The Ghost of Blackwood Lane

by Greg Enslen

  The guy was probably drunk. If Gary had been in a better mood, he might’ve felt sorry for the person. But tonight, he felt nothing.

  Gary shook his head. He saw his cigarettes sitting on his side table, right next to his tarot deck, but he resisted the urge to light one.

  He didn’t understand these people, or this Southern California lifestyle. Everything in it, everyone in it, revolved around appearances and facades. Big cars, fancy name plates on walls, servants and chauffeurs and gardeners. Business cards with shiny metallic printing, distributed by the dozens to impress others. Corner offices and limos and private, trendy little restaurants where the food was lousy and lauded.

  Lies, big and small, dictated the pace of life in Los Angeles. They were the fuel that powered the endless parties and the neon lights and the lives of these people.

  Everyone strived recklessly to prove their own personal worth to others but never to themselves. Nobody here went out in the morning until they looked perfect, and no one went home at night until they were sure that their friends had seen them and taken notice of their new clothes, new car, new girlfriend, or new whatever.

  Superficial didn’t quite begin to capture the sheer level of audacious preening and posturing that happened all day long in L.A. And no one around here seemed to care that in the long run, none of it would matter. Gary shook his head and crossed back to his bed, climbing in.

  He had grown up in the Midwest, in a small town east of St. Louis, and he’d learned shortly after arriving here that the middle of the nation was a region of the country disdained by the residents of L.A. Everything between California and New York was considered “a flyover state.”

  But Gary had been raised in the Midwest with a set of morals that didn’t apply out here in Los Angeles. The instincts ingrained in him from birth marked him as an outsider. Here, who he was on the inside was much less important that what he had, what he made, or who he was seen with.

  Gary hated Los Angeles.

  He’d moved down here two years ago after graduating from California State University–Fresno, just south of Sacramento, accepting one of the offers he had received after obtaining a master’s degree in architecture.

  He’d thought it would be good to get away from his father and his new wife, to get away from his life in Sacramento. But now he knew that the characteristics that made him so much of a loner in Sacramento were actually worse here in L.A.

  He had a nice apartment, a great career, and a bright future ahead of him. And he’d never felt so alone in his whole life.

  He wanted a drink so badly he could taste it.

  Gary turned over and ignored the impulse, distracting himself by staring at the hospital plans hanging on his bedroom wall, architectural renderings of a project he was working on. The urges came and went, but they were the worst at night. Two months and ten days since his last drink. But the drive to visit his old friend was getting stronger and stronger every day. Lack of sleep, probably, and the dream.

  ------

  Judy sat on the hard wooden floor next to her bed, sobbing.

  She cried silently, only to herself. A few bars of yellowish moonlight penetrated the closed blinds, falling diagonally into the room and across her bruised and bloodied face.

  She stared straight ahead of her, her face blank, hopeless. A patch of blackness was growing around her eyes, and a thin trickle of warm blood traced a thin line down her delicate chin.

  She glanced at the back of the bedroom door. He was gone now, but he would be back.

  One hand reached up and slowly curled around the handset of the telephone on the nightstand next to her. She pulled the receiver off its perch and raised it to her ear, but her other hand made no move. The phone hummed softly, then after a minute a recorded voice told her to hang up.

  The sound of another person’s voice, a voice other than his, seemed to stir something in her vacant eyes. She seemed to notice the grating recording, and her eyes turned from the back of the bedroom door to look at the thing in her hand, staring at it as if she’d never seen a phone before.

  She was in their house, in their bedroom, sitting on the floor. Her bed was behind her, and she’d been sleeping when he’d come in....

  She stood suddenly, unsteady, and hurried to the bathroom, making it to the toilet in time to throw up. The tile of the bathroom floor was cold on her legs, but after a moment she finished and stood teetering, leaning on the counter. She glanced into the mirror and gasped at what she saw.

  An unrecognizable face, contorted by bruises, stared out at her. A long line of blood ran from cheek to chin, and she absently brushed at it. His ring must have cut me, she thought. She remembered that part. The bruises and black eyes all ran together in her memory, but the sharp sting of his ring cutting her skin—that she remembered.

  She started the water, watching it run for a long moment. It swirled around the expensive porcelain and gurgled down the sink, and she found herself wishing that she were that water, escaping. Her joints, swollen and painful, cried out, and her arms and legs felt sluggish, heavy as metal. She could see in the mirror a series of bruises on her arms and chest—some were fading, but many were new. After a moment, she switched off the water in the sink and started the shower.

  Vincent had never been a gentle man, not when they had been dating and certainly not since they had been married. It had attracted her to him at first—his “bad boy” side. Not anymore. And that side had been getting steadily worse over the past year. And over these last few weeks it had gotten really bad.

  She was in her own personal version of hell, and no one could help her. She was in a prison she had made for herself, serving eight years so far in a term with no definitive end date.

  And her jailer was her distant, angry husband.

  Tonight she’d been sleeping when he’d come home. He’d come into the bedroom with his usual mixture of cursing and kicking, and Judy had known immediately that things would go one of two ways: he’d fall asleep, or he’d make her pay for today’s incident.

