CHRISTIAN GALACAR
CICADA SPRING
A NOVEL
Cicada Spring
Copyright © 2015 by Christian Galacar
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, or events used in this book are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, alive or deceased, events or locales is completely coincidental.
Ebook formatting by Maureen Cutajar
www.gopublished.com
Print ISBN: 978-1508616696
For you
It’s always for you
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
About the Author
One Last Thing
As adults, we find solace in the knowledge that monsters do not exist. This is true because it’s what we choose to believe. That is the privilege of the practiced mind. But the terrifying reality is that monsters are real. They do exist. They are us. And that is more horrifying than anything I ever imagined as a child.
CHAPTER 1
The girl stopped at the creek and looked down at the blood. Some of it was from the cut on her lip, but most of it—the darker blood—came from between her legs. She tried to wipe it away with her hands, only smearing it into broad red streaks across her fair skin. Bending at the water’s edge, she regarded her rippled reflection: bruised flesh and wild hair. A tear welled in her eye and broke free. It traced her nostril, caught for a moment, then fell from the tip of her nose into the water. She looked away, her heart dropping from the sight of her face.
The sky through the canopy of trees was an overcast, ashen plate, the color of a moth’s wings. A premature New England summer on the heels of an early heat wave had turned the evening into a solid thing. Humid, earthy scents hung heavy in the air, and in the woods where she found herself now, the ones that separated downtown Heartsridge and Durham Street, the crickets began to sing their lonely songs of approaching night.
It was May 7, 1979, a Saturday, and Kara Price was fifteen years old.
She glanced up and down the trail cautiously, looking left, in the direction of town, and then right, toward home. When she was certain she was alone, Kara removed her sandals, her shirt, and her underwear. She folded them neatly on a flat rock beside the creek, save for the underwear, which she crumpled and threw into a bush. She left her bra and skirt on, rolling the skirt up at the bottom to spare it from the water. Her hands trembled as she picked up her purse. They felt like clumsy, impersonal appendages that belonged to someone else. She fumbled with the zipper for a moment, eventually sliding it open, and removed a small packet of tissues which she placed on top of her stack of clothes.
The water was unsympathetic—it stole her breath. She waded into it, determined, watching for anyone coming up the path. Cupping her hands, she leaned forward and christened her face. Her lip caught fire in a flash of needling pain and she winced, turning her head as the sting fell off into a low whimper. She ran her tongue over the spot, finding an awkward, cumbersome lump. Then she tasted the sick metallic saltiness of blood. Clenching her jaw, she brought another splash of water to her face, washing away the tinge. She hated that taste; it was something like old pennies.
Next she splashed water on her legs, her arms, and her stomach, and began running her hands over her body in slow circular motions. She just wanted him off of her. She wanted to be clean. He had done terrible things to her in the backseat of his car, and she was certain she could still smell him. It was as if he were still on top of her, breathing and sweating. She just wanted to forget him, to put what had happened behind her.
Five minutes passed, and by the time her skin was free of blood she was nearly numb from the cold. When she was finished, Kara stepped out of the creek and blotted herself dry with the tissues. She put her sandals and shirt back on. The shirt was a pink top, and on the straps were small specks of blood. She would throw it away when she got home, but for now, she needed to slide back into that sordid skin.
Kara could not allow anyone to find out what had happened. She was ashamed and embarrassed about the whole thing. Maybe I deserved it, she thought. And for the first time in a long while, Kara found herself longing for her mother’s touch, wanting to feel that safety a child can only find in a parent’s embrace. But she couldn’t tell her mother. This could very well have been her own fault. How could she look her in the eyes? Her mother had expressed her disapproval for the outfit she was wearing that morning, telling her it was not professional for a first day of work. Kara had scoffed and told her she was being too old-fashioned. “Get with the times, Mom!” she’d said. Maybe her mother had been right all along, though. And maybe Kara had brought this on herself.
Even if she did tell someone, who would believe her? This notion, this feeling of helplessness, gripped her stomach and filled her with a dreadful hollowness. She was alone, and somewhere inside, in the badlands of her consciousness, she knew that her life had just significantly changed, that her course had shifted, and now she was heading toward some dark horizon where storm clouds were stacking, promising to bring hard times. Kara sat down at the edge of the water, brought her knees to her chest and started to cry into her arms. Time elapsed in an incoherent daze.
Why did he do this to me? Did I do something wrong?
The questions rolled through her mind, repeating like some sort of awful scrolling text, the words bright and red against a black abyss. But no answers came. There was only a strange, far-off guilt to greet her, a feeling that she had done something terrible and that no one could know. It was a secret she must keep. So that was what she would do.
