their plates, hoping to be entertained by Jeff’s speech. I’m sure they were already planning their gossip territory marking.
What came next caught me completely off guard.
“I got these from Bissett’s desk,” Jeff spoke as he produced a small stack of pictures: me lying in an induced coma in a hospital bed, me working PT in a johnny, me walking down the hall with an IV pole…
He held them up one at a time, turning each over to reveal Officer Bissett’s carefully lettered writing: SHE IS WORTH IT. My old name was written on the front of each photograph.
“Tell me about these, Ally,” Jeff said, as if he was talking about the weather or what he might have for supper.
“That’s not my name.” I stood and walked away. Then I fled
the camp, not even stopping for my backpack. Done here.
Down the road was a small pond, lined with rock cliffs. I stopped to catch my breath, and soon found myself climbing to a ledge fifteen feet up the rock face. Curled up there, I yanked off my gloves and stared at my scars, feeling foolish for having thought I could ever be accepted anywhere. I waited for calm to return, hugged my knees, and sang to myself.
I heard the crunch of Eric’s boots on the path, but I kept singing. This was not a time to curb the impulse; it was keeping me sane. I’d gone soft, being out in the world.
Eric rounded the corner, watched me for a moment, and clambered up.
“Please don’t be scared when someday soon you hear I’ve gone away,” I sang. Joe Pernice’s words were a balm. I was Going Away. I continued to sing, picturing Chappaquiddick Skyline’s blue album cover. It was displayed on my MP3 player whenever I played this song, “Everyone Else Is Evolving.” It made me sadder, but it made me feel calmer, too.
I looked at Eric, at the concern in his eyes, and realized, to my horror, I was going to cry. I turned my face away, but near the end of the song, he reached out to feel the vibration of my throat and ended up also feeling the cooling wetness of my tears.
“Oh,” he said, gathering me in his arms, sliding me onto his lap, pressing my head against his shoulder, and stroking my hair. I had no idea how to react to this, but my body did: the dam burst. Suddenly I was a weeping jumble of flesh, helpless to stop the tears.
Eric just sat there, holding me. There was no attempt on his part to stop me from crying. He didn’t seem the least bit discomfited by my display of emotion. He was simply there. He helped me mourn in a way I’d never allowed myself to.
When the tide eventually ebbed, he gave me a tissue and asked, “Why does Jeff have pictures of you in a hospital?”
I shrugged and shook my head while blowing my nose. How in hell had Jeff known Officer Bissett? Why had he shown those pictures in front of everyone?
Eric took a long, slow breath and asked, “Will you tell me about Officer Bissett?”
I didn’t know how to answer it, that question I’d been dreading. I held my hands open, palm-side up in my lap, looking at and rubbing their scars and stalling. I hadn’t pulled my gloves back on when I heard Eric approaching because I simply didn’t have the energy to hide anymore. I realized now this was a mistake. Eric had probably suspected my gloves hid some exceptional ugliness, but now he had proof. He wasn’t going to let me off the hook from his question, but he was mentally listing new questions every second.
I finally replied, “He got me out of there. His reward was a painful, humiliating, drawn-out death.” That pretty much summed it up.
Eric waited for me to continue. When I didn’t, he asked, “How did you meet him?”
I snugged my head in between his neck and shoulder and breathed out a short whisper of words, “Car accident.”
Eric waited again, eventually prodding, “Tell Of.”
I felt disoriented, like I’d shifted through to another dimension without moving. The humid air made my skin stick to his. Without forethought I began to speak. He thought he wanted a story? He could have it.
“We were going to escape, run away. My older brother, my younger sister, and I. Zack was sixteen, May was eight, and I was fifteen. Zack had nicked the car keys. He hadn’t ever driven, but we’d seen it done. It looked easy enough.
“We slipped away late at night. No one even realized we’d broken out, but then, they hadn’t expected us to try, either. The headlights picked up mist in the air, then a light rain drizzled down. We didn’t know it would bring up oil in the road. That’s part of why we crashed so spectacularly.
“There was a long, wide corner on the way out of town, and Zack didn’t slow down for it. A deer was in the road. My brother tried to avoid it, and completely lost control. You hear people talking about wrapping a car around a tree? We literally did that. May went flying out the windshield, never making a sound. She landed over sixty feet away. She died on impact. My brother: I don’t know how, but he ended up caught between the car and the tree. Because of the pressure of the car against the tree, he didn’t bleed out right away. I couldn’t reach him, couldn’t move. I was crushed between the dashboard and my seat, impaled by metal in a couple different places.
“Zack cried and apologized for at least half an hour. ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ he said. He said it again and again. I kept telling him it was probably for the best, anyway. That’s… That’s what…” I had to stop there, because I was heading off-track.
“For the best, anyway,” Eric nudged, trying to keep me talking.
“It’s what my mom said before she died. She told me, ‘That’s okay, little one. It’s for the best, anyway.’”