  He made her pay.

  At one point, Judy Luciano had looked up at her husband as he stood over her, and she had seen nothing in his eyes that even approximated compassion or love or caring. All she saw was anger. It hadn’t always been that way. But that’s the way it was now.

  And then she knew why he was beating her—it was because of that boy at the grocery.

  Earlier that day, she had gone into town to pick up some groceries at Kroger. She usually went alone and preferred it that way—sometimes she drove past Wood Bakery, remembering when she and Chris had met there, so long ago.

  For some reason, Vincent had decided to invite himself along.

  She had been shopping quietly, looking over the produce, and that’s when she’d noticed the young man stocking apples and bananas. He was looking at her—why, she wasn’t sure. She’d been pretty once, she knew, but the years with Vincent had changed her.

  The young man couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. When she’d noticed him looking at her, she’d tried to make eye contact, to somehow tell him to stop looking, but those kinds of words were impossible to convey silently—or at least she hadn’t figured out how.

  Then Vincent saw the boy, and instead of ignoring him or moving on, he had done what he always did in those situations.

  “What are you looking at?” Vincent had shouted across the vegetables.

  The boy’s expression had gone from quiet, distant admiration to one of shock. He’d opened his mouth to say something, probably to apologize or deny the undeniable, but nothing came out.

  “You looking at my wife?” Vincent shouted again. His face contorted with sudden anger, and he swung. He punched the boy right in the mouth, knocking him down.

  Judy knew what would come next.

  Vincent had stood over the boy, shouting at him for several minutes, and when he straightened up and looked around, she knew what was coming. Vincent kicked the boy hard in the ribs
. Judy noticed that the produce section of the grocery had miraculously cleared.

  People avoided Vincent in this town, and not just because of his reputation for beating his wife’s admirers. Judy watched as he kicked the boy once more for good measure, grunting as he did it, and then walked back over to her.

  “I saw you looking at him, you stupid bitch. We’ll talk about this later,” he said.

  He’d brushed past her, his eyes hard. The words hurt her, like he knew they would, and she knew that it was only the beginning.

  And forcing her to lie helpless on the bed while he shouted at her, accusing her of all kinds of horrible things—that had been the payback.

  “You still think you’re beautiful, don’t you?” he’d asked her, his voice low and husky with excitement as he’d pinned her to the bed. “When are you going to figure out that you’re mine? All mine. And no one else is going to have you, not ever.”

  On some level she understood that it was his jealousy that drove him to do the things he did, but that didn’t make it better. She had come to dread going into town, dreading the accidental glances and looks that he saw or thought he saw, looks that always seemed to drive him into fits of rage. It still amazed her that she even warranted any looks of admiration. And surely word must have gotten around about what happened when people looked at her, especially if Vincent were around to see it.

  Judy had lain there on the bed, helpless, defenseless against his anger.

  “No, honey,” she’d said, trying to calm him, hoping that he wouldn’t hurt her. “I know I’m not pretty, not to anybody except you.” She repeated the mantra again and again, words that had once calmed him. In the past few months, these and other words of self-deprecation didn’t seem to chill the fire in his blood. But maybe this time they would work, maybe he would calm down and....

  Vincent had swung, punching her hard in the belly. The wind was knocked from her—he was a strong man, and there was really nothing she could do but take it. Take the beating, try not to think about it, pray for it to be over.

  He slapped her hard across the face and she felt the blood well up in her mouth. It was a feeling she was getting used to. The feel of the warmth of her own blood flowing freely no longer surprised her. He would beat her until he felt better about himself.

  He’d been looking at her, waiting, and she’d known what he’d wanted. He was waiting for her to cry out, make some kind of response. But something defiant bubbled up inside her from someplace she was only vaguely aware of. She knew that this time, she would not give him the satisfaction of crying.

  It was a crazy, rebellious thought. On some level she knew it was stupid, a gamble that would just prolong the pain, but suddenly she was tired of it all—tired of the helplessness.

  He wanted to hear her beg him to stop. Usually she would—but not tonight. She would endure silently until he tired of hitting her and left.

  She knew that Vincent loved her. But he loved her the way you love a car or a beautiful watch—like a possession, not a person. And he jealously guarded his possession from the rest of the world.

  It used to be different, back when they started dating. Chris had proposed to her and then disappeared. She’d been devastated, and Vincent had been there—even though she’d known the history between the two of them, she still needed someone. She’d been so lonely....

  Judy looked at herself in the mirror again. Thinking about Chris wouldn’t help, not now. Or thinking about his ring.

  Her shoulder screamed as she started the shower then reached up and pulled open the door to the medicine cabinet. She pulled out a half-empty bottle of Advil, taking four at once with a handful of water from the sink. The Advil would help with the swelling and especially the black eyes to come.

  After a few minutes, she felt slightly better. She stripped off her clothes and stepped into the shower. The water ran hot over her. She soaped and rinsed three times, scrubbing her entire body, going easy on her shoulder and ribs—she could already see the bruises forming. Taking long, hot showers and scrubbing with soap had become her new ritual, cleansing her mentally as well as physically.