Once she’d cried herself out, Kara stood and headed down the trail in the direction of home. The hard orange glow of the streetlights along Durham Street silhouetted the new-budded branches of the trees ahead, turning them a seasick green. When she reached the road, she turned left. Her house was only a quarter mile ahead on the corner of Durham and Columbus. Walking briskly in the cover of twilight, Kara stuck to the shadows below the low corridor of branches overhanging the sidewalk. But she ached and burned between her legs, and this eventually slowed her. She reached down and touched where it hurt. Pulling her hand away, she looked at it. Clean. The bleeding had stopped; all that remained was the pain. It was like some kind of sick, unwanted legacy he’d passed on to her.
There was a small playground in front of the Clarke Middle School a few hundred yards before her house. Kara stopped, taking a seat on one of the half-buried tires cresting out of the ground. Only the year before,
she’d attended this school and played on these tires with her friends, hopping from one to the next, but it felt like such an impossibly distant place now. She would’ve given anything to be back in that earlier version of her life—young, innocent, carefree, no knowledge about the sad truth of the world—but the harder she reached for it in her mind, the farther it receded, slipping through her fingers as she tried to grasp it.
Toughen up, Kara, an internal voice said. This was something her field hockey coach used to yell at her from the sidelines. She recognized the words, but this wasn’t her coach’s voice—it was her own. Toughen up, Kara.
So she toughened up as well as she could, stiffening her posture, throwing back her shoulders, choking back tears. In this moment, her mind forged a distorted lens, and through it Kara viewed the rape as something that sometimes people just had to endure. Plain old bad luck. Something that needed to be gotten over and moved past. The facts of life, kiddo. She would never tell anyone that she’d been raped. This was her decision. This was her choice.
Then Kara remembered her face. How would she explain it? People would ask questions. If she had learned anything growing up in a small town, it was that curiosity was a powerful drug, and it demanded answers. She needed a story, something believable, something she could retell over and over again when people asked, cracking a counterfeit smile to sell the lie, maybe laughing a little at her own expense.
Kara recalled the path she’d taken through the woods. At the start of it there was a two-foot drop where the asphalt of the parking lot in back of the Saver Mart met the beginning of the trail. It was a place people could easily fall if they weren’t careful, just a silly mistake. If she rubbed a little dirt on her palms and knees, she could really sell the story. It was decided. The cliché of the assaulted woman explaining away her bruises by saying she’d fallen was something that Kara did not yet understand. In her mind, the lie had no holes, no cracks in its veneer to be pried open by doubtful eyes. It was time to go home now, time to get gone and get on.
She stood and left the park.
The front lights were already on when Kara got to her house. She stopped at the granite walkway step and rehearsed her story one more time. While she ran through it in her head (Mom: Kara, sweetie, what happened to your face? Kara: Oh Mom, I’m such a klutz…) her eyes fell on the features of her house. It was a picture she’d seen a million times before, but now what she saw looked different and somehow sinister.
The windows were dark and stared back at her like large, sunken, accusing eyes. The red front door resembled a jackal’s mouth ripped open wide, howling with laughter. To the far left, the large bay window revealed the kitchen. Kara saw her mother pouring a glass of wine at the counter. Her father wasn’t there, and then he was. He walked in behind Kara’s mother, wrapped his arms around her waist, and kissed her neck. Her mother smiled, turning her head to meet his cheek. They rocked from side to side for a moment in a lovers’ slow dance. Then her father backed away, picked a magazine up off the kitchen table, and disappeared into the house. The smile remained on her mother’s face long after her husband had left the room. It was all framed so serenely in the yellow glow of that window, like a silent home movie from a time before Kara had been born. Young love not yet pressed with the task of raising a daughter. Watching her mother and her father brought a thickness to the back of Kara’s throat, an achy feeling, the feeling of holding back the tears that so desperately wanted out. But Kara remained strong. She would not cry. Toughen up, Kara.
Looking left, Kara gazed mindlessly down the sidewalk, searching for something she could hardly define. Perhaps a last bit of calm before everything crystallized. Four houses away, Mrs. Twomey stood in her front yard, watering her prized tulips—brilliant reds and yellows that cut the haze of the settling evening. The woman’s silver hair cinched tight in a bun resembled a shimmering coin in the distance. Underscored by a blue gardening apron and white cotton gloves, she almost looked cartoonish, drawn into the scene by some unseen hand of God—the Almighty Animator. Then Kara’s eyes moved from Mrs. Twomey, looking hard down the center of Durham Street. The streetlights on either side had the illusion of bending inward as she focused on the distant vantage point. She stared with a purpose, trying to see beyond the limits of her vision, trying to find some new place beyond reality—salvation—until the road fell away into a gray and orange haze and her awareness harmonized with the moment. But what she found was not deliverance. She found a place where past, present, and future—the primary colors of being—all overlapped like sheets of transparent film, existing all at once in a deep, dark, dreadful fourth color.
