by John Everson
She forced herself to take a deep breath, and stared hard at her noodles.
All that mattered was the meal, she told herself. Anders is dead to me. He does not exist.
It was probably just the vengeful nature of her imagination, but somehow, it seemed like the spaghetti bled more with every stab of her fork.
She hated it when Anders called. He didn’t do it every day, like a decent father would, but if she could have gotten an unlisted number so he could never find them, she would have. Nevertheless, the courts said no matter how much of an asshole he was, he still had the right to talk to his son.
But moving where she’d gone, she had certainly made it a little difficult for him to see Eric. While she agreed that a boy should have the influence of a father figure in his life, she did not agree that Anders was the man to provide that influence. There could be no good impression received from that man.
Still, she couldn’t stop the boy from talking to his dad. All she hoped was that he eventually saw through his father’s bad humor to realize that the rotten jokes just offered a temporary way for the man to hide what a rotten person he actually was.
When Eric finally came back to the table, Rachel was almost done with her plate, though it was sitting heavy in her stomach.
“Your food’s getting cold,” she said, trying to hold back her anger.
“Dad bought a new truck,” Eric announced.
“Great,” Rachel said, biting her tongue. “Eat your spaghetti.”
“Actually, it’s an old truck,” Eric added. “He said it was used but that it’s really big and electric blue and he’ll give me a ride in it when he comes down.”
Rachel felt her chest constrict. “When is he coming down? Not this weekend, I hope?” she asked, just a little too fast.
“I dunno,” the boy said, twirling the cooling spaghetti noodles around his fork. “He didn’t say.”
“Okay,” she said, trying to remain calm. “Just remember, he needs to clear weekends with me. He can’t just show up here.”
Eric gave a “Yes, Mom, I’ve heard it all before a thousand times” roll of his eyes. “I know, I know,” he said.
“I’m not trying to be mean,” Rachel said. “But your father…well…he doesn’t always follow the rules. And that just makes everyone else’s life difficult. I don’t want him making our lives difficult anymore.”
Eric didn’t say anything. He stuffed a forkful of noodles in his mouth.
“Do you understand?” she asked.
He met her eyes, his own wide and blue, unblinking. His cheeks puffed out like a chipmunks. After a few seconds, he nodded.
And in that moment, Rachel felt like utter shit. Eric deserved to have a good childhood. A fun one. She’d pledged that no matter what, she wouldn’t let her problems with his father interfere with that. At least, not any more than separating and renting a house in a strange town already dictated. But here she was, throwing a mess in Eric’s lap. A mess he had no idea what to do with.
Being divorced was almost as hard as not being divorced, she thought.
Chapter Eight
Thursday, May 9. 7:44 p.m.
Motrin wasn’t helping. Billy lay back on his pillow and moaned. After playing catch with Eric, he’d popped a couple pills and gone straight to bed. He could hardly see straight. The good thing about living alone was that you could make pretty much as much noise as you wanted. Fart as loud as you felt like, moan whenever you rolled over, cry out some porn star’s name if you wanted when you came.
There was nobody around to hear or care.
Right now, Billy wished there was. He wished Casey’s warm breath was tickling his neck. The feel of her heavy breasts brushing against his arm and chest would not have failed to push any pain he felt into the background. When he was with Casey, there was nothing he could focus on but her. He could have stepped in a bear trap, and he wouldn’t have been able to look away from the glint in her eyes.
Now, when he thought of her, all he could picture was the blood and the ragged hole that had just a few hours before been one of her beautiful eyes.
The hole where the spiders had eaten their way inside her head.
A shooting pain hit right behind his forehead, and Billy yelled out to the room. “Fuck off, you fucking fucker!”
Eloquent. But his shout turned into a cough.
And his cough, turned into a choke.
Billy sat up in the bed, struggling to cough the problem free. His throat prickled with something that strangled his breath. His coughs turned heavier, and he could feel his reflux mechanism threatening to kick in. He was ready to puke to dislodge the problem.
“Fuckin’ sucks!” Bill choked, and rolled off the bed to stagger to the bathroom. He’d had problems with allergies before where his throat closed and the coughs came painfully hard. But this was different. This wouldn’t stop.
His breath came in ragged wheezes, and he opened his mouth again and again to gasp for air as he knelt down over the toilet. This was ridiculous. He hadn’t been eating anything, so he hadn’t swallowed wrong. He hadn’t done anything but lie in bed, praying for the headache to go away. And now for no apparent reason, it did seem to be trying to escape…through his esophagus. Something hot hit the back of his throat, and Billy closed his eyes with a disappointed “Oh shit”. Whatever he’d eaten earlier, was leaving.
He opened his mouth as the stream of acid shot forward. But something still felt wrong, even as he felt the familiar rush of puke. He hadn’t drank himself to the point of puking in a while, but he knew all the stages.
And the stages didn’t include a feeling like claws dragging at your throat as the vomit came. Something dark hit the bowl, and then in another cough, more acid slipped out. Billy didn’t try to stop it; he let it come, just wanting whatever was wrong to get out.