  She stepped from the shower and dried off, dressed in clean clothes. Weekend nights were her favorites, usually. Vincent went out with money in his pocket from his regular Friday paycheck, and he stayed out late. Often he would come home drunk and force himself on her, but sometimes he was too drunk to even do that.

  Any night he went out drinking with his buddies, she prayed that he would drink too much and wreck his car on the way home. There were sharp, twisty corners on Blackwood Lane. And Vincent always drove too fast.

  Blackwood Lane was supposed to be haunted—maybe one night, the woman’s ghost who was said to haunt the lane would rise up out of the road and scare him. Maybe he’d swerve his car into a tree and crash and die. It was a terrible thing to think about, to pray for, but she couldn’t help it.

  Her stomach rumbled, and she remembered that she’d been planning to eat after her nap, the nap that he had interrupted. She cleaned up the bedroom and went into the kitchen. She wasn’t that hungry, but she forced herself to eat—she’d lost twelve pounds in the past nine weeks, since the beatings and humiliation had escalated, and she knew that the smaller she got, the more trouble she’d have standing up to his abuse. Nothing in the refrigerator looked good, so she pulled down a pot from above the stove to make some instant soup.

  As she waited for the water to boil, she went into the living room and turned on the TV. Baywatch was on, a show Judy watched every chance she could get. She knew it was stupid and the acting was horrible, but the men and women were beautiful, and exciting things happened to them every week.

  And the show took place in California. Chris was out there somewhere, probably living a good life, enjoying the sun and the beach, far from her pain.

  She knew Chris was in California because Vincent had gone looking for him and his father there. That had been back in October of 1989, just after she and Vincent had gotten married.

  But the trip had been a failure—Judy had surmised that much from Vincent’s return from Sacramento and his subsequent dismissal from the familia.

  He’d been a changed man after that. He was disgraced.

  That’s when he’d really turned violent.

  After that trip, Vincent had been forced to fend for himself—he’d started his own crew, and Tony, the new head of the Luciano family, had looked the other way.

  It was times like this when she couldn’t help but wonder what might’ve happened if Chris hadn’t gone away.

  She wouldn’t have sunk into a fit of depression that lasted over a year, and she would never have been out at that restaurant by the highway, “The Hole,” that night when Vincent Luciano had asked her out. She wouldn’t have dated him out of some desperate need to break out of her funk. She would never have fallen for his silly lines. Or slept with him with some crazy notion of making herself feel better.

  She would never have married Vincent, or gotten pregnant, or lost the baby as a result of his first beating just months after their marriage.

  None of it would’ve happened. Or maybe it would’ve. Maybe she just wasn’t supposed to be happy.

  Tears welled up in her eyes, tears of regret and longing for happier times—times that existed only in her dreams, the kind of dreams she imagined prisoners had, looking out barred windows at a glowing crescent moon hanging over their prison.

  But prisons came in all shapes and sizes.

  The soup was done and it smelled good. It was the first pleasant sensation she could remember feeling all day. She poured some into a bowl, carried it into the dark, wood-paneled living room, and sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV. She sat on the floor because the chair was his, his favorite place to park himself when he was home, and she didn’t want to sit in it, whether he was here or not. Sitting on the floor was her own pitiful version of rebellion, but it was rebellion just the same. These little rebellions and he
r paintings were about all that kept her on this side of sanity—those things and that short, horrible letter she’d gotten from San Antonio, Texas, four years ago.

  But it was her little rebellions that felt the most constructive. Something still lived inside of her, something that still allowed her to dream of other times, other places. She still fought against Vincent in her own small ways, and as the punishment and abuse grew more frequent, so did her dreams of freedom, of release.

  Sometimes she fantasized about killing Vincent.

  Sometimes she thought about smothering him as he lay in bed next to her sleeping, a smile on his face after satisfying himself with her. She wondered if she could do it and get away with it, and wondered if it would be worth it to kill him even if she couldn’t get away with it. Prison would be bad, but could it be worse than this? At least the pain would stop, and the beatings.

  But she didn’t think she could do it. He was a powerful guy, and he could easily kill her if he really wanted to. If she tried and didn’t succeed, he could snap her neck in a second. And with the friends around here that he had, he could probably explain his way out of it. His family was too powerful to be messed with, especially by someone like her, with no power.

  Anyway, if she did manage to kill him, Vincent’s family would find her no matter how far she ran—even if she ran all the way to California.

  No, if she was going to kill him, she would have to find a foolproof way to do it. And sometimes it was just those sorts of thoughts that got her through her days and nights.

  Judy finished up her soup and switched off the TV.

  The thought of running away slipped through her mind as it did almost daily, but she had no money that she could easily get to—San Antonio was a long way off, and California was even further away. She doubted she could even get the twenty miles west to St. Louis before being spotted and returned to her fuming husband like a wayward pet. He had told her once that if she tried to leave he would break both of her legs, slowly.