In her mind she saw herself, an eight-year-old girl, wearing a purple snowsuit, being towed up Durham Street in a wooden toboggan. Her father had the yellow rope wrapped around his hand and taut over his shoulder, his feet sliding on packed snow as he leaned his weight forward, trying to find purchase and pull her along. He stopped, turning back to smile at her. The scene shifted to August of that same year. She sat on the hatch of the family station wagon, swinging her legs, waiting for her parents to take her to Crane’s Beach for the first time. They drove in the heat, eventually breaking to cool, salty air. Marsh all around, sand dunes and blue skies. That day she spent nearly two hours in the surf and earned her first sunburn. Her mother had to stop for burn cream on the way home. Kara remembered this. She remembered the smell of her toasted skin and then, later, the smell and cool feel of the Lidocaine. It was seven years behind her, half a lifetime ago, but she remembered. Here the images were clear, but yet they were also tainted, viewed through the filter of that fourth, dark color where everything existed all at once.
Kara brought her hand to her face and touched her lip. It stung fiercely, the sweat on her fingers bringing the pain to a point again, dousing her recollections of childhood. She clenched her jaw, inhaling long, thin breaths through her teeth. Toughen up, Kara.
She walked up the brick walkway to the front door. Through it, Kara could hear her mother talking. “I think she said she was out at six so she should be home soon. You could probably light the coals now.” There was a beat of silence. Then: “And did you get the mail today? We still haven’t received our invite to your cousin’s wedding.” The voice soothed her. It was the sound of home, the sound of family and comfort and rescue. Somehow it touched her heart. Squeezed it. And then broke it.
Home, Kara thought distantly. Her lips parted, and she whispered a word to herself as if she didn’t believe it: “Mom.” At that, the world around her blurred gray and white and every color at once and then fell into a dizzying darkness. Her knees became rubber. The strength, the toughness, the walls, the barriers, the story about how she’d tripped and went face first into the ground all fell with it. And when it did, Kara’s mother opened the door and saw her daughter standing there. Toughen up. But how?
“Oh my God!” her mother yelled, and Kara Price, the fifteen-year-old who was afraid that everyone would find out, afraid that she had done something wrong, fell into her mother’s arms and wept.
She was eight again. And it was spring.
Harry Bennett pulled his Eldorado into the junkyard, the car dipping and diving through a landscape of dried-up puddles and washed-out potholes. He accelerated and peeled through the entrance gate, past a faded sign that read HEARTSRIDGE TRANSFER STATION in big orange letters. In the distance, at the far end of the rolling mounds of garbage, a black pickup truck sat parked. Harry sped toward it. When he was close, he brought his car to a skidding stop. The tires of his Cadillac belched out plumes of pale dust as they crunched over the baked gravel. Harry turned off the ignition and stepped out, waving vaguely at the truck as he opened the back door of his Cadillac.
Eddie Corbett hopped out of his pickup, wearing khaki slacks and a denim shirt. He was a short, balding man in his mid-fifties, with glasses sitting atop a small upturned nose. There was something very pathetic about him, the way he stood: hands in his pockets, shoulders slouched. Desperate
.
“Why the hell did you want to meet me all the way out here on a Saturday?” Eddie asked, folding his arms. “I could’ve met you at your office.”
Harry was leaning into the backseat of his car. When he straightened and turned around, he was holding two one-gallon jugs of water in each hand. “Evenin’ to you too, Eddie,” he said. “Had an errand to run out here, thought I’d kill two birds.”
“What errand does the mayor of Heartsridge have at the dump?” Eddie moved toward Harry.
“Need to ask you a favor,” Harry said. He turned and placed the two jugs on top of his car. Then he bent back down, grabbed another two, and put them beside the others. “We’re friends, right? I was hoping you’ll be able to help me out. Who knows, maybe help each other.”
They weren’t friends. If it weren’t for the fact that their wives were cousins, they might never have known each other at all. Save for the occasional run-in around town, the only time the two men ever spoke was at holidays and birthday parties. Even then the conversation was stilted and forced.
Eddie wrinkled his brow, running a hand through what remained of his thinning hair. “A favor? What could I possibly have that you want?”
Harry removed his gray sports coat, folded it over his arm and put it in the backseat of his car. He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, stopping midway up his forearms when the muscle grew too thick. “It’s the thirtieth anniversary of the Heartsridge Spring Festival, starting this coming Thursday, so we’re expecting it to be a big one.” Harry removed his tie, tucking it into his breast pocket. “Do me a favor, Eddie, and grab me that bucket over there.” Harry pointed behind Eddie to an old rusty bucket sitting next to a toppled-over ice chest.
“What the hell you need that for—”
“Christ! Just get it!” Harry snapped, his face darkening. “I’ve had a shit day, and I got things to do.”
Eddie flinched and jumped back, his glasses sliding to the end of his nose.
Cicada Spring Page 1