I continued, “Not ten minutes after Zack died, a police cruiser came across the mess. Officer Bissett realized who I was—who my stepfather was. He recognized the car. He knew what my stepfather did, and he hadn’t been able to do anything to stop it. He’d been trying to since he joined the precinct eight months prior, but my stepfather pretty much ruled our county—he had ties stretching far and wide, and that included local law enforcement.”
Eric furrowed his brow. “But how’d your stepfather accomplish that? I mean, what he did was so—so unforgivably sick, how did he get the police behind him?”
“My stepfather was savvy enough to freely supply jugs and jugs of his drugged water to the area’s police stations for their water coolers. He’d say, ‘I’m just trying to give back to the men and women who keep us safe,’ which was great PR for him in the community, but it was really to keep the cops under his thumb. Officer Bissett never got exposed to the chemical, though.”
“How come?”
“Officer Bissett was an odd sort of health nut; very disciplined, in every aspect of his life. He only drank coconut water—he even used that for cooking. Just a lucky accident, but he sidestepped the toxin as a result. So he was the only officer in the precinct who recognized—or cared—how appalling and dangerous my stepfather was, but he hadn’t been able to find a way to act on this knowledge. After we met, I warned him about the water, but even that wasn’t enough to bring my stepfather down, because there was no test that could detect my stepfather’s additives. Officer Bissett once told me his captain had warned him in no uncertain terms to leave my stepfather alone.
“Anyway, at the crash site, while his partner was out of earshot, calling for a rescue crew, Officer Bissett said to me, ‘Live through this and I promise I’ll get you away from here.’
“The Jaws of Life had to be hunted down from a neighboring community. Maybe four hours after the crash, I was cut free of the car and loaded into an ambulance.”
Eric waited for me to continue. He was holding his breath.
“Breathe. I was in the hospital for weeks, had a series of surgeries. Breathe, Eric.” I stopped.
Eric obediently took a breath. “I read about that in the paper,” he murmured. “It happened a few towns over from where we lived.”
I went on, trying to ignore his words. “Officer Bissett came to visit every day. Sometimes we’d eat supper together; other times we’d walk the halls or watch TV or movies on the computer he brought in. I was never allowed to leave the floor without being accompanied by him—in his law enforcement garb—to assure the nurses he’d look after me.”
I filled my lungs with air and went on. “The night before I was set to be released, he came in and suggested a walk. We went to a quiet floor, and he gave me a bag of clothes to put on. He told me, ‘Walk like you’re supposed to be leaving with me, and no one should question it.’ We went out to his car—no one even seemed to notice us—and he drove me south, out of town. He gave me the backpack filled with clothes, snacks, a bottle of coconut water, money, and a bus ticket. He’d arranged for me to stay with the farmer. They were cousins.
“He dropped me off at the bus station and turned back for town. A few weeks later, the farmer told me
Officer Bissett had died. And he told me how it went down. And… and it’s my fault, because I knew how he’d pay for his kindness.”
“Why? How did he die?” asked Eric.
“In a… Program. Main Event. I can’t… the things they did to him…”
Eric held me more tightly, and I got myself under control. It all tumbled out from my mouth, this anguish I had carried around and never shared with anyone. I burned with embarrassment at the gaping ravine of vulnerability yawning beneath me. Eric threw a lifeline.
“What was life like at the farmer’s home?” he asked. That was safer territory.
“Good, busy. My room was a stall in the stable. We spent mornings tending to the animals and doing farm chores. Afternoons we had what the farmer referred to as ‘practical learning.’ We’d work on engines, as you know. We’d do science experiments, identify plants—all sorts of useful stuff. He trained me how to properly defend myself; he taught me how to fight back effectively. In the evenings his wife and I had ‘book learning.’ They taught me about so many things. I was there for years.” I sighed. “They were a bit odd, I suppose, but who isn’t?”
“Odd how?”
“I don’t know. Mostly little things. They wouldn’t talk at all during meals. They didn’t socialize much, though they tried to encourage me to. The farmer especially felt out of place around most non-farming people. He didn’t know how to deal with them. He was a bit obsessive-compulsive about things, and he seemed… almost afraid of outsiders. The farmer had enormous enthusiasm for mechanical work and for the natural world, as I suppose a lot of farmers do, but when it came to other people… well, I guess it says a lot that pretty much all he wanted to teach me about humanity was how to fight them off. I wouldn’t say he was misanthropic, but he was certainly mistrustful.”
“Why did you leave?”
Wasn’t he sorry for asking questions by now?
I briefly examined the memory. Forcing my voice to stay level, I gave up another secret. “I woke up one morning and the farmer had turned. He was chewing on my foot. I put him down with a pitchfork. Sounds like a horror movie cliché, right?” I smiled feebly, hoping to lighten the mood.
Survial Kit Series (Book 1): Survival Kit's Apocalypse Page 11