Spasm after spasm shook him, but as he choked up his lunch, he felt something scratching his throat. When he looked into the bowl, as the feeling finally waned, he saw spots of something bright in the dark of the toilet (What had he eaten for lunch? he wondered). Three spots of red dotted the mess he’d puked up.
He winced, and blinked tears into the bowl. Then he pulled some toilet paper and used it to wipe his eyes and mouth. The tremors in his gut seemed to have slowed, and the strange feeling in his throat had quieted too.
But when he shook his head, it felt like he was shaking a fish bowl. As if his brain were swimming in a sea of coral, swishing this way and that…and catching bits of itself on the rocks.
Billy pulled himself up, holding on to the marble of the sink, and then reached down to flush. Just as the water swirled, dark colors mixing with dots of red and chunks of not-quite-white, Billy could have sworn he saw something reach out of the water. Something small but segmented. Something purple.
His eyes widened, but it was too late.
Whatever it was, was gone.
Billy felt his gut shudder. He wasn’t sure if it was from the idea of something purple coming from inside him, or because of something he ate. He tried not to think about it, and instead plunged his face into a stream of cold water in the sink.
Then he peeled off his shirt and pants, and climbed back into his bed, this time, beneath the sheets. All he wanted to do was sleep.
Sleep and forget.
Chapter Nine
Thursday, May 9. 8:02 p.m.
Anders Sorenson hung up the phone with his son, and took a deep breath.
Then he pivoted on a dime and punched his fist into the wall. There was a satisfying give in the seemingly hard surface, and he felt flecks of paint fall from his skin as he pulled his hand back from his release. The pain was a relief from the frustration wired up around his heart. He’d punched his knuckles into plenty of hard surfaces before; more often they were jawbones instead of walls, but the point was to make the point. Anders had never taken any shit. And the fact that his wife of ten years had fucking driven the car that he had bought to a slimy lawyer’s office and filed
paperwork that made half of his shit hers—only without him—and then hired a moving van with his money to come take half of his shit, including his son, away from his house…
Anders pulled back his arm and jabbed forward again, hard.
“You fucking cunt!” he yelled. Nobody answered. The nice thing about living in the suburbs was that if anybody heard, nobody cared. There was a good amount of yard between his house and the next, and the guy who lived next door? Anders didn’t even know the pencil dick’s name. He was thin and wore glasses and came home in a pixie boy suit. That’s all he needed to know to know. Anders didn’t need to know the guy’s name, occupation or favorite color.
Anders didn’t give a shit.
He looked at the dent in the wall, and then at his knuckles, flecked with drywall dust, and now starting to bloom in blood. The familiar sting began as the blood stippled through the broken skin.
“I should never have let you go,” he whispered. “You were my wife, nobody else’s. ’Til death and all that shit. We could have worked it out, if I’d have stopped you. I should have done more to stop you.”
He stared at the phone, and then at the knives in the cutting block on the kitchen counter. The knives someone had given them for a wedding gift. Someone with a death wish? Who gave knives as a gift?
“Eric is my kid too,” he whispered. “And I’m not going to let you keep him from me. You can drive him hours away, but I can drive just as far. And I will.”
Anders ran his knuckles under the faucet and fantasized about the look on Rachel’s face when she opened the door and saw who had just shown up on her doorstep. She would not be happy to see him. But what could she do? If Eric was right there behind her, waiting to give him a hug, she couldn’t really say no to him, could she?
If she did, who was the asshole then, right?
He grinned, and dried off his bleeding hand with a paper towel. He’d have to fix the wall this weekend. No big deal…he’d fixed worse problems before.
And then he’d worry about fixing Rachel. And he would. He worked a lot, but he could manage a drive down to Passanattee. He had a couple days on the books that he could take off if he needed to. He needed to see his son again. Not to mention that he needed to teach a certain uppity cunt a good lesson or two.
Lesson One: Nobody got the best of Anders Sorenson.
Not by a long shot.
Lesson Two: Nobody took Anders’s son away from him.
And number Three… Nobody fuckin’…see Lesson One.
Anders Sorenson nodded and looked at the calendar hanging on the wall. There was a picture of a beach bunny on top, showing some nipple peeking out from her teeny bikini. That was the only good part about Rachel being gone. Anders could watch porn in peace, and hang as many nudie posters around the house as he wanted.
The calendar still read April though it was well into May.
He lifted the calendar to the next page and fingered a date in the middle of the page. He pictured Rachel’s face the last time he saw her, looking drawn and mean in a divorce court. He knew deep down, that she wanted him back. But she was the kind of girl who’d cut off her nose to spite her face.
Well, he was not going to be bested by her. He’d said those words before in his head, but this time, he really meant it. He had come through the hard part, and it’d hurt like hell. But now…now he had a plan. Time to give some back.
The bandages only hurt a little bit when he pulled them tight across his bloody knuckles. He was working on a job site tomorrow, so he knew he needed to cover the cuts. But he wasn’t really paying attention to that. He was thinking about Rachel. Thinking about how she used to love it when he grabbed her ass really tight, and bit down with just the right amount of force on her nipples. He lifted the calendar another page, and nodded to himself.
“You’ll be in my bed again by June,” he pledged.
Chapter Ten
Friday, May 10. 6:17 a.m.
The morning air was crisp. It was forgiving. But it also led her to the place she’d known she would go—the place where sacrifice was made. In this particular case, the sacrifice would not be bloody.
But it would hurt.
Rachel turned the iPod to a Ke$ha mix and pressed the buds into her ears. Pain was always easier to stomach with dance music. There was going to be a lot of pain for a while—she hadn’t been on “the path” in years. But the softness of her belly and the thickness she saw in her thighs said that if she was going to start a new life here…well…it was time to improve the quality of her life. And that meant improving her.
She took a look down the path and steeled herself with a deep breath. And then Rachel began to jog. It had been a long time since she’d worked out, but the thirties were creeping up on her and she couldn’t rely on good genetics anymore. She was gaining weight. From now on, before work, before Eric got up for school, she was coming down here to what everyone seemed to just call Swamp Park. There was a path just three blocks from their house that started near a baseball diamond and wound into the shaded cypress branches of the edge of the Everglades. Rachel could feel the temperature change as she entered the shadows of the thick green forest. It had been crisp enough if the 6 a.m. morning air, just barely hinting at the heat of the day to come. But as soon as she entered the heavy shadows of the dirt path the temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees.
That only played in her favor though, as sweat broke out quickly beneath her arms and under the hair on her neck, quickly dripping in a cold stream down her back. Ke$ha was taunting “D-I-N-A-S-A, U R a Dinosaur” in her ear as she turned down a curve in the path fifteen minutes into her jog and Rachel nodded in time to the beat. “Yeah, I am,” she agreed, and forced her calves to keep pumping.
She’d mapped the route out on her computer; the path ran through a short jetty of Everglade swamp, but then crossed a bridge, angled back and came out a couple blocks away from her house in another open area park near the grade school. It tallied up to a solid two-mile run, and since it had been a long time since she’d run from more than the kitchen to the bathroom, she suspected that two miles would be a solid goal for quite a while. She might be walking home some of it, actually.
Even this early in the morning, the air was pregnant with the humidity of May, but as soon as she entered the dark shadows of the path, Rachel shivered. She ran now to warm up. The path was rough with tiny branches and broken leaves beneath her feet, but she forced herself to keep moving, slapping the balls of her feet again and again on the dark, uneven path. The sun filtered through the trees above her, giving the whole run a strange half-lit feel.
The deeper she got into the rich foliage of the Everglades, the more remote she felt. In her head, Rachel knew she was only a few blocks from home, but the landscape suggested otherwise. She felt disconnected, far away. And with the chill of the atmosphere, she was even able to push herself to run faster, almost afraid that she was moving farther away from home, not on a loop that led her back to very close to the place where she’d begun.
Soon she settled into a rhythm of foot, breath, foot…and the morning felt clean and fresh and new as she jogged through its mist, still-forming amid the trees around her.
And then she felt something catch on her toe.
The world suddenly changed from speckles of green and sun to a splash of brown leaves and dirt. The path slapped her in the face. She’d fallen and taken a mouthful of dirt in the same breath. Rachel pushed herself up on her hands and spit. She’d eaten a lot of things she didn’t want to in her short life, from cock to rhubarb to asparagus, but dirt wasn’t going to be one of them.
Her ankle yelled out a protest that said “I’m hurt” and she rolled to her side, crying out at the unexpected pain. She wasn’t going to be jogging, or even walking back to the house today.
Rachel started to reach for her pocket and realized in her trepidation about her first morning run, she’d forgotten her phone. Stupid!
Sure, she hadn’t planned on catching h
er ankle on cypress roots and taking a spill in the middle of alligator land, that was for sure. But she had no business ever leaving the house without having her phone in hand so Eric could reach her if need be. Yet another checkmark against her single mother skills.
Rachel moved and instantly a pain shot up her leg.
Crap.
She looked down the path in both directions. While this was obviously a used trail, she had no idea how used. She’d not come down this way before. How long would it take for someone to find her if she couldn’t get up and hobble back?
“You are a fuckin’ embarrassment,” she hissed, as she tried to stand. She didn’t complete the act. Instead, the pain shot like a knife through her ankle and calf, and she fell back to the dirt and mulch path. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “You’re going to have to do better than that!”
She didn’t sound convinced by her own scold. Her voice just sounded hurt. Rachel closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Then she straightened her leg and pushed herself to a sitting position. “This is supposed to be exercise,” she said. “I have to get home to Eric. Bad ankle or no bad ankle!”
But when she tried to push herself up again, she only fell back with a shriek.
“What am I going to do?” she moaned aloud.
“Perhaps you’ll get up and walk again?” a voice answered from behind her.
Rachel jumped. And then groaned at the resulting pain. “Who…”
“Just your friendly neighborhood forestry worker,” the voice returned.
And then a face with two strong blue eyes leaned into her field of view and along with the face, a hand. He reached out, and her fingers were quickly encircled in a strong, gentle grip. “Hello,” he said, holding her hand. “My name’s Terry Brackson. I work here—I’m a forestry ranger for the state. It looks like you’ve got a problem.”
“Yeah,” Rachel said, with a sour snarl. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”